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Opening a door via text message

billy — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:35:04 +0000

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.

Sad Obama

billy — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:50:11 +0000

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 … Continue reading →

Mac OS is great, except…

billy — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:24:21 +0000

World Cup

billy — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:03:48 +0000

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

New York City Sunset

billy — Sun, 09 May 2010 02:08:43 +0000

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.

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

San Francisco zombies take notice…

billy — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:50:47 +0000

Found this walking around in Sausalito. We just so happened to buy a little zombie finger puppet moments before too.

splurb, an aggregator of aggregators

billy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:11:10 +0000

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

Honest Tea not so honest

billy — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:33:49 +0000

Here’s another solution to the recession. Honest tea has a gaping void at the bottom of their bottle. It’s about 1.25 inches deep. I was amazed when my friend showed it to me. This makes the bottom of a wine bottle look like a golf ball dimple. The result is a bottle with a deceptively long and thirst quenching figure.

Update:

Here’s a comparison of the new and old bottles (the new one on the left). Even though they contain the same amount of tea, the one of the left looks larger!

Cat Caller

billy — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:06:23 +0000

I made an iPhone app that plays a sound that attracts cats. Watch it work below. You can get the app at http://bit.ly/catcaller

Is WolframAlpha going the way of cuil?

billy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:26:45 +0000

I like wolframalpha and have used it several times. They had great buzz going, but it looks like it didn’t stick.