RasterWeb!
(consider it cc:by)
Flamebot is a robot that has no legs, but he flies around with flames shooting out of the area where his feet would be. If he had feet. Which he doesn’t. He is very colorful though, and in honor of the rainbow of colors he represents, Flamebot salutes you, and all you do for the good of the Robot Nation.
(consider it cc:by)
It started as a box but turned into a very bad die. The 3 sides you see all have just one dot on them, and I’m pretty sure the 3 sides you don’t see do as well. Sometimes you gotta roll with it.
I love Last.fm. I love music, and I love data, so it makes sense. Last.fm, for you unhep cats out there, allows you to keep a log of what you listen to by “scrobbling” your music – that is – it submits the info about the songs you listen to the Last.fm web site via various bits of software. There’s scrobbling clients that work with iTunes, and your iPod, and your iPhone, and other things that don’t start with ‘i’ or come from Apple. (Oh, I’m rasterweb at Last.fm)
It’s interesting to see what I listen to, and who my top artists are, and all that jazz that comes with logging data… charts, graphs, etc. Fun stuff!
But as you’ve seen, I’ve been on a kick lately to pull all that data back to my own site. (See Also: Scuttle rides again!, Tweet Nest: Archive Your Tweets, Data goes in, Data comes out., Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!) So I figured it was time to get the data I’ve been feeding into Last.fm since 2006 back to me, and back to my own site…. thusly “Heard” was born.
Heard is a bit of PHP code I whipped up which uses the Last.fm API to pull my scrobbled data back to my own site and stuff it into MySQL, and from there it simply displays the data. Once again, this is my insurance policy. If Last.fm goes down, disappears, loses all it’s data, or something else happens, I’ve at least got an archive of all of my listening data.
Last.fm is a great service, and they’ve provided a great API that makes doing these sorts of things possible, and I thank them for that.
So Heard is really just some hacked together code right now… I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hours on it, but it is functional, and syncs data once per hour. Once I implement all the ideas I have for ways to improve it, I’ll upgrade my version, and think about releasing some code if there is any interest in it. I’m a pretty poor PHP programmer, but I’m dangerous enough to build simple things. If someone else loves this idea and wants to run with it, let me know, and I’ll share whatever I can.
And yes, the design (or lack of design) of Heard is minimalist to say the least. In one part it pays homage to Last.fm’s display of data, and in another part, I didn’t want to get too caught up in the look at this point, but I do have some plans for later.
(And one more thing: Thanks goes out to Pixis Creative for doing a bit of CSS debugging for me.)
Update: The code for Heard is on GitHub. I’d love if people smarter than myself found ways to make it better.
I got sick of waiting for Stylish to be updated to work in Thunderbird 3.1, so I took care of it.
By “took care of it” I mean I did the following:
And since it worked for me, I’m putting it out there.
Over in the code section is a new directory named stylish. Go there, download the file stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi, and install it into Thunderbird.
There’s also a simple readme file there that explains what I did. I’ll show it here as well:
stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi is a hacked version of stylish-1.0.9-fx+tb+sm.xpi There are basically two differences from the official version: - This one has an 'a' in it's name. - This one will install into Thunderbird 3.1.x All I did was change the string that says what version of Thunderbird it can install into. I could find no license info for the original code. If the author wishes me to remove this, I certainly will. Update 2010-07-28: The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0 Use at your own risk. <-- the lawyers told me to say that!
So if you trust me, feel free to download the hacked version and install it into Thunderbird 3.1... and if you don't trust me, go read the Hacking Firefox Extensions post and then do it yourself.
(You'll also find my 'Various Tweaks' file in the stylish directory as well. This is a style I use for Thunderbird based on info I got from this page on Thunderbird Chrome. )
Update 2010-07-28: The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0
I recently posted about Kickstarter and Natali, who wants to start an “UberDork Café” in Milwaukee, and just came across an interview with her about her project over at Game Couch.
I’ve got a few views on this project… First, I’m behind it. Why? Because I love to see someone who is passionate about building community take action and make things happen. Will it work? I don’t know… but it’s great to see it take shape, and hope for the best possible outcome.
From another angle, I see this as related to things like BarCampMilwaukee, where we pull together people who aren’t afraid to call themselves geeks or nerds and do some pretty interesting things. One of my favorite BarCamp memories is the “Popsicle Sticks 2.0” session I lead at BarCampMilwaukee2, where it ended up being almost totally dominated by kids. I didn’t plan it that way (but then, what type of planning do I ever do for sessions besides facilitating them?) but it was great to see people comfortable bringing their kids to BarCamp, and providing a creative environment for them. (Bucketworks also provided paper, crayons, markers, and plenty of art supplies.)
DrawCamp was a similar experience, where we created an environment where everyone who came (young, old, people who could draw well, people who could barely draw at all) seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves, and fit in just fine with people of similar interests.
A lot of Natali’s concerns seem to be based around wanting a place where she (and her kids) feel comfortable being themselves, and building a community of people who “get” who and what they are… and I applaud that.
Secretly (ok, not so secretly) I hope that there can be connections made between things like BarCamp, Bucketworks, and the UberDork Café.
I also admire Natali’s attitude. I grew up in the punk rock music scene, where if we had an idea, we executed it. If we didn’t know how to do something we figured it out, we tried it, and if we failed, we tried again… This is where I got my DIY ethics from, and they continue today it almost everything I do. We don’t wait around for someone else to do it, we do it. Is something stopping you from doing what you want to do? Find a way around the obstacle, find partners in crime… Don’t sit back and wait for others, stand up and make it happen, and get others to go along with you for the ride…
Stay excited, keep building communities, and share the stories… We could all use a bit more inspiration in our lives.
