matsu

Codebits 2009

For those of you who don’t know what Codebits is, it’s a three day international event of programming and hacking held every year by Sapo, with talks, workshops, quiz competitions, a 24 hour team coding contest, and a live music show (this year by pornophonique). It’s free, and it hosts, feeds, and powers (two full time generators for all those multi-core laptops) around 600 participants for three days of fun, work, meeting people, and lots, lots, lots of pizza.

Although I’m not a real programmer, I submitted a LEGO Mindstorms NXT project, and we ended up being the biggest team, with nine members!! Here’s the video:

And besides the project, I had two very unique experiences: first, meeting Mitch Altman and buying a TV-B-Gone kit and assembling it right there and then with his help, and the second, meeting the people from AltLab, Tiago who I had met before at Twittlis, and Catarina, who were demoing their Makerbot Industries open source 3D printer.

Putting 2 + 2 together, I managed to challenge Catarina to design and print an enclosure for my assembled TV-B-Gone, right there at Codebits!

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

If you have your own 3D printer, you can download the model files here, and print your own TV-B-Gone enclosure!

Kids, *this* is the future, and you probably saw it here first!

Filtering @ replies from your Twitter feed

Twitter is simultaneously a “micro-blogging” platform and IRC 2.0 (as many people have dubbed it), meaning that it sometimes becomes a giant chat channel.  Many people (like I do) use what they write on Twitter to enhance their own blogs, or feed it (along with other sources) to services like Friendfeed.

The problem with this is that the ratio between your “original” content and replies to other Twitter users becomes very low, and these so called “@ replies” have little value for people that aren’t in on the conversation.

Continuing my love affair with Yahoo Pipes, I’ve created a really simple pipe that will fetch your non-protected Twitter feed, and filter out all the @ replies. It will also remove the “nickname: ” prefix from the start of each tweet.  Just input your twitter username on the form, run the pipe, and choose the “Get as RSS” from under “More options”, inside the “Use this Pipe” section. Feel free to clone it and improve it.

Tweeting Google Reader notes

I wanted to have a way for my Google Reader notes to be “automagically” tweeted, but not the regular shares (so I don’t flood my Twitter stream).  I don’t know if there are already other solutions for this, I made this essentially to learn a bit more about Yahoo Pipes.  It also uses twitterfeed, a very nice service which fetches a RSS stream and tweets a small blurb plus a shortened link for each item from that stream .

You’ll need:

• The URL of your Google Reader public page, it should look something like this:

  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09549915423433150590

• Your exact author name from your Google Account page, mine is “Pedro Pinheiro”
• The Yahoo Pipe I created to filter the shares without notes, and input the previous two bits of information on the form.  Feel free to clone it into your own Pipes space and edit it/re-distribute it.
• To click on the “Get as RSS” under the “More options” button inside the “Use this pipe” box, note the URL
• To create a feed on twitterfeed – it uses OpenID, but you need to supply your Twitter username and password (yes, I know this isn’t safe, but as far as I know, Twitter doesn’t provide a safer alternative yet).

That’s it! Once the feed is activated on twitterfeed, within the specified time-interval, your Google Reader notes will automatically show up on your Twitter stream.

Saving some trees

Sheila Williams‘ December 2008 Asimov’s editorial was an interesting one for me. It discussed the story behind the physical sizes of the magazine she’s the current editor of along its history. Why did I find it interesting? Because I’ve never read Asimov’s (or Analog’s) paper editions. I started reading these magazines in 2002, and I’ve always bought the digital versions only, first at eReader.com (back then to read on my Treo 180), and later on Fictionwise.com, when eReader stopped having them available (eReader and Fictionwise have since then become one company).  Nowadays, I only buy paper books when they’re not legally available in digital format.

Even within my geekier circle of friends I’m a bit of a rarity, having heard the most passionate defense of classical paper books from some of the people who otherwise use the sharpest of the cutting edge to live and make their living.

The jump to the immateriality of the commerce and enjoyment of other media like music and video has had a much greater acceptance (both legal and otherwise…), even among the non-geek.  Does this say something about the people who read books, or just about a mismatch between books and the digital world?  From my numerous discussions with dead tree lovers , their qualms have some relevance, particularly for non-linear research reading, such as being easier to navigate and annotate the texts.  But after all, hasn’t the practice of reading news online and digital correspondence become all but universal? Why not for leisure, linear reading?

The main points for their passion of paper are its physical properties and permanence.  The smell, the texture, the physical bulk as a representation of the information contained within.  That the book is enjoyable without any hardware beyond the human sight, that it has a instantaneous “boot time”, and no DRM whatsoever.

My stance is different, based on several reasons, starting with the question of elegance: why would you chop down trees, move them to the paper factory, make ink, move everything to the printers, and move all the finished books around again, when the goal of transferring the knowledge from a writer’s mind into your own can be achieved by only pushing electrons and photons around, using the devices you already have? (I currently read my eBooks on my iPod Touch – I don’t find dedicated devices like the Kindle appealing for my needs).

The lack of bulk for me is one of the great advantages, as it allows me to carry in my pocket all the books I’m currently reading without carrying any extra weight (that’s why dedicated reading hardware is not appealing to me).  Therefore, I can use any unexpected free time to read a little more, and I can take any books on  weekends and vacations without any forethought or hassle.  And if you have ever moved from one house to another, you know how heavy all those boxes filled with books are.  My reasons aren’t limited to the physical realm, two other reasons are very important: the instant gratification of buying an eBook online and being able to start reading it as soon as the purchase is made; and being able to reference any unknown words on any dictionary loaded into the reading software just by touching the word.

I still haven’t made the switch completely, as many publishers, either for fear of copying or by not thinking there’s enough market for it to be worth the trouble, still don’t have their titles available in digital format.

In the end, I think it’s just another cultural limitation – if you’ve grown up with paper, changing is difficult.

blippr.com

On this early decade of the 21st century ADD has mutated from a medical condition into a way of life. Thanks to the way we can have access to content, we can (need?) to shift focus constantly between different conduits of information.  From ten years ago, we’ve gone from visiting websites, checking our e-mail, and chatting on ICQ to a constant diet fed to us through RSS feeds, Twitter, Blackberry push-mail, and multiple messenger services at an ever increasing rate. If you use only e-mail and messenger applications you’re a web Neanderthal.

In this context, several new services have appeared to help us deal with this overload.  We don’t have a miraculous way to read or write faster, so the only way to get all this info in and out of our brain is to cut the overhead, to be much more succint.  One of these new services is blippr.com, which is still in closed beta as I write this.  Blippr is a bit of a twitter + digg mashup for reviews of books, movies, music, and games.  Each micro-review is called a blip, and it can be 160 characters long, plus a overall satisfaction vote.

I’ve been using it for the past few months, and I found out one important thing: I tend to not procrastinate writing up reviews because I know they’ll take around a minute to write.  This is not only due to being short, but also due to the wonderful integration that blippr has with outside sources of information.  If you’re the first one blipping an item and if it’s even not yet in their own list, it will show automatically what it is when you search, including covers for books, and trailers for movies, and give you an option to “…be the first to blip this item”.

Each item will then be rated based on the overall votes it gets.  It also boasts a social model, in which you can follow or be followed by other people, which influences the weight of the votes when you are browsing the reviews.  All in all – a clever idea, a simple interface, a powerful engine beneath the hood.  And you can output what you blip into your “lifestream” – the cacaphony of little blurbs that make up what you produce publicly online.