wubbahed.com

TodayFeels.com is a little website I’ve been putting together in my off hours and will be talking about in more detail today at MobileCampSF2. It’s a site that gives you a weather forecast relative to what it felt like the day before. So instead of just telling you highs and lows and the percentage chance it might rain, it says that today “is going to be a little warmer than yesterday” or that it’s “going to be wetter and colder than yesterday”. The idea is to create something more human and personal to you and your experience.

The site is still in early development, but check it out and let me know what you think. The biggest issue most people will encounter is that it might not work in your area. Right now, the service only covers about 25% of the zip codes in the United States, so if you’re international or in an area not supported, send me feedback with the area you’d like to see included. Eventually, the service will expand to the rest of the US and beyond, but if you ask for coverage in your area, I’ll be sure to give that top priority.

Text TODAYFEELS to 41411

In addition, to the website, there are several other ways you can use Todayfeels.com, including:

• text ‘TODAYFEELS’ to 41411. You can also include your zip code as well to get an immediate response back. For instance, sending ‘TODAYFEELS 94114′ to 41411 will tell you how today feels in San Francisco.
• for newer Nseries/S60 phones, you can download a widget (requires WRT)
• add it to your iGoogle page
• add it to your NetVibes page
• if you have some other widget, blog or place you’d like to include TodayFeels, let me know and I’ll see what I can do there as well.

Next Steps

I’m going to keep adding functionality to the site, based a large part on user feedback. Also, it’s pretty obvious I’m not a designer, so any design contributions are completely welcome! Finally, I wanted to give an API Shout Out to the open source libraries and free web services on which TodayFeels.com is built, specifically:

• Yahoo! Weather
• Google Charts
• TextMarks
• Jott
• SimplePie

If you happen to be in the SF area on Saturday June 14th, be sure and check out MobileCampSF at the Swedish American Hall. If you’ve never been to a BarCamp before they’re lots of fun. It’s completely free, and as of this post, it’s already around 70% full so RSVP now if you’re going to come. I’m hoping to talk some about this simple little project I’ve been working on lately. If you want a sneak peek at it, just scan the QR code below. Otherwise, wait until after BarCamp when I’ll post a full writeup of the project.

more on Flickr

Every year I vacation in Boothbay Harbor, Maine and I like to take advantage of my time off to try out some larger scale arts and crafts projects. This year I wanted to try my hand at painting, but I’m not exactly the best artist in the world, so I came up with a system to let me turn my digital photos into a blueprint for a large painting.

The idea is simple. Just take a digital photograph you like, shrink it down to a small size with a limited palette of colors, and then recreate that small image on a large canvas. I did a test run this past week with a picture I took of a lobster, but there’s no reason why anyone can’t use these methods to create their own personalized painting of their favorite digital picture.

Read on to learn how it was done.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I recently purchased a Chumby. According to UPS, it’s on its way here, and in anticipation of its arrival I’ve started reading about how to make your own Chumby widgets. Turns out, the widgets are all just 320×240 FlashLite 3.0 movies.

This is wonderful news.

Why? Because my phone also runs Flash Lite 3.0. So now if I’m going to go to the trouble to make a Chumby widget, I can design it to work on the Chumby and on my Nokia device. As a quick test, I grabbed some of the existing Chumby widgets and tried to see if they would run on an N82.

Out of the box, two widgets worked great — the MTV News widget and the Chuck Norris Facts widget. Some of the other widgets like weather and NY Times launched correctly, but I need to pass them some configuration details so they know what content to download from the web. That’s the next step.

Bottom line is that if you have an Nseries device that runs FlashLite 3.0, then check out Chumby as a source for games and things that you can load straight on your device. And in case you need proof, here’s Chuck Norris Facts running on an N82.

Yeah, yeah the video is kind of fuzzy, so here’s what it looks like on a real Chumby.

My co-worker went to Mitsuwa in New Jersey this weekend and brought back some treats for the office. I got a can of Meiji Yan Yan Choco Cream Snacks. The snacks come in a small can filled with shortbread sticks which you’re supposed to dip in chocolate. The chocolate is in a reservoir also in the can, so the package is like the Japanese offspring of Pringles and Cheese-N-Crackers minus the plastic red stick used to spread the cheese…

Anyway, the best part of these snacks are the messages on each of the sticks. The first part is a little cartoon and the name of an animal (Whale! Seal! Mouse!) followed by a little known fact about that animal. Who knew that the Whale is the biggesy mammal or that seals love to sun tan? They’re all pretty good except for the blatantly lame Star+Fish. Would it have been so difficult to just say “Regrows Limbs”?

My co-worker turned me on today to Blueprint, a CSS framework that’s based on typography rules so it helps you design websites in a clean way. Needless to say, I think it’s brilliant and beautiful.

A quick Google search turned up a few Wordpress themes that had been developed using Blueprint, but the Blueprint theme by Fire and Knowledge stood out head and shoulders above the rest, so I’ve added it to my site. I still need to tweak a few things like the color palette of the Google ads, but if you’re like me and you typically just read RSS feeds in Bloglines or your favorite reader, then pop back to my site for a change and check out the theme.

So I’ve been playing around with the new Widgets / Web Run Time for S60. It’s a great tool because it allows you to write what seem like native S60 applications when in fact they’re built entirely with a combination of HTML and Javascript.

Web apps are okay, but they really become powerful when you can tap into the phone’s features directly. Luckily, the S60 Widgets give you some capabilities in this area, and I put together a small widget to demonstrate. This widget is a text-to-Morse Code translator. The widget takes any text you type in and turns it into Morse Code either through beeps, flashing lights, or vibrations in your device.

I think I’ve got this working fairly well, but alas, the N95-3’s firmware doesn’t support these types of widgets yet so I can’t do a real world test. I’ve only been able to test in the S60 emulator and while the beeps work just fine, I can’t test the vibrations or the lights. If you have the N95-1, the N95 8GB (global), or some other newer Nseries models, then you can run this widget with the latest firmware.

If you happen to be one of the lucky people with a WRT compatible device, then you can download this widget directly to your device via this link, or this mobile code and try it out:

I’m curious what kinds of experience people have with this. Yes, I realize if you’re stranded on a desert island the last thing you want to do is waste your battery life buzzing out Morse Code to yourself, but it could be a good helper tool for people wanting to learn Morse Code.

Once I’ve confirmed that the widget works well on some real devices, I’ll post it along with its documentation on the Forum Nokia Wiki as a learning example. In the meantime, here’s a video preview of what the interface looks like.

Too many social sites, too many status updates. I’ve been trying for a while now to find one place where I can type in one status update and have it show up wherever I want — Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, you name it. Isn’t that what this whole Web 2.0 crap is supposed to be about?

Well, I finally found a solution in hellotxt.com. It has the ability to post one update in multiple places, there’s a Facebook app so I can do it in Facebook if I want, there’s a mobile app so I can do it from the device, I can login to their own site and post there, etc. etc. etc. But now I’m faced with a bigger problem.

Verbs.

You see, when you submit an update to Twitter, it posts the update, and all of your Tweets read like a first person account of what you’re doing. When you submit an update to Facebook, it automatically puts your first name at the beginning of the update, so now all of your status updates are presented in the third person. For instance, if a guy named Bob were to submit “Go Red Sox!” as a status update, it would look like this:

Twitter: Go Red Sox!
Facebook: Bob Go Red Sox!

Which makes no sense (at least on Facebook). So how can we solve this? The best thing i’ve come up with so far is to start each status update with a verb. But no ordinary verb. Only verbs that are identical in the first and third person. Verbs like ‘can’ or ‘will’. So if Bob posts “will take out the garbage later”, it reads:

Twitter: will take out the garbage later
Facebook: Bob will take out the garbage later

Unfortunately, ‘can’ and ‘will’ are the only two verbs like these that I’ve come up with so far. Any others people want to contribute? Only rule is that it has to be identical for both first person and third person. Post them in the comments, or email me…

UPDATE #1: Talked about this with friends last night. Added could, should, and oughta to the list. For being publishing/grammar types, though, they generally didn’t think this was a very interesting problem.

So I’ve been spending some time lately over at JamsBio.com (Full disclosure: I’m friends with one of the site’s developers).

The premise is basic and one that we all know too well — share the memories that you associate with a particular piece of music. I mean there’s the usual songs you think of with a first kiss or the first time you got pulled over by a cop, but what amazes me about this site is that the crazier a memory sounds, the more real it seems.

When someone writes that “the opening piano notes of 10,000 Maniacs’ “Because the Night” will forever be entwined with Mortal Kombat“, I don’t question that, I believe it. It’s totally real that Jamie Lee Curtis and a nasty breakup would be forever associated with Shawn Colvin’s “Polaroids”. And for the dude that suffered through eating natto for breakfast after a night of too many sake bombs, my heart goes out to you and the fact that you’ll always get nauseated when listening to The Prodigy’s “Diesel Power”.

Seriously, the title says it all. best user generated content EVER.