isnoop.net blog

Despite the advances of the Internet, apparently some news still travels slowly. I closed down my Gmail Invite Spooler page months ago, but I’m still getting hundreds of unique visitors to that page along with about a dozen email requests for Gmail each day. Almost all of the emails and traffic are from foreign countries, so I devised a simple javascript that will allow folks to more easily translate the page into their own language.

You can use this very same javascript. It should work on any site just by including the following:

Here’s what it will look like:

In order to help a convention get off the ground, I built a tool that scraped all of the prices for round trip flights from every American and Canadian airport to eleven major North American cities.

According to my Costimator, Washington DC is the cheapest major destination, and NYC’s LaGuardia airport is the cheapest origin airport in North America.

You can enter airport codes and view the average cost to major destinations along with the percent difference from the average cost.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a web radio boom box. I’ve hollowed out a perfectly good radio and made room for a tiny motherboard and power supply that are set up to run Damn Small Linux off of a USB flash drive. There is a wireless card inside, and the box is configured to sniff out wireless networks and automatically start streaming web radio on any friendly Wi-fi network.

I’ve come across several obstacles along the way, ranging from the actual hollowing out of the stereo to linux wireless headaches to my most recent discovery: the new, smaller motherboard I found for this project has very anemic audio output.

I fully expect to install a small audio amplifier to drive the speakers that go with the stereo, but sound quality is still very tinny even with the EQ fully tweaked out in XMMS (a Linux Winamp clone). I’ll have to do some more experimenting to see if this motherboard can be made viable. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work on my other projects. More about those later.

Continue to Web Radio Boom Box Part II >>

I subscribe to several fast moving feeds. Most of the news in these feeds is of little interest to me, but I’ve remained subscribed just so I can catch the occasional gem.

This problem begged a simple solution, so I’ve created FeedSifter.com. It is a very easy to use service that allows you to monitor any RSS/RDF/Atom feed for multiple different groups of words. FeedSifter automatically determines what sort of feed you are filtering and gives you only the entries that you care about. You can generate as many filtered feeds as you’d like, and you can change your filter at any time by returning to the site.

For example, say you want to filter the FatWallet.com Hot Deals feed for free items, NewEgg.com deals, and drives of all sorts (USB, harddrives, etc). You could use a filter like the following:


Free
NewEgg
GB,drive

Once entered, you are provided with a filtered feed URL and you’re all set.

After watching a building burn across the water from my office today, I had the idea of applying the Seattle emergency response data to a map.

You can click on each of the datapoints for some interesting info on what’s going on at this very moment in the Emerald City. In later revisions, I’ll add auto-updating AJAX calls and fancy icons for different event types.

If you live in a major city with data like this, let me know the URL. I might be able to whip up something similar for you.