Posts categorized as Technology
More amazing photos from Mars
The first is another photo captured the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-resolution imager. You can see the lander suspended from the parachute. This photo is taken at a very unique angle which makes it looks as if the lander will end up in the large crater, however: Shown here is a 10 kilometer (6 mile) diameter crater informally called "Heimdall," and an improved full-resolution image of the parachute and lander. Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) in front of the crater. This is another photo from the orbiter, ...
Posted on: 2008 May 27
Filed under: Space, Technology
Video of the landing sequence for the Mars Phoenix lander
These video sequences are the best parts of these expeditions. The reactions of the engineers as the nerdy signals come into the NASA command center get me all choked up with happiness :) Here's the video, click play to watch: YAY!
Brightkite, easy to use, location based "Twitter" and photos
Long title, huh? I was going to write out a thoughtful post about Brightkite and why I'm kind of warming up to it, but Herschell's vertigo-addled brain did all the work for me: My first text to the brightkite servers was relatively painless and took the same amount of time as it would to tweet it (on Twitter). All I did was send “? LOCATION” to BrightKite’s SMS # and in seconds, BKite (see what I did there? heheh) asked me to verify WHICH LOCATION, in which I replied “1? and PRESTO CHANGE-O! Internets! YAY. Bonus points for the seamless ...
Posted on: 2008 April 20
Filed under: Internet, Life, Social Networking, Technology
apple, brightkite, champagne, chicago, fireeagle, geospatial, iphone, locationservices, sdk, sms
Dealing with information overload
How I skim my "high volume" feeds: information overload from Clint Ecker on Vimeo. I've long thought it would be interesting to make a video of how people with tons of feeds skim them and pull out interesting information. This is my "high volume" folder which holds posts from sites which post 10+ more items a day and which I could "mark all as read" and not miss much. When I skim through these posts, this is how I do it. Each post probably gets less than a second to catch my attention. You can definitely see which posts get ...
Posted on: 2008 March 28
Filed under: Internet, Technology
aggregation, aggregators, feeds, googlereader, information, informationoverload, reading, RSS, skimming
Awesome little robot
I've built robots before, and I probably will again in the future. I ran across a post about this robot today in my feed reader and I absolutely adore him! The Yellow Drum Machine robot's sole purpose in life is to avoid obstacles, find a flat surface, and then to play a tune on it with little drum sticks. He tests it out, and if it has a good sound, he records a sample of himself playing the tune, and plays it back and plays along with it, building up cool little percussive tunes. Check out the video, not only ...
Posted on: 2008 March 23
Filed under: Fun, Technology
electronics, letsmakerobots, robot, robotics, yellowdrummachine
SXSW: Friday and Saturday
We left our apartment in Chicago around 6am and made it to the airport on time. We had a mini freakout when we encountered not one, but two sprawling and packed security check lines. To make matters worse, I only have an expired driver's license for identification and I was a little worried it would hold me up. I performed some ninja moves and found a tucked away security line that not many had discovered and we zipped through. My lack of non-expired identification was actually not that big of deal. They lady hassled me a little bit and then ...
Posted on: 2008 March 08
Filed under: Blogging, Health & Lifestyle, Internet, Social Networking, Technology
TechCocktail 7
These things are so packed I can never find anyone I actually want to talk to. I still meet new people every time though. Here's a photo of me and Jacqui waiting for the bartenders to start handing out the booze! Link: TechCocktail
Posted on: 2008 February 23
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
Kanye West at the Grammies
Kanye is so cool! I want his jacket and wait til the end when Daft Punk appears. They're totally tronned out. Awesome.
Posted on: 2008 February 11
Filed under: Music, Technology
South by Southwest Interactive
Yes, Jacqui and I are heading south this March. To Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, or SXSW as the kids say. A lot of really cool people from all over the country who also happen to be friends are going too. I am also excited to be attending my first conference in a long time where I am not media. That means I can have fun, enjoy things, learn stuff, goof around with friends, stay up as late as I want, and get a pony for Christmas too! For those who may not know exactly what South by Southwest ...
Posted on: 2008 February 07
Filed under: Internet, Marketing, Programming, Social Networking, Technology
Google Reader Team: Let me add a short comment with my shared items
Dear Google Reader team, I love sharing items with my friends on Google Reader, it's one of the best parts of the site. However, I would really like to send along a short message with my shared items. Currently, I'm using Facebook Shared Items to compliment my Google Reader shared items, mostly because I can personalize the message and give my shared item some context. If Google Reader supported something like this, even a Twitter-esque 140 character limit to the comment, I could ditch my Facebook crutch for this sort of thing. That's all, thanks! Clint
Javascript Loading Speed
A great post by John Resig, the lead developer of jQuery. The pbWiki guys did an excellent analysis of many different Javascript libraries and there are a few takeaways that web developers should note. On the subject of compressing your Javascript files: Looking at the speed of loading jQuery in three forms: normal, minified (using Yahoo Min), and packed (using Packer). By order of file size, packed is the smallest, then minifed, then normal. However, the packed version has an overhead: It must be uncompressed, on the client-side, using a JavaScript decompression algorithm. This unpacking has a tangible cost in ...
Posted on: 2008 February 05
Filed under: Internet, Programming, Technology
Incompatible
I really, really like this photo I took this afternoon of that MacBook's 60W adapter plugged into the MacBook Air. I was attempting to show why it wouldn't work too well. This picture doesn't illustrate that very well, but the photo is really nice!
Thanks to everyone who's added me on Google Reader
I just wanted to drop a quick line here and thank all the people who added me as a friend on Google Reader. I'm already seeing a lot of cool posts I probably would've never come across normally!
Posted on: 2008 February 03
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
RSS organization systems, how about you?
About a month ago I decided to initiate an experiment. I would switch over to Google Reader and reboot my feed reading tactics. I had read posts by Matt Wood and Jason Kottke (who had expanded on Matt's system). I had accumulated a very hodge-podge organization system which had grown quite wooly over the past four years or so. At one point I was reading up to 500 subscriptions daily when I was writing for Ars on a regular basis, and with a poor organization system it was get quite overwhelming. My previous system looked like this: Ars Ars Projects ...
Posted on: 2008 February 03
Filed under: Blogging, Technology
aggregators, feeds, googlereader, lifehacks, organization, RSS, subscriptions
Did I forget to post about EveryBlock?
A week or two ago, Adrian Holovaty and his intrepid crew at EveryBlock released the product they've been working on for the past 6 months or so. His team of Paul Smith, Wilson Miner, and Daniel X. O'Neil have put together a site that aggregates civic information like business licenses and street closings and mashes them together with crime data, business reviews from Yelp, missed connections & lost and found reports from Craigslist, and more. All these stats can be broken down, viewed by neighborhood or zip code, and analyzed. Most common crime in Chicago? Theft! Other weird stuff I ...
Posted on: 2008 February 02
Filed under: Internet, Journalism, Technology
adrianholovaty, chicago, django, everyblock, hyperlocal, journalism, nyc, SF, wilsonminer
Seeking excellent Google Reader friends
I current have a good set of friends who use Google Reader on a regular basis and I often find myself enjoying the items they share with me. Despite that, I'd love to have even more really smart, interesting people who are sharing good stuff with me. Not to come off like Robert Scoble, but I feel that the more I "surround" myself with smart people pointing out cool things to me, I can only benefit! So, if you're a Google Reader-using, item sharing nut, add me as a friend in Gmail/Gtalk, I'm clintecker@gmail.com
Posted on: 2008 February 02
Filed under: Social Networking, Technology
Revolutionary iPhone ideas: Apple take note
Let me stream internet radio to my iPhone over WiFi. I can't tell you how awesome this would be. I don't want to have to capture Groove Salad over night to a big ol' MP3 and listen to it throughout the day. I want live radio! NPR, cool college stations, it would be extremely cool. When my iPhone is attached to my computer, I should be able to send and receive text messages (SMS) via some method. Address book used to do this (I think) with phones connected via Bluetooth. Why not build this functionality into iChat? Or expose it ...
Posted on: 2008 January 29
Filed under: Apple, Technology
Eye-Fi needs firmware update
bwoop bwoop
Django People
DjangoPeople is a site put together by Simon Willison & Natalie Downe that hopes to gel the Django community at large into a more cohesive group. Simon puts it this way: I'm constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC. The site allows you to ...
Posted on: 2008 January 22
Filed under: Django, Internet, Social Networking, Technology
django, gmaps, google, maps, mashup, nataliedowne, simonwillison
Sup? Macworld is a blast. So is Devo.
Check out my roundup of our first day's Macworld coverage. We went to the Microsoft pre-Macworld bash party last night. It was fun and we met some really cool developers from the Mac Business Unit. Then we took a shuttle to the Macworld bash. Devo was playing. DEVO. These guys are old by now, but they can still rock! You don't think Devo can rock? You're badly misinformed! Today was another crazy day of running around, pounding out stories, and meeting cool people. We had a really fantastic lunch with Brian Lam and his girlfriend Lisa at hotel whose name ...
Posted on: 2008 January 16
Filed under: Apple, Ars Technica, Technology
Analytics junkies
My friend, super-blogger, and fellow Arsian, Josh Bancroft has a really keen post about how he tracks the various metrics of his personal blog (which gets quite a good bit of traffic!). I will admit it too, I am an analytics junkie too and I use a lot of the same metrics and tools as Josh does to see what content is doing good and where I can make improvements on my site. This is another post that grew from an interesting conversation at work. We were discussing what site statistics/metrics are REALLY important to a blogger. That is, swimming ...
Posted on: 2008 January 09
Filed under: Marketing, Social Networking, Technology
Apple dominates CES
Last year, Macworld and CES were booked over the same week in January. Quite unfortunate. Does anyone even remember what happened at CES last year? The iPhone, Apple TV, and a slew of other Apple products hit the ground and blew away anything that was being discussed in Las Vegas. Well this year, Apple barely had to try. Macworld is next week, and as you know, Apple announced minor, incremental updates to their pro-line. Result? News of CES is swept away on the blogs (that is, if you count TechMeme as an accurate portrayal of what's being talked about). Heck, ...
Posted on: 2008 January 08
Filed under: Apple, Marketing, Technology
apple, ces, ces2008, macworld, macworld2008, marketing, PR, publicrelations
Dissection of OLPC XO-1 by bunnie
I've been a huge fan of Bunnie (Andrew Huang) since he did his work hacking the Xbox so long ago. More recently he's been behind the Chumby. Chumby is a consumer product created by Chumby Industries. It is designed as an Open System, with schematics, PCB layouts and packaging/outerware designs available. The primary intended use for a Chumby device is to play a set of user-customizable widgets, small Adobe Flash animations that deliver real-time information. The animations also have the ability to control and interact with the low-level hardware, thereby enabling functionality such as smart alarm clocks that bring the ...
Fluid 0.6 is out
Fluid is a new tool that I've been having a lot of fun with. It's a very generic OS X application that allows you to run individual instances of web applications as if they were pseudo-sesktop applications. It s a generic Webkit view with a few enhancements to make browsing safer and easier to handle. In generic terms, applications like Fluid are called SSB or Site Specific Browsers. Have you ever had a few web apps running in one of your millions of tabs in your browser, close the window and lose what you were doing there? Maybe it was ...
Posted on: 2008 January 07
Filed under: Technology
CES Keynote was boring, who could've guessed?
Those poor guys who have to go cover the CES keynote. Ben Gold may or may not be there (he's quite the enigma), but he apparently watched it and had this to say: Other than that, it was basically just Bill talking for a little bit and then these two other Microsoft dorks for the majority of the keynote, a man and a woman, I already forgot their names. The guy was wearing the same exact outfit as Bill, but his sweater was green and Bill's was violet. It was a little bit creepy. "Here at Microsoft we like to ...
Two videos for a slow Sunday afternoon
You read TechMeme, right? For those who don't, it's a completely automated site that pulls, organizes and displays the hottest news from blogs at any given moment. It changes continuously, 24/7 in response the the "buzziest" news of the second. Amit Pagarwal at Digital Inspiration made a pretty cool 50 hour time lapsed visualization (down to 50 seconds) of the evolution of the TechMeme home page: And if you're familiar with the Scoble/Facebook thing (as well as that stupid video made about Britney by Chris Cocker), this might be a little entertaining:
Posted on: 2008 January 06
Filed under: Blogging, Fun, Technology
Facebook Shared Items now in Tumble Log. It was harder than it should've been!
As a point of notification, I've now started to include my Facebook Shared Items in my Tumble Log (how's that for openness!). While it's technically true that I can export all of my shared items from Facebook via a handy RSS feed, it's not nearly that cut & dry. I treat Facebook Shared Items as a sort of social bookmarking service. I have a bookmarklet in my browser's toolbar and when I run across a site I enjoy, I stab it, enter any thoughts of my own and click submit. Facebook tries to extract an image from the page as ...
Posted on: 2008 January 05
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
dataportability, export, facebook, feed, import, RSS, socialgraph, socialnetworking, syndication
The Wii Fit, looks pretty cool!
I heard about the Wii Fit when my friend and colleague who writes for Ars Technica wrote about the device at last year's E3. It's basically a new peripheral and "game" for the Wii that helps you work out, tracks your progress, and has a bunch of other fun balance games, watch this video: We talked about the Fit today at work and I think we've resolved to get one, but I think that I'd like to get one for home too. I've heard mumblings about it being release in either January or February, but there's nothing definitive yet.
Posted on: 2008 January 03
Filed under: Fun, Health & Lifestyle, Technology
Live blogging and the Eye-Fi Wireless 2 gigabyte SD camera memory card
Jacqui and I (and others at Ars Technica) have done the live blogging thing enough to know that orchestrating the whole affair can be a challenge with only two people in attendance. Unlike the mega-sites Engadget and Gizmodo who can afford and finagle up to four people to sit in the press area, take photos, transfer them, format and upload them, manage the live blogging itself, et cetera. When we go to an event like WWDC, MacWorld, or TechCrunch40, we generally only have two people in the keynote (if we're lucky). Most of the time there is only a single ...
Posted on: 2008 January 03
Filed under: Internet, Technology
apple, ars, arstechnica, camera, conferences, dslr, eyefi, liveblogging, macworld, mwsf, wwdc
My Twitter Statistics
Damon Cortesi has written a Perl script that downloads all of your tweets to Twitter, aggregates them in useful ways, and provides a nice looking Numbers template for presentation of the data. Here are my stats for the past year: For some reason I tweet a lot more on Tuesday than any other day of the week. Weird. Via Gruber
Macworld Predictions
I saw this headline pop up in my reader and it reminded me that me and Jacqui have been trading our own MacWorld predictions back and forth between each other for the past few weeks. Since we'll both be in attendance live blogging the keynote and covering the floor during the week of MacWorld, I thought I'd make my own predictions prior to reading Ryan's post. Movie rentals from iTunes. This has been talked to death in the press, Jacqui got the news a while before it hit the mainstream press and Ars covered this here. It's pretty much a ...
Posted on: 2008 January 01
Filed under: Apple, Technology
apple, appletv, iphone, ipod, itunes, macworld, macworld2008
You want comments? You got em!
While compiling my 2007 year-end posting statistics post, I made an observation that I had built a nice following of commeters. My posting volume had gone down, my content length had increased, and with that, I saw an explosion in the number of people commenting on my blog. So with that information under my belt, I've finally got comments up and running here on the site. I'm using the largely undocumented (and unconverted to newforms) django.contrib.comments. Trust me, the built-in commenting that comes with Django is feature-packed and super-cool, but it could really use some documentation. However, I assume this ...
Posted on: 2008 January 01
Filed under: Django, Site news, Technology
Web Applications I Use on a Daily Basis
I saw Michael Arrington post his list over on TechCrunch and since I have always been a proponent of using online tools over desktop applications to get things done. In the past year though, it has become even easier to make that transition. Whereas I swore off desktop mail clients years ago and went 100% Gmail, I just recently made the jump from NetNewsWire to Google Reader (mostly for the cool sharing support and persistence everywhere, including the fancy mobile interface for my iPod touch and Blackberry). So here's a list of all the online tools I use on a ...
Posted on: 2008 January 01
Filed under: Internet, Technology
analytics, bookmarking, facebook, flickr, gmail, google, googlereader, lastfm, tools, twitter, web, web2point0, yelp
Where is your god now?
This post specifically targeted at Micah Strand:
by Clint Ecker
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- My server has been going wonky for a while :(
- Wouldn't it be cool if I could stream any iTunes purchase to a special iTunes radio station on any computer I'm authenticated on?
- I SAID GIVE ME THE BRANDY
- @simonw Awesome! I'll be there :)
- So much crap to catch up on from the weekend