Houseplant on Twitter
Just put together a Botanicalls kit, hooked up, and got a hello, world tweet.
That was pretty satisfying.
(Also: headers are a pain in the butt to solder.)
Paper Bits digital, paper, notes and bits.
Blue Label
Been iterating through a lot of little changes to the tag design.
It would be easier if I weren’t a huge type nerd.
links for 2008-11-17
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Aggregation of your online activities into your own CMS is a good idea (for backup purposes at least), but nobody wants to read a constant stream of your twitters and Flickr photos with equal weighting. "There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information. My home page isn’t the answer; the bulk of it uses an overgrown weblog format and suffers from using identical treatments for different kinds of content. But I have started to make it more human friendly. For example, if I post dozens of photos to Flickr in a day only a few appear on the site, with a link to see the rest, rather than swamp the page. And Twitters, whose value decreases rapidly with time (unlike longer essays), aren’t part of this chronological stream. But it needs, and will get, bigger changes."
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A Ruby-Arduino graphical interactive shell. Worked out of the box on my 10.5 MacBook.
Quote of the Day
The metaphor of personal computer as physical space has been strained beyond usefulness, in my opinion. It’s the lack of physicality that affords such insane productivity for Quicksilver users. Everything is abstracted into nouns and verbs and I get to mash them up however I need to. I’m unconstrained by “here” and “there.”
– Merlin Mann, 2006, on BumpTop.
Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-126 Launch
I can’t quite believe we can count the number of times we’ll see this again on our fingers.
— Matt Jones
Paper Bits Sketchbook
If I’ve tagged my paper and made it searchable, I can standardize my sketchbook into tagged manila folders. That makes it easier to work in a larger format, like the Behance Dot Grid book.
I still do a lot of sketching on index cards, so I’ve got envelopes to capture those on the folders, too.
Now starting to look at how to transition more easily between the data shadow and the paper, using my phone and a visual-marker recognizing camera on the computer. That’s still in the paper prototyping stage, though.
(Otherwise known as the ‘point at things with phone and make "boop!" noises while doing things manually’ stage)
links for 2008-11-16
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iPhone app lets you use either the touchscreen or accelerometer as a mouse to control your computer. A server application needs to run on the computer you control, which is available here.
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ACTPrinter operates as “virtual paper” for the iPhone, giving you a place to store electronic tickets, boarding passes, bar codes and other data. You can take e-mails, Web pages, letters and more with you when you leave. The resolution is high enough that you can scan bar codes directly off your iPhone’s display, according to Houdah. ACTPrinter lets you print from any Mac application to the iPhone or iPod touch, and integrates with Mac OS X PDF Services. The Mac and iPhone synchronize using Bonjour zero-configuration networking. It operates in both landscape and portrait viewing modes, and supports pinch zoom.
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"Using the combined power of the We feel fine and MOO Api [Brendan Dawes has] created 100 Feelings felt. It pulls out the most recent 100 feelings from We feel fine, and creates 100 different MiniCards. It’s a perfect snapshot of time - each MiniCard is printed with a description or emotion on the front, and the name of the feeling on the reverse (happy, sad, angry etc) - along with the date and time the feeling was felt. It’s a wonderful piece of history you can hold in your hands."
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"remember Zink, that company whose technology prints digital photos on the spot without ink? It's joined forces with toy-maker Tomy to make the xiao TIP-521, a digital camera with a printer built in."
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Can't believe I didn't have this bookmarked: these notebooks are possibly my favorite paper product besides index cards. Unpretentious and simple, with a lovely design identity. If the moleskine is too snobbish, or just too big, check these out.
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"That’s because this is more a system than a product. Most traditional entertainment is about providing an artifact — a book, a script, a show, a score, a performance — that is then preserved, passed on and reinterpreted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But new entertainment — social networks, games, online communities — is about empowering everyday people to express themselves and interact without a central arbiter. The thing is, interactive entertainment is much harder to design than it is to experience. A great game like chess, poker or Tetris should be easy to play at first and then reveal deeper levels of complexity and skill."
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The difference between an excellent horror experience in any medium and a mediocre one is in how it measures out all those little jolts over time. It is balancing the generation and release of episodic tension with a mounting sense of dread that gives the narrative its basic arc. If viewers, players or readers are oversaturated with dramatic and graphic scenes, they can become desensitized. Too much wasted space and the consumer can become bored in a more obvious way.
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As Aaron Cope Straup put it, a treasure trove of pen computing resources trapped in a Flash interface. (But still pretty cool for all that)
Geeking out around the house
Lately, I’ve been doing the exercises in Making Things Talk.
I put some pictures here.
Paper is human.
(Please click through to the flickr photo page, as there’s information in the notes.)
Quite often, I’ll capture a germ of an idea, to be fleshed out later. That’s on a blank index card.
What I’ve done here is, I used a pre-printed, “unique”(*) geohash MOO QRCode sticker, and tagged that card the next morning. Then I dropped it into my scansnap, which uploaded it to Flickr automatically, as a private photo. Okay: captured.
I used the photo notes feature in Flickr to make the QRCode clickable in the browser. That’s something that could be automated via the API. I don’t know how to do that, yet. Also, I added a tag to the flickr with the geohash from that QRCode: this is something that could be automated, as well. Not to mention, if the geohash was made two-way (it isn’t right now), you could do much more interesting things with machine tags and Flickr’s location API than that.
Then, I used the description field to flesh out the idea on the card:
Ubiquitous Computing has the potential to be a blessing or a curse.
personally, I’m hopeful that we can use it as an opportunity to undo the attention-hogging mistakes of the GUI.
And I used the notes feature to translate my handwriting. (That’s not something a computer would likely be able to do right now, but that’s more a function of my writing.)
So, when that was done, there was a fairly rich, multi-layered document. It’s tagged, part of a few groups, part of a couple photosets on Flickr, geotagged, and you can pull a link right off the screen with your phone, if you want.
Then I used the blog button on Flickr to start writing this.
That’s a lot of friction. Or, as Matt Jones put it, it has a high drag coefficient.
What I’d like to do with the QRCode is, pull the geohash URL, and create a new blog post with it. That is, if the QRCode is actually a unique identity for that card, scanning it and automatically putting it online should create a “blog” page for it to live.
And that should happen regardless of _how_ I get it online: scansnap, flatbed scanner, or high-resolution camera with a network interface.
Or, to put it another way:
The act of adding a QRCode to any given object in the world should, by implication, give that piece of paper a place, online, for its data shadow to live.
And capturing an image of that object, with its code, should create and populate that data shadow, as an Atom post object. No friction.
Sketch. Tag. Snap. And maybe edit.
Notes or diagrams, scribbled in your Field Notes notebook, or sketchbook, or a book margin, become the initial seed of an idea.
If you decide you want that idea to be tagged and shared, you can automatically tag it, and automatically create an online space for a second draft. Flesh the idea out. Link it to others.
But the important part is, you have to reduce the interaction. Make it work like Magic Ink: use the context that you’ve provided, and use convention to create an initial stub. Which you can fix later.
If that were working, then what I’d have done here would look more like this:
1. Pull out a sketch or note. Tag it.
2. Snap an image.
3. Magic!
The QRCode suddenly has a viable data shadow, through the act of scanning it. And that’s a place to flesh out your ideas, edit it, share it with others.
How would this work? I have a rough idea:
1. I pull the note out, decide to take it a bit further. I tag it with a QRCode.
(Note: The tagging with a QRCode is itself an interesting interaction design problem, but one for a later day.)
2. I run it through my scanner, or use my Eye-Fi and camera. The scanner puts it on Flickr.
3. A bot sees that my photostream has updated, and checks it for a QRCode in the image.
* It finds a code.
* It interprets the code into a URL: http://paperbits.net/w6f024k4cetx28bcd/ and sticks a photonote on the QRCode, and adds a machine tag with the geohash and any other available context data.
* It checks to see if that URL exists: nope, it doesn’t exist.
* It posts a new atom object to paperbits.net with that URL, and mirrors the flickr photo, notes, and tags to it.
So, now, if I read the QRCode with my phone, I have a space online to annotate that object, or that time, or that space.
Basically, what I’ve done here could happen without all the insane scutwork.
Still working out how the hell to make it work. Suggestions appreciated: my email is my first initial, and my last name (DiMauro) on GMail, if anyone is interested.
(Also see: the PaperCamp mailing list.)
Mandatory Apology
Slapping on a theme to fix some random brokenness.
Fixes coming.
So I Sez
“I prepared to hurl myself into the diseased water to rescue my beloved canine.”
– My Dog is So Smart
18 June 2006
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