Category Archives: Pals

Microsoft Reader -dead

Pals

CLOSING THE BOOK Microsoft is discontinuing Microsoft Reader effective August 30, 2012, which includes download access of the Microsoft Reader application from the Microsoft Reader website. However, customers may continue to use and access the Microsoft Reader application and any .lit materials on their PCs or devices after the discontinuation on August 30, 2012. New content for purchase from retailers in the .lit format will be discontinued on November 8, 2011.

https://www.microsoft.com/reader/

Now imagine this is itunes. Or kindle. Or anything that you bought that features digital rights management…

Via Bruce Sterling.

The Fist, and how to deal with it.

Pals, Save.the.world, , , ,

I have been proud for some time that I knew Lydia McDonald back when she was a total goofball, before she became the sort of person who writes a thoughtful, well-considered response to the violence in Norway. Here’s one of the nut sentences:

Would you not rather suffer the pain of the innocent than wonder if something you have said or done stole enough joy from another human being that they passed the pain onward until it found you again?
It is that culture that mocks love and empathy and praises violence in whatever form, from unkind words to machismo to enslavement to war, that allows for the construction of human monsters at all.

There’s more, and you really should read the whole thing, now.
When you get punched, and I speak from a long history of inspiring violence in others, most people focus in on the fist. “I just got punched! What the hell? Why did they hit me?” The key question is not the fist, but what to do about it. Are you going to wrap yourself up in a fight or are you going to get out of it?

Lydia’s response, and mine, is that we can dissolve the fist before it ever reaches our nose. This doesn’t always work – but neither does anything else.

Let’s not be friends on facebook.

Pals, Politics, , , , ,

Let’s be friends right here.

I’ve got a website and I’ve got a feed reader. That’s how I “publish to the world”. See, all Twitter and Facebook really are is a way to post and get a feed of all the things your friends are saying. But someone is selling your friends to you.

You can get a website for free. You can get a feed reader for free. Google Reader or Bloglines or net news wire – etc.  There’s tons of feed readers out there.

I like google plus, and yup, I’m on google plus.  It’s got the same privacy concepts as diaspora, but unfortunately centralized.

I’m on twitter and identi.ca.  But they are just microblogs.  Oh – they also have direct messages!  That’s micro-email!

So just email me.  Just get a WordPress or Blogger blog.  And when you want to step up to your own website, I’ll help you set that up and import all your old posts in. It’s super easy.  No one will sell your friends to you and someone else’s website going down won’t blow up yours.

My Valentines / Music Hack Day NYC app!

Dev, Django, Music, NYC, Pals, Python, , , ,

-or-
Why I wasn’t around this weekend.

I was at NYC Music Hack Day!

You can try out the idea here in our valentune.es beta. We send love and music over wires and wireless to your special sweetheart.

You put in your sweetheart’s Name & cellphone, a couple of key words about your them and then ask the app to get busy.

It goes out to the MusixMatch lyrics service – finds lyrics that describe your sweetheart and then gives you a list of songs we can find streaming full mp3s online for. You choose what you don’t want in the play list and hit send.

We call your sweetheart up using the Twilio API , give them your sweet message and then play them your custom made mixtape over the phone! Yes, my lovely wife Sam was the first non-developer to get a call from the valentun.es robot.

Getting SongsPick songs on the iPhone!

Don’t have a web browser handy? Surely you jest! If you’ve got an iPhone you can use the iPhone app.

If not, the website is mobile compliant and works great on Android phones. The website uses CSS3 and WebFonts for style, but degrades well to older browsers. How old? IT WORKS ON LYNX!in case you need web 3.0 from a terminal

So all of this was accomplished by 6 talented and dedicated people over the course of 24 hours in NYC. The whole team was positive and awesome. I’m really proud of what we did so quickly. It’s got bugs 1 , but it works. I didn’t sleep the whole 24 hour hack session and I worked on a lot of the bits.

  • The Musixmatch call to find lyrics that talk about your sweetheart.
  • The Skreemr call to find playable songs with those lyrics
  • Adapting Jeff’s web mockups to Django templates
  • Calling into Alex’s Twilio wrapper
  • Pitching the idea and the vision and recruiting the group
  • Helping design the process flow and settling on using Django with Nate
  • Helping coordinate who would do what and figuring out the pitch with Jeff
  • Presenting the whole thing in 2 minutes to over 300 people with Anna and Nate

It was a busy 24 hours!

  1. the Title element has the wrong spelling of valentunes and the message doesn’t always go through and the songs sometimes take a long time to play, etc…   (back)

Project Idea: Conscience

Hacks, Incentives, Pals, Save.the.world, ,

This is just a sketch of an idea. Help me fill it out.

The elevator pitch

An angel on her shoulder

What if you could have an angel on your shoulder that helped you make purchases that reflected your values? We’d all like to vote with our dollars, but complicated corporate structures and global supply chains have made it difficult to keep track of who is doing what.
Continue reading Project Idea: Conscience →

Not dead, just sleeping

Pals, , , ,

Currently working on Project H, which involves many spreadsheets and calculations and trips and much gnashing of teeth.

Before that, I was under the radar on a huge CSS project for work. Lots of hours burned and no personal stuff.

Now I’ll be able to get a few book reviews done and make some changes for Add-Art. Looks like AdBlockPlus 1.3 doesn’t work with Add-Art, so I’ll take a stab at fixing that tonight. Then more polish on UpFuckr and a few ideas for Processing sketches.