Making.
Tools, hacks, side projects, this site
- Automating your way out of bad behavior
As I write this, I’m sitting on the platform at the Back Bay Amtrak station in Boston, waiting for the train to New York. At 9am (6 minutes ago), I got a text message prompting me to write a blog post today. It said “Get your blog on! It’s a good thing”. The text message,… Continue reading
- Wanted: Highrise Chrome Extension
Update: I built it. I’ve used Highrise as a lightweight CRM for a few years now. It’s fine for my needs — basically keeping track of people who I meet on email. The thing that really made Highrise start to work for me is integration with Gmail, via Rapportive. Being able to add someone to… Continu...
- cibi.me
The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me — for NYC’s forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it’s beautiful and fun to use. The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fu...
- Hacking email: getting things done by bypassing the inbox
I’m not a hard core follower of GTD, but I do believe that working from the top of your inbox all day long is a recipe for disaster. However, accessing email is important and necessary. Problem is, with most email clients (I use gmail), you have to pass through the inbox (risking distraction) to…...
- Quick Compose w/ Gmail and Quicksilver
From the Yak Shaving department Working from the top of the inbox is a recipe for working on stuff that isn’t important. But, sometimes you need to write emails. The problem is, to write an email you need to first go to your email client, which usually means passing by your inbox. For me, this… Co...
- Simple, and fun to use.
Whenever you start a project (and I’m thinking about building websites and web applications), you are balancing two somewhat opposed goals: 1) get something working right away and 2) satisfy all your hopes and dreams. The first, I think, is a good instinct. The second is the real challenge — it’s y...
- Digital Power Tools
This past week, I spent some time cutting a hole in the wall in between our kitchen and our family room. It’s a project we’ve been talking about for a long time, and we considered lots of different ways of doing it before we actually got down to it. We were concerned about the cost,… Continue readin...
- Iteration
This weekend, I built some shelves in my closet. It was pretty simple affair — some pre-finished shelving boards, wooden corbels, and a rod for hanging things. What’s funny is that the supplies for all this have been sitting on the floor in my office for about eight weeks now. Every time my wife ask...
- Wanted: The Self-Hiding Alarm Clock
This morning while cleaning up my office, I came across an old sketchbook from one of my design classes in college, circa ~1999. In it was a gem of a product idea (if I do say so myself). Without further adieu, here it is: The Self-Hiding Alarm Clock: So, who’s with me to set up… Continue reading
- The Wheels on the Bus…
As of 11am this morning, buses in Brooklyn are telling the internet where they are. And I’m proud to say that our work is behind it. For the past several months, we’ve been working with the MTA on this one-line pilot, to demonstrate that it’s possible to achieve a workable bus tracking solution usi...
- This is kind of a cop out, but…
As part of my goals for 2011, I’m trying to blog more regularly — once a week, right here, to be precise. As I mentioned, I don’t quite have the rhythm down yet. This is evidenced by the fact that I’m sitting in bed at 11:30pm on Sunday night writing this half-assed post, just so… Continue reading
- Wanted: An Open Commonplace Book
I’ve been reading Steven Johnson‘s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. It’s an enjoyable read, in large part because of Steven’s ability to draw connections across seemingly unrelated subject areas to tell a unified story. I’m only about halfway through, but in...
- Time to Get Singing
I opened my talk at last week’s Times Open event with this little video plugging Phone Idol. It got a few laughs, which was the point, but unfortunately no new songs sung just yet. Derek Gottfrid from NYT made the great suggestion that I print up some stickers and put them up in… Continue reading
- Tumbling on
Most of the action is happening on my Tumblog these days. For some reason I can’t stop posting there, and I can’t start here… Continue reading
- Tool Time
We are starting up several projects right now at OpenPlans. As a first step, we are setting up project management infrastructure for each. You would think that being a 10-year-old software and media company, we’d have rock-solid, time tested, perfectly smoothed out techniques for managing our projec...
- Wanted: Aggregated Group Playlist
I love music, but I am really bad about keeping up with new stuff. My iTunes library is only so-so, so I spend most of my time listening to playlists on 8tracks. This is good for variety, and great for finding the right background music for a BBQ or party, but there’s something missing: my… Contin...
- Phone Idol: an experiment in web-enabled telephony
At work recently, we’ve been exploring the idea of integrating voice and/or SMS into our applications. Much of what we do has to do with people responding to their physical environments — their neighborhoods and the streets and public spaces that constitute the bulk of our public experience. So, I ...
- jPlayer sprites SVG
For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player. I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls. So, I just traced the default sprites in Il...
- Scribefire is so awesome
I can’t say enough about ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client. Here are just a few reasons why it’s awesome: You’re blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open. This comes in really handy w...