As a result of the Skiff Hack, we now have Skiff member profiles and presence info available for the skiff at http://who.theskiff.org. As in, you can see who is currently in the Skiff or who has been around recently, and a bit about them in the process.
Yes, that is another profile to maintain, but this helps. We can find out who is around us at the Skiff on a day to day basis. Lovely work Tom and Simon and I don't know who else made it.
I'm rather fond of django-imagekit -- a useful django tool that organises a bunch of image processing on images saved in django models. It comes with a bunch of useful scale, crop etc tools based on PIL.
However, I was looking for a way to make a sepia images from my uploaded image. I found Fredrik Lundh's PIL code for sepia in his post Sepia Toning with PIL and adapted that into the form needed for a django-imagekit image processor. Here's how that looks:
Given how useful the # key is, it has always annoyed me that on the standard UK Apple keyboard, getting a # key requires keying Alt-3 to get it to appear.
If you are doing web development with jquery, or writing shell scripts or python, you end up using this key a lot and Alt-3 just doesn't work for me. However, on the left of the recent Apple keyboard, there is the § key. I've never used §, I guess somebody must.
Anyway, so I went and found Ukelele, a keyboard layout editor, and modified the keyboard map to put the # where the § used to be, and the result is what I call the BritishLHash keyboard layout.
How to use this:
~/Library/Keyboard Layouts folder.That's all there is to it. I've been using this mapped file for a year or so, and it works fine in OS X 10.5 and 10.6.
I'm getting rather fond of a full mutiple-window experience when watch the Formula 1, and one of those windows is open on a search for f1 or #f1 to keep an eye on the discussion.
That works, except there is often a repeated promoted tweet that stays at the top of the search results. This confuses and annoys me, as I have to cast my eyes past this promoted tweet again and again and again to see the real search results. Once, on the initial search, is enough, after that, these things are unnecessary noise. Like this:
So, I've made a Google Chrome Extension to take away promoted tweets after the first time you see them. When there are more search items, and 'x new tweets' shows, clicking on this renders the search results minus the promoted tweets. You'll still see Top Tweets, though, I might take them on next.
Get the extension from here: Hide Repeated Promoted Tweets. Read more info here. I hope it is useful. And let me know what you think.
Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on.
Very nice piece of work, this. Unlogo removes logos and corporate signage from video. What a great experiment. I haven't had a look at the videos on the site yet, but I have great hopes.
One of the things that I notice particularly about the UK countryside is that there is a complete absence of billboards, and that's almost worth a sigh of relief every time there's a stretch of road with green either side and no advertising signage.
Promote JS is all about referencing high-quality Javascript documentation, and I surely approve.
For some years now, I've been, on occasions, having a good rave about wanting to start a (print) magazine that had neutral or balanced advertising. I'd want a magazine that devoted equals space and effort to advertising to sell things to people, and advertisments to encourage people not to buy things.
So, on one page you'd have an ad for a new 'fridge, and on the other side, a similarly high-quality ad encouraging you to maintain and keep the old one or share the neighbours. There are two sides of every buying decision, we just don't get to see them very often. And when we are trying to save carbon, not buying appliances does help reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.
So, you get the idea: A nicely designed magazine with rules that mean that advertisers need to somehow ensure or allow or fund the for and against cases for their product. Would anybody care to advertise? Would anybody dare to advertise? It'd be an interesting experiment.
It would be mad to start a new print magazine right now. So, what about something online -- and this is the new bit of my thinking. Presumably, once can buy banner ads with the keyword 'fridge' or whatever and promote not buying a new fridge. It's be easy enough to make ads like that, and they'd get nicely delivered onto pages where people were looking to buy fridges or were searching out a new 'fridge to buy. Perhaps the click through rates wouldn't be that high, so it wouldn't cost too much, but who knows?
This has to be against ad placement terms and conditions, you think? Well, I've just had a look at the google adwords policies, and I can't see anything in there that make it wrong to suggest not buying something might be a good option. Actually, under the 'Anti' and Violence section of the Content Guidelines, there is a specific allowance for "Consumer awareness ads (positive and negative) that don't violate the basics of the policy". That sounds ok for now, but there's a lot of details to work on.
Okay, so, to make this thing fly, we need:
And that probably means a charity or consumer organisation that wants to try it out. An initial experiment would be very interesting because it would yield click-through information about how consumers react to these messages, and could give a charity or similar a quite high profile.
Anybody interesting in trying this out?
Google Scribe provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe's suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.
I have another question for you is to become an editor of the newspaper and then at the end of their lifespan and regenerative capacity of these cells to their cognate receptors on the cell surface and then they will become more apparent from the following detailed description of the invention.
The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research.
That runs counter to the 19th-Century "top-down" view of brain structure.
In more brain news... here we have new research that likens brain structure to a network rather than something top-down.
I'm a bit surprised that the top-down model has survived for so long in neuroscience...
It was interesting to read Jaron Lanier, in the New York Times, referring to Clay Shirky talking about twitter as a kind of global mind...
In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.
That reminds me of my somewhat provocative talk at the Twitter Developers Nest last year: You are a Neuron, which was a thought experiment and chat about our individual messaging of short messaging on twitter adding up to the beginnings of a global mind of sorts.
I'm thinking I need to go deeper with that talk, specifically to tease out some of the interesting aspects of how we learn to work together in a connected social system to do things like share and filter links for each other. At an individual level, sharing a few links with followers seems simple enough, but can we express that as some kind of intelligent filtering function.
But enough of that. Jaron Larnier's article is well worth a read; as a part of the ongoing discussion about what is Artificial Intelligence. And especially to red about the unsettling thought (or rumour) that Google is scanning all those books not just for human search, but to feed to a big artificial intelligence...
