multitouch $50 microscope

Mac — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:57:39 +0000

Testing a multitouch interface to a 2-axis microscope stage powered by cheap servo motors, controlled by an arduino, processing, and TUIO events from an iPhone. My dream is to be able to put my fingers on giant microbes and swipe them around. Based on diybio.org/ucam.

ucam development 25 Feb 2010 from mac cowell on Vimeo.

better web history

Mac — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:51:53 +0000

I rarely refer to my web browser’s history. It has a low signal to noise. It seems like the most literal implementation of the notion of “browsing history”. It has no notion of what I was looking for, why I was visiting a page, and if I found what I was looking for when I visited.

I’m reading about Unit Tests and Zope and Test Driven Development. I am going to read the wikipedia page on each of the concepts and probably some other pages elsewhere on the web. I want to be able to highlight the one or two most valuable snippets from each page and use those together as a the history entry.

When I go to my history list, I don’t really care about the list of pages I visited, I care about what I was looking for and why I went there.

I want task- and concept-centric history lists.

notes: Generalize the concept of a content consumption stream, a content history. What if it magically existed for all the books and papers I read in college. Would each page be an entry? Each paragraph? Each book or article? That wouldn’t be as useful as some kind of… distillation of the key concepts:

acting as pointer to help me find my way back to content surrounding main article (a bookmark)
and as a stand-alone distillation or note of the record

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multitouch $50 microscope

better web history