Bitchy Tweets would be a website where you quickly rank a person’s twitter stream on how much they complain about stuff, and determine their positive/negative tweet ratio. The result would be a ranking of where they sit on the complaintometer.
I’m imagining you enter a user’s name (or just bitchytweets.com/domo_domo), and are given a quick ajax listing of their last 15 tweets. You can then just quickly check off the ones that are considered bitchy. You click ‘I’m done’ and you get one of those dials similar to DSL speed test, of where the person ranks on the bitchometer. A link to this graph for future reference is given.
A history of rankings would be kept, so hopefully overtime the ranking could become more accurate, and given an average as the result of the ranking.
As part of my IT job, I sometimes have to put together instructions for how to install or use a program. Would be nice to automate this. The hardest part of the whole thing is taking the screenshots and integrating them into a document. The more visual the instructions are, and the less words, the generally more effective they are.
I’m thinking of a webapp where you could import screenshots, and then easily mark up the screen shots with instructions. Draw a box around the ‘OK’ button in a screenshot, and enter ‘Click this’ and an arrow with the text is automatically painted on the screenshot.
It would also be cool if you could customize certain fields based on a query string. So if I am sending instructions to user ’szissou’, the user field in the screenshot is automatically filled in with szissou.
This experiment was the longest yet. The goal here is to build up a circuit that makes a pulsating style noise, like a burglar alarm. In the process I learned about programmable unijunction transistors (PUTs), and how to use bipolar transistors (in this case the 2N2222) to amplify a signal.
Making some notes to myself here about PUTs, as this is the major new component introduced in this experiment. The most common PUT is model 2N6027.
Like a bipolar transistor, a PUT has three leads. However, they are called the anode (input), gate, and cathode (output). The lead orientation of a PUT is opposite of a 2N2222. So if you have the flat side facing left and the round side facing right, this will put the anode at the top and cathode at the bottom.
My startegy for learning stuff by lonesome is triangulation. When you are book learnin, often times there will be gaps in one author’s explanation. By getting two or three books that cover the same material, you can can use your secondary books to backup your ‘main’ book.
Make: Electronics is still my main book. But now I got the classic Getting Started in Electronics too. Also picked up Electronics for Dummies. I’ve already run into a few things I was spotty on. For instance, with a unijunction transistor, I get that you program it’s voltage tipping point via a resistor. But what I don’t get is how you know what that point is. Hoping that when I run into these kinds of situations, the other books will help me out.
I’d like to see a video game leader board website. It should have a super simple API. Anyone game can submit to it once the developer has an API key. It would not be tied to any particular game engine, totally neutral.
Each leader board would have an RSS feed that can be used be rebroadcast that data on other sites/within a game itself. It would be nice if there was a way for people to ‘claim’ their scores somehow, so they all show under one unified account. Not sure how this might work. Maybe facebook connect/oauth is part of the puzzle.
XBox Live certainly has this concept, but it’s an island (a really big, totally awesome island). But what about random flash games, iPhone games, etc.
There might be some sites out there doing this, but they seem to be tied to specific platform or engines.