- A Slower Speed of Light — game where you control the speed of light and discover the wonders of relativity. (via Andy Baio)
- Facebook Demetricator — removes all statistics and numbers from Facebook’s chrome (“37 people like this” becomes “people like this”). (via Beta Knowledge)
- Rx — Microsoft open sources their library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators.
- Typing Karaoke — this is awesome. Practice typing to song lyrics. With 8-bit aesthetic for maximum quirk.
Nat Torkington
Nat has chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He ran the first web server in New Zealand, co-wrote the best-selling Perl Cookbook, and was one of the founding Radar bloggers. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region.
Four short links: 7 November 2012
Relativity Toys, Removing Metrics, Parallel Open Source, and Text Karaoke
Four short links: 6 November 2012
Internet of Copters, Privacy Game, Visualizing Data, Secure Configs
- Tilt-to-Fly Controller and Copter (Kickstarter) — This looks totally awesome and hackable. The controller has a USB port, the protocol is documented, and you can even connect your own electronics payload, like an Arduino, camera, or homebrewed project to the auxiliary serial (UART + power) port.
- The Privacy Game (The Open University) — This game is designed to highlight how privacy and consent work online. Players make decisions about which information they reveal, who they reveal it to and why. For example, you may decide to trade some information for gifts when shopping on a website; or you may decide to keep other information secret when posting on a social networking site. (via BoingBoing)
- statwing — very easy analysis and visualization of data.
- duraconf — a collection of hardened configuration files for SSL/TLS services. It’s easy to reduce crypto effectiveness with crappy choices and options, so it’s good to have solid configurations to go from.
Four short links: 5 November 2012
Psychology in a Nutshell, IRS Data, Fulltime Drone CEO, and SQL Injection
- The Psychology of Everything (YouTube) — illustrating some of the most fundamental elements of human nature through case studies about compassion, racism, and sex. (via Mind Hacks)
- Reports of Exempt Organizations (Public Resource) — This service provides bulk access to 6,461,326 filings of exempt organizations to the Internal Revenue Service. Each month, we process DVDs from the IRS for Private Foundations (Type PF), Exempt Organizations (Type EO), and filings by both of those kinds of organizations detailing unrelated business income (Type T). The IRS should be making this publicly available on the Internet, but instead it has fallen to Carl Malamud to make it happen. (via BoingBoing)
- Chris Anderson Leaves for Drone Co (Venturebeat) — Editor-in-chief of Wired leaves to run his UAV/robotics company 3D Robotics.
- pysqli (GitHub) — Python SQL injection framework; it provides dedicated bricks that can be used to build advanced exploits or easily extended/improved to fit the case.
Four short links: 2 November 2012
Tablet table, Google contest for students, watch your incentives, research on web search abandonment.
- Latest Tablets (Luke Wroblewski) — table showing the astonishing variety of tablets released in the last two months.
- Google Code-In Contest for High Schoolers — an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. (via Andy Oram)
- Watch Your Incentives — NASDAQ added two new incentives programs, and robotraders responded. On November 1st, there were 369 seconds where the number of quotes in BAC exceeded 17,000; a total of 6.6 million quotes. During those seconds, only 1,879 trades executed. Between market open (9:30am) and 12:45, BAC had 7.8 million quotes and 116,000 trades. Which means 85% of all BAC quotes occurred in those 369 seconds. Which means it is likely that one algo from one firm (all of this quote spam is from Nasdaq) is responsible for 85% of all canceled orders in BAC. (via Robert O’Brien)
- Predicting Web Search Abandonment Rationales (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on how to predict why people cease to search or to click through on the search results. I’m really impressed by how well they could distinguish “bah, the Internet doesn’t have it, I’m giving up” from “oh, the answer was in a search result snippet, my work here is done.” (via Mark Alen)
Four short links: 1 November 2012
Open Source Kickstarter, Long-Term Thinking, Inquiry Learning, and Progress Reports
- Selfstarter (Github) — open source roll-your-own crowdfunding platform. (Kickstarter has its own audience, of course, which why they could release their source-code and still be top of the heap)
- 100 Year Business Plan (Unlimited) — New Zealand Maori tribe has a 100-year business plan, reflecting their values of sustainability and continuity.
- Given Tablets, Kids Teach Themselves to Read (Mashable) — Story from two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa […] Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said.
- snippets (Github) — mail out updates on coworker progress, a-la Google’s internal system. (via Pamela Fox)
Four short links: 31 October 2012
Turing Complete Users, Live Bootstrap Editor, Remix Exemptions, and Automatically Strengthening 3D Designs
- Turing Complete User — General Purpose Users can write an article in their e-mail client, layout their business card in Excel and shave in front of a web cam. They can also find a way to publish photos online without flickr, tweet without twitter, like without facebook, make a black frame around pictures without instagram, remove a black frame from an instagram picture and even wake up at 7:00 without a “wake up at 7:00” app. [… They are] users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. (via BoingBoing)
- Bootstrap Live Editor — a WYSIWYG HTML5 Editor built for Bootstrap. It offers a nice and elegant way to edit and beautify html content with Bootstrap-ready UI elements. I love how Bootstrap has become this framework for simpler website creation. I’m just disappointed they’re all startups chasing $ instead of being open source infrastructure.
- DCMA Exemption Recommended for Remix — recommended expanding the noncommercial remix exemption to cover both DVDs and online services. The reference to “motion pictures” covers “movies, television shows, commercials, news, DVD extras, etc.”
- New Tool Gives Structural Strength to 3-D Printed Works (Science Daily) — Findings were detailed in a paper presented during the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in August. Former Purdue doctoral student Ondrej Stava created the software application, which automatically strengthens objects either by increasing the thickness of key structural elements or by adding struts. The tool also uses a third option, reducing the stress on structural elements by hollowing out overweight elements. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 30 October 2012
Sandy's Latency, Better Buttons, Inside Chargers, and Hidden Warranties
- Fastly’s S3 Latency Monitor — The graph represents real-time response latency for Amazon S3 as seen by Fastly’s Ashburn, VA edge server. I’ve been watching #sandy’s effect on the Internet in real-time, while listening to its effect on people in real-time. Amazing.
- Button Upgrade (Gizmodo) — elegant piece of button design, for sale on Shapeways.
- Inside a Dozen USB Chargers — amazing differences in such seemingly identical products. I love the comparison between genuine and counterfeit Apple chargers. (via Hacker News)
- Why Products Fail (Wired) — researcher scours the stock market filings of publicly-listed companies to extract information about warranties. Before, even information like the size of the market—how much gets paid out each year in warranty claims—was a mystery. Nobody, not analysts, not the government, not the companies themselves, knew what it was. Now Arnum can tell you. In 2011, for example, basic warranties cost US manufacturers $24.7 billion. Because of the slow economy, this is actually down, Arnum says; in 2007 it was around $28 billion. Extended warranties—warranties that customers purchase from a manufacturer or a retailer like Best Buy—account for an estimated $30.2 billion in additional claims payments. Before Arnum, this $60 billion-a-year industry was virtually invisible. Another hidden economy revealed. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 29 October 2012
Behaviour Modification, Personal Archives, Key Printing, and Key Copying
- Inside BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design Bootcamp — see also Day 2 and Day 3.
- Recollect — archive your social media existence. Very easy to use and I wish I’d been using it longer. (via Tom Cotes)
- Duplicating House Keys on a 3D Printer — never did a title say so precisely what the post was about. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Teleduplication via Optical Decoding (PDF) — duplicating a key via a photograph.
Four short links: 26 October 2012
Windows 8 Web Theme, Taxing Mobile Payments, Digital Divide and Digital Service Delivery, and Consequences of Internet of Things
- BootMetro (github) — website templates with a Metro (Windows 8) look. (via Hacker News)
- Kenya’s Treasury to tax M-Pesa — 10% tax on mobile money-transfer systems. M-Pesa is the largest mobile money transfer service provider in Kenya, with more than 14 million subscribers. […] It is estimated that M-Pesa reports some 2 million transactions per day. […] the value of money transferred through mobile platforms jumped by 41 per cent in the first six months of 2012. Neer mind fighting you, you know you’re winning when they tax you! (via Evgeny Mozorov)
- Digital Divide and Fibre Rollout — As the group of non-users gets smaller, they are likely to become more seriously disadvantaged. The NBN – and high-speed broadband more generally – will drive a wave of new applications across most areas of life, transforming Australia’s service economy in fundamental ways. Those who are not connected in 2015 may be fewer, but they will be missing out on far more – in education, health, government, commerce, communication and entertainment. The costs will also fall on service providers forced to keep supplying expensive physical and face-to-face services to this declining number of people. This will be particularly significant in remote communities, where health consultations and evacuations by flying doctors, nurses and allied health professionals could potentially be reduced through e-health diagnostics, and where Centrelink still regularly sends teams out to communities. As gov2 expands and services move online, connectivity disadvantages are compounded. (via Ellen Strickland)
- Smart Body Smart World (Forrester) — take note of these two consequences of Internet of Things and Quantified Self: Verticals fuse: “Health and wellness” is not its own silo, but is connected to our finances, our shopping habits, our relationships. As bodies get connected, everyone is in the body business. Retail disperses: All retailers become computing retailers, and computing-specific retailers like Best Buy go the way of Blockbuster. You wouldn’t buy a smart toothbrush at a specialty CE store; you’d be more likely to buy it in the channel that solves the rest of your hygiene needs. (via Internet of Things)
Four short links: 25 October 2012
Big Data's Big Picture, Real-Time Queries, Real-Time Queries, Single-Process Real-Time Queries
- Big Data: the Big Picture (Vimeo) — Jim Stogdill’s excellent talk: although Big Data is presented as part of the Gartner Hype Cycle, it’s an epoch of the Information Age which will have significant effects on the structure of corporations and the economy.
- Impala (github) — Cloudera’s open source (Apache) implementation of Google’s F1 (PDF), for realtime queries across clusters. Impala is different from Hive and Pig because it uses its own daemons that are spread across the cluster for queries. Furthermore, Impala does not leverage MapReduce, allowing Impala to return result in real-time. (via Wired)
- druid (github) — open source (GPLv2) a distributed, column-oriented analytical datastore. It was originally created to resolve query latency issues seen with trying to use Hadoop to power an interactive service. See also the announcement of its open-sourcing.
- Supersonic (Google Code) — an ultra-fast, column oriented query engine library written in C++. It provides a set of data transformation primitives which make heavy use of cache-aware algorithms, SIMD instructions and vectorised execution, allowing it to exploit the capabilities and resources of modern, hyper pipelined CPUs. It is designed to work in a single process. Apache-licensed.