EagerEyes Shorts

It seems that I’m not the only one who thinks that Many...

Tue, 31 May 2011 14:46:00 -0400

It seems that I’m not the only one who thinks that Many Eyes’ new-ish URL is completely insane. If this is supposed to be advertising for IBM, it’s not working. How is it even possible to get such a horrible URL in 2010 (when they moved from the slightly less crappy alphaworks)?

Image source (PDF)

The Ad-Supported Kindle Won't be Free

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:19:39 -0400

marco:

Amazon to Release Ad-Subsidized Kindle for $114

Bizarre:

Ads will appear on the device’s screen saver and show up as a banner on the homepage, but will not appear inside books.

It’s only a $25 savings from the normally-$139 Kindle 3. I’m sure they can find buyers for it, but at what cost to Amazon’s (and the Kindle’s) image?

I don’t think this is about ads: it’s about lowering the initial cost and making people pay the balance later. If anything, the ads only pay for the interest on the owed money.

I doubt Amazon will make serious money on these ads. They’re mostly there to annoy you into paying the $25 to remove them. And that’s why the difference is such a small (and “nice”) number: it’s small enough for somebody to just pay it at some later point. Lowering the price to $99 would make the later payment $40, which looks like a lot more, and is almost half the original price; so it appears to be a lot more.

That is also the reason why Amazon won’t give the Kindle away for free (like a lot of people have suggested): they don’t want the ads, they want people to buy it so they can pay the difference later. Nobody will pay $139 to remove ads from a free Kindle.

Evan Suma, who got his Ph.D. at UNC Charlotte and is now a...

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:28:25 -0400

Evan Suma, who got his Ph.D. at UNC Charlotte and is now a post-doc at USC, created this very clever response to Google’s Motion-Controlled GMail April Fools joke. At the time of this writing, it has been viewed over 420,000 times, and it’s only been online for about four days. Very impressive.

What a terrible chart in The Atlantic! The labels make no sense:...

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:27:34 -0500

What a terrible chart in The Atlantic! The labels make no sense: why put the numbers in the chart, rather than the country names? The numbers mean nothing to most people, so why even bother? Or at least not make them the main feature, the countries are clearly more interesting.

The choice of colors is also bad. China and “Other” look the same, it’s not at all clear which is which. You can tell from the order in the legend, but it takes some work.

A much better choice would have been to label the slices with the countries, then the poor choice of color would have been much less of an issue. The “Other” category is a good idea to reduce the number of slices, but when “Other” is the largest slice, that should tell the chart maker something. A different chart (bar chart, sorted by amount) would have worked better and provided the information in a more useful way.

Converting Running Data from Nike+ to GPX

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:00:07 -0500

Like many others, I started running using Nike’s Nike+ GPS app on my iPhone. It’s been a great ride for the last three months, but I am now feeling its limitations. The app isn’t self-contained at all, and the website is slow and buggy. So I’ve decided to use RunKeeper instead, but what about all that run data Nike has locked up on its website?

While looking around, I found a forum discussion where somebody had figured out how to coax the GPS data from the Nike site in a JSON format. Obviously, RunKeeper can’t import that directly, but it does accept GPX (GPS Exchange Format). So I wrote a little conversion script and make it available. It’s written in Python and available on github:

Nike2GPX

The process how to download and convert the data is described in the README. It has to be done manually for every single run, and you’ll have to then manually import the data into RunKeeper (or whatever you want to use). But it works, and it’s great to have my entire running history available on the new site.

"What we need is a manifesto,” he told his audience of designers, “set diagonally and..."

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:01:25 -0500

““What we need is a manifesto,” he told his audience of designers, “set diagonally and vertically, all script caps with soft shadows, outlined and underlined, with poor punctuation and hundreds of hyphens, stretched to the edge and cropped at the sides, printed in yellow on day-glo paper, trimmed badly and poorly presented.””

- True to type: how we fell in love with our letters

thedailywhat: SMBC. SMBC is pure genius.

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:22:40 -0400

thedailywhat:

SMBC.

SMBC is pure genius.

mydailytea: by Robert Kosara I took this over five years ago...

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:59:48 -0400

mydailytea:

by Robert Kosara

I took this over five years ago while staying at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin. Nice to see it getting some attention: it has been liked or reposted almost 2,000 times on tumblr and fav’d on Flickr almost 60 times.

Dear Reader: some are good, some are crap, some will get you...

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:46:00 -0400

Dear Reader: some are good, some are crap, some will get you laid, some will NOT

A little visual summary of the demos at HCIL I saw last week as...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:26:56 -0400

A little visual summary of the demos at HCIL I saw last week as part of the Visual Analytics Consortium Meeting at the University of Maryland.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:41:30 -0400

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Words cannot describe the brilliance of this photo. The shallow...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:22:00 -0400

Words cannot describe the brilliance of this photo. The shallow depth of field and the stuff around her make it look like they photographed her Barbie, not herself.

NYTimes, Snooki’s Time

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:11:01 -0400

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrenbon Fried Digger Dangle Dungle Burstein von Knacker Thrasher Apple Banger Horowitz Ticolensic Grander Knotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kürstlich Himbleeisen Bahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nürnburger Bratwustle Gerspurten mit Zweimache Luber Hundsfut Gumberaber Shönendanker Kalbsfleisch Mittler Raucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, composer.

This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently....

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:53:29 -0400

This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently. It describes a technique for interacting with parallel coordinates using the multi-touch trackpad found on laptops like Apple’s MacBook Pro.

It’s a lot better if you watch it in HD on the vimeo site.

Making a Pecha Kucha Timing Video

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:26:46 -0400

For my presentation at Pecha Kucha Night Charlotte, Volume 6, I was looking for a way to keep the timing (20 seconds per slide). I also need to see at least my current slide to know what I’m talking about. When I give talks or lecture in class, I always use the presenter view, so I can also see the next slide.

There are some iPhone timer apps for Pecha Kucha, but they’re very basic: they simply show you the number of the current slide and how much time you have left as a number. I wanted something a bit more visual than that.

So I decided to create a video from my presentation that would show me the current slide and an indication how much time I had left. I added 19 little boxes to each slide, each of which would disappear a second after the previous one. This is what that looks like on the title slide:

The boxes have a 2px white border so they are also visible on a dark background. Depending on the colors in your presentation, you might want to adapt that. But black and white work pretty much everywhere.

Exporting the video took a bit of experimentation. It seems that Keynote gets a little confused when there are automatic slide transitions and you want to create a video: it ends up adding the time for the export transition to the slide timing. So remove the slide timer and then export with a 1-second delay and 1 second for the transition (it won’t allow smaller values, and somehow that, together with the 19 timed boxes, ends up being exactly the right timing).

One issue is that exporting with the Full Quality setting creates a video that has a bit rate that is too high for the iPhone. So you can either use the CD-ROM Movie, Medium setting, which gives you only 400x300 pixels (which is workable, it’s just not very pretty). Or you can export using the higher-quality setting, which is 800x600, and then reduce the bit rate later. I used Stomp for this purpose, but there are lots of other choices. I reduced the bit rate to 125kbps and the frame rate to 10 (still way more than necessary).

This may sound tedious, but even with some experimenting, it didn’t take very long. And having my current slide and a usable timer in front of me was tremendously helpful during my presentation. The video was also useful to scrub through on the phone a few times right before the presentation, to remind me of the order and think through the things I wanted to say.

thedailywhat: Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not...

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:35:24 -0400

thedailywhat:

Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not Taking Debit Card’s? Thats a Hell ov a Inconvenius.

[reddit.]

Two kids working at bloom recently asked me for help with spelling the word “inconvenience,” which they needed for a sign. Between the two of them and Word’s spellchecker, they couldn’t figure it out. They had to ask me, whose native language is not English, for help.

A New Villain For A New Millennium

Fri, 14 May 2010 14:11:00 -0400

A New Villain For A New Millennium:

We always need someone to hate. Until recently, for many of us that was Bill Gates. But now that he’s fighting Malaria and curing AIDS, that gets more difficult to do.

So we put up an ad to find someone new who would fit the bill. The ideal candidate

makes a wildly successful product we come to depend on,
does things with it we don’t like
abuses his power, and
is a recluse, sociopath, or both.

Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg has stepped up to the plate.

chartier:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

roomthily: The Insipid World of Infographics via Cool...

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:26:00 -0400

roomthily:

The Insipid World of Infographics

via Cool Infographics

Edit: this was apparently created by Will Lybrand

My Summer Reading List

Thu, 13 May 2010 23:39:53 -0400

By popular demand, here’s my list of books to read in the summer. Not sure yet about the order, but this is the rough plan:

Stephen Few, Now You See It
Fred Brooks, The Design of Design
James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Kaiser Fung, Numbers Rule Your World
Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?
Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart

Since I’m notorious for starting books an never finishing them, I am instituting the rule that I can only read one book at a time, and have to finish one book before I start the next. Let’s see how this goes.

After all the criticism of bad and pointless infographics,...

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:34:00 -0400

After all the criticism of bad and pointless infographics, here’s a really good one for a change. It explains how a cell phone call works, how the network is set up, and even illustrates some very technical points like code-division multiple access (CDMA).

From Cellphones.org. That site also has a few other interesting infographics.