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% [?]
desk chair stat monitor
I’m addicted to the stats from my bike computer. I’m addicted to my blog stats. I’m addicted to stats at work. I’m pretty much just addicted to stats.
I want more stats. This got me thinking. Put a Wii style accelerometer in your chair. It can sense your movement on the chair. It can wifi information to your PC to plot your day. It would be able to tell when you were seated, moving, away from your desk etc… At the end of the day you could look at your chart and see that you spend 12% of your day away from your desk.
As well as the soul nourishing stats this could also provide health benefits. A tray icon could flash a warning when it’s been 2 hours since you last left your seat - so you don’t get a seized up body through inaction - or DVT.
Productivity advice could give the opposite message - “you have spent 3 hours so far today away from your desk - lazy boy!“.
Tiny games like minesweeper could be controlled by jiggling about in your seat. Or messages like “you have burned 48 calories by zooming around on your seat today“. These guys have to add this to next years models.
Popularity: 26% [?]
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% [?]
global webcam weather monitor
Another overcast morning. Joy. I’ve had an idea for a distributed weather forecasting / tracking project though. Every cloud…
Basically everyone who has a webcam leaves it on when not being used, and points it out of their window. A small app on their PC then sends a stream of images to a web service which sets the view onto a map.
If the cam is pointing at the sky, or at something outdoors at least, changes in colour, brightness, etc… will indicate local weather conditions.
When a cloud passes over a district, the central server can see the webcams darken in succession. It can then drive a real time view to the website for people in the area. I could see a dark mass approaching from the west, and predict rain arriving shortly.
If it looks like it got dark a mile away, I can look at the nearest webcam to see for myself in more detail. That way I can see if it is cloud, or just a cat sitting on the windowsill blocking the light. If it’s a cloud, I should be able to see if it’s raining, or just overcast.
This is much better than pictures of clouds with raindrops coming out of them and some guy yabbering on about it being ‘mainly clear with some showers’.
The weather map would look like one of those photographs made up of thousands of other photographs. Or it could simply take an aggregate color / brightness value from webcams within the area.
Scale
If the central server is replaced by a swarm of nodes then even better as it could be totally open and distributed. Most people will only be interested in local weather, as this is really a micro weather forecasting system, allowing me to see actual weather near me now. If I’m about to go out for a run, or to cycle to work, this is amazingly useful. The data then doesn’t have to travel too far, other than reporting out broad aggregate values – for plotting on the national maps.
It could also plot the average colour of the webcams across the country – it would be beautiful when it snows. Animations would look amazing. Flash mashups with google maps and time animations as big storms moved over an area could look amazing. Screensavers could be great too – based on live feed info.
You would also be able to see night time approaching as cams get darker – again, animating this could be cool.
A lot of towns and cities have webcams running 24/7 already which could be used to trial this. Even if they point at something complex, so long as it is outdoors it would work, it is the change we are looking for, darkening or lightening for example. We don’t need to actually see the sun or the cloud for this to work. Assuming the project consumes the webcam feed lightly, I can’t see any objection people could have to allowing it to harvest already published images.
It could be operationally similar to open street map, a great project which produces maps in this people generated manner. Some geotagging group should be able to accomodate kicking off something like this, and have a sound tech foundation for it already from other projects.
Thanks for the CC webcam pics to http://flickr.com/photos/konnecke/268895705/ and http://flickr.com/photos/snype451/42070498/
The sketch:
Popularity: 14% [?]
fancy rain guage idea
I really need to fix my guttering. Theres a spot above the front door that leaks. It only leaks if there is a reasonable amount of rain tipping down though, more than just a shower. This got me thinking…
What if I could tune this problematic guttering to spray that overflow water into fancy patterns, swirling fountains, or clean jets aimed at a pond in the garden?
What if I could have four pools, graded to the weather, and four separate spouts fed them? What if I could use this to state how heavy the rain was? “Look dear, it’s dinging down a 3er out there”.
An end piece for a standard gutter should be formable from copper to direct overflow in this way. The pools could look great - every garden benefits from a pool or two. We’re not talking mammoth lakes here, just little foot or two across garden ponds. I guess any newts that took residence in the big pool might get a shock during a ‘grade four downpour’ when the jet turns on - bet hey - they can swim.
I’d pay for that. Some artisan gutterer turns up at my house with his copper bending kit, his intuition, and an apprentice to dig a few ponds in ‘just the right place’. Think how cool your neighbours would think you were. “look John, next doors house looks so PRETTY when it rains!”
This would really fit with my liking for arbitrary measurement. When making coffee we talk about a ‘3 spooner’ or a ‘4 spooner’. When we recently got all new cutlery the meaning of ’spoon’ changed. Our terminology didn’t. It just feels more organic. I like the thought that a ‘pool 2 day’ at my house is a ‘pool 4′ half a mile away. Personal units of measurement are so much more touchy feely than metric units.
Popularity: 14% [?]
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About Steve
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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