Infobits
« Previous EntriesFriendfeed invades metaspark
Sunday, September 7th, 2008Metaspark.net has just been redesigned to reflect my friendfeed addiction. If you had been following metaspark as a way to stay current on all things Sparky will likely find this to be a much more complete feed. If you want to see the old version it’s still available at http://sparktography.tumblr.com/.
If you follow metaspark via RSS you will want to move your subscription over to this new feed.
Holy orange creamsicle!
Monday, June 23rd, 2008If you want to win this:
Then go here to enter the latest Gear Live contest. It might only be a 1st gen iPhone on the eve of the 3G launch, but it’s at the right price: free! There are other prizes too, but who cares: orange creamsicle iPhone!
Metaspark
Thursday, May 1st, 2008Or: Further experimentation with personal aggregation services
After my initial experimentations with personal aggregation basically failed I’ve decided to take another stab at it, but this time with a DIY bent. I registered metaspark.net and am working a complicated series of Wordpress plugins to attempt to create the functionality I want.
Unfortunately it’s not entirely baked yet, but keep your eye on that domain – once I get a few RSS aggregation, twitter update, and posting date issues sorted out it should be ready to go fully live, and with style no less.
Stay tuned!
Experimenting with aggregation
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008In an effort to bring together the wonderful wide world of Sparky* I’m experimenting with Tumblr as an aggregation service. The hopes of my experimentation is to create a single point of contact for all my personal web content. Currently to get every last drop of Sparky goodness (and who doesn’t want that) visits to my blog, Flickr stream, Facebook profile, and Twitter are necessary. By providing this aggregate source of Sparky – henceforth referred to as Meta-Sparky – a single website can be visited to consume Sparky, Sparky, Sparky, and more Sparky.
Without further ado: http://sparktography.tumblr.com/
Update: Tumblr ended up being close to what I want, but not quite it. Tumblr will only allow short form content and won’t import long format blog posts. I also noticed it copies Flickr photos locally and re-compresses them which adds a slight color cast and loses the tack-sharpness that so much effort goes into on the front end.
Anyone know of a better aggregation service with similar features that I could check out? Leave a note in the comments with a link to it. If I don’t find anything readymade I guess I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and make something.
*wonder, wonderment, and wonderfulness not guaranteed. All Sparky all the time has been known to cause health complications in certain situations. If you experience a Sparky lasting more than 4 hours consult with a physician immediately.
Twitter added to sidebar
Friday, January 4th, 2008I’m again experimenting with adding my Twitter stream to Futurist Now. People detested the old post style integration so this time I’m trying a live feed view in the sidebar. Leave a comment if you love it or hate it.
I can configure the number of tweets to display – how many do readers find useful? If I just put a single one it shows real-time context without visually overpowering the main content column. On the other hand more gives a better context of what I’m doing, but adds a huge block of text to the sidebar.
links for 2007-09-22
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007-
Typographic art! Justin uses old typwriters (heavily modified I’m assuming) to create beautiful images that have surreal and organic qualities.
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My favorite author Cory Doctorow’s short story on Salon.com about what would happen if Google and Homeland Security teamed up for the ultimate in invasive personal search.
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Great tips for anyone who gets involved in an unfortunate run-in with the police. Particularly if you are innocent remember to follow these simple rules and it will help things go much more smoothly.
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Remotely deliverable pain, now in a convenient jeep mounted form factor. The Raytheon people seem rather short sighted to not get how something like this is just plain and simple a bad idea.
links for 2007-09-21
Friday, September 21st, 2007-
A new study shows that 1 in 3 American’s would rather have the internet than sex! The study also dives into what is more important to people: TV, their cell phones, or the internet.
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Discover the Power, Speed and Efficiency of Induction Cooking With New GE Profile™ Induction CooktopOK – this is cool: cooking food with magnets. This new induction range from GE allows you to cook food in cast iron and magnetic stainless steel pots without heating up the surroundings, or even the range itself. I wonder what this kind of magnetic field
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Neat! Typography control at a very granular level on the web – it’s very cross browser compliant, downgrades gracefully, and generally is a web designers dream!
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An iPhone derived Intel prototype of what looks like the ultimate portable device. It looks a bit too long for my tastes, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a slightly larger all-screen iPhone!
links for 2007-09-20
Thursday, September 20th, 2007-
The folks at Navizon have created a 3rd party application for the iPhone (jailbreaking required) which using cell phone tower latency and triangulation to approximate your location and pass it to the iPhone Google Maps application. Not quite as accurate a
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A nice writeup on lifespan as compared to the physical size of the organisim. I need to get bigger if I want to live forever!
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Lifehacker links to both an article and a great diagram on packing for vacation via the wrapping method. These claim that this makes for more compact packing, less wrinkles, and from the looks of it a great way to protect a laptop or similar equipment in
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NYT blog post about the iPhone, it’s cost’s, and the kickbacks Apple is getting from carriers. The point that the iPhone price could drop further is an obvious one, but some of the details are interesting.
links for 2007-09-19
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007-
The New York Times has long been famous for it’s walled garden of content requiring users to pay to access it. They have finally wised up to the ‘net and will be opening up their content (ad-supported of course) to search engines and the consumer market a
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Mozilla is spinning Thunderbird off into MailCo, a $3m startup aimed at making Thunderbird the worlds most powerful open source mail client. Hopefully this move will see Thunderbird upgraded to be more of a competitor to Outlook and other corporate messag
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For once I agree with the oft-outspoken Dan Savage – this gay restroom sex sting business is getting out of hand. I’ll be the first to agree that sex in a public restroom is just plain wrong – but a proposition of another man clearly isnt.
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Our dear friend Jack Thompson is at it again – this time saying that the latest Grand Theft Auto game is a specific threat to his physical security.
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Brow beating and chest puffing aside this may mean that CS3 won’t work with Leopard out of the box. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling that I’ll have to wait for this to be addressed prior to upgrading to Leopard – as cool as Apples OS 10.5 looks I
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I need this so badly my spleen hurts. Not only does the guy have the coolest looking home theater setup ever, but he’s stocked to the gills with Meridian gear!
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Some interesting comments by the big Steve himself shortly after he officiated over the UK iPhone launch with O2.
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I’m an IMAP fan myself, but webmail is here, and it’s obviously here to stay. Lifehacker’s write up on the two providers and some analysis on what each one gets right.