dekay.org

"Now, to cover my ass: These candles are never to be lit outside of a properly constructed and certified fume hood. Burning anthracene and aromatic compounds in general is a bad idea and produces a gross black flame of cancer. Toluene smells bad and that green candle was made with more chloroform than I’d like to admit. They’re (probably) perfectly safe to set on a shelf and enjoy the fuck out of; however, Ⅰ take no responsibility for your future cancers. (Ⅰ have it on good authority that the long wavelength dyes don’t last too long on the shelf – even in wax.)"

"Self-Experimentation That you can learn how to do things by doing them has somehow always seemed mysterious to me. –Kermode (1995), p. 164"

"Not quite satisfied with what Ⅰ had available, Ⅰ created my own self-surveillance bot to try to figure out what my ideal mycrocosm or Daytum might look like. Ⅰ happened to just finish reading Seth Roberts and Allen Neuringer's paper on self-experimentation in which they identified 6 lessons learned from their own self-experiments: 1. Measure something you care about 2. Make data collection and analysis as easy as possible 3. Taking more than one measure is usually worth the trouble 4. Make graphs 5. Communicate your ideas 6. A flawed experiment is better than none"

"Now, Ⅰ have been a fan of information visualization since my sister gave me Edward Tufte’s first book in 1989, and Ⅰ had found MicroCharts from reading Stephen Few’s blog where he described the winning entry in a contest from a few years ago. So, needing a quick start, Ⅰ started playing with this tool. In the dashboard, Ⅰ incorporated a number of graphs Ⅰ think Ⅰ got from Charles Kyd’s e-book on dashboards (www.exceluser.com), but Ⅰ also used a basic layout from Timothy Dearden of Morgan Stanley that Ⅰ saw at a budgeting conference in Amsterdam. The result came together in a couple of weeks between other projects. Ⅰ do have to admit that it didn’t stem the PowerPoint tide dramatically – our operations still live and breathe slides. However, though Ⅰ have taken a new job, Ⅰ think the report is still “live”, and Ⅰ do think that a number of the themes and tools (sparklines, small multiples, high data-ink ratios) have started to catch hold and are infiltrating throughout the group’s

"MicroCharts: Charts Reduced to the Max! Create rich reports and Excel dashboards with more information per square inch. MicroCharts, winner of the BI Network’s 2006 Data Visualization Competition, enhances Excel, OLAP and standard reporting with powerful, compact visualizations such as sparklines, bullet graphs and other in-cell charts."

"I’ve been thinking about what’s causing this rush to the 99¢ price point. From what Ⅰ can tell, it’s because people are buying our products sight unseen. Ⅰ see customers complaining about how “expensive” a $4.99 app is and that it should cost less. (Do they do the same thing when they walk into Starbucks?) The only justification Ⅰ can find for these attitudes is that you only have a screenshot to evaluate the quality of a product. A buck is easy to waste on an app that looks great in iTunes but works poorly once you install it."

"So it's no wonder that there are a number of tools promising to make reading the WikiPedia on your iPhone faster and more comfortable. Ⅰ found seven different free1) applications and there are a few non-free ones as well. Ⅰ was curious how those apps would differ and downloaded all the free ones. Let's start with a feature Matrix before digging into each application a bit deeper."

"This is interesting: the prevailing argument about App Store pricing seems to be that developers are rushing down to 99 cents because apps priced there sell better (and developers say they can't fund really great apps priced there). But Mobile Orchard did a little number crunching, and their conclusion upends the whole premise: 99 cent apps don't sell any better than their more expensive counterparts. They plotted each app's popularity against its price, and while there are a few 99 cent apps out there selling better than any higher-priced app, the only real way to make the app "sell" better is to give it away for free. Above $0, price doesn't really matter than much in terms of popularity."

"With Hyperwords for Firefox you can select any word on any web page and do useful things."

"Dash Dot Plot A dash-dot-plot places a tick mark on the axis for each value in a scatter plot. When there are many values in the graph this can be a more effective way to understand their distribution than looking at the raw data."