Aku Aku

my beating heart

A Bay Area inventor has been hand producing stuffed hearts with a computer controlled beat in them for some time now. They are designed to be hugged in such a way that they lead your own heart beat into a pattern that resembles that of someone in a deep meditative state. He recently sent a message out on the FutureCommons mailing list announcing he was now getting them mass produced and thus new pricing. From his email:

It sounds a little crazy, but it works. It relaxes people faster then perception drugs. I meditate and I've been trained as a teach yoga, so I incorporated these disciplines into hardware/software design.  The goal was to use high-tech design to help people relax and allow them to be more aware of themselves and their surroundings, as opposed to distracting them from their surroundings and body.   That's the back story.

It does sound a little crazy. This is the splash image on the My Beating Heart website:

My_beating_heart

I can't help but immediately wonder why the boy doesn't just hug his dog. I mean, I get it, the dog's heart beat is unlikely in a deep meditative state or whatever. It just seems a little sad. But that being said, I also can't help but want to try one. I'd rather hug my wife, but then the stuffed robo-heart will never get grumpy or tell me its too hot.

I like the warning that comes with it:

My_beating_heart_warning

20 of 52: Winterish

Ok, this one is lame. But Whatchagonna do. Inspired by some truly amazing art produced from normal sheets of paper, I made a little winter scene using cd-roms as a frozen creek and little paper trees lining the river. My exacto knife cuts like a butter knife and I'm bleary eyed from lack of sleep so this is all I got this week. I really need to stop trying to get something done after dinner on Sunday.

You should check out the inspiration though, perhaps then you'll forgive me for wasting your time.

I'd like to try some more things in this vein using the laser cutter in the future.

Everything Must Run Its Course

I've probably listened to the song Time to Pretend by MGMT (pronounced "management") over two dozen times in the last week. It makes me want to take a drive just so I can sing it on the highway. I love the lyrics, the fuzzed out sound, the two hit punch at 2:20. And just when I thought I couldn't love it any more, I found the video for it. I'm having a heck of a time getting vox to link to a working video, at the moment this one works. I managed to embed a working live version of it for now here, but the real one is optimal.

MGMT "Time to Pretend"

I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life
Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and f*ck with the stars
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars

This is our decision to live fast and die young
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun
Yeah, it's overwhelming but what else can we do
Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We were fated to pretend
To pretend
We were fated to pretend
To pretend

I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone

But there is really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew
The models will have children, we'll get a divorce
We'll find some more models, everything must run its course

We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end
We were fated to pretend
To pretend
We were fated to pretend
To pretend

I said yeah, yeah, yeah
All right yeah, yeah, yeah
I said yeah, yeah, yeah
Ah yeah, yeah, yeah

Best Political Headline Of This Campaign Season

Ron Paul is the Snakes on a Plane of 2008

I was really bitchy about that movie hype when it came out. It gave me no small amount of satisfaction that it (apparently) sucked as much as I expected it to. I started hearing the same sort of hype about Ron Paul a bit ago. This round up of Ron Paul actions made me write him off early as well.

Brain Training For Fun and Profit

I've started a new gig working with Lumos Labs. They have a web site Lumosity which provides Brain Training (aka Brain Exercises or Brain Games) that keeps your thinking muscles in shape. I worked with them earlier as a consultant but it looks like I'll be switching to full time Director of Engineering in April when Mie, Tesla and I get back from South America (I've alread arranged great apartments in Lima and Buenos Aires). The vacation is a last blast before descending back into the regular full time employee world that I haven't been in since quiting my startup company in 2004.

Anyhow, the brain games are pretty fun, and there's a lot of science behind their efficacy. You should check them out. My favorites are Raindrops, Word Bubbles and Memory Match. The games are designed to improve four cognitive areas: Memory, Attention, Processing Speed and Cognitive Control. It's nice to know that there's some healthy stuff going on, but they are also fun to play and enough of a challenge to give you real satisfaction as you improve.

This is my new desktop image on my workstation: Brain storming.

New Gig at Lumosity.

I've started a new gig working with Lumos Labs. They have a web site Lumosity that provides Brain Training (aka Brain Exercises or Brain Games) that keeps your thinking muscles in shape. I worked with them earlier as a contractor (still am at the moment), but it looks like I'll be switching to full time Director of Engineering in April when we get back from South America (already  arranged apartments in Lima and Buenos Aires). The vacation is a last blast before descending back into the regular full time employee world that I haven't been in since quiting my startup company in 2004.

Anyhow, the brain games are pretty fun, and there's a lot of science behind their efficacy. You should check them out. My favorites are Raindrops, Word Bubbles and Memory Match. The games are designed to improve four cognitive areas: Memory, Attention, Processing Speed and Cognitive Control. It's nice to know that there's some healthy stuff going on, but they are also fun to play and enough of a challenge to give you real satisfaction as you improve.

This is my new desktop image on my workstation: Brain storming.

19 of 52: Yet To Be Named Travel Research Site.

This week's project is a web site. Unfortunately, while I got most of the development done on it over the weekend, I didn't have time to deploy it to a permanent hosting server tonight. It's running only on my development workstation at the moment. I can describe it here though and will update when it goes live.

The idea for the site was born out of a personal need. I'm planning on taking a vacation in March with my family and we were trying to figure out where to go.

Traveling with Tesla effectively rules out some options, like staying in hostels, so I was hoping to rent an apartment somewhere like I did when I lived in Brasil for a few months in 2005. There's a site Jay Allen introduced me to called VRBO.com. Vacation Rentals By Owner. It's got thousands of listings of apartments for rent all around the globe. Unfortunately the site looks like it's had the same UI design last century. It's hard to get a quick idea of how much a 2BR apartment costs in various cities.

Another issue in deciding where to go is how much it costs to fly there. I was checking the airfare for various cities as I thought of them but that was tedious.

What I really wanted was a site where I could put in my home airport and it would assemble the cost of a three week vacation in every city that had a VRBO listing plus the cost of airfare to that city. It would then display that list sorted cheapest to most expensive. Additionally it would be nice if the site allowed crowd-sourced compilation of various costs in the cities (typical meals, fare from the airport to city center, gallon of mil, etc) and included that in the assembled costs. This is the site I started to build. For a first iteration I limited it to only South American destinations, but eventually I will make it cover all of the VRBO listings.

The first step was scraping the apartment data from the VRBO site. For this I used the open-uri and hpricot ruby libraries to write a scraper. In production this scraper would run maybe once a day to get the latest listings and put them in the site database.

The second step was getting the airfares. I had found a great site, farecompare.com, that finds low price airfares. I started attempting to use the mechanize ruby library to manipulate the search form and scrape the results, but the site developers seemed to have gone to great lengths to make this difficult to do. Undaunted I fired up Wireshark and started sniffing the network traffic. If my browser can make the form work, I can write code to do it as long as I can analyze and reproduce all the necessary network traffic.

So I started getting into that, but then decided maybe I should just try another site in the interest of time. I looked at a few other sites but they all seemed to have a similar level of difficulty for scraping. Finally I noticed one site had almost exactly what I needed. Kayak.com is an airfare search site that has one search mode where you can put in your home airport, select a region of the world (like South America) and it finds the lowest fares to all the major cities in that region. Perfect! Except this search flow was also designed in a way that was difficult to scrape. Kayak had another feature that made them desirable though; they have a developer API, so network traffic analysis (not a lot of fun) wouldn't be necessary! Even though their API did not expose a way to do their regional search, I could make separate searches from a home airport to a list of other airports. It is not as elegant but it should work.

The Kayak API has some flaws though. First off, it seems buggy in that sometimes the API calls work, but most of the time I get a bogus error that says anonymous access to kayak API denied even though I am using a non-anonymous developer key. If I rerun the same API call several times in a row, eventually it works. This bumps me up against another problem with the Kayak API though: they limit API queries to 41 per hour (that's 1000/day). Since I have to make separate queries between the home airport and each city in a region, this means I can effectively only do one regional search per hour. They say you can request a higher limit, so I have an email request pending regarding that.

By the way, I think we're going to Buenos Aires.

System Overview

When a user comes to the site, she enters her home airport code, number of travelers and departure/return dates. The system fires off a BackgroundRB worker in a separate process to start hitting the Kayak API with airfare queries from the specified airport to each South American city listed in the VRBO database table. The user is shown a 'searching' web page that gets updated every 5 seconds as the airfare queries are coming in. Once the low price is found for each city, the background worker is released and the system correlates the airfares with the VRBO data already scraped and in the database. The Kayak results are cached for some time so that the queries don't need to be re-run again if the same home airport is entered. The lodging price is determined using the number of travelers to know what size apartments to look at and the length of stay to know whether to use the nightly, weekly or monthly rates.

Eventually I'd like to expand it to cover other housing options (hostels, hotels, chartered boats).

Anyone got any good names for such a site? It's so hard getting a decent domain name these days.

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.