These are some of the things I’ve worked on or developed. I’m always on the lookout for fun projects that I can sink some energy into, and I think a good project is the best way to learn a new skill.
- CryptoParty SF is the San Francisco branch of the CryptoParty series of events. For the most part they consist of workshops and demos of crypto tools and concepts, targeted mostly at beginners and novices. Anyway, I organize the events in San Francisco (with a ton of help). The first was in November 2012.
- Iron Blogger SF is about blogging and beer. Participants must post something to their blogs each week; if they fail, they have to pay $5 into the pot. When the pot’s full, everybody goes out and drinks. There have been a few Iron Bloggers before in other cities, and I started organizing the San Francisco chapter in January 2012.
- The Dickens Bar is a reference to the Twitter “#dickbar“. Instead of adding meaningless Trending Topics to the top of the content you’re trying to see, the Dickens Bar adds topics from one of the English language’s most celebrated authors, Charles Dickens. It was made in collaboration with Robert Böhnke and Johnny Adams.
- Skandle is an art project designed by Robb, Michelle, and I to exploit the so-called “analog hole” to rip a DRM-free version of Kindle books directly from the device, using a scanner and OTR software. It was only displayed once, only sort of worked, and is just about the least effective DRM-circumvention technique I can imagine, but I’ve still got a soft spot for this guy.
- Redactive Poetry Project was put together with Amanda Levendowski and Nick Panama as an assignment for a class called “Who Owns Culture?” I wrote the bookmarklet, called “RePoMan,” that forms the technical basis for it. Basically, it allows for the user to modify any website through the process of redaction, and we collect poetry that has been created that way. That form of poetry isn’t new, but as far as we know we’re the first group to make the tools to do it online. The source code for the bookmarklet is not obfuscated in situ, but is also available on Github.
- I’d Grind the S***| Out of That is a co-production of Sean O’Brien and myself. IGTSOOT is based on hundreds of hours of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. Although the lingering effect on reality of puzzle games such as Tetris is well-documented, to date inadequate resources have been put towards studying the same phenomenon as it applies to the THPS series.
- Free Culture TV and Yes, We’re Open! date back to my days as an intern at the Participatory Culture Foundation. These were streams of freely licensed media that I curated into an RSS feed for use with Miro. At the time, in the summer of 2008, these became fairly popular, but changes to the RSS service I was using ended up rendering these dormant.
