- From Rétrofuturs @ Flickr

-From bookworm.@Flickr

-From etcetcetc

Amazing hand printed Valentines Day cards from jazzy Jenn!

From: Turn Of Phrase

Amazing video by director Sugimoto Kousuke. This is about a month or so old, but I ran across it for the second time today and thought it was equally as brilliant.

For the last month, I’ve been manually recording my automobile fuel consumption. Its been an evolving process, as the amount of recorded data and data acquisition techniques have steadily been refined. This morning when I was inputting a row into my spreadsheet, I though that this process could be greatly optimized with a good iPhone/iPod Touch app. Turns out this has been done. There are a bunch of apps available that help you record your fuel consumption: Gas Cubby, GasHog, greenMeter, and AccuFuel just to name a few. GasHog and AccuFuel are the most basic of the lot, and too basic for my needs. greenMeter is by far the most innovative (see fuelclinic, NYTimes), however I don’t want more flashing lights–or in this case, real-time feedback on my fuel consumption–to distract me while driving. Gas Cubby appears to be the most mature of the fuel consumption apps, with support for lots of data parameters (tire size/pressure, fuel octane, etc.) and great features like online syncing (for more information, see the Gas Cubby manual). At $4.99 Gas Cubby seems like the app for me, let’s see if it works out.

Today, Wolfram Alpha told me my life expectancy is 78.91 years as a 25 year old Canadian male.

A jetpack t-shirt. Enough said.

What’s that car on the cover of Out Loud?

I’ve been wondering about that one for a while now, so I decided the other day to put this question to rest. The album cover of Boom Boom Satellite‘s 1999 album Out Loud, features a Alpine A110 Berlinette rally car, circa 1961-1977.

Sun Clock:

Check it: PantherModem @ LibraryThing

About a month ago, I created an account on LibraryThing.com, a “social cataloging web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogs and book lists” [Wikipedia]. It wasn’t until a few days ago that I put some time into using the application and I have to say, it’s pretty cool and then some.

The idea of a virtual bookshelf to me is strongly appealing since my own physical bookshelf is a poor representation of the literature I’ve read and enjoyed. No longer can I skim over my IKEA Billy in medium-brown, and be reminder of what I’ve read in the past.

Although “Billy” does still house a few shelves work of books, more and more of what I’m reading comes from the library, or I’ve find myself feeling increasingly less inclined to hold on to a book once I’ve finished reading it. This is not always the case, the exceptions being: if the book is truly outstanding, deeply sentimental, or rare and difficult to locate. Yet for the majority of my reading I have little desire to hold on to the title once it is completed, and so without the physical mnemonic to recall my reading history, I tend to forget what I’ve read. I can vaguely say that I haven’t ready much Space Opera in the last few years, I can’t give you a comprehensive reading history. Lucky this is the age of plethoric information, so there must be something to help me catalog my reading history and make it fun in the process. Let me introdue you to LibraryThing. And it does a lot more then just reading history. Lots more.

So, what’s on my bookshelf? Here’s just a few of the titles:

For those of you who like audiobooks, and like to acquire them via legal means, LibriVox is “a digital library of free public domain audio books, read by volunteers” [Source: Wikipedia]. The objective of this online community is to “make all public domain books available as free audio books”.

Today at the “InfoVis for the Masses” paper session here at IEEE InfoVis 2007, a particularly interesting application was mentioned that provides meta data about your computer usage. Here’s their plug:

“Truth is, digital life is redefining the landscape of our social interactions, our activities, the meaning of community and even who we are. We build software products that explore new ways to help you understand, visualize, express and share your digital life. Some people like to describe what we do as ‘personal analytics’. That’s pretty good actually.”

The application is called Slife. Cool. A visualization of computer usage; in particular my usage. Over the course of the year/month/week/day, when was I spending the most time on my machine? How much time am I spending on what applications? and what I’m doing within those applications? What sort of insight can I discover into the computing activities that occupy so much of my time? Slife provides this kinds of “personal analytics” and visualizes this data. See, cool.

The crew at Slife Labs didn’t spot there. Enter Slifeshared, integrated with Slife:

“…[it] is an activity network for you and your friends where you share your live computer activities, such as videos you watch, music you listen to, web pages you find interesting and much more as a way to stay in touch.”

Slifeshare puts an Facebook-esque spin on an already exciting application. Again, cool.

Currently Slife is only available for OS X, but looks like a Windows beta version is available.

Last week I was tipped off about an interesting web app called We Feel Fine. This app crawls blogs looking for posts that include the statements “I feel” or “I am feeling” and records these sentences. Age, gender, and geographic location of the blogger is also stored and through a nifty interface the databse of these records can be accessed and browsed.

Here’s an example of what I came up with for posts from ages 20-29 living in Calgary, Canada on October 2007 with no restriction on feeling, gender, nor weather:

Avatar Machine