Jon Udell

I presume you are familiar with the long-time strategy among some professional photographers to put a starter pistol (technically a firearm) into their photography gear so make it less likely to go missing? https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/09/amazing-lifehack-pack-a-starter-p…

Follow up: Looking over the old SIMILE site I couldn't find the original project. Also David Huynh didn't mention it in his own website, but some searching yielded the original project, "Parallax" https://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FZPtpgntwC&pg=PA36 More from the era: https://blog.jonudell.net/2008/08/25/motivating-people-to-write-the-se…

Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile. I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total. Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok. I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to… In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish. And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away. I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly. One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" - it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a…

There used to be a python spreadsheet that worked as a spreadsheet - Resolver One. It was .Net based but did not make enough money. I wonder if done now there would be enough support to open source something like this. For a review see https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/27/first-look-at-resolver-an-ironpyt…

I'm a fan, and documented my journey in a series of posts including: https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/07/24/pl-pgsql-versus-pl-python-heres-w… https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/13/pl-python-metaprogramming/ https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/21/postgres-functional-style/

That's a really good point. I wonder if folks would intuitively get it if you provided little data visualization (visible on hover or whatever). Like: Result 1: (4.5 ) Result 2: (5.0 ) edit: HN stripped out the unicode characters :(. I was using something like this: https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/05/the-tao-of-unicode-sparklines/.

Hypothesis is going strong. They have smart people working on it, it's fully open source with open APIs and data available over anonymous RSS, the culture is nothing like rap/bro culture, and the founder is independently wealthy from winning the startup lottery in a past life and seems to be running the thing as a passion project no matter how much it makes. (Their main commercial play right now is selling higher ed. on the idea of using Hypothes.is for scholarly criticism.) See "Notes for an Annotation SDK" from a couple weeks ago <https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/09/03/notes-for-an-annotation-sdk/>

The timezone database is also a surprising amount of fun: https://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-ol…

Agreed, I used to read Jon a lot back in the magazine days. Glad to see he is still at it! This page will answer some of your questions: https://blog.jonudell.net/about/

>Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? It has been tried, and early attempts failed. Jon Udell was one of the drivers behind the Elm City Project, which merged many RSS feeds of calendar information into a uniform resource. [0] Maybe its time has come again. [0] https://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity-project-faq/

This blog post discusses using Hypothes.is to annotate on media, and provides some tooling to make it a little easier, if that helps you: https://blog.jonudell.net/2018/03/10/open-web-annotation-of-audio-and-…

Never heard of it. Because it is silverlight, never would have been able to run it. Sounds like it did a lot less according to http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/14/popfly-and-pipes/ Lemme guess, you worked on it?

I did a similar thing (with Bill Zeller and John Udell) as a ubiquity/twitter extension a couple of years earlier[1]... but in practice the low resolution of the standard unicode caracters makes them just a novelty; the technique's been reinvented several times but hasn't found a niche. Even this font doesn't quite hack it for me - the curves are too wide to take in the time series at a glance. [1] http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/01/13/fuel-prices-and-pageviews/

An alternative comment on this posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3443043 Original here: http://blog.jonudell.net/2012/01/09/another-way-to-think-about-geeks-a…

Here's what I'd seen before. Looks like it was discontinued as a product even when I first saw it years ago. http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/03/14/the-floating-arms-keyboard/

Jon Udell had a very interesting article recently on a related topic: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-ols… Jon's particular slant was reading the comments in the timezone database and reflecting on the political influences captured within. A fun read.