Dash! [1]
A quick plug for thedaniel’s excellent Dashers unite — in which the ubiquitous video game quick-dash becomes a lifestyle choice.
{ Monthly archives }
October 2006
Pinstripe on Firefox [5]
The updated Pinstripe theme for Firefox is just gorgeous:
In particular, browser sidebars (an example of which is shown here), the Bookmarks Manager window, and the Find in This Page... ⌘F strip are much improved. Super thanks to Kevin Gerich for his excellent work on this theme.
2006-10-24
Departmental e-mail etiquette and other failures [2]
Good idea: Write a weblog to keep folks in and around your University department informed of your work activities.
Bad idea: Regularly send an e-mail to everybody in the department, reminding them of updates to your weblog. Do not allow folks to opt out of the e-mail. Do not have a clue.
I can understand — in fact, would encourage — a one-time message announcing the existence of the blog, a description of why you want to read it, and links to the site and feed.
Here’s the most recent e-mail in its entirety:
From:jillha@umich.edu
Subject:Education and Outreach weekly report
Date:October 23, 2006 8:40:31 AM GMT-04:00Hello, you can view the latest education and outreach report for SI and CoE at
best, Jill
2006-10-23
WalkerTracker: hook, line, and pedometer
Finally signed up for WalkerTracker. The bkerr step blog records my short pedestrian lurches around town, possibly annotated with my pithy urban ranger observations.
Over the summer I picked up a pedometer as a feelie for some contract work. I’d been recording steps:
- as a crazy pixel graph made with Pixen,
- as a Python dictionary, and finally
- on paper.
This was fun, but unmutual. More recently, I was planning out a shell-to-feed script for keeping track of steps, Animal Crossing stalk market prices, etc. — but using the existing tool and maybe plugging into it later seemed prudent.
WalkerTracker is a [blog | forum | map | pedestrian-brinkmanship] site wrapped around a form where everybody types in the number of steps they took that day. It’s maintained by Ben in Portland, OR, who has several very cool projects at ideacog.net.
2006-10-18
SI.opml updated [3]
Please find a few more changes — mostly catch-up with changing URLs — in SI.opml, a directory of School of Information feeds.
If you just want to keep abreast of School of Information blogs, SIclops is the place to go.
Once SI shuts down SIclops (and it inevitably will — the half-life of student projects is super short around here) then some of the feed data, or at least a pointer to it, will remain available here.
2006-10-18
Free idea: MediaWiki RSS feed for RecentChangesPatrol [1]
RSS feed of (unpatrolled) RecentChanges from a MediaWiki, where each item’s link is the diff page for that edit. Shove a lot of items into the feed, don’t cache it so much, work from that for RecentChangesPatrol.
RecentChangesPatrol is this amazing wiki pattern / pathology where people review and approve every single (anonymous) edit on a wiki. Holy crapola, right? But still, the technology isn’t helping, and a RecentChangesPatrol feed could save a lot of ⌘-clicking and opening and closing of browser tabs.
2006-10-18
WorldChanging Tour — two rust belt stops [1]
Some of the WorldChanging crew are going on a book tour / weird networking roadshow to promote the User’s Guide for the 21st Century. The schedule brings them to:
November 12th: CHICAGO - Event at the Shedd Aquarium 6:30-9:30
1200 South Lake Shore Drive
November 14th: TORONTO - Event at The Berkley
315 Queen Street East
Toronto, ON M5A 1S7
I’m thinking about an Ann Arbor delegation to one of these events. WorldChanging is worth the trip. Want to come along?
Update 2006 10 18: tour itinerary has been updated with details for the Toronto and Chicago stops.
