Natebot
I For One Welcome Our Android Overlords

Wednesday, November 12

Google's Street View rolls through Wedgwood, Seattle

Google has rolled through our hood this summer, capturing photos for their mapping application's street views. Using the app I was able to find the Big Rock from down the street, aka the Wedgwood Rock which I discovered only this summer. The huge rock was deposited over 14,000 years ago by the Vashon Glacier.



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A few other highlights:

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Monday, November 10

Ballard Featured in NYTimes



The New York Times has a short article in their Escapes section about our favorite neighborhood Ballard. The picture above (taken at the great Sunday market on Ballard Ave) is part of a photo slideshow featuring some great shots of our old 'hood, including the windows of the fish ladder of locks down the street, and the Olympics-facing beach on the other side of Sunset Hill.

Sadly, novelty shop (or whatever you call a place that sells bacon floss) Archie McPhee's is leaving after the landlord decided not to renew the contract after years. McPhee's will be moving to Wallingford. It would be a pitty to see another condo going up on the property. When I moved to Ballard four years ago, at least five different condo properties appeared off of Market Street. Now with the housing crash effecting some areas - many condos are left empty - at $900K it doesn't sound that sweet of a deal. Ballard's growth doesn't seem to slow though.

posted by Natebot at 10:36 PM | 0 comments | Email This!

Wednesday, November 5

The Young Folks

For those of you out of town (or not in Chicago), you missed a heck of a party:


I was teaching class last night on Capital Hill. The Hill was alive with voices and honking horns as folks filled up Broadway and Pike as seen in the video above.
. But spontaneous celebrations also filled downtown, starting with The Strangers election party at Showbox that drew the most revelers.

posted by Natebot at 5:44 PM | 0 comments | Email This!

Monday, November 3

Amazon Gets It

I briefly considered entitling this "Naked Amazon" but reconsidered since it is stretching the metaphor. Anyway, as you may have heard Amazon is embarking on an initiative to reduce redundant packaging of products.

On occasion Jeff Bezo, founder of Amazon, posts a notice on the front page of the internet shopping site*. These usually regard some new product, like the Kindle, or a new service like mp3 downloads. Today Jeff, announced an initiative that I'm glad to hear and hope other companies pick up. We could all do with less waste, especially of the plastic kind, from packaging.

Responding to what Jeff calls "Wrap Rage" - the frustration trying to open those damn vacuum packed clam shells - the letter claims Amazon will be aiming toward replacing crappy packaging with easy to open and environmentally friendly packaging (aka cardboard).

While this is good news for the cardboard suppliers of the world, time will also tell how successful Amazon is in persuading manufactures to change their packaging techniques. Could this be a well timed initiative to drum up free pre-holiday press by the world's largest online retailers? Certainly. Could it have an effect. Possibly. Amazon doesn't have the swagger of Walmart, who isn't afraid to throw around its weight around in deciding what's best for you, but it's a start in the right direction.

BTW - the Lifehacker site suggests using a can opener for those pesky clam shells.


*If the letter is off the site when you read this you might find it here.

posted by Natebot at 9:20 PM | 0 comments | Email This!

Saturday, October 18

Seattle Webcam Flip Book Project

I'm started a little long term project I am calling the Seattle Webcam Flip Book.

web cam imageEvery time you visit the site I'll save my web cam image of Seattle. Then in about a year's time I will have a gallery of web cam images that I can correlate with my site visit logs. The result being a nice flip book animation of the city built by my site visitors.

Typically the web cam is a shot from Queen Anne hill and captures the Space Needle but sometimes it points to the Marina. So the flip book may jump around a bit from location to location unfortunately. Also, I don't get a ton of visitors so it's unlikely the flip book will be anything like time lapse photography. To do that I'll start a new project that saves a picture via a cron job.

Also the image now changes it's text depending on the time of day in Seattle.

posted by Natebot at 8:19 PM | 0 comments | Email This!

Thursday, October 16

Becoming Ubiquitous

If you are a Firefox power user and consume many Web services like Google Maps, Twitter, or, um, email, you are going to like what you can do with the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser.

This video does a good job explaining how powerfu and useful Ubiquity can be in mashing up various Web 2.0 services.



I particularly like being able to drop in Google Maps into my emails or emailing portions of web pages.

Being able to check the weather by simply typing 'weather seattle' is very nice too.

While Ubiquity is still in alpha release, it's pretty handy and there is already a great many third party developers extending it with their own scripts. In future posts I'll show how I use Ubiquity for PHP and Flash development using third party scripts, and introduce a couple Ubiquity scripts of my own.

posted by Natebot at 1:10 PM | 0 comments | Email This!

Saturday, September 20

Make Quicklook Better


Unlike the snazzy but arguably useless addition of Cover Flow navigation to OS X, Quicklook is one of the best UI features of Leopard. You can page through Word docs and pdf's, preview images, all without waiting for their apps to load (a serious time suck for apps like Word, Adobe Reader, and Photoshop). This can seriously increase your productivity when trying to find that one file whose name your forgot, or quickly lookup info in a pdf or Word file.
However, for Web developers, it would be nice if we could Quicklook our javascript, css, and actionscript files too. It would be even better if it provided color coding to make visually parsing our html, php, and other text-based files even easier.

Now we can thanks to the one of the great Quicklook plugins listed on qlplugins.com. The plugin is hosted here on Google Code. If you develop on Leopard, drop in this plugin to your /Library/Quicklook folder and speed up your development time.

Even if you are not a dev, the Folder and Archive plugins are very useful - allowing you to preview the contents of a folder or a file archive (like a zipped file) without opening or uncompressing them respectively. I have found these last two plugins so helpful that I am surprised the functionality didn't come stock in Quicklook.
What sort of customization have you done to your Leopard install? Please share!



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