I moderated a panel on micromobility at the annual Moving the Future Conference at Harvard Business School. I had the fortune of discussing this decade’s favorite topic with four heavyweights in the industry. We had the panel discussion on Groundhog Day, when Punxsutawney Phil saw no shadow and thereby predicted an early spring (ain’t that the truth), We discussed the potential for micromobility,…
The Machine in the Garden , written in 1964 by Leo Marx, explores the relationship between the pastoral ideal and the industrial progress that ostensibly is in opposition to that ideal. This book is not necessarily a literature review, although it enlists a half dozen full-length writings to understand the cultural symbols that encode the interplay between imagination and reality. The urge to…
Back in 2014 I was driving up the 101 coming back from a YC alumni Demo Day and I had a lightbulb moment about the way I wanted to control my new Hue lightbulbs. That’s when the idea of Turn Touch was born. I’d had some experience building open source hardware projects for my home , and developing open source art installations for Burning Man at a slightly larger scale, but I had never thought I’d…
Grove is a set of 10 interactive biofeedback sculptures, a conversation between humans and trees. Each tree is made of steel tubes, thousands of LEDs, and custom breathing sensors. Grove is a 2016 honorarium installation at Burning Man and is the second installation made by the group that made Pulse & Bloom in 2014. The core team is ten people: Saba Ghole , Shilo Shiv Suleman , Severin Smith ,…
Dear Mom and Pop, This was going to be an awkward year for us from the start. Thanksgiving is normally a time when we, two dozen immigrant Jews and first-generation Americans, come together to eat a turkey stuffed with oranges, served with a side of smoked fish and a dozen competing salads. Before the election, I thought the greatest thing that would divide our dinner table would be my recently…
This was my second year attending Burning Man. Many use Burning Man as a week to detach from their workweek and experience a new life of intense leisure. Not me, I come to Burning Man to build. Pulse & Bloom is a 2014 honorarium installation . The core team of 6 people — Saba Ghole , Shilo Shiv Suleman , Rohan Dixit , Heather Stewart , Luke Iseman , and myself — built 20 interactive lotus flowers…
For New Year’s Eve 2014, my girlfriend and I went to a dance party where wearable electronics were not only encouraged but also on display from a variety of hobbyists. I decided to use this as an opportunity to combine two of my favorite hobbies: sewing and electronics. It is my goal to encourage more people to weave wearable electronics into their own clothing. It’s the future and we might as…
Every hardware hacker has a start, and this one is mine. My girlfriend bought me a Raspberry Pi for my birthday, and so I became determined to build something with it for her birthday two months later. As you can see above, I built a photo frame that has a few interesting parts. For one, the software which runs the photo frame, which I explore below, keeps the photos fresh from Instagram and…
We’ve all done it. Our code base has one huge monolithic file, packed full of JavaScript spaghetti. It’s unwieldy, hard-to-debug, and has little to no separation of concerns. It is a nightmare to bring new engineers up to speed. This blog post is about decomposing NewsBlur’s single-file 8,500 line JavaScript application into its component parts: 8 models, 12 views, 3 routers, 3 collections. This…
NewsBlur has and, for as far out as I can see, will be a side-project. It’s fun, but I can’t even begin to imagine the headaches I’d face if I had to support a living salary through NewsBlur. My goal is just to meet potential co-founders and to try to make a splash. And I’ve been meeting folks here in NYC who I would not have met otherwise. So it’s working quite well, so far. Fabulously well, in…
Progress is progress, except when it gets in the way of your workflow. Let’s compare these two screenshots: Old-style Leopard Exposé New-style Snow Leopard Exposé Notice how much more pleasant the old-style Exposé is? Introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and virtually unchanged until OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, it featured proportional windows. By just looking at the size of the window relative to the…
Last week I submitted my project, NewsBlur , a feed reader with intelligence, to Hacker News . This was a big deal for me. For the entire 16 months that I have been working on the project, I was waiting for it to be Hacker News ready. It’s open-source on GitHub , so I also had the extra incentive to do it right. And last week, after I had launched premium accounts and had just started polishing…
I recently moved NewsBlur from MySQL to PostgreSQL for a variety of reasons, but most of all I want to use connection pooling and database replication using Slony, and Postgres has a great track record and community. But all of my data was stored in MySQL and there is no super easy way to move from one database backend to another. Luckily, since I was using the Django ORM, and with Django 1.2’s…
It’s always nice to see that after working on a project for 13 months, people are finally starting to use it. The source behind NewsBlur is available on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/ . And recently, in response to a Hacker News thread about why RSS readers sucks , I linked to NewsBlur and explained my rationale: I think I created a very nice feed reading experience with NewsBlur:…
There are many solutions to the edit-in-place problem, but I wanted to make an easy solution that wasn’t as complicated as some of the other edit-in-place JavaScript scripts, like jEditable. Features: Detects surroundings and keeps the input container as either a block or inline display. Highlights text if it is the original text. If the text has changed, the entire text is not highlighted on…
I want JavaScript to feel as smooth as a native application. I think scrolling is one of the largest issues, but this code snippet is more about aborting the jQuery AJAX event before it has a chance to complete. There’s no good documentation in the jQuery docs about how to do this. other than to just use this command on an existing AJAX request: var request = $.ajax('/url', data, callback);…
One of the best ways to write code that you tend to have to re-use is to put it in the public domain. That way when you need it again, it's a Google search away from your own blog. This is a rather simple working example of default text on an input field. Click on the field, the text disappears, only to reappear if the user clicks somewhere else on the page without typing. The input also has a…
This Storybird is written by thesundaybest, found on twitter: @thesundaybest . A Faulty Heist by thesundaybest on Storybird Storybirds like this remind me why I love working with a community of artists and children's literature.
The wonderful django-mingus includes a few separate syntax highlighters, including one from django-sugar. However, the pygmentize template filter only works on <code> blocks and tries to guess the language. A better syntax would be to include the language in the class of the code block, like so: <code class= "python" > import this print [ r for r in range ( 0 , 10 , 2 )] </code> You can use this…
Every two to three years I start a new project. Having recently completed the SunRayLab blog, I turned to another problem that I have been having since i started visiting blogs and other sites through the lens of my RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire. I am starting a new project called NewsBlur. NewsBlur is an RSS feed reader with intelligence. See NewsBlur in action . My problem is simple: I subscribe…
Since 1999 I have had a presence on the web. I bought conesus.com back then and used it to link to projects, code samples, writings, and photographs. I now own conesus.com, samuelclay.com, and ofbrooklyn.com, all of which now serve different purposes. My primary blog platform has been a hand-coded blog engine called SunRayLab that I used for ofbrooklyn.com for the past three years. It’s time to…
SVG, an open, standardized vector graphics markup language is now supported on 30% of all web browsers. The other 70% of browsers (specifically, Internet Explorer), support VML, a close cousin of SVG. If you write both SVG and VML, you can provide rich, interactive vector graphics > 99% of all browsers. Raphaël JavaScript Library does all the heavy lifting for the developer. Write your…
In response to James Padolsey's blog post on his apprehension to studying Java before his first-year studying computer science. University is unlike anything youve done, and unfortunately anything else youre going to do unless you really love the study of computer science. I recently graduated from university with a degree in Computer Engineering, taking roughly similar courses as a Comp Sci…
We were accepted! Here is our finished abstract, also available on the SVG Open 2009 workshop page: http://www.svgopen.org/2009/registration.php?section=workshops . Dmitry Baranovskiy - http://dmitry.baranovskiy.com - dmitry@baranovskiy.com Samuel Clay - http://www.ofbrooklyn.com - samuel@ofbrooklyn.com The power of web browsers has reached the point when it is easy to use native vector graphics…
Raphael is a wonderful Javascript library, used for creating vector graphics, and interacting with SVG/VML elements through Javascript. Raphael allows the developer to interact with these elements through a number of complex animations. Until now, the only speed for an animation was a linear movement from one state to another. This plugin extends the animation of Raphael to allow for easing…
The SVG Open 2009 is in October at Google's campus in California. I recently submitted my proposal for a course on writing SVG through Javascript and the Raphael Javascript Library. Below is my proposal. Let's hope it is approved and I am able to continue work in SVG. I am proposing to teach a course about building an interactive SVG module on the web through the use of the Raphael Javascript…