Archive - Apr 2005

I really want to apply the incredible new client-side javascript/DHTML tool Greasemonkey to modifying news stories such that their weaknesses (the ones that threaten our democracy - found at Weblogg-Ed, Brain Flotsam, and droganbloggin) are made evident.

After reading The File Manager Is Dead. Long Live the Lifeblog (a brief review of Nokia's LifeBlog application/system), I was moved to try to put down a few thoughts I've had on the topic of annotating photos. (There's also a larger story that I hope to bring out.) First, let's consider on-line tagging systems (AKA Folksonomies if a group is involved), esp. photo-related ones like Flickr. (My favorite non-photo one is del.icio.us/.) I'm not a regular Flickr user, but it seems that it lets you add information to photos, usually in the form of notes and tags.

Another quickie: When using my laptop at night (for the usual - writing, reading, and programming), I often need to type a function key (e.g., F11 to toggle Full Screen mode in Firefox or Ctrl-F11 in IDEA), but I can't see the darn keyboard! This really screwed me over once - I was hunting for the function key and accidentally (I found out later) invoked the hardware disable for the trackpad!

Here's a quickie: When my toothpaste tube is almost empty I always want to squeeze every bit out in order to save money, save resources, and because I'm just thrifty that way. Anyway, I usually want to do this when I'm about to brush my teeth, but at that moment I often don't have anything handy to squeeze the last bit out. I've tried using the handle of my toothbrush, but it's got rubber on it and doesn't slide well. Then I thought - why not make a toothbrush that has a built-in squeezer? My first thought regarding the design is to split the handle so that there's a slot the tube could slide into. Something like this (note: I'm having trouble getting my patented AsciiVision (TM) diagram to show properly):

+---------------------------------+
|                                 |
|   side     front                |
|   view     view                 |
|                                 |
|   +---     ++--+    \           |  

Here's an idea that I had a while ago while standing at the top of one of the mountains on the Holyoke Range: Wouldn't it be incredibly cool if we could give students (and anyone, for that matter) a pair of binoculars that had both a focus knob and a time control? With the time control set to zero, looking through them would show you exactly what you'd see through a normal pair of binoculars: A zoomed-in or zoomed-out field of view (FOV) based on where they're pointed. However, by turning the time control you could simulate seeing the same area in the past or future. There are three primary areas of interest that the control would modify:

• geology - how the FOV is predicted to look
• flora - what kinds of tress, grasses, etc. might have been present

Starting tomorrow I'm going on vacation for about ten days, so I wanted to leave you with something light and fun (I don't have time to finish up my current 'serious' post). So here's my recipe (passed along from my neighbor) for making the ultimate cup of hot chocolate at home. It's easy, and you will never again want to drink anything made only with cocoa powder (even good cocoa powder).

Ingredients

• 8 ounces of good milk (preferably organic, and from a local farm)
• ~4 tablespoons of fine chocolate (details in the Notes below)
• ~1/2 tablespoon good quality sweetened cocoa powder (I like Scharffen Berger's)

Steps

1. Pour the milk into a small sauce pan.
2. Use a knife to break off small pieces of chocolate from the block, and measure out approximately 4 tablespoons (careful not to cut yourself!)

I just finished reading Why Not, which, at the beginning, suggests asking yourself: What really bugs you? to generate problems that need solving. The first thing that came to me was this: Often I'm in our neighborhood video store browsing videos (of all things), and I'll come across a title that seems good but whose quality I'm nervous about. (I don't watch much TV, so they're all pretty new to me.) I have a few rules that help me decide ("Don't rent anything that Larry King likes" comes to mind), but what I really want are review summaries from trusted sources. Naturally I want them quickly and easily, as there are many videos to look at.

By now everyone on the planet knows about Google's Satellite Maps feature, which is extremely cool. I would love to see a blog devoted to shared satellite images of particular interest, i.e., those that:

• show some particularly beautiful visual feature
• capture some surprising thing (ship, house, animal, etc.)
• capture an unexpected event

A few examples:

Hi Folks,

Welcome to my new blog! In this first post I want to talk about a) what this blog's focus is, b) its goals, and c) the obligatory bit about me, and some of my interests and influences.

Origin/Motivation