scot hacker's foobar blog

June 6, 2011November 6, 2011

A Guide to Twitter for Facebook Users

Some of my Facebook friends have been asking why I seem to spend more time on Twitter than on FB, and wonder what I see in it. I’ve started to realize that a lot of Facebook users kind of misunderstand Twitter, and don’t realize how much value is there. The two networks represent very different kinds of parties, and it’s not like you have to choose one or the other – you get very different things from each of them. I can’t imagine not doing both!

Finally decided to put together this little guide to clarify a few things. Hope you find it useful!

Image via Boing-Boing
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May 22, 2011November 6, 2011

Maker Faire 2011

Miles and I have attended Maker Faire in San Mateo every May since it started five years ago. It’s gotten huger with every passing year of course – wall to wall people, and tricky driving/parking if you don’t arrive first thing. A lot of the same themes from year to year, but always something new to feast the eyes and tease the brain. Didn’t stay as long this year, didn’t dig as deep, and didn’t get as many diggable photos as we have in the past, but still glad we went and will keep on keeping on!

Strangely, one of the best moments of the day had nothing to do with welding or LEDs or Adam Savage. It was a magical encounter with a lone man sitting at a small typewriter (yes, typewriter), selling poems. “You name the topic, you name the price.” With a friend’s 50th birthday coming up that night, I asked him to improvise on the topic of “bicycles in the city of your mind.” We carried on a conversation about French surrealist Alfred Jarry and his impact a hundred years later on the punk/new wave movement, and about how Picasso actually bought his gun after he passed, and ended with me spontaneously ejecting the sentence “This moment is a grommet through which the aglet of morning has finally emerged.” We laughed, he handed me the finished poem, and it was absolutely fantastic (sorry, I already gave it away as a gift, so can’t share it here). More at zachhouston.com.

Flickr set

May 15, 2011November 6, 2011

My Drunk Kitchen

At the Knight Digital Media Center where I work, we depend on interns and assistants to accomplish a lot of what we do. We’ve had a lot of good ones over the years, but one of the best was Hannah Hart, aka Harto. Unfortunately for us, Hannah moved to NYC to become an assistant to one of the actors on 30 Rock… and to turn herself practically overnight into a minor celeb as host of her own YouTube channel, where she’s been working on the net-only cooking show My Drunk Kitchen.

MDK is recorded on a single MacBook webcam from her kitchen apartment while demonstrating cooking techniques for complicated “meals” like grilled cheese sandwiches and cookies – while getting completely and totally crocked on cheap champagne, wine, or whatever happens to be sitting around that day. Sound insane? Just you watch. It’s all about the repartee’.

Each episode starts off innocently enough, but by the time the prep is done, Hannah’s pretty much off her rocker, questioning whether anyone really knows what it means to “cream the butter” (“I’m sure they meant ‘cram’ – I’ll just cram the butter in here…”).

Hannah’s just launched her own web site, featuring all MDK episodes to date.

May 4, 2011November 6, 2011

Content Farms and the Demand Media Cesspool

Never mind black-hat SEO and the mostly closed ecosystem of the second internet (Facebook) – the web is facing a possibly even bigger nemesis in “content farms” like Demand Media, which attempt to game the search + advertising money machine that is Google. I knew that content farms were a big problem (Google even recently released a Chrome plugin that would let end users identify non-useful content on the internet so it could be deprecated in search results). But check out the infographic below. It’s all interesting, but wrap your head around the the raw numbers: “Demand’s goal is to publish 1 million articles/month (30,000 articles per day)” — all crap content written by underpaid writers churning out intentional baloney, all with the intention of skimming pennies and dollars out of AdWords. In the process, they’re wrecking the quality of the search results you rely on every day, and filling the web with bile and nonsense. Staggering.

[Source: OnlineMBA.com]

April 30, 2011November 6, 2011

Lego City

Over the past year, Miles has been building a city of Legos along one entire wall of his bedroom. It changes every day – tearing things down and rebuilding them, rearranging them… this is how it looks today, but it was different yesterday and will be different tomorrow.

Lego City from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.

April 21, 2011November 6, 2011

Looking Back on ZiffNet: 20 Years in Technology Publishing

Social networking and online publishing weren’t always about the web. When I got my start at ZiffNet – an umbrella organization for the family of Ziff-Davis computing magazines – “online” meant CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. At the time, CompuServe was only accessible in command line mode, through terminal emulation software. Seems impossible by today’s standards, but at the time, it was the state of the art. The Ziff-Davis presence on Prodigy and AOL came a bit later, and were graphical – some of the first to take advantage of the then-new new Windows operating system.

We were lucky to have been in the cat bird’s seat when the web hit in the early ’90s (though we were also blind-sided by it, since our business model was all about charging for connection times). I was lucky to have been there at the birth of the web, and got to help create Ziff’s first web presence, which in turn inspired me to launch Birdhouse (first as an arts collective, then later as a blog, and later as a hosting service).

A lot of water under the bridge since then – incredible to contemplate how the landscape of online publishing has changed since then. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of ZiffNet, ZDNet has published a ZDNet 20th Anniversary Special, with memoirs from myself and others involved at the time. ZiffNet launched my passion for technology and my career. I’ve re-posted my own contribution below, for posterity.

See also: Photo gallery: ZDNet through the years, 1997-2010 as well as Michael Kolowich’s recollection of the start of Interchange – a service that was designed to blow the doors off the online services of the time, but that was eclipsed by the birth of the web: ZiffNet: ‘Project Athena’ and the moment of conception.

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April 17, 2011November 6, 2011

Migrating from Django-Tagging to Taggit

When Bucketlist launched a year ago and I needed a good app to let users create a taxonomy for their life goals, django-tagging was the main contender, and that’s what we went with.

Django-tagging worked pretty well overall, but had one critical bug: Because it only had a tag “name” field but no slug field, users could enter tags with slashes in them. Accessing lists of those tags would then generate a 500 error – a bad user experience, unclean, and I was getting tired of seeing the error reports. Unfortunately, django-tagging hasn’t been been updated in quite a while – starting to look like abandon-ware.

At Djangocon 2010, buzz was that Alex Gaynor’s django-taggit was picking up the slack and becoming the go-to tagging library for Django. Unfortunately, Taggit provides no migration strategy to move your existing tag base over. I held off on migration hoping one would appear, then finally decided this week to try it myself. Thought I’d document the process for others in the same boat.
Continue reading “Migrating from Django-Tagging to Taggit”

March 27, 2011November 6, 2011

Political Speech

Had so much fun playing Mad Libs as a child , diving headlong into surrealism and humor while learning the parts of speech. Thrilled to see Miles getting into Mad Libs now – we’re having a gas learning to tell our adverbs from our plural nouns. Loved the Nixon and other old-school political references in this one he completed today:

Ladies and gentlemen, on this sleepy occasion, it is a privilege to address such a gassy looking group of birds. I can tell from your smiling cars that you will support my sassy program in the coming election. I promise that, if elected, there will be a mirror in every toothpaste and two leaves in every garage. I want to warn you against my stinky opponent Mr. Miles. The man is a cool shoe. He has a boastful character and is working vent in glove with the criminal element. If elected, I promise to eliminate vice. I will keep the sea turtles off the city streets. I will keep crooks from dipping their pencils in the public till. I promise you rainy government, clean taxes, and runny schools.

March 24, 2011November 6, 2011

Bristlebots in the Classroom

A year ago, Miles and I made our first Bristlebot – a small robot made from a toothbrush head, hearing aid battery, and the vibrating motor from a cell phone – which skitters around on flat surfaces in chaotic patterns.

The experiment didn’t end well – Miles grabbed a hot soldering iron by the shaft when I wasn’t looking and we had to segue into burn control. When that subsided, we had great fun racing the bot across the floor.

I just volunteered to help his entire second/third grade classroom build their own bristlebots this April. We’ll also try a variant with mint tins and paper clip legs. We plan to build a “sumo” ring they can push each other out of, and may also try our hand at bristlebot painting:

Chris Cerrito’s Vibrobots on Paint from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.

Found a good source for a battery + motor combo pack, which I’ll be ordering in bulk. Now just need to get my hands on a lot of toothbrushes!