“tips”

A wonderfully clever contraption by David Seah: The Procrastinators clock. For those who set their clocks ahead to stand on their toes only to become habituated after a while, a randomly ahead clock. Web & desktop versions available.

Ah, clocks were an early obsession of mine (see for instance this color clock), earlier than calendars…

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)

SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.

I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.

Update 11/Dec/07

Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)

Who would have thought the new Mathematica would introduce one of the coolest interface design innovations in recent years: automatic inteface building?

You should browse this nice showcase of examples but to really grok the idea you’ve got to watch the Author and Deploy an Application in 60 Seconds screencast.

That above is a screenshot of the presentation: the code above generates the application below. Isn’t it beautiful?

Wolfram Research calls it the day documents and applications merged and they’ve got a point. This makes creating an application as automated and straightforward as creating a graph, and similar ease is being introduced for embedding these tiny apps in documents (“Documents are, quite simply, talking things”).

It’s no panacea but it do makes simple things easy, difficult things possible. In Rails jargon, you could call this a very elegant scaffolding functionality, a victory of convention over configuration (:“At its core it means that what you do (especially if you’ve done it a lot) should carry a lot more weight than having to configure (and reconfigure) things over and over”).

One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.

In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.

You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)

You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.

YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the (social) command line for the web”—a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.

It used to be the only option to streetmap Guadalajara^WP was to use local mapmaker Guia Roji’s crappy—and I mean crappy—interface. Google, Yahoo, and the like had the nice satellite imagery but that isn’t nearly as useful to give directions. Street names are a whole lot more useful than trees to find your way around.

Englishman Gwyn once stepped in to teach a local (or was a local teaching an English man?) about MapQuest, which has a better interface than Guia Roji but still isn’t draggable.

But that’s all in the past. An unknown while ago Google Maps updated its database and now includes pretty, draggable street maps of Guadalajara (and a lot of other Mexican cities). This is major people.

Unfortunately, while you can search for businesses (in a so-so fashion, there isn’t yet much online info for Google to mine) you can’t yet search for particular addresses. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, Google Maps is the poster child of the new web for a reason—ah, the beauty of true interactivity!

Another unfortunately: the street map is oddly not yet available trough a Blackberry.

Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.

”...begins with a single step,” no? That’s the classic form in English of a Chinese proverb usually attributed to Lao Tzu. It’s wisdom could be said to lie in counteracting our natural inability to grasp incrementalism.

Interestingly, there’s a variant of the proverb I had never heard before—“The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.”—which can lead one to a totally different interpretation: wherever you are, whatever your goal, you have to begin where you stand. The place to start is here, can be nothing but here.

(And for a further remix, “On a journey of a hundred miles, ninety is but half way.”)

It’s watermelon season here in town. Which means the cheapest, sweetest sandias of the year. The green bellies crack open at the slightest cut, roar, and out bulges sweet, sweet candy-cotton. I tell you friends, it’s a good time to be a frugivore^WP mammal.

Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.