Radio babylon
I used gumstix to build a small device to stream random things from iTunes. Read more about it here
flickr hacks
I've used the flickr api to make little scripts a few times.
- Parsing a GPS log and reading
date capturedfrom the exif headers for a pool of photos, then running the two together in order to geotag all the photos automatically - Reading a list of photopage urls, then downloading each original photo referenced and stuffing it back into a secret group in my photostream. I wanted to make beck a qoop book using lots of her photos from 2005, but qoop will only print from your own account. The obvious answer was to just pinch her password and do it from there, but this way was more fun.
- Adding a "sort by date captured" option to a set (flickr eventually added this to the organizr themselves)
RSS in your xchat
Here's some perl that watches multiple RSS feeds and prints new items into your xchat window. Excuse the dreadful windowtheme there. These days I much prefer NetNewsWire
Postscipt hacking
I taught myself to write programs in postscript once for the fun of it. Mostly by reading the red book cover to cover.
ghostscript on unix has this mode where you can open a pipe to it. When you send showpage, it will update the display with the most recent page. This way you can use it as a very limited kind of live canvas for a sort of display postscript. I once had something watching an irc channel, counting the unique words and making some postscript on the fly and graphing the results
Here's some postscript (run it more than once!) trying to be auto-illustrator (jpg) (faces)
Bugzilla -> Postscript
I don't use bugzilla at work anymore, but when I did I made some perl that screenscraped the bugs list and made prettier postscript for printing (sample).
IRC text stemming -> google lookup
I wrote an IRC plugin that watched the text as it scrolled by on a channel. It used a natural language parsing application and attempted to look for proper nouns that it hadn't seen before. Then it used the google API to look these up and insert the first result back into the IRC channel stream. It wasn't that sucessful as it had a tendency to lookup the bleeding obvious and it was unable to use context to narrow the search.
YAPI
A long time ago everyone had a tendency to write their own photo gallery application - I was no different. The idea was pinched from ade, then discussed during a walk with celia and paul. Esentially we decided the directory structure was a perfectly good way of organising photos and so I built YAPI which pretty printed directories containing photos. There was an interface for browing the structure, and an interface for searching the photos based on their filenames. Eventually we had a way of commenting, walking directories, displaying exif information, nice thumbnails and so on. The output was all template driven and I had some nice CSS which overlayed the image title on the image. The feature I never really got around to, was wanting to connect different sites together using some kind of RPC. This would have enabled us to pool photos based on exif headers to get a combined view on an event that more than one person had taken photos of. Quite possibly that was a stupid home of the future solution.
Anyway, then along came flickr and that was that.
poster for the conspiracy
Another flickr hack! One of the companies I work with, the state51 conspiracy, licences the digital rights to the best indie music. We digitise all the assets and deliver them to various musicservices. The jukebox is great, but I was thinking about other uses for all that stuff. I used the state51 platform to download 209 random packshots of conspiracy content. We store a high quality tiff for each album. Then I uploaded all of these to my flickr account, tagged so I could easily group them into a set. Next I used qoop to make a nice poster of that set. Came out well! A real world version of those last.fm quilts everyone was making a while back.