November 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
Name things
It makes them real
April 2011
1 post
"Famous"
Last weekend, while visiting San Diego, I passed a place called Jimmy’s Famous American Tavern. From this, I can only infer the following:
Jimmy started a restaurant called Jimmy’s American Tavern
Many people came to it, and started talking about it
When people came to the Jimmy’s they were unsure if it was the Jimmy’s they had heard about
In order to stem confusion,...
March 2011
2 posts
Gepetto's Army
Yesterday, I talked about Social Robots at SXSW. It was great sharing this new topic with the audience, and I was flattered by the feedback on the #twitterbots hashtag.
Unfortunately, the talk wasn’t recorded, but I’ve put the slides online. You don’t get the narration, but you can check them out! Hopefully you’ll find them thought provoking.
Gepetto’s Army: Creating...
Social Robots, SXSW, and the future
Almost two and a half years ago, before Ashton and CNN, I embarked on a challenge to see if Social Robots could infiltrate online communities. Zack Coburn and I launched a small armada of fully autonomous Twitter bots against clusters of users who already knew each other. A project in Mark Chang’s course at Olin College, we called it Project Realboy after Gepetto’s puppet Pinocchio. Each...
November 2010
1 post
Captive Audience
I send a disproportionate amount of personal emails from planes. There is nothing else to distract me, so I jot dozens of notes to friends.
September 2010
1 post
Glass
We are a few years from having a generation of teens who are faster keyboardists on multitouch glass than physical keyboards.
August 2010
1 post
Social Music
Results:
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Two Door Cinema Club
“fun.”
Seal
Ryan Montbleau
Bootie Top 10
Uffie
Colin Hay
The Script
June 2010
3 posts
Instapaper Android Bookmarklet →
I made this page that lets you add an Instapaper Bookmarklet to Android. Using some code gabrielsroka posted in the Android bug on bookmarklets, it outputs a http://javascript(eval()) “link” that Android is ok with you bookmarking.
If I were more on top of my game, I’d make my page easier to use and not require you to edit the URL by hand. Maybe Rev2 if anyone asks for it.
...
Wanted: Penpals
All of my personal correspondance since summer 2004
Since the summer is here, I am reinitiating the Greg Marra Summer Penpal Program. If you would like to apply to be a participant of GMSPP 2010, please mail a handwritten letter that enumerates your qualifications and explains why you should be admitted to the program.
There is no limit to the number of participants that can be accepted into...
iPod Touch Offline Mail Protip
If you don’t have Internet access and the iOS Mail app hasn’t downloaded the full text of a message, you can go into Settings and change the number of lines in the preview to 5. Mail will show you more of the email that it has already cached, perhaps letting you glean the important information. -Greg
May 2010
2 posts
Ash Cloud Shuts Airports in Parts of Europe →
I do hope the ash has settled down by two weeks from now.
April 2010
1 post
Pangaea - A Real Life Weasley Clock
This is a demo of the Olin College Marauder’s Map Weasley Clock project I have been working on. A servo indicates where on campus I am based on my last check in on the Olin College Marauder’s Map, an opt-in wifi localization system. It’s all powered by an Arduino with an ArduinoEthernetBoard which talks to a web app to tell it where to point.
The project is codenamed...
March 2010
3 posts
February 2010
4 posts
Python libgmail wrong username/password
I have a script that I wrote in 2008 that uses the libgmail Python library to programmatically download attachments from a gmail account based on the label applied to the message. The script has worked great for the last two years, but did not work when I fired it up this year.
Google has changed the way the GMail login flow works. When I attempted to run the script, I got this...
CakePHP in a Subdirectory
If you’re installing CakePHP into a subdirectory, you need to set up mod_rewrite to have RewriteBase set correctly to each directory.
For many hosting services (GoDaddy, 1and1), your web server is actually being served from a user directory that already uses mod_rewrite. If you are installing CakePHP into a user directory (http://example.com/~username/cakephp/), or any other URL structure...
CakePHP with xampp on Mac OS
If you are getting an unstyled no css default page with CakePHP using xampp on Mac OS, you need to modify your apache config to contain an alias pointing to Cake’s webroot directory.
This blog post details what to do:
http://practicaltechniques.com/2008/04/28/setting-up-cakephp-with-xampp/
In short:
Scroll down to the area where you see the Alias established for phpmyadmin and paste the...
January 2010
4 posts
Bangkok Temples
10_01_08 Bangkok
Today we went up and down the Chao Phraya River to see some of Bangkok’s temples. They are amazingly impressive. Taking the boats around was a great way to avoid Bangkok’s congested traffic. Going from one bank of the river to the other cost only 3 Baht (or about $0.09 USD)! The “tourist” boat up and down the river was 25 Baht per ride. If only transit...
Google Maps Mobile
Google Maps for iPhone hasn’t really changed since it came out several years ago. The Windows Mobile and Android Google Maps have completely blown past it in terms of features. I wish I had access to My Maps and better directory listings.
December 2009
1 post
Pangaea - Customized Reverse Geocoding
Pangaea is a utility to help you utilize your Google Latitude location. Pangaea turns GPS coordinates like (42.29, -71.26) into codewords like “Olin College” so that other things you make will have an easier time understanding where you are. After you give it access, Pangaea reads your secret Google Latitude location feed to produce a secret Pangaea location feed.
I put this...
November 2009
4 posts
Business Idea: Marker Vending Machines
Put these in places with whiteboards whose markers always get stolen.
October 2009
5 posts
Caller ID
When I call someone, it shows them my phone number.
Why not also show them my name and a photo?
Back of the Plane →
Back of the Plane helps you find interesting people on your flights. I put this together with other Oliners over the weekend. Feel free to give it a spin - it’s going to get some more polish in the next few days.
September 2009
4 posts
Skeeball @ Olin
And for 29 glorious hours, Olin College had Skeeball machines.
09_09_12 Skeeball
August 2009
2 posts
Spoilerbot
Executive Summary
Spoilerbot is an automated Twitter robot designed to ruin people’s enjoyment of works of fiction by preemptively revealing the ending. For instance, upon seeing that PotterFan525 tweeted “So excited to be reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, Spoilerbot would tweet “@PotterFan525 Snape kills Dumbledore”. In doing so, Spoilerbot...
“Twitter users around the globe could not Tweet for at least three hours.”
– USA Today
July 2009
8 posts
Revisited - New Year's Resolutions
With 2009 slightly more than halfway behind us and Summer almost two thirds done, the present is a perfect time for a bit of reflection. Journey with me through the annals of my blog, and let us see how I am doing with my New Year’s Resolutions.
Logging
I said I wanted to do a better job documenting my life.
Notebooks
I filled up my first notebook and am almost done with a second! I use...
Python 2.6 Modules on OS X
OS X handles Python installations differently than Windows or Linux. This becomes evident when you try to install modules. Particularly if you then try to use those modules.
If you are like me and your Mac OS 10.5 install came with Python 2.5 and then you updated to Python 2.6, you should follow these instructions on droidism.com. They also tell you how to install Python 2.6, but most crucially,...
Facebook + Location
As Facebook has grown internationally into a worldwide network, we’ve come to realize that organizing our users into geographic networks isn’t as useful as knowing where a user is currently located.
from Facebook dev blog
Does this mean I will finally be able to ask Facebook, “Hey, I’m going to San Francisco, which of my friends are there?”.
June 2009
10 posts
One Velociraptor Per Child
This is another micro-essay from my Harvard Business School app. It is about One Velociraptor Per Child.
Last summer, one of my friends worked for the One Laptop Per Child organization, which strives to enable education in third world countries. She had an idea for a funny parody of OLPC, “One Velociraptor Per Child.” Velociraptors are a popular meme in many web comics, so we thought...