Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

In today’s edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library
and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

  1. Echo Chamber – the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story’s spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
  2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting – build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
  3. ActiveRecordJS – just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it’s interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
  4. I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle – a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn’t all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.
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