the washcounter 3000
Black T-shirts go grey. They just do. Unless you never wear / wash them. Use ‘color’ detergents, use ‘colorstay’ dryer sheets, use voodoo and magik. Nothing stops the inevitable ageing of your black shirt into a grey shirt.The age old question though, is which t-shirt lasts longest? I have a feeling that the Meh shirt from thinkgeek stayed black-black for WAY longer than my Roots tee (the one with the cool Atari joystick). But did it, or did I just wear the roots tee more often. How many wash cycles did each pass through?
Introducing the washcounter 3000.
The washcounter is a tiny rfid embedded in the label, which has a heat sensor to tell it when it goes through the machine. It can be interrogated by the washcounter drawerwatcher - which sits in your shirt drawer / closet / wardrobe / rail. This will simply give a list of your shirts, with a simple count of how many times each has been washed. You could even post this to the washcounter live website. You would have an overall score for how often you’d worn each shirt. Some would want a low score, the dark greens would want a high score.
The trivia side alone is worth my money. But the satisfaction of knowing that Meh lasted 10 more washes than Roots must approach that of making a lumpless tasty bechamel, or nailing a perfect level on Q*bert. American apparel could boast exact figures for how black their shirts stay.
Clothing manufacturers could use them to encourage restocking - for example as my Meh shirt appraches 30 washes the drawerwatcher could start to say ‘Meh is getting grey dude, buy something fresh’. Direct access to my brain at the moment that I’m looking for something to wear. A marketers dream!
As I write, washcounter.net is available to anyone who feels the urge to take this on.
Popularity: 23% [?]
what color is my website - colortoy 2
I’ve made a modest extension to colortoy 1, and quite grandly titled it colortoy 2. Where colortoy 1 told you the average color of a single image, this version tells you the average color of a webpage. Just enter a page URL below to see the color of that page. One step closer to the webcam weather project.
Just tap in an address or try it for bbc.co.uk, techcrunch.com, boingboing.net, facebook.com, nick.co.uk. Green peppers and red tomatoes.
The thumbnails are courtesy of the excellent thumbnail generator at artViper.
This will run more slowly than colortoy 1 because the thumbnails are being generated before being tested.
Popularity: 19% [?]
colortoy one
My recent idea for a global webcam weather network got me coding. Introducing color toy 1. A very simple tool to let you see the average color of an image. I’m playing with grabbing the average color of a few outdoor webcams over time to plot color etc.. against time. I thought some of you might enjoy playing with it too.
For example to see the current ‘color of Aberdeen’ click here. It’s grabbing the City Council webcam view of the harbour. Glamorous.
To see your own average color just drop the URL of a JPEG into the form above. Something like “http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/home_photo_codepoet.jpg” (see it here). It has to be a jpeg, anything else will likely break the tool and give worrying DB errors etc… Actually some JPEGs seem to do that too, PHP seems to hate the encoding or something. Just make sure you play nice, and make any images reasonably sized, legal, and colorful!
If you know of any good outdoor webcams publishing a jpeg, rather than a flash stream or other less accessible format, do email me the URL > steve@inventoids.com. Collecting data from them will help with Color toy 2 which will be a step closer to the global webcam weather thing. I’ll post the source once I’ve cleaned it up a bit, PHP isn’t my strongest.
Some interesting / useful bits and pieces on the bookmarks as part of this. Mainly related tools, techniques and posts:
- Image Magick - open source image manipulation and calculation
- Wisegeek - another image / color / flickr mashup giving a hex value from a Flickr image ID
- PHP Imagecolorat() - starting pointin the PHP manual for color experiments
- Theo - nice flash single image color averaging
- drunkmenworkhere - interesting ‘color of the web’ project
- fractulus - search for images by color
- AntoAPI - nice ajaxy implementation of color calculating
Popularity: 18% [?]
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Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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