urasaru

Smartlerts, web alerts that work like the web.

fkh — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:00:08 -0400

Take that stack of unread Google Alerts, all that time spent scrolling through results that aren’t relevant. Forget it all. Instead, look forward to smart alerts with Smartlerts.

Smartlerts starts out like Google Alerts. But while Google Alerts stay dumb, Smartlerts keep track of the links you follow in the daily emails, and tunes the results accordingly. In just a few days, you start getting results that are relevant, with none of the crud.

Sit back and let the engine tune itself, or give a hand: you can mark down particularly off-key alerts, and mark up the ones that are spot on. Meanwhile, the smart alert engine keeps an algorithmic eye on your browsing, anonymously learning your friends, fans and total strangers.

Eventually, Smartlerts start to suggest relevant results that you might be interested in - looking beyond your search terms to the context they occur in.

You just annexed a bit of the web and used it to extend your brain. Keep on top of the stuff you care about, with smarter alerts.

Is __________ down?

fkh — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:06:19 -0400

The fastest and most insightful notification service for turbulence in the cloud.

We’ve all been there: just as you hit post, the dreaded Tumblr error message. Or the basecamp Oops. And don’t even think of a Gmail error or a Facebook fail. Shaking, you head to the status blog. Which invariably says “all systems go”.

Rather than hitting refresh and getting irate, just head to Is _________ down? We listen to twitter all day long, comparing instances of worried tweets to the regular baseline. If anyone of those essential services falters, the tweets are half-way around the world before the status blog gets its boots on. We’ll be listening.

We honestly listen all the time. Our baseline is pretty good. We can tell you the probability that things are really down bad, rather than a local glitch. With Is ___________ down?, you can breathe easy. Let other people tweet in panic, and let us learn from it.

You’re wondering what happens if Twitter goes down? Funny guy.

Countdown to Lakh-falafel

fkh — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:34:00 -0500

The excellent Hoomos Alsi on Kenmare will serve their 100,000th order any day now.

Here are some charts —

Got receipts? Let me know the # at the bottom.

Curious about Lakh?

BikeOut, a cycleshed mapping tool

fkh — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 11:22:50 -0400

(From an old discussion with TA, posting now after seeing the wonderful mapnificent.net).

BikeOut is a tool to show you what’s accessible by lane/other facility cycling, vs regular direct routes. It shows how the current cycle infrastructure brings some places closer, or how there are islands of difficult-to-access places now made accessible by new links.

Here’s a demo:

Red shows the fastest route (within 1 mile for d/town Bk, 8 mins for Union Sq). Green shows the same time/distance for the safest routes..

The Happening City map, showing the pulse of urban and regional data activity

fkh — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:45:00 -0400

Thump thump. There’s a lot of data out there. Right now, someone sent a geolocated tweet from over the road. Thump thump. And you’re sitting in a tax block that has three DOB violations, one outstanding road surface issue and an unresolved request for a bike rack. Thump thump. Someone upstairs in your building is photographing local stores and putting them on twitter, and just last week a volunteer group came by and uploaded details of your street trees to a webmap. Thump thump.

The Happening City map keeps an ear open for new data, all the time. As geographic information gets published, the Happening City absorbs it. Each update or new source is a mini heartbeat, and collectively the pulses of new information show what’s happening around you.

Zoom out, and the map really becomes informative. Each time new data is released, the map updates all five mile grid cells covered by that information. Compare places to get a sense of the scale of open data that we’re generating. If content generating, open places are liveable, find the hotspots on the map and move there. Keep zooming, and the grid resolution becomes coarser. You’re looking at the pulse of cities, regions, society, humanity.

Thousands of data layers go into the Happening City map, from federal datasets to local crowdsourced info. It’s a dynamic artwork, and an essential tool to measure the vibrancy of cities and regions. Wizzy algorithms plus some whizzier humans keep the inventory up to date and wise to the latest feeds and downloads. Everything gets republished as a data feed — we’re smart enough to avoid including that in the aggregation, could lead to a black hole.

Really Sleepy Syndication, the solution to RSS overload

fkh — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:29:00 -0400

Really Sleepy Syndication helps you stay on top of your RSS and blog feeds — while you sleep.

Overwhelmed by your Google Reader inbox? Unable to keep up with the volume of your network’s twitter updates? Are you staying awake just to stay connected?

Really Sleepy Syndication will help. Import your Google Reader feeds, plug in your earphones, and go to sleep. Wake up eight hours later, filled with insightful analysis, witty comments and the latest buzz (and Buzz) from your network.

It’s RSS while you ZZZ. Really Sleepy Syndication waits until you’re asleep, then drip feeds the day’s updates into your ears. The latest text-to-speech guarantees accurate and easy-to-absorb renditions. Any links in your messages are followed and summarized, so you get the complete picture*. The soft murmurs continue for a few hours, or until your feed runs out.

Download today, be rested and well informed.

* actual pictures only available with additional headset extension.

Noteworthy, bridging the gap for your physical notebooks

fkh — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:24:36 -0400

Noteworthy turns your precious Moleskines, Muji notebooks and Staples pads into tagged, indexed graphics on your desktop, iPhone and iPad. Combine the beauty and flexibility of a paper notebook with a intuitive and powerful digital book editor.

Ever wished you could look something up in an old notebook? Are you carrying two full notebooks, just in case you need to refer back? How easily can you find those initial sketches from a couple of months ago? Have you ever backed up those notes?

How Noteworthy turns your old notebooks into essential reference materials:

Sign up on the Noteworthy website. Print off the mailing label, and drop your notebook into the mail. Buy a three notebook deal for the best rate. We’ll even send you a fresh notebook.
The Noteworthy team scan the notebook, and alert you by email. This process takes a few days, but it’s worth the wait.
Go online to browse the notebook pages in crisp high-resolution images. Tag any page section with keywords - maybe a project number, or client.
Download the Noteworthy app to your mobile device, and browse your notebooks anywhere. Search, tag, share, forward as pdf to email.

The notebook pages aren’t just images, they’re like a hypertext-enabled super version of your printed notebook. Noteworthy’s cursive script recognition identifies and tags of titles and dates. It detects and tags changes in pen or density of text, helping you divide the notebook into logical chunks. And images are extracted from pages, making it easy to find that critical chart or diagram.

Noteworthy isn’t the end for your filled-up notebooks. It’s the beginning. Keep annotating. Make links to other pages, add tags, link to external documents or embed the pages in other places. Noteworthy remembers these layers of data and presents them on the page, alongside your original scribbles.

Meanwhile, carry on taking notes in your current notebook. It’ll become Noteworthy soon enough.

Come to a chatroulette party

fkh — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:17:07 -0400

Take one large party-able space with four projection screens, one per wall. Hook up each screen to Chatroulette with a webcam pointing inwards for each one.

Throw a party, and the random webcam people can join us. Like a flash mob but with no control and no guarantee of finding it. Ignore the screens, or chat, or click Next…

Who doesn’t like naked strangers at their party?

"If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how..."

fkh — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:33:07 -0400

“

If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it. Be the opposite of secretive. Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones. Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea. Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn. The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero. The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

”

- Developing new startup ideas, Chris Dixon.

March 14, 2010

WhereItGoes.org, a neighborhood stormwater mapper

fkh — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:43:22 -0400

WhereItGoes.org shows your personal sewage and stormwater overflow infrastructure. In a heavy rainstorm, sewage and stormwater mix and discharge into local waterways at CSOs (Combined Sewage Overflows).

WhereItGoes.org estimates the flow of stormwater and sewage for any address you provide. Factoring in rainfall, elevation and information about city-wide infrastructure, interactive maps show you the most likely CSOs serving your block.

Change location on the map, and see the CSO mapping change. Click a CSO to read more about it, upload your photos and leave comments. Add a CSO to your watch list, and get alerts via email, SMS or social media when an overflow is imminent.

(For more on CSOs in NYC, check out Storm Water Infrastructure Matters.)

CSAmazing.org, a web management system for volunteer-run CSAs

fkh — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:35:49 -0500

Community Supported Agriculture is sprouting up in many cities - over 100 groups are offering vegetable shares in NYC this year, up from 70 last year. Most are run on a volunteer basis.

CSAmazing is a hosted web management system for CSAs, taking care of the most common tasks, including payment, registration and volunteer coordination.With CSAmazing, volunteers spend less time working on admin, have an easier time delegating and can help the CSA group grow together as a community.

Common CSA tasks managed by CSAmazing include:

easy sign-up for new members, including waiting lists once all slots are taken
flexible payment options - thanks to generous support from non-profit food organizations in NYC, online payments via CSAmazing have no fees.
cost calculators allow CSA organizers to forecast income and costs over the season, and share this info with the farmer
email and social messaging tools to communicate with members and other CSA volunteers
volunteer shift management - flexible re-scheduling, reminders and nagging emails make the process of staffing the CS pick-ups very smooth
farmer communication, including details of vegetables each week
tools to share data with other CSA organizers, to support local food efforts and build on experiences from other schemes
a flexible, modular system, with optional extras including recipe databases, photo sharing and community food mapping

Getting a CSAmazing portal is simply a matter of registering with the main CSAmazing site, and filling out some info about the CSA. A custom domain is automatically set up, like this: crownheights.csamazing.org. With some simple customization though the admin interface, costs, shift times and other essential info can be entered.

Development of CSAmazing is open source, with a tiny team of developers supported by small contributions from participating CSAs and generous assistance from food-related foundations. Using a hosted solution means that backups, upgrades and security updates are taken care of. And since the underlying system beneath CSAmazing is a widely-used content management system and database, the foundations are solid.

The site is optimized to be undemanding. It runs smoothly on mobile devices and also older hardware and older browsers - helping CSAs reach a wide audience across the spectrum. The mobile version of the site even allows volunteer coordinators to check off shifts and edit schedules directly at the pick-up location.

Do you run a CSA? Say goodbye to miscellaneous google docs, long email chains and binders of volunteer shift coordination - sign up for CSAmazing today.

Air Freshener, a climate-denial filter

fkh — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:15:00 -0500

Air Freshener is a Firefox extension. Tired of reading comments from crazy climate denialists? Do you wish skeptics were actually skeptical rather than brainless? Interested in facts, debate and science?

If the tide of crazy comments on news sites and blogs gets you down, let Air Freshener invisibly take care of them, leaving all sane contributions untouched. You won’t even know what was there.

Air Freshener uses advanced Bayesian filters to target comments likely to contain ludicrous climate change denial. Spot a missed comment? Click the Freshen Up button to alert the server and improve the filtering.

Typical keywords include:

AGW corpse
massive liberal fraud
cherry picking data
warmists
climategate
false science
money making hoax
discredited fraudsters
“climate change” hysteria
why is it snowing if…
(anything definitively talking about PROOF, anything else in CAPS and/or sentences mentioning Al Gore’s personal wealth).

We can’t make climate change go away. But we can blank out the idiots, and focus on constructive steps. Install Air Freshener today and enjoy a better web browsing climate.

Better tools for siting transmission corridors

fkh — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:54:00 -0500

Introducing View Finder, a web tool for evaluating the visual impact of new transmission corridors.

Placing power transmission lines across the landscape is a necessary to transmit energy from source to destination. Until we get a breakthrough in efficiency, distributed and localized generation, new transmission corridors will be needed.

Choosing where to put corridors is contentious and drawn-out - for example, see the well-documented campaign against new corridors in Virginia run by the Piedmont Environmental Council. Reviews take a long time, and require data, expert analysis, public and stakeholder consultation. What if new tools could help make the processes more effective?

Here are two such tools:

View Finder. A visibility analysis for the entire US, running in your browser. Discussed below.
Path Finder. A collaborative platform for contributing, assessing and commenting on corridor options.

These two tools alone don’t resolve all the challenges around corridor placement, but they represent small building blocks towards more inclusive and open processes.

What is View Finder?

View Finder uses freely-available datasets to calculate what can be seen from a particular location. While detailed viewshed analysis is expensive and slow, View Finder provides a rough sketch of the same information in seconds, right in your web browser.

From your browser, click a point on a map, or draw a path to represent a transmission corridor (shown green in the screenshot below). View Finder overlays two colors: blue, showing locations that can’t see the point or corridor, and pink for locations that can.

Pre-set options relevant to transmission corridors allow you to specify the height of the pylons. Taller corridor infrastructure increases the size of the possible viewing area.

Vegetation cover data are used to calculate summer and winter views, where the corridor is located in or near a deciduous forest.

The ground cover also affects how likely you are to see the corridor from each location - forest gets in the way more than scrubland, for example.

After tweaking the settings, share, save or print the viewshed.

Behind the scenes, View Finder uses the National Elevation Dataset, and the National Land Cover Dataset. Both are stored in Amazon Elastic Block Storage, and called as needed by a GRASS GIS script running in Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to calculate the visibility for the current location. Map tiles showing the view shed are generated on the fly by Mapnik and stored for re-use.

View Finder is an integral part of Path Finder - to be covered in a follow-up post.

Querelous, a 3D barcode buster.

fkh — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:48:00 -0500

Querelous is a disruptive app for a disruptive technology. Why should creative graffiti be limited to human-readable materials?

See a QR code in the wild.

Use Querelous on your iphone to snap the QR code.

Querelous will decode the code, and search for a valid alternative that can be created by changing only a few pixels.

Uncap your black sharpie.

Follow the on-screen instructions, coloring in the indicated pixels to subtly subvert the code.

Recap sharpie and leave. Another QR code subverted!

Open redistricting.

fkh — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:57:00 -0500

Once the Open Neighborhoods Project is set up, the collaborative neighborhoods will form the basis for a fair re-districting of electoral boundaries. Rather than a few people determining how votes are accumulated, the same tools that support complex online collaboration for neighborhoods will be used to openly and fairly correct distortions in how we elect our reps.

Districts can be determined by a combination of commonly-held local boundaries, and geography. We have the tools: social media, versioning, open geographic standards, an engaged development crowd. Other nations have independent commissions to determine districts - but nothing open and crowd-sourced. There’s a lot of prior art in this area, most of it in the ‘dark arts’ category. Too bad.

This is the first Census year where a people’s redistricting is possible. Could be amazing. Let’s fix this embarrassment.

UPDATE: As well as prior art, there’s active art happening right now along the same lines at Redistricting the Nation. It’s hopefully obvious that none of the ideas on here are original research - just tossing out some sketch thoughts, rather than trying to give a state of the art with all due diligence. Turning on comments here soon so it’ll be easier to add other existing examples.

The Open Neighborhoods Project.

fkh — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:00:00 -0500

The Open Neighborhoods Project is an independent, crowd-sourced repository of neighborhood boundaries for the US. Three parts:

a web map for anyone to contribute their neighborhood boundary
tools to review and agglomerate different neighborhood outlines into commonly-accepted boundaries
a data repository of current and previous neighborhood boundaries for download and re-use, forming a People’s Atlas of neighborhoods

Why

Only people who live in a neighborhood are able to define its geographic extent. But neighborhoods are the ideal data frame for many activities – local government, map making, planning initiatives, journalism, electoral districts, statistical comparisons, hyper-local news, agglomerations of geo-located data, etc. Most people seeking to describe a neighborhood are ill-informed to define its boundary. Centralized attempts to define neighborhoods will always fail.

A People’s Atlas of neighborhoods is possible, now: the web-based mapping tools are ready. The open process precedents for reviewing neighborhoods are ready. The data exchange standards are ready.

The published neighborhoods will form a foundation for relevant local action. Imagine mapping city-wide data using districts that were relevant to their residents. Imagine making statistical comparisons between areas that respected local definitions of place. Imagine re-drawing electoral districts from a base of non-partial local boundaries. Imagine your hyper-local news actually reflecting the place you live in. Imagine historians reviewing the changes in neighborhoods over time.

#1 The mapper

The Open Neighborhoods Project website is built around an open source, standards compliant web map. Any visitor to the website can register, adjust the map to show their area, and draw a boundary. This boundary can be named, and saved.

Optionally, the boundary can be constrained to snap to existing local boundaries, such as Census Blocks, county line, etc.

#2 Tools for analysis and review

Learning from open source software projects, the process for storing, reviewing and analyzing the neighborhood data is completely transparent. Individual boundaries can be recalled, or all boundaries overlapping a particular area. Comments can be attached to particular boundaries, and reviewed when inspecting a map.

A toolkit allows visitors to review all boundaries for a particular neighborhood, and select from present interpretations that dynamically processes the lines into a common boundary. Different methods of interpretation give different results.

Decisions about which interpretation to use as the “published” boundaries are made through open discussions via mailing lists, with guidance from an advisory committee of cartographers and demographic data experts.

#3 Data streams

The neighborhood boundaries are offered as dynamic feeds in all modern formats.

Users can download the neighborhoods into any map tool, including Google Earth, and other GIS platforms.

Feeds allow direct integration into other software tools. News sites can adjust their news coverage as borders are changed. Analysis built with census data on the neighborhoods will update to reflect the changed consensus of a boundary location.

Historic review allows anyone to inspect a boundary at any point in time.

Dot Dot Dot, a collaborative diagramming tool.

fkh — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:00:00 -0500

Dot Dot Dot is a collaborative diagramming tool that embraces the messy nature of drawing out a process.

It’s more analogous to paper and pen tools than a fully-featured tool like OmniGraffle or Visio - think how Etherpad compares to Word.

But simplicity doesn’t mean Dot Dot Dot isn’t powerful:

Smart auto-layout tools allow you to focus on entering the diagram, not dragging boxes out from undereach other - click anywhere and start typing to create a new bubble.

Limited shapes and styling let you focus on the flow, not the look. But don’t worry: these default shapes are beautiful, but there’s full css control if you’d prefer to style your own or load a third-party template.

Magic imports - give Dot Dot Dot an outlined document (bullets, numbered, indented) and see a diagram produced.

Plug a feed into Dot Dot Dot to get a diagram that self-updates every time the feed changes

Export your diagram in a multitude of formats - images (you can link these into blog posts, etc), pdf, SVG for editable vector graphics, other graphing tools, outlines, dot files for graphviz, annotated text format with full revisions

But it’s really collaboration features that set Dot Dot Dot apart -

No logins: send someone a link, they can start editing right away

Review contributions using the innovative diagram timeline - Dot Dot Dot knows a layout tweak from a typo correction, and keeps track of changes to the diagram structure in a seperate stream to the formatting. Don’t let copyediting obscure bigger changes - quickly filter your timeline view to show the major diagram structure changes. Or maybe the color tweaks are your focus - choose to see those instead

Flexibility in diagramming approaches. Edit linearly if you think that way: add bubbles as parents, children or siblings of existing features.

But don’t be constrained - a collaborative workshop diagram is unbounded, and so is Dot Dot Dot. You can loop back, add comment bubbles, group bubbles together into neighborhoods, ringfence, box off, sideline, break the diagram apart, create nested sub-diagrams in boxes or links to other diagrams… Go wild.

Multiple authors can add separate items to a diagram simultaneously and join up later - ideal for note taking in a workshop or brainstorming an idea,

More mature diagrams will go through a lot of revisions - responsible contributors might want to leave a little note about their changes. Dot Dot Dot offers a few mechanisms for this: either comment in a bubble as you create it, so others can hover over it later to read them, or in the free-form notes area.

Or, hit the Commit With Comments button to tag your recent contributions with an explanation - the version control-like commit log can be reviewed later for an overview. Excellent transparency for changes. (There’s no need to ‘Commit’ for regular edits, of course - Dot Dot Dot saves incrementally all the time).

Owners and trusted authors can freeze some diagram elements. For example, you might want to get comments on a proposed timeline - draw the timeline and freeze it. Then, all comments and additions are an overlay on this frozen base. Or freeze your starting point and goals, and let everyone map their way between them.

And there’s a finely configurable RSS feed so anyone can keep track of changes.

See you in diagramming heaven!

Csssearch, a CSS search engine.

fkh — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:00:00 -0500

Csssearch (pronounced “scchearch”) is the first CSS search engine.

While other search sites index the web’s content, Csssearch goes after the layout. Using some clever cascade-aware logic as it munches CSS files, the search tools give you the web in its non-semantic glory. Who cares about the content, let’s look at the layout!

Search in your web history, delicious bookmarks or the entire web. Great for the forgetful, people with better visual memories and anyone looking for code or design case studies. For example -

find that three column layout you saw last month
get back to the page with those chunky black text labels
look at some sites with pale blue backgrounds
find examples of browser-compatible layout tricks
enter a specific css phrase to see it in action

The API allows for some intriguing exploratory tools, including a neat dynamic layout browser. As you resize your mini version, adjusting headers, columns, spacing etc, real world examples of similar layouts are fetched from the index and displayed in thumbnail form below.

Csssearch: all the benefits of a search engine, with none of the content!

Get ready for the Mapture.

fkh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:17:00 -0500

Come to the Mapture! Bring your latest work in progress to share with the crowd - city planners, neo-geographer, urban designers, architects, open source mappers, data crunchers and all.

Come and hear what’s happening in the map making and urban data scene. Bring ideas. Bring slides on a memory stick. Bring paper maps. Bring incomplete failed projects. Show off your latest web app. Lurk in the crowd. Take lots of notes. Give criticism. Drink beer. Talk.

Venue, date and time to be confirmed.

Key-Ip Compact: the real iPhone keyboard.

fkh — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:04:00 -0500

Key-iP Compact (pronounced keep, the iP stands for iPhone) is the fix for your finger-aching, composition skill destroying virtual iPhone keyboard.

Slotting either side of the iPhone, Key-iP creates an ergonomic split keyboard, with the phone in portrait mode in the middle. Learning from the wonderful portable palm keyboards, a simple grasp on the sides of the board unhinged it into two folding flaps. Either keep the iPhone sandwiched in the middle, or slide it out. In folded mode, the keyboard is only slightly bigger that the phone.

Pulling power from the base of the handset, the keyboard requires no batteries, and communicates with the phone via a very low power Bluetooth signal. The updated Apple spec for external devices allows the Key-iP to work without the onscreen keyboard - more screen real estate for editing.

Arrow keys, shift, caps lock, copy, paste and numerical keys. No batteries required, and so light you won’t notice it in your bag. Ideal for writing on the go, finally killing off your persistent netbook temptation.

You want to write seriously with an iPhone? Time to Key-iP it real with a Key-iP Compact.