Today I pulled this from the trash for you

 

Tiny AppleScript: play iTunes video in QuickTime

I really dislike viewing videos in iTunes. It's clunky, there's no support for multiple displays, I'm picky.

I wrote this little script to open and play the selected item in QuickTime, increase its played count by 1 (which marks podcasts as played in iTunes), and pause any music you might be listening to.

tell application "iTunes"
set theTrack to item 1 of selection
set theFile to (get location of theTrack)
set theCount to get (played count of theTrack)
set played count of theTrack to theCount + 1
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
playpause
end if
end tell
tell application "QuickTime Player"
open theFile
activate
play document 1
end tell

Ahh, that's better. I set this up with a Quicksilver trigger and am no longer grouchy. Ever. Download the script. For some reason, the playpause (or play, or stop, or anything else I tried) wouldn't work if I put all of the iTunes stuff in one tell block...so that's why there're two of them.

Tiny AppleScript: add current track to playlist

Three lines, real simple:

tell application "iTunes"
duplicate current track to playlist "srsly partytime"
end tell

And then you can create a Quicksilver trigger to run the script; so, anytime you hear something and think "yo, that's my JAM" you don't have to leave the keyboard to make sure it gets in the rotation for your upcoming birthday party. A couple of tracks that should be on there right now:

1. Crystal Castles - "Crimewave"


2. Foals - "Olympic Airways"

Bike Friday is on order

http://www.bikefriday.com

It will be canary yellow and I splurged for the Brooks leather bar tape to match the honey brown saddle. This could be the start of a product evangelism crusade for me as it is for many Bike Friday owners.

I'm also planning on heading up to the factory in Eugene, OR on the first of November to pick up my bike, meet the folks who built it, and do some day rides/light touring in the area (I'm thinking maybe a 3-day loop to the coast, over to Portland, and then back to Eugene and then ride Amtrak back home).


not my Bike Friday. imagine this one in yellow with leather accents...

If I haven't already gushed to you about it, Bike Friday custom-builds high-end folding/travel bicycles. The coolest part may be the travel case they sell for it which checks as standard luggage on airlines and has some add-ons that turn the case into a trailer you can haul behind you. Basically, this means I can fly anywhere and ride away from the airport car-free. Not that airports are the most bike-friendly places, but you get the idea. And its not some junky folder, either. I've ridden a couple of these and you forget you're on a folding bike until you look down. Feels like a legit road bike to be sure. This is something I've been getting excited about for months on end. I've never even owned a new new bike, let alone one custom-built for me.

Also, I treated myself to McSweeny's Book Release Club and Bowl of Cherries is a very entertaining read. Imagine--a funny book about a man awaiting execution in an Iraqi prison! Sounds like a laugh-riot, no? Well, the plot also involves an eccentric Egyptologist who is researching how the pyramids were build using sound waves to move the stones (which makes me extrememly happy as I recall an episode of Coast to Coast AM years ago while driving a mail truck at 3 in the morning in Iowa during which an eccentric Egyptologist claimed they moved the stones with sound and that a low F# is the frequency of the wobble of the Earth on its axis). That's right, I just gave a blog shoutout to late-night conspiracy theory AM radio.

About 8 people said they liked my sweater today, so that means I'm the freshest. This video is still the champion. It makes me wish I still had a copy of Lost Blues & Other Songs...which I can't find digitally anywhere. I may actually have to buy a physical CD! Totally stone age!

ASCII party tricks; word coinage

growl...missing pictures from the Wordpress transition...

I come across lots of new words in the readings for my information science class this term. The whole field is fertile ground for making up new words. Aboutness, findabilty, satisfice, berrypicking. The list goes on. I've decided to coin three new words this week.

1. memesta - A digital gangsta who has a specific goal of spreading or popularizing a new unit of cultural information, and does so through a planned and concerted effort.


2. homepwnership - Annoying maintenance/labor/money costs of owning a home. You may own the house, but the house pwns you.


3. ASCIIwall - A wall full of ASCII art, the source of which may come from a video feed.

Meme becomes a more significant term for the info-saturation age based on how agile and fanned-out our new ways of "telling" are. Write about a meme on a popular blogging aggregate website and a potentially huge audience receives it. This may usher in the day of the memesta, a digital gangsta of ideas.

I like that idea so much, I think I'll be one. You see, here's how homepwnership came up originally:



I looked, and the word's been used before, but not very much as far as I can tell. Now, I've put it up on wordie.org, submitted it to urbandictionary (which surprised me--they have editors and I have to wait for my submission to show up!), and I'd imagine I could find some image of a tree falling on a house and put the word in block white letters near the bottom of the frame and post it randomly in fark forums and CL rants & raves. With the housing market crisis that's been in the news lately, its pretty timely. Default on your subprime loan? This is homepwnership in a big way.

And for the ASCIIwall. A friend of mine is helping Camille Utterback (a prominent interactive video artist) with an installation in San Jose this month. I also came across QuickASCII, a Mac command line tool that renders any Quicktime video into ASCII and plays it in Terminal. We were having a party, so I set to work on an installation for the event. Here's how it went:

1. iSight records 60 seconds of video


2. QuickASCII plays that video in Terminal, which is projected onto the wall.


3. iSight records another video while the first one is playing.


4. QuickASCII plays that second video.


5. Repeat 4eva.

Here's the janky AppleScript I wrote to keep the party going. I liked having the minute-long delay between recording and projection. That way, you noticed the installation, thought "hey--that's me" and moved your arm around. When it didn't move right along with you, you had to watch a little more to figure out what was going on. DJ took some good pics here.



I'll upload some other pictures and give them the texasparty07 tag, too. I also had people hacking the KraftPad so we could play StepMania, an open source DDR clone. That's right, it just ain't a party unless AppleScript's involved and there's a hot soldering iron.

Sparklines, Squirrel Cage, Sunnyvale (again)

It's been a busy couple of weeks.

I went to visit my brother and family in the Omaha metro area. Very fun visit and I took a bunch of photos at the Omaha Henry Dorly Zoo (here's a link). The pictures are stored on my local wiki because I thought it'd be an easy way to get good captions for all the photos. You see, my brother has a family pass to the zoo and I think they go there at least once a week in the summer. Hence, my brilliant 10-year-old nephew knows the name of every animal there. Plus, he gets to learn a little web 2.0 lesson in the process. Here's a youtube link to some little videos from the trip. Pay close attention to the ones about the famous Council Bluffs, Iowa Squirrel Cage Jail. Here's a Wikipedia article explaining the Rotary Jail.

Its crazy, but a lot of people (particularly most of my family until now) still have no idea what a wiki is. They know what Wikipedia is, and sometimes they know that anybody can edit it, but that's where it stops.

I must give a special shout-out to Edward Z. Yang (aka Ambush Commander), who wrote this great MediaWiki Extension that allows batch image uploading if you have good access to the server that your wiki is hosted on. SpecialUploadLocal worked like a charm to get my 80 photos into MediaWiki's mechanical stomach.



Within 10 hours of landing back in California, I went to a one-day class in San Francisco taught by Edward Tufte, a preeminent charts and graphs guru and information design expert. Amazing day. Smart guy. Seriously, until the mid-afternoon when I started getting tired, about every 3 minutes I had some "wow, this guy is really smart" thought running through my brain.

One big idea I took home: when presenting information visually, don't waste a single pixel on anything that doesn't convey information. For example, does that arrow really need to be big, green, and have a drop shadow? Probably not. Make it black or gray with a thin line and your audience will focus on the things on either side of the arrow more easily, rather than being distracted by your design. That, and annotate stuff that shows causality—heck, annotate pretty much everything.

His website has very nice information architecture/design forums that are moderated and full of other smart people saying stuff (and probably fanboy disciples, too). His four books are beautiful, and I got nice hardcover editions of each as part of the class. Now that's what I call takeaway. Here's the Wikipedia article about Tufte for a general introduction.

SF 44-57     This is a sparkline of wins and losses for the San Francisco Giants so far this season, generated at hardballtimes.com. Sparkline is a term Tufte coined to describe data dense graphics that can be displayed inline with text. (Wikipedia link) Basically, you've got a little chart or line graph that's a couple of inches long, as tall as regular text, and can convey a lot of meaningful information using potentially thousands of data points. There's a cool PHP package available to start makin' your own at sparkline.org. I'd love to start doing this with my own cycling statistics.

And the other big news—we signed a lease for a place in Sunnyvale and will move there in August. Oh, so much fun to pack everything up and move it all of 4.2 miles. Once we're settled in, I'm hoping to have a free Saturday afternoon to curl up with Beautiful Evidence.

Alaska pics are up; distributed human computation

After about 8 man-hours of labor, I pared the photos down from 1500 to just under 200. Still a lot, but what can I say--Alaska was amazing. It is on my official list of "places to go back to." Wouldn't the Northern Lights be cool in wintertime?

Here they are, in five parts: Alaska07 pics. And here are a few shaky-hand youtube videos. The teaser image here is an ice cave underneath the Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau.



Something I read in this month's Wired got me thinking of ways I could cut down on all that post-vacation photo labor. Wouldn't it be great if you could, say, put all 1500 of your vacation photos up on Flickr and have the hive mind of that established community tell you which 100 photos best represent the entire collection?

The article is worth reading, an interview with Luis von Ahn. Luis is the inventor of those squiggly/obscured strings of text used to prevent bots from setting up accounts for various online services. These are pretty darn useful for things like keeping communities legit (i.e., preventing spambots from overrunning Yahoo's game sites or craigslist's apartment listings). The device itself is called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Humans and Computers Apart), and they're starting to be used for productive side-projects as well, like having unassuming computer users decipher words that OCR systems can't parse.

Other projects von Ahn has worked on are more like games that get bored cube-jockeys and dorm-dwellers to put their time-wasting cycles to work tagging images for use by massive web search tools. There are a lot of applications of this kind of distributed human computation good for broad, gigantic projects, but I'm curious to see if anyone has ideas of how this can be good for me. The crux here, as the article explains, is trying to make the work something fun, that people will play on their own volition, without you having to, like, pay them. Hit me up with great ideas and/or VC cash any time. ;-)