gizmos & hacks

Hack Your Town

September 7, 2011

“If guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power.” – Charlie Stross in The Fear Factory “Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.” – H. Jackson Brown Chicago Trib news app developer leaves Chicago and moves to small town of [...]

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2010: A (Dorky) Space Odyssey

July 2, 2010

The Lone SysAdmin, his lovely new fiancee, D and I were lounging in my living room last weekend. When I stumbled on a laptop and the realization that there were at least two computers per nerd in the room, not counting smartphones. It was, of course, the perfect opportunity for another episode of Interpretive Dance [...]

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Bring The Open View Project To New Orleans!

April 3, 2010

The Where2.0 conference this year was a great success for me. What The Hell 2.0 am I talking about? Read all about it here. If you still don’t understand, it’s an annual coming together of map technology geeks. I’ll write about the conference in a lot more detail over at VizWorld, so check there for [...]

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Data, Data Everywhere

March 2, 2010

You read yesterday’s VatulBlog post on natural disasters and the benefits of educating yourself in this time of information plenty.  Where do you start, however, when search engine output has a rather low signal-to-noise ratio? 1) A list of Google’s or Ask’s search terms shows many internet users cannot pose a question to save their [...]

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What The iPad Might Have Done For Me

January 28, 2010

Needless to say, you’ve all heard about Apple’s iPad by now.  I’m certain Steve Jobs’s unveiling speech yesterday was more popular than Obama’s State of the Union address, judging simply from the crazy high TPM (tweets per minute) related to the new gadget’s drop.  (Disclosure: I contributed to said traffic with 9 tweets and around [...]

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A List Of Lists

December 28, 2009

Lizzy Caston and I were to write a mode d’emploi for air travel in this day and age of the ever-orange threat advisory.  A sample: Lady, please do your best not to wear four-inch-heeled slouch boots and every metal ring and bracelet in your collection before entering airport security.  The grimace on your face as [...]

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Making US Unemployment Maps

November 17, 2009

If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and [...]

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Chicago, Part 4: Enigma

August 20, 2009

The events and artifacts of World War II fascinate me.  Not World War I, not Korea, not Vietnam, not even the war of the greatest import to my family, but World War II.  I still smile knowing we lived only a few blocks down the street from the D-Day World War II museum in New [...]

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Not Buying The Kindle

May 14, 2009

As a supporter of Project Gutenberg‘s eBook philosophy, I refuse to purchase a device that operates solely in proprietary file format and has hinky public domain vs. copyright and ownership issues associated with it. Lately, the PG-forum arguments for and against the Kindle have turned into ones of readability; subjective terms such as “comfortable” and [...]

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Day 1237: Chegg CEO Rashid Applies Netflix Concept To Textbooks

January 15, 2009

Link The business model? Rent out college textbooks via a website, deliver them to students via UPS and save them 50% to 70% off the cost of buying used or new books. The 18-month-old service has hundreds of thousands of customers on 4,000 U.S. campuses, says Rashid, 38. While financing has tightened for businesses, Chegg [...]

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