11.28.09
Posted in Navel Gazing, Programming at 12:16 am by thomas
#haiku is a new little experiment for my Stories In Flight site – a mashup of Twitter and Flickr: The page searches for tweets with the #haiku hashtag and then visualizes the results by searching for each word in Flickr photos.
It’s a evolutionary step from FlickrPoet, and while it removes the interactivity, it certainly adds a meditative quality to the experience: You can sit there for a while and see the words and pictures dance past, with both Twitter and Flickr delivering near inexhaustible material.
I’ll have to work a little on the code that cleans up the tweets, since there is quite a lot of variation in the formatting of the haikus, with links, hashtags and response tags freely peppered across 140 characters.
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11.22.09
Posted in Culture, Games, Tech Nostalgia at 12:54 am by thomas
In November 1979 – 30 years ago – the Atari 400 and 800 computers went on sale to the public.
Atari 800 (wikipedia.org)
The Atari 400 and 800 were both based on the 6502 CPU and had a number of custom chips that definitely pushed the envelope in the late 70s and meant that close descendants of these machines were still being sold in the late 80s.
I very much remember the first time I saw an Atari 800 in person back in a office supply store in my hometown in Germany – it must have been 1982, when most affordable home computers where small plastic boxes with the simplest possible keyboards, often no sound, and quite often black-and-white TV video output.
The Atari 800 towered over these other machines, with cartridge ports under a neat lid in the top and the large keyboard in an extremely heavy case. And that machine was able to provide very robust graphics and amazing sound for the time.
Many hours were spent “testing” that machine and the few games available in that store, but I never bought an Atari 800 until much later when I got myself an Atari 800XL in the mid-80s when they were on sale for ridiculously little money after the Atari ST series machines had come out.
The 8-bit Ataris, during most of their production time, were overrun by cheaper competition, chief among them of course the Commodore C64, which had a slightly simpler architecture and a cheaper price, which helped in attracting huge sales numbers worldwide and as a result of that the full attention of software developers everywhere.
There were many great early arcade game conversions for the Atari 800 and I have very fond memories of both Mr. Do and Dig Dug among others. An original release for this machine was Lucasfilm’s Rescue on Fractalus – which made the most of the limited 8-Bit machine and certainly was one of the highlights of this era.
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11.19.09
Posted in Books, Good Stuff, Modern Life at 11:39 pm by thomas
Ariana Osborne has some great advice about Print-on-Demand projects over on her blog. I can pretty much only say “What she said!” about that post – read the FAQs for your publishing service, proof read the layout, order a proof copy for yourself first… all of that is important…
…and then there is her previous post, which has the one crucial advice that will make or break your POD project:
DO IT!
No matter how late at night you have stay up to get some quiet time from the kids, no matter how early in the morning you have to get up to write a page/edit a photo/draw a picture before you go to work, just do it. There is nothing worse than unfinished projects – with one exception, and that would be Projects You’ve Never Started.
And this is really not just true for Print-on-Demand, but for any kind of maker projects you’ve been dreaming of. Every day you haven’t started that dream project of yours is a day lost in a corner of the space-time continuum that we can’t access: The Past.
Don’t lose your precious projects to The Past, stop reading the intertubes right now, sit down and make something!
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11.15.09
Posted in Navel Gazing, Programming at 5:02 pm by thomas
Since we’ve built MapSkip a few years ago now, I’ve been steadily thinking of storytelling, its influence on the web and also the influence of modern technology on storytelling itself.
A few days ago I had an idea that was simple enough to experiment with and since I needed a place for the pages, I’ve started a new site – Stories In Flight – to hold storytelling-related tech demos that I’ve had bouncing around my mind.
The first little project to see the light of day here is FlickrPoet – an exploration of adding photos to a short story or a poem by searching for the words of the text on Flickr. This came out of some random experiments with the excellent Flickr APIs, and took on a life of its own. It can be very random, but every now and then it creates a collage of sheer genius. From what I’ve found it can work really well with poems and song lyrics. Feel free to experiment! 
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Posted in Good Stuff, One World, Travel at 12:16 am by thomas
Friday morning while I was getting ready to move my bike out for the ride to work, I heard on the radio that there are two men in a boat coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge… from Japan!
My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought was – “Wait – if I speed up a little bit through Sausalito, I can see these guys!”. So off I went, biking at full speed (not as fast as you may imagine, trust me) up the hill to the bridge, and there they were – they had just passed under the bridge and were surrounded by a small fleet of boats, guys on surfboards and even a news helicopter:
I figured that they would probably go towards the Marina, and I kept an eye on the group of boats while I crossed the bridge and rolled down through Crissy Fields. As it turned out, the timing was perfect:
Meet Mick Dawson and Chris Martin, who in their boat Bojangles just finished rowing across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the US. It took them 189 days on the open ocean to complete this amazing feat.
Yesterday evening I spent several hours reading through their very entertaining blog Golden Gate Endeavor and it is just amazing to follow along from day to day with their struggles. The Pacific Ocean did not make it easy for them, that’s for sure! The weather was often brutal, and on a number of days the wind and the currents did everything to push Mick and Chris back towards the East.
So Congratulations to the crew of the Bojangles! And thanks for taking us all along on your expedition across the ocean – the blog and the pictures of your adventure are quite fascinating and very inspirational.
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