October 2011
1 post
Gaudi Gaudi not fendi or prado
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Oct 20th
August 2011
2 posts
Stomp the secret stairwells
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Aug 4th
Go horseback riding with Vayable
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Aug 4th
July 2011
3 posts
Russell Howze on SF Street Art and underground...
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Jul 16th
Ted Choi from City Kayaks speaks about his Whale...
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Jul 16th
Wonderful wednesdays - found a Tesla Model S in...
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Jul 16th
May 2011
2 posts
B-movie victim run away from biker
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May 17th
UPS for food - oh wait, it has existed long...
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2882-the-incredible-delivery-system-of-indias-dabbawallahs Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
May 2nd
April 2011
5 posts
How To: Tear Apart a Star (Ingredients: A black...
Just incredible:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/04/07/followup-on-the-star-torn-apart-by-a-black-hole-hubble-picture/ Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Apr 12th
Murals
Taken at San Francisco Women’s Building Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Apr 10th
Mission De ASIs
Taken at Mision san franisco de asis Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Apr 10th
The Möbius Gear
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ahoover/Moebius.html Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Apr 4th
Unicorn
Taken at The Curiosity Shoppe Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Apr 1st
March 2011
5 posts
VW Truck
Taken at Maxfield’s House of Caffeine Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Mar 31st
Painted Sisters
Taken at Alamo Square Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Mar 29th
Dolores
Taken at Liberty Hill Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Mar 28th
High Speed Rail in America - Mad Men Style
http://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie#p/u/18/Kvy3CSkO2QE Posted via email from I am Sam | Comment »
Mar 27th
Dolores Mission Church
Taken at Mission Dolores Catholic Church Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Mar 19th
January 2011
7 posts
An Old Macintosh Ad - "Macintosh has one [mouse...
And that single handedly sums up why Apple products notoriously have fewer buttons than the competition.  See more ADs like these here: http://www.topdesignmag.com/oldest-computer-ads/ Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Jan 17th
Get a kick out of electricity - The Four Women of...
This is amazing stuff - kick a soccer ball, which in turn produces electricity and stores it. 15 minutes of kicking around can power a lightbulb for three hours.So, kids, put on K’naan’s Waving Flag and start kicking that ball around and light up the world. Joga Bonito! Read the whole article here - http://www.livetotry.com/2010/12/30/2-5-lin-matthews-silverman-thakkar-kick-a… ...
Jan 16th
Autonomous Quadrotor can Build Your Next House
</object>Not quite there for a big house yet, but let’s hope it’s scalable. Right now, it can do some amazing stuff with scaled down models (a matrix of interconnecting rods with magnetized ends).  Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Jan 16th
These Gorgeous Product Packages Rival Apple's...
One of the many jaw dropping features of the iPad is the ability to experience visuals with great clarity. There are a few favorite apps of mine that really capitalize it. Thanks to Pulse and Flipboard, I’ve come across some great curators of interesting things. Amongst the foray of the design section in Flipboard, I discovered this amazing little community for package design lovers called...
Jan 8th
Banana Peels Remove Contaminants From Water - Long...
A PhD student in Brazil has found a novel way to purify water by using pieces of banana peels. Apparently, the banana peels have highly negative molecules that attract the heavy and positively charged metal pollutants in water. What a great use of organic waste! Here is the original article - http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/01/chemist-discovers-a-non-prank-use-for… Posted via...
Jan 8th
Australian Student-Designed Solar Car Smashes...
Some Pictures: Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Jan 8th
Erlang, Ruby, Node.js & Scala, Oh my! So much cool...
There has been a flurry of interest in Erlang on Hacker News recently with so many spinoff posts that I haven’t had a chance to catch up with them all. I figured I’d share them on my blog fyi and my sake (can’t depend on your social bookmarking sites these days, ya know? Ahem, Del.icio.us).Well, I have been obsessed with Comet recently and that has taken me through some...
Jan 5th
December 2010
2 posts
The definitive guide to minimalistic design or why...
jobs_sculley.jpgI stumbled upon this old interview from John Sculley with Cult of Mac. In it, he does what most CEOs won’t do - admit defeat. Jobs was infamously known for this one-liner, “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” when he convinced Sculley to jump ship from Pepsi to Apple.  But, the times and tides were against Jobs. A wary Board and a...
Dec 15th
How to get better at design + my crazy idea of...
Kids + crayons + wall = chaotic creative combustion. That sounded good in my head, so I had to write it out.  There is something so cathartic about drawing on walls. It’s so fluid and very freeform like (I am talking about real life walls, if you thought I was talking about facebook — oh dear, I can’t help you there). No wonder, graffitis are very much different.  Ok,...
Dec 3rd
November 2010
16 posts
Get 768MB free space on Dropbox for doing these...
As I say about Dropbox - “You don’t have to look behind when you’re backing up with Dropbox :-)”https://www.dropbox.com/static/13746/images/logo.pnghttps://www.dropbox.com/free Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 22nd
Googd news - Microsoft Office can now talk with...
Translation: on top of your Time Machine backups, AerfoFS syncs and Dropbox backups, you can add an another layer of protection by uploading your documents to Google Docs. Oh, don’t get too excited if you’re on a Mac, the early preview is for Windows only - https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDQxRC1rTWN6dkJ2YmwwaUN3ZzBX… Posted via email from...
Nov 22nd
Lost in an echelon of columns - the architecture...
Holding onto memory is like holding to a cupping handful of water - it just slips away and leaves only a hint of moisture. Like a river gone dry and exposing cracks of the earth, the handful of water appears to have made deltas of hand prints. Memory is like that - the deeper the experience, the more ingrained it is and also subject to great perversion in time. I came across this article this...
Nov 22nd
Light Saber using Kinect
Wish I had more time and a Kinect to make it work with the telepresence robot - http://kinecthacks.net/real-time-lightsaber-tracking-and-rendering-on-the-kin… Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 22nd
Sweet - Amazon EC2 Now Gets a Render Farm Option -...
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_instances_amazon_ec2.html Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 15th
The only pretty poster you need for counting...
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Nov 15th
Emory MARBL Book Acquisitions App
As part of my master’s software engineering class, I managed a team of three to build this app for the Emory Rare Books Collection. We used Django and used agile methodologies. My responsibility was to be the team lead. I actually got to work on the whole stack - ranging from writing the backend, integrating the frontend with a Django admin plugin, writing the specs and keep the team in...
Nov 12th
A Travel Search Engine (sort of)
Here’s a project I did for my information retrieval class. The code isn’t quite open source/I haven’t been maintaining it since I’ve jumped ship to Rails. If I get some time, I will patch it up and have it as a turn-key app for App Engine.  Of course, since then, I’ve had some more insights into better search techniques and algorithms. If I have to do it all over...
Nov 12th
CancerQuest.org Search API - A poster I presented...
This is my poster that I presented at the end of last summer’s research program at Emory. My grant was funded partly by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I wrote a search driven API for CancerQuest.org amongst other things last summer. The private API has been in use with several collaborators. Download now or preview on posterous SURE_poster_final_sam.pdf...
Nov 11th
An aerodynamic umbrella that can withstand 70mph...
http://www.senzumbrellas.com/en/the-idea/ Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 11th
1 tag
Fun with Stop Motion
This is purely experimental at its best. Check out this stop motion flick I made. Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 9th
1 tag
Fun with Arduino and Motorola 68000
Here’s an interface project connecting Arduino with a Motorola 68000. It was interesting to make the kid on the block talk with the good-ole-grampy Motorola 68000 three decades later. Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 9th
1 tag
A Simple Story - An Animation for Campus Movie...
Here’s an animation short that we made for Campus Movie Fest. It was selected by AT&T for featuring it on their mobile phones video homepage. Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Nov 9th
1 tag
A Telepresence Robot
Here’s a quick snapshot of the telepresence robot my friend T and I have been working on for quite some time. I wrote the software stack and T, the hardware.  As of now, there are three ways to control it remotely - one is via Chat (I am using XMPP for those curious eyes out there); it can also be controlled via browser and the most fun way - via iPhone accelerometer. It’s been a...
Nov 9th
Cart (with fan) Goes 2.5x faster than Downward...
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Nov 6th
Type faster on mobile without a keyboard
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Nov 1st
October 2010
15 posts
An Audi that recharges in 6 minutes, drives for...
Yes, I am obsessed with electric cars. I really hope Tesla is working on this new-fangled battery pack. Or with their IPO, maybe some acquisitions? Regardless, it’s great news for electric car enthusiasts everywhere. And naysayers, you probably take 20 minutes at the gas station store anyways, so stop thinking about rebutting :-p Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s...
Oct 30th
Dreams come true - a production ready python...
Yelp Open Sourced their map-reduce framework, mr.job. It looks really promising and is instantly usable via Amazon’s map-reduce service. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but definitely looks as promising as Dumbo (python for Hadoop). Let’s hope this gets forked like crazy and we get a python Mahout! There are some nifty example out there in the fork and be sure to run...
Oct 30th
Screw Urban Dictionary - Enter Wombos (Word...
Where you’ll find gems such as Shiskatern: Noun • Prolific intern who enjoys a myriad of activities including barbecuing. “Peter the shishkatern, while appearing to have rolled out of bed, had in fact been grilling all day long.” Apparently, you can contribute to wombos@gmail.com - I hope I can get published there someday.http://wombos.posterous.com/ Posted via email ...
Oct 30th
So you want to be a Lawyer
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Oct 29th
So you Want to Get a PhD in Humanities
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Oct 29th
Wanna Dj? Have a Mac?
http://www.algoriddim.com/djay  Posted via email from Sam.Jp’s Tics-N-Tacs | Comment »
Oct 27th
If Apple Mail is a venti latte, then Sparrow is an...
I’ve always had a love/hate relationships with local mail clients - especially between Apple Mail & Thunderbird. I’ve recently given up on them and found it to be more productive with basic, browser-based Gmail (the vim shortcuts are a must - check Gmail Labs). There is some hope left however - Sparrow is shaping up to be a minimal client for OS X. I’ve been using it...
Oct 26th