"hacks" entries

Four short links: 1 December 2010

Four short links: 1 December 2010

Kinect Hacking, Crowdsource, Lists, and Tablets

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 1, 2010
  1. 2 Kinects 1 Box (YouTube) — merging data from two Kinects in real time, to get astonishing 3D information. (via Chelfyn Baxter)
  2. Crowdsource is not Open Source (Simon Phipps) — there are some businesses that don’t understand this, and exploit community for their sole benefit in the name of open source. Ignorance of the four freedoms is dangerous.
  3. We Like Lists Before We Don’t Want to Die (Spiegel) — fascinating interview with Umberto Eco. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
  4. $139.99 Android Tablet at Toys R Us — sales of Android tablets (as well as Apple tablets) could help bolster the after-market accessory opportunity for wireless players, including modem makers and wireless operators.

    5. (via Sylvain Carle on Twitter)

Four short links: 15 November 2010

Four short links: 15 November 2010

Prison Blogging, 3D Hacks, Budget Simulation, and Enterprise Sales

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 15, 2010
  1. Between the Bars — snail-mail-to-blogs transcription service for prisoners, to make visible stories that would otherwise be missed. there is a religous program here called Kairo’s in the program inmates are given letters and drawings made by small children not one in that program did not cry, after reading the words of incouragement from those kids. An unmissable reminder of the complexity of human stories, suffering, and situations, the posts range from the banal to the riveting. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
  2. Kinect Opensource News — a roundup of open source Kinect hacks. I like memo’s gestural interface the best. Impressive stuff for just a few days’ access to the open source drivers. (via Andy Baio)
  3. You Fix The Budget (NY Times) — a simpler version of Budget Hero, which lets you choose policies and see their effect on the deficit. Unlike Budget Hero, the NYT app doesn’t discuss non-deficit consequences of the actions (social consequences, ripple-on economic effects). Like Budget Hero, you can’t add your own policies: you’re forced to choose from the ones presented. Real life is more complex than this simulation, but even something this simple is powerful: by interacting with this, you understand the magnitude of (say) education vs healthcare, and you realize how much of the current debate is froth.
  4. Meet the New Enterprise Customer, a Lot like the Old Enterprise Customer — Ben Horowitz nails the difficulty of selling to the enterprise, and drives a stake through the “they’ll buy our service with their credit cards, like consumers do” myth. xcellent enterprise sales reps will guide a company through their own purchasing processes. Without an enterprise sales rep, many companies literally do not know how to buy new technology products. (via Mike Olson on Twitter)
Four short links: 1 October 2010

Four short links: 1 October 2010

Javascript Hacking, Digitization, Computer Vision, and Cyborg Contemplation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 1, 2010
  1. Interview with Marcin Wichary (Ajaxian) — interview with the creator of Google’s Pacman logo, the original HTML5 slide deck. One of the first popular home video game consoles was 1977’s Atari VCS 2600. It was an incredibly simple piece of hardware. It didn’t even have video memory – you literally had to construct pixels just moments before they were handed to the electron gun. It was designed for very specific, trivial games: two players, some bullets and a very sparse background. All the launch games looked like that. But within five years, companies figured out how to make games like Pitfall, which were much, much cooler and more sophisticated. Here’s the kicker: if you were to take those games, go back in time, and show them even to the *creators* of VCS, I bet they would tell you “Naah, it’s impossible to do that. The hardware we just put together won’t ever be able to handle this.” Likewise, if you were to take Google Maps or iPhone Web apps, take your deLorean to 1991 and show them to Tim Berners-Lee, he’d be all like “get the hell out of here.” (via Russ Weakley)
  2. Liberating Lives — The historian Tim Hitchcock, behind projects such as the Old Bailey Online and London Lives, has reflected on the impact of digitisation on our access to archives. Archives, he notes, tend to reflect the assumptions and practices of the institutions that created them. But by providing new ways into these records systems, technology can undermine the power relations that persist within their structures. Read the entire post, which has a moving description of the bureaucracy of Australia’s racism and the modern-day projects built on it. (via spanishmanners on Twitter)
  3. Deblurring Images — interesting research work reconstructing original scenes from blurred images. (via anselm on Twitter)
  4. 50 Years of Cyborgs: I Have Not the Words (Quinn Norton) — We need language that lets us talk about the terrorism of little changes. Be they good or bad, they are terrible in aggregate. Thought-provoking essay pushing our ideas of change, future, technology, and culture until they break. (via kevinmarks on Twitter)
Four short links: 23 August 2010

Four short links: 23 August 2010

Crowdsourced Architecture, Lego Timetracking, Streaming Charts, and The Deeper Meaning of School

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 23, 2010
  1. Open Buildings — crowdsourced database of information about buildings, for architecture geeks. A sign that crowdsourcing is digging deep into niches far far from the world of open source software. (via straup on Delicious)
  2. Lego-Based Time Tracking — clever hack to build physical graphs of where your time goes. (via avgjanecrafter on Twitter)
  3. Smoothie Charts — a charting Javascript library designed for live streaming data. (via jdub on Twitter)
  4. The Big Lie (Chris Lehmann) — why school is not only about workforce development: I think – I fear – that the next twenty or thirty years of American life are going to be difficult. I think we’re going to have some really challenging problems to solve, and I think that we’re going to be faced with hard choices about our lives, and I want our schools to help students be ready to solve those problems, to weigh-in on those problems, to vote on those problems. It’s why History and Science are so important. It’s why kids have to learn how to create and present their ideas in powerful ways. It’s why kids have to become critical consumers and producers of information. And hopefully, along the way, they find the careers that will help them build sustainable, enjoyable, productive lives. Also read Umair Haque’s A Deeper Kind of Joblessness which Chris linked to.
Four short links: 2 August 2010

Four short links: 2 August 2010

Search Tips, Web Parsing, DNS Blacklists, Complex Machines

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 2, 2010
  1. Hidden Features of Google (StackExchange) — rather than Google’s list of search features, here are the features that real (sophisticated) users find useful. My new favourite: the ~ operator for approximate searching. (via Hacker News)
  2. Natural Language Parsing for the Web — JSON API to the Stanford Natural Language Parser. I wonder why the API to the library isn’t an open source library, given the Stanford parser is GPLv2. It’d be super-cool to have this as an EC2 instance, Ubuntu package, or Chef recipe so it’s trivial to add to an existing hosted project.
  3. Taking Back the DNS (Paul Vixie) — defining a spec whereby you can subscribe to blacklists for DNS, as Most new domain names are malicious.
  4. Building Complex Machines with Lego — I saw the (Lego) Antikythera Mechanism at Sci Foo. It’s as amazing as it looks.
Four short links: 19 July 2010

Four short links: 19 July 2010

Open Source Brain Software, Mind Control, Data QA, Android Game Engine

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 19, 2010
  1. OpenVibe — open source software for brain-computer interfaces, from Inria.
  2. Robot Controlled by Mind (video) — uses OpenVibe. I love that this can see blinks and other neural activity, and that it’s hackable.
  3. Talend Open Profiler — open source tool to QA data.
  4. AndEngine — open source 2D OpenGL Game Engine for the Android platform.
Four short links: 6 July 2010

Four short links: 6 July 2010

Critical Thinking, Impulse Buys, Cell Tower in a Handset, and American Jobs

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 6, 2010
  1. Critical Thinking — a world-class resource for teaching critical thinking and Internet literacies. The ability to separate bullshit from truth (to find the gold nuggets in the butt nuggets, as it were), is how people can get the good effects of the Internet while avoiding most of the bad. (via Clay Johnson)
  2. Economist Direct is a Fabulous Idea — on the Economist’s offer to let you buy a single-issue subscription: it’s not a subscription; it’s more casual than that. It’s an impulscription. (via BERG London)
  3. OpenBTS on Droid — run a GSM network from a CDMA handset, with the help of Asterisk. Cute hack!
  4. How to Make an American Job, Before It’s Too Late (Andy Grove) — former head of Intel talks about the nature of jobs and industries. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

"Hackers" at 25

It's been 25 years since "Hackers" was published. Author Steven Levy reflects on the book and the movement.

by Mac Slocum | @macslocum | +Mac Slocum | June 3, 2010

In mid-1980s, Steven Levy wrote a book that introduced the term "hacker" to a wide audience. In the ensuing 25 years, that word and its accompanying community have gone through tremendous change. In this Q&A, Levy discusses the book's genesis, its influence and the role hackers continue to play.

Four short links: 3 June 2010

Four short links: 3 June 2010

Passionate Users, Mail APIs, Phone Hacking, and Patent Data Online

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 3, 2010
  1. How to Get Customers Who Love You Even When You Screw Up — a fantastic reminder of the power of Kathy Sierra’s “I Rock” moments. In that moment I understood Tom’s motivation: Tom was a hero. (via Hacker News)
  2. Yahoo! Mail is Open for Development — you can write apps that sit in Yahoo! Mail, using and extending the UI as well as taking advantage of APIs that access and alter the email.
  3. Canon Hack Development Kit — hack a PowerShot to be controlled by scripts. (via Jon Udell)
  4. 10TB of US PTO Data (Google Books) — the PTO has entered into a two year deal with Google to distribute patent and trademark data for free. At the moment it’s 10TB of images and full text of grants, applications, classifications, and more, but it will grow over time: in the future we will be making more data available including file histories and related data. (via Google Public Policy blog post)
Four short links: 6 April 2010

Four short links: 6 April 2010

Copytheft, Digg UI, HIV Detection, and Facebook Sueage

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 6, 2010
  1. Thinking Further About Copyright (Confused of Calcutta) — several nice illustrations of the “copying is not theft” distinction. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
  2. DUI: Digg User Library — Javascript UI library from the folks at Digg.
  3. Building a Handheld HIV Detector — gadget the size of an iPod, that detects the T-cells that HIV kills. Prototype cost $250 to make, orders of magnitude less than the typical medical instrument. This is just one of many approaches to the problem, including disposable test kits funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (via @parc)
  4. How I Got Sued by Facebook (Pete Warden) — he’d previously reported security holes to Facebook’s security team, and that apparently saved him from a full-on lawsuit. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn’t the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me.