"project" in Weblog

My friend and partner in crime, DRMaciver, pointed me to David McCandless & Derek Guo’s shocking visualisation of Atlantic fish stocks in the Guardian. I’d been vaguely concerned about our fish-eating habits. I happen to love fish but the murmurs about the state of fishing has been making me increasingly uneasy, fuelled by documentaries like Shark Water and Blue Planet. But I find it very hard to make a decision about what’s okay to eat. I simply can’t keep the information in my head.

An IRC buddy of mine, Zarkonnen, had a similar problem and turned the Guardian’s data list into HTML and JSON. I pulled in his JSON and turned it into a mobile-friendly, home-screenable list. Nothing fancy but I’ve been using it for the last few days and have found it genuinely useful already.

So, here it is: Which Fish?

I’ve been getting very into personal instrumentation recently, tracking energy expenditure via a Fitbit, weight via some Withings scales, mood via Mappiness,  movies, gigs and books via my very own @oo5 project. I started noting all this stuff  out of curiosity; I didn’t have any concrete plans for the data. There were vague thoughts of some kind of visualisation to help me find correlations between my habits and my general wellbeing. I ran across an anecdote from the Evernote CEO, related by Tim Ferriss, which got me thinking though. This chap had been trying to lose weight for years. He’d tried every fad diet under the sun but while the weight shifted, it always came back. The single most important thing in his road to a leaner, meaner self was simply to weigh himself every day and let his subconscious do the rest.

Since reading that I’ve noticed something about my behaviour as it relates to what I do, where and when. My Fitbit makes me think twice about getting the bus all the way to work; my Withings scales influence my lunch destination; @oo5  (with the help of my Kindle) effects whether I browse the internet, catch up on Instapaper or read a proper book. The simple act of measuring things has changed my behaviour. 

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.

— Lord Kelvin in 1884

Curious, I wanted to try measuring some things I wanted to change. I tried using the very beautiful Daytum but it was just a touch too slow to inject into my daily routine. After a bit of a think I decided to make a simple iPhone-installable counter, that could be launched fast, used quickly, and forgotten about. So on the way back from SXSW I hacked together  TallyHo. You can create counters for anything you like, add them to your home screen, and away you go. I’m tracking a whole bunch of things, including cups of coffee, which I should drink less of,  glasses of water, which I should drink more of, and plastic bags, which I want to use less of. 

The main focus is on what you’ve done today. There’s a big number in the middle of the screen telling you how you’re doing. Underneath is the medium term view - how you’re doing this week, and the long term view - how you’re doing overall.

I released TallyHo quietly a while back and uptake has been surprising. Somewhere over 1200 items have been counted to date, with tallies including:

• Cigarettes
• Coffees
• Beers
• Teas
• Indigestion
• Bars of chocolate
• Bags of crisps

At the moment the data gets synced to my server and there’s an option to claim your tally by signing into Twitter, so you will be able to retrieve your data should anything happen to your phone. I might add a sync to Daytum too, to benefit from their lovely visualisations. In the meantime, drop me a line if there’s anything you’d like to see TallyHo do. I’d also love to hear from you if it’s helped you change something (anything!) about yourself.

This time last year I had just arrived in Belize. I was standing on the beach in Placencia, on the world’s narrowest high street, with my brother and friend Brett. Our ferry had been cancelled and we’d spent the whole day working our way from Honduras up the coast by truck, boat, bus and lancha.

With the New Year just gone I thought it might be nice to reminisce so I build a little hack project to help me mine the hundreds of memories that my Flickr stream contains. It’s super basic at the moment but I thought I’d put it live anyway. So. Introducing:

This time last year - Flickr reminiscence

It’s really intended for use on my iPhone but I’ll add a desktop format at some point.

While I was in Central America over New Year I found myself trying to place the Maya, the Olmec and the Aztecs into the timeline of world history. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in context before - everything I’ve read deals with a single empire, civilisation or region. So I decided to draw a graph to find out. The result is Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power & Politics.

Setting about Wikipedia with random abandon, looking up dates and following links I have creating an editorial list of the things I think are noteworthy. I’ve played it fast and loose with dates and inclusions. Broadly speaking: early entries are cultures; late ones are empires. There’s a fine line between them, when there’s any line at all. Cultures tended to be subsumed so their “end” is debatable; empires were conquered but have a tendency to decline so their end is also in question. What I’m trying to say is that this chart is just my interpretation. If you want to know more, have a read. If you decide I’ve made a mistake, drop me an email.

Out of curiosity I also decided to try to give some indication of the cultural legacy of the world’s powers. As a rough yardstick I’m using the number of Google search results for the quoted search “name culture”. This is skewed towards those whose names have continued - Chinese and Egyptian, for example - and against those who have died out - like the Mauryan and Bagan - but it’s an interesting measure.

A couple of features I like:

The straight line marking the end of the Phoenician, Kushite, Greek and Persian empires as the Romans rise.

The big gap between the Romans and the Spanish - the Dark Ages - while Asia and the Middle East flourish.

The Maurya, apparently a golden age for the Indian subcontinent, fading from Western memory and the chart.

Enjoy!

Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power & Politics.

Over the last week or so I’ve started pushing a little thought tool/influence experiment I’ve set up called Elect or not? I’m trying to gently nudge people into thinking about why they vote for who they vote for while hopefully gathering some data on the halo effect while I’m at it. I’ll write more about the science behind it when I get some more time.

Out of curiosity I just crunched the numbers for the results I’ve had so far and thought I’d share… Bear in mind that this is people saying who’d they vote for based on looks alone, without knowing who the candidate is, who they represent or what their policies might be…

• 32% Conservative
• 25% Labour
• 24% Liberal Democrat

Compare these results to some of the proper polls… 

YouGov (2010-04-28):

• 34% Conservative
• 27% Labour
• 31% Liberal Democrat

ComRes (2010-04-27):

• 36% Conservative
• 29% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

ICM (2010-04-25):

• 33% Conservatives
• 28% Labour
• 30% Liberal Democrats

Tweetminister (experimental):

• 35% Conservative
• 30% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

It’s a little bit scary but my numbers don’t seem too far removed from these far more sensible and official polls… See the data for yourself on the Elect or not? Parliament page.

On a whim, and after an off-hand suggestion from Stef, I decided to pop some of my most-used Sass mixins - the ones that I include in every new project - up on Github. There’s nothing too ground-breaking here: a straight port of Eric Meyer’s reset.css, and a few CSS3 expanders.

The CSS3 expanders are probably the most interesting. I was getting irritated with having to type and retype certain of the new rules over and over again with the now ubiquitous -moz and -webkit prefixes. So I bundled them into mixins. Mixins are Sass’ way of adding very simple scripting to your stylesheets. Let me give you an example.

This Sass snippet:

div
  width: 500px
  height: 300px
  +box-shadow(#000, 0px, 3px, 5px)

Gets rendered as:

div {
  width: 500px;
  height: 300px;
  box-shadow: #000 0px 3px 5px
  -webkit-box-shadow: #000 0px 3px 5px
}

Dead simple. I’ve wrapped up border-radius, box-shadow, gradient and box-sizing. Interested? Grab the files from Github.

I’ve been using Wesabe for a few months now and I love it. I’m finding accumulating financial data quite addictive. Unfortunately, of the banks I use only my current account has any kind of export. I wrote a little script to parse my downloaded statement HTML into QIF files and over the weekend I decided to polish it a little and slap it on Heroku.

The result is my QIF Converter. It’s dead simple: you copy and paste from your online transaction into the textarea, specify how it’s formatted and hit convert. That’s pretty much it. If you want to import the transactions into your own financial planning app then you can just download the QIF file. If you’re using Wesabe and you have the downloader plugin installed you can just hit upload to Wesabe and you’re done. I’ve been using it to import the ridiculous PDF statements my bank insists on pensioning my old transactions into too. Bing!

While in Iceland back in November Brian Suda and I (when not discussing ideas for sausage innuendo) had an idea for a kind of physical wiki. I had met a guy at Etech a few years ago who was experimenting with placing blank pieces of paper and pens in public spaces and seeing what conversation might develop; Brian was trying to work out how to make real-world travel guides more social. One of the ideas we came up with was this physical wiki - to act both as a social object and a way of sharing knowledge amongst strangers. When I found myself on the Barcamp London Planning Committee I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a prototype: PaperWiki v1.0b.

What is a PaperWiki?

Basically, it’s a load of bits of paper stuck on a wall and connected by bits of string.

Things are written on bits of paper and stuck on the wall. People can locate things spatially - grouping notes as they see fit - or connect related notes with bits of string. They can also write directly onto other peoples’ notes. Simple and fairly intuitive.

Setting up

Given the Barcamp context and the technical awareness of attendees I assumed that the “wiki” label would carry a fairly big hint for use. I added a note about the wiki with a link to the title to act as an example too though, just in case.

Seized by last-second doubt I also scattered a few sample questions about the space as well.

The experiment

The best and most surprising thing about the whole shebang was how easily people seemed to accept the idea. I was worried that it’d need a bit more explanation or worse still, might not use it at all.

That said, it turns out that when presented with a blank piece of paper geeks will create a Twitter clone. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - I’m not coining Stenhouse’s Law just yet - but it went down a storm. Introducing Papr.

And alongside Papr a PaperNet emerged, including its own protocol, pampp://…

…a link-shortner, Tinyprl…

…a Flickr clone, Plickr…

…and assorted other jokes…

Conclusions

Uumm, it’s not quite what I had in mind! By Sunday the jokes had overwhelmed the useful information… More Geocities than WikiSpaces. But it was still good fun and it seemed to serve its purpose as a social object so I think it was a success.

The photos that I managed to take are up in a Flickr set and there are a bunch more from other people floating around too.

As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on? Well, I did but I’d completely forgotten about it. Fortunately my friend Tone hadn’t…

The game’s called Exquisite Corpse or Consequences - depending on where you come from - and is ludicrously good fun. Tone grabbed his mate Suzie and with him acting as middle-man Suzie and I gave it a try over email:

Thomas the tank engine rolled into the station, just as he did at 6:43 every morning. The platform was quiet - it was still too early for the morning rush of commuters - and he coasted to a halt, perfectly in line with the lights at the end of the platform. But before he could open the doors to get the hell outta there, the roof came crashing down. “Man!” Shouted Rock Master Scott, “the roof is on fire!”… the Dynamic Three jubilant that their jail was finally burning yelled in unison “we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn!”. Scott smiled… they were free now. Together they fled into the forest, shooting furtive glances back the way they had come, desperately hoping no one had noticed their escape. No one had and before long they hit the main road back into town. From the safety of the thick undergrowth they peered left then right to see Killa Gorilla cooking dearest Kevin on a spitroast. Hooting and banging his chest, they knew they’d make dessert if they stepped out. With no way back they thought fast; “what would Jesus do?” or “what would Rambo do?”. Pulling out their machine guns they were home for tea.

The End

It was so much fun that we decided to make it as a little web app! Suzie as designer, me as developer (unusually) and Tone as wrangler. The result is Frankenstory, which is loads and loads of fun! Give it a try, let us what you think, and hopefully tell your friends.

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.