Opening a door via text message

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Here’s our office door, which is now able to be opened and closed via a text message. Goodbye keys!

One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that I use Twilio to handle the text message sending and receiving.

You can view the code in this github repo.

Thanks to all the people that wrote the majority of this code, including Bean, who made GET work, parallax, and all the other people listed in the source.

Blizzard 2010 in NYC

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I went out today, a day after New York City was hit with a massive snow storm. These types of storms are no big deal, but when they hit New York, it shuts down one of the busiest cities in the world. I walked down streets that normally would be jammed with traffic. Cars, trucks, people quickly walking to work, food stands and honking were all eerily missing. And it was…. peaceful.

Walking around was a mix between the first scene of Vanilla Sky (where Tom Cruise is running through an empty Times Square) and the turn of the 20th century. There were no cars. Even if they wanted to drive, most streets weren’t plowed yet. And the ones that were plowed had more people walking than cars driving.

Below are some photos I took. You can click on any of them for higher resolution

A street in Astoria, Queens

Buried cop car

Jay St, Brooklyn

Walking down Smith St, Brooklyn (extremely strong winds forced me to walk backwards for a couple blocks)

Everyone walking down Smith St

Father, Son time

Most streets looked like this

And a funny bonus vid. These pigeons were incredibly confused and kept eating snow thinking it was food. I didn’t get a lot of it recorded because some guy scared them away.

Sad Obama

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It’s funny how the newspapers need to round out their narrative with photos of obama looking quite sad. Of course he’s disappointed, but most of these photos are taken out of context to set the mood. I’ve seen several sad obama faces today that I think it warranted this photoshop.

World Cup

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The World Cup reminds me of War of the Worlds. So I made this handy side by side comparison.

New York City Sunset

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I don’t know if it was the gusting 35mph winds that practically knocked me over, but something strange and beautiful was happening that made the sky look brilliant today.

sunset

Full resolution can also be downloaded. Zero editing done to it.

splurb, an aggregator of aggregators

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My newest project, splurb.com, is now open for everyone to read.

The idea is simple. Find links that have been made popular across all the social voting sites. Only list the ones that have appeared on two or more of those sites.

Those sites include digg, reddit, mixx, propeller, yahoo buzz, fark, and tweetmeme. If you follow all (or even a few) of those sites daily, you’ll end up reading through a ton of links. I wanted to cut into the noise a bit and extract out a condensed list of the best links of the day.

So far it’s worked great and has stayed very interesting. Please check it out and always love feedback. Visit splurb.com

You can also read a great article by Christina Warren over at Mashable on splurb

Craigslist BS Filter

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I’m moving and have been trudging through craigslist apartment listings daily. I CANNOT stand all the cliché buzzwords, misuse of symbols, and overall bs of realtors.

So, I cooked up a greasemonkey script that gets cuts through the bs and dramatically cleans up the apartment listings.

The post:

$1500/1BR XXXX-LARGE ***** SUPER MINT ***** MUST SEE. WILL NOT LAST 1BR Apt

Becomes:

1500/1Br Large 1Br Apt

ahhhhhhhhh, much better on my eyes.

The actions performed by the script are:

  • Replace a whole mess of cliche phrases and buzzwords
  • Get rid of all symbols
  • Remove repeating spaces
  • F I X   S P A C E D   O U T   W O R D S
  • Properly Case Every Word

If you missed the link to the script, you can grab it here. It requires firefox and the greasemonkey extension.