Night Earth
Personal hack project. Night earth that is panable and zoomable. Uses NASA imagery and Amazon Cloud to host Google map tiles.
I love lego. I love Rube Goldberg machines. I love this. It is utterly pointless, but an amazing build. Watch out for the train and robot arm.
4mins of amazing. View from the ISS at night.
Watch the lights (that’s us), the thunderstorms and the aurorae. Awesome.
Shell*: “Internet, design our new marketing campaign for the drilling in the Arctic. We’ll put whatever you come up with on billboards across the world.”
Internet: “What?! You’re drilling in the Artic? You’ll kill every…”
Rest of Internet: <nudge>,<wink>.
Internet: “… eh, we mean, sure! You want us to put our text, on your images, with your logo? That sounds like fun.”
*not Shell, actually Greenpeace and The Yes Men.
arcticready.com along with @ShellisPrepared combine to make possibly the most sophisticated brand attack ever. Ouch.
“Yes,” I lied to the Texan, “in Scotland every day *is* like this. That’s why the grass is so green.”
GB’s Journey to Work
Fascinating Mapping from Duncan Smith at UCL’s CASA.
Paraphrasing Duncan:
The visualisation puts travel patterns in context against different urban and regional situations.
It highlights how different London is because of it’s public transport network, when compared to other areas like the West Midlands, Manchester and West Yorkshire, where cars are dominant.
He notes that Glasgow and Edinburgh perform well in public transport terms, compared with larger cities in the North of England.
YouTube View Count in Google Spreadsheet
At work I was monitoring our social media in a Google Spreadsheet and wanted to list the number of views a YouTube video had received, in a way that would update over time.
This was harder than expected as the importXML and importFeed functions were not suitable. My solution was to use a custom function that looks up the views from the YouTube API.
function ytViews(video_id){
var result = UrlFetchApp.fetch("https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/"+video_id+"?v=2&alt=json");
var json = Utilities.jsonParse(result.getContentText());
return json["entry"]["yt$statistics"]["viewCount"] + " views.";
}
In a Google Spreadsheet:
Tools > Script Manager > New > Blank Project > (Paste the script above.)
Save the script (name not important), Close Script Editor.
In the target spreadsheet cell: =ytViews("VidEo1D")
So, for the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ,
enter the formula: =ytViews("dQw4w9WgXcQ")
Leap Smear: Google Skew Time by Lying
The point at which Dr Who sci-fi plot lines and big business interent enterprises meet.
Google lied to all their servers to skew time pending a imminent leap second, in a manoeuvre they refer to as ‘leap smear’. Genius.
The Go Lectures: Start with Nothing.
Q: How do you get more people in to Wales?
A: By connecting Mountain Bikers to Forrest Land.
Q: How do you do that?
A: Start with nothing.
Product Vision vs Product Roadmap vs Product Backlog.
Link Halflife.
I would love to see the same thing for Youtube videos.
Is This the Future of Farming?
“I don’t know” is a great answer, and should be a social norm.
Your CV makes life look linear. It isn’t. (Therefore keep doing crazy projects.)
Happiness does not come from doing something you are good at. It comes from doing something you love.
Doing something that you don’t enjoy leaves you physically fine, but mentally down.
Doing something you love can leave you exhausted, but mentally energised.
Life satisfaction and spiritual fulfilment comes from being in your element, doing what you love.
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