I finally silkscreened into reality one of the witty (I hope) t-shirt ideas I mentioned awhile back.

These </3 t-shirts are a really geeky double entendre: To IM addicts everywhere this is obviously a broken heart, but for the anal xhtml geeks among us it could also be a validated heart. Or, true, the end of a heart. I like to think it means my heart's written in valid xhtml. (OMG! Just like my blog! Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Anyway, this idea came up during deliriously dorky IM conversations with coworkers at my last job. We were thinking that a regular <3 looked like it was going to get caught by W3C's validator and wondered if </3 would *have* to mean a broken heart.

So now I've got six </3 shirts in four different styles for sale in my new etsy store. Sorry, fellas, there's only one [normal men's shirts now in action] for you right now (sporty style) because I messed up the other men's shirts by silkscreening the </3 upside-down, making it look like <\3. Still broken, but it totally ruins the xhtml joke. Oops!

But there are women's t-shirts (high-maintainence glitter and regular-type) and tank tops. And more men's shirts coming soon, I promise!

update: Men's shirts (finally managed to silkscreen them non-upside-down) and more women's sizes now available. Male model for the men's shirts still nowhere to be seen.

another update: Broken heart/valid heart shirts (and mugs and stickers and magnets and mousepads) are now available at zazzle.com/kenspeckle. Hand silkscreened shirts will only be available while supplies last or by special request.

I'm just back from a trip to Florida, during which I had a chance encounter with one of JetBlue's new BetaBlue planes, equipped with free WiFi access.

I somehow missed the much documented inaugural flight, so I was shocked and psyched to see the BetaBlue pamphlet, but saddened to read that the WiFi provided no actual web surfing, but only email and instant messaging…and only through Yahoo!?!

According to Engadget, "If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features […] will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo."

Well that's a relief! JetBlue, if you're listening, keep in mind that we'd rather have the option of paying to get service-agnostic access than be limited to an account with a contacts list that's about three years outdated, eh?

Of course offering WiFi at all — especially free WiFi — puts JetBlue light years beyond any other airline (and just reinforces their status as my all-time favorite airline), but seriously: We get that you don't want to give unlimited internet access, but don't tell us whose servers will be holding our emails and IMs.

Oh, and btw: What on earth does free Yahoo! email and IMing on your planes have to do with an RSS icon? If we can only log into Yahoo! email and Yahoo! messenger, we pretty much by definition cannot access our ballooning number of unread items in Google Reader. Ya know?

Sean Flannagan and I have finally finished initial development and obsessive content compilation for Datamob, a directory that highlights the connection between public datasets and awesome interfaces that people have created to make public data more accessible—including amazing tools like OpenCongress, EveryBlock, and Oakland Crimespotting.

You're intrigued, I can tell. Well, it is, admittedly, a g2g website—that's my this guy's neologism for geek-to-geek, like b2b. We hope it'll be a useful and compelling way for data geeks and developers to find new data sources and inspiration for their projects. And why should the non-geek care? Our mission statement puts it best:

Widely accessible public data enables informed civic engagement, and we believe that providing restriction-free data to developers is the best way to promote the technological innovations that will spread knowledge.

For those of you who do better with visualizations than words, Datamob is a lot like the Google chart API pie chart below: 61% datasets, 28% interfaces, 11% resources, 100% informative, empowering geeky goodness [breakdown as of post time].

My language nerds, I haven't forsaken you. Wondering about the etymology of Datamob's name? Well, the folks at Freebase coined the term "data mob" to describe a group of data-lovers working together to perfect a small portion of Freebase's ambitiously all-encompassing database. As for our Datamob, we hope it'll inspire more institutions with vast reserves of information to put their data out there in accessible formats—and bring together more data mobbers to bring that information to life.

And to ensure I've covered all my geek demographics with this post, a few words on the development of Datamob: For the past two months I've had my head entirely buried in enlightening railscasts, the amazing heroku (a web-based rails development platform), and the somewhat befuddling rails framework documentation. Weren't you wondering where I'd been? This was my first-ever Rails project, and it was an amazing learning process.

For all the buzz about RoR making things so easy even an orangutan could build a slick web app, your average geeky front-end web girl who tools around a bit with the PHP in her WordPress template (that would be me) still had a lot to learn about actual programming work. But figuring it all out was totally exhilarating.

For anyone thinking of taking their first venture into the big, bad world of programming, A List Apart just published two super-introductory articles to Ruby on Rails—they don't include code, but have a great general introduction to the concepts you'll need to know. If you're ready to get coding, I quite liked Agile Web Development With Rails, although Rails 2.0 has outdated some of it.

Happy Datamobbing!

So two weeks ago when we were all having a chuckle at Google ad sales people's surprising faith in the future of scannable barcodes for tracking print ads, I wanted to post a few notable barcode arts & craft projects. As I commented on Sean's post, geeky artists and are way more likely to increase the virtually nonexistant adoption of barcode cameraphone scanning in the U.S. than…uh…advertising—and it's still a long shot.

But then I got extremely distracted by the primaries, so I never posted it. Well, now that Super Tuesday is over and our hopemonger (best new word ever) is finally ahead in the delegate count of everyone except The NYT (which seems to be refusing to count even one more delegate until Hillary starts wining), voilà!

QR code needlepoint

This awesome needlepoint QR code by tikaro apparently uses semapedia to point to the wikipedia article on pillows [via craft].

QR code cake

Flickr user Magitisa must have an incredible amount of patience, because she stenciled a QR code onto a cake [also via craft].

every barcode

In case you forgot what barcodes used to look like, there's the non-cameraphone-compatible Every Barcode animation by the barcode-obsessed Scott Blake of Barcode Art. He's got plenty of other barcode goodness, but Every Barcode is definitely the best—how can you beat a flash animation that cycles through all 10,000,000,000,000 possible barcodes (if you let it run for ten years, that is)?

space invaders scarf

This extremely geeky scarf, made by a strange collaboration between British knitwear designers Office Lendorff and "mobile enthusiasts" (although it's not really clear what they do when not encouraging knitwear enthusiasts to knit QR codes onto scarves) Kaywa features a secret QR code knitted below a pixelated Space Invaders pattern. According to one purchaser, the code reads "insert coin for new life."

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

And, of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with semacode posters that pointed to old photographs of the former Third Avenue El.

Apparently hip typophile types have known about Bembo's Zoo since 2005, but since I only found out about it this week from word[is(not equal to)]art, it's time to share the awesomeness!

The flash version of Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich's children's book by the same name morphs the names of 26 animals written in bembo into illustrations of said animals using nothing but the letters that make up their name and the occasional punctuation mark.

Ok, it's a lot cooler than I made it sound. My faves are the unicorn (above) and flamingo (below).

It's been, like, a full two minutes since Sean sent me LOLinator [via tech crunch], and the humor has still not worn off!

Especially since the LOLified version of my last over-excited post is actually disturbingly similar to the version not actually written by a kitteh.

Or was it??

Happy 2008! How better to celebrate than with some kenspeckle tech art that crossed my desk in December 2007?

Camera Obscura 1-∞

To create Camera Obscura 1-∞ [via Network Research], Przemek Zajfert and Burkhard Walther auction off two holes of a pinhole camera on eBay every week. The camera is sent first to one high bidder to take a picture with it, then to the other bidder to take another, usually in a different part of the world, creating an overlapping composite picture.

The example above is from Pinholes #207 and #208. The right shot (#207), called Higher Education, was taken by a John Earl Jones in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, and the left shot, called Higher Hey du Kaetzchen (unfortunately Google translator renders this as "Higher Hey du kittens") was taken by Manfred Rosenthal in Stuttgart, Germany.

Sounds fun, but I couldn't find any current eBay listings.

Why are numbers so comfortable?

Cody Trepte's hand-quilted binary blanket, Why are numbers so comfortable? [via rhizome] needs little explanation (except for the fact that the binary pattern actually represents the title of the quilt, unless you are actually a computer), but here's his statement on his binary work (which also includes binary needlepoints):

With only a one and zero, all information can be described in binary; it has become the universal language that connects both physical and technological spaces. Binary is so fundamental to our everyday lives, yet when seen out of context it appears abstract. While computers use binary as an efficient method for processing data, I am interested in the process of manually executing information, bit by bit, to explore the differences between human and technological expression. Each cross-stitched piece is the artifact of a performance of inefficiency, an attempt to hold onto the rapidly disappearing human hand in modern life. As each piece is stitched, a bizarre combination of new and old technologies is mixed together to form an image of information, the literal translation of the title into binary.

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves [via information aesthetics] is a book of fanciful drawings by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas of radio technologies (Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi, and Zigbee, to be exact) represented biologically. Pictured above is the drawing of Bluetooth from her book.

Ingeorg created the project for Timo Arnall's research project, called Touch, which "investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things."

Timo refers to the book as resembling "an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna," but I think these drawings look more like microorganisms. At any rate, I love the latin names she gave her radio "species":

Bluetooth: Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
DMB: Spherum Elektrum Multanum
GSM: Spherum Magnea Globalum
RFID: Raptus Arphadus
Wifi: Videus Fidelus
Zigbee: Nevrotis

data.tron

I admit, after reading the installation description, I have no earthly idea what data.tron [via rhizome] actually is, but all those numbers look awesome in a sort of monolith-from-2001: A Space Odyssey way, no?

Here's the explanation, such as it is:

How many points are there in a line?
What is the number of numbers?
How can we verify that the random is random?

data.tron and data.film are parts of the datamatics project, which is a series of experiments that explore such questions, physically and mathematically. Visitors will experience the vast universe of data in the infinite between 0 and 1.

data.tron is an audiovisual installation, where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. These images are projected onto a large screen, heightening and intensifying the viewer’s perception and total immersion within the work.