Tag: javascript

Dark data experiments?

Untitled - man in the dark
I have a lot of curiosity and one of the things which has consistently got me curious, is the challenges of the hidden. Hidden being the trick, the data, the technique, the place or the knowledge. This is why I’m very interested in Hacker House (it was almost added to my new years resolutions for 2017 even).

Currently data is the hidden which intrugued me the moment, hence my massive interest in data ethics. There’s been 3 experiments which have really got me jumping up and down about this all… thought I’d share while I eat cheese and drink wine on Christmas day

  • Click Click Click
    A perfect and fun demonstration of mouse tracking on websites using just JavaScript. This is the data the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc use to track users dwell time and implicit actions on the website. Found via some folks on our BBC R&D internal slack.
  • I know what you downloaded (…last summer or even last Christmas)
    This site collects IPs from public torrent swarms by parsing torrent sites and listening to the DHT network. They have more than 500.000 torrents which where classified and have data on peers sharing habits. The slightly twisted feature is the ability to share a link and see what people have been sharing. I promise not to do this but highlights the problem with shortern urls and long query strings you can’t be bother to read or don’t understand how they work (knowledge). Found via Torrentfreak
  • Find my phone
    Man’s smartphone is stolen in Amsterdam, so the same man decides to root another phone and deliberately track the phone. Along with the person who stole it! The results are turned into a video which you can watch on youtube.
    Found via Schneier

Mixed reality with compound documents?

WebVR-Logo

There is something quite exciting which i dont think most people have spotted. VR is nice and getting alot of attention recently. In theory, webvr could be more flexible that other vr engines because it’s the web; the browser’s are use to compound documents. While the other engines have to build all this stuff into their engines. My guess this might be the 2nd or 3rd reason why GearVR supports WebVR? It kinda already works in the lastest Firefox & Chrome, even works on Android Chrome (works for me without the dev version of Chrome, try it yourself)? Although polyfill might have some use here.

The nature of a compound document can enable multiple types of technology to be triggered from the same source. Say for example I could mix webvr with the geolocation api, orientation api and the webaudio api. Can you imagine the crazy experiences you can build with those things? I believe the JavaScript can run at the same time as everything else but this might be browser dependant.

It’s still a bit of a theory, but this could enable true mixed reality or (VisuoHaptic Mixed Reality if you must). Not that crappy stuff you currently see. Still like to see magic leap myself but to be honest Project foxeye interest me.

I’m looking to research this area with a bunch of smart people…

PIM Overview please enable URL’s

PIM Overview

Quick thought, I was messing around today looking at new widgets for Konfabulator for my laptop and workstation computers. I havent really messed with Konfabulator since Yahoo! bought it, I just simply downloaded the updates and kept all my old widgets the same. Anyhow, I had a good look through them today and found this really nice one by Yahoo called PIM Overview.widget. What it does is look at your Outlook or Ical file and displays the data as a Windows mobile type today screen. This is great if your running Outlook as it just picks up the outlook pst file and goes from there. If your using ical you need to point to a place where the ical files actually exist. Luckly I've been playing with Mozilla Sunbird, so I was able to point to somewhere on the local machine.

But what I dont get is, why is there no option to look at a remote calendar? A simple URL out to Eventful or even Upcoming.org would be so useful to people who dont use Outlook and may not use a application as such. This would make so much sense for Yahoo! as Konfabulator is now a Yahoo application and Upcoming.org is a Yahoo! service. I mean what more of a reason do you need Yahoo? Hell, I might even try doing it myself, I've been meaning to build and hack a few widgets for a while.

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