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It’s our new name for our company 2×5 INteractive (two by five = 2 hands and 5 fingers). Xtepz is the name of our super duper exciting project and this site will give you more information on this project as it develops.
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I hope I had these tools when I was coming up with my son’s name. I’ll have to forward this to a few friends who are having their juniors soon.
Baby Name Brainstorm [babynamebrainstorm.com] is an interactive, animated name graph that helps future parents to find names with particular aesthetic and semantic qualities. Names can be selected (e.g. “Andrew”) and explored within several contexts, such as “sounds like” (e.g. “Andreas”), “found in” (e.g. “Andrews”) or “contains” (e.g. “Andre”), while also pointing out some facts (e.g. “Andrew” being one of the Apostles, “James” being one of the Tank Engines).
See also:
- the famous Baby Name Voyager
Here is a tip on how you can use Google Docs Form and create a link in Gmail to add custom data collection tools for yourself.
If you’re looking to keep a closer eye on your finances this year and you live and breath Gmail, reader Nick Espinosa has developed a clever method that may be up your alley.
Using Google Docs, Espinosa creates an expense form designed to quickly and painlessly gather expense information and save it to a Google Spreadsheet. He then emails that form to himself and bookmarks that email in Gmail using Gmail Quick Links.
You can submit the Google Doc form directly from the email as many times as you want, so every time he incurs an expense, Espinosa simply opens that email and adds the expense. It’s a nice little system for quickly and easily capturing expenses using tools that you’re already using every day.
Use Gmail and Google Docs to Track Your Spending [Google Docs]
Whenever I watch this guy I realize that everyone seems to be struggling about the same thing, life. I always enjoy the way he speaks. Very straight forward and frank about everything, especially how he feels about them. Here is a video of him speaking about Design Patterns. This is a subject that I am very very interested in right now so I was quite happy to find this talk. Many things he said hit my nerves because I felt that I was thinking many similar things.
Here are some notes I made while watching this video
Design pattern, recurring problem solving
Twyla Tharp’s book - The creative habit
Stephen King’s book - On writing
time you set aside each day (I’m trying to make this a habit these days)
process of making things
having ideas is the least of your problems
making something awesome is hardpeople who want to make the leap
learning how to work your ass off - jacky chan school (I need this)
Uber patterns
- you gotta want it enough to sacrifice
- sit down and work, try
- soft/hard absorbe, then edit
Merlin Mann - “Toward Patterns for Creativity” - Macworld PULSE
Here’s a video of my presentation, “Toward Patterns for Creativity,” from earlier this month at Macworld, here in SF.
As I said, I’m very interested in seeing where a topic like this could go. Because I truly believe it’s an idea that could help push a lot of people to the next level.
Related: if you’re interested in where my head was as I prepped for this, be sure and catch the previous post, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”.
Also, if you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favor, and pick up the book I highlight in this talk: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe.
This is way back when Motorola used to be the Bomb! Too bad they are going in to the way of the dinosaurs…
In 1981, the first Motorola cellular phone, consisting mostly of a big battery, was marketed almost exclusively to police and emergency services. Few other customers could afford it.
The development of technology that could “hand off” a call from one cell tower to the next was a huge achievement at the time. I like the way the museum curators adjusted the appearance of this display, using Lucite and perforated steel to capture that “modern” 1980s look.
I have a DVD of an early Hong Kong gangster movie in which actors talk into Motorola DynaTAC phones. I wish I owned one. Imagine pulling one of these monsters out of your briefcase during a business lunch.
I’m sure glad user interfaces came as far as it has. I can’t imagine working with an interface like this one…
We sure came a long way.
Jason sez, “DePauw University presents a series of videos on how to program the PDP-11. They present all of the steps: toggling a loader, reading and punching paper tape and running an assembler. A must-see for retrocomputing neophytes!
Just one Jon-Lovitz-warning: ACTING!”
ZOMG, these are utterly fantastic!
Using a PDP-11/10 to Teach Content and History in Computer Organization Courses
(Thanks, Jason!)
found the source of these beautiful data visualization I found in amm FFFFound 
Data Visualization
I collaborated with Instrument to develop a series of data visualization concepts for Google. These interface sketches are are all based around a concept of aggregating and visualizing online media buzz across various social media outlets.
Working in tandem with Google Analytics, the Flash-based, interactive tools allow users to explore relationships and see the effects of blogs, as well as mainstream and social media over time.
Credits
Client: GoogleAgency: InstrumentAccount Manager: Vince LavecchiaProject Manager: Justin LewisArt Director/Designer: JD HoogeProgrammers: Matt King, Ryan Spangler
this looks like a cool form of information mapping, and decision mapping online and collaboratively. Flow chart and information mapping is something I’m really interested in so I played with this a little bit. quite limiting to be a real application, more of a cute design item you can play around with.
I was very intrigued when I saw that they were selling the content generated by this application. Can a company make a business out of selling user generated content back to the users? Or is everyone doing this already?
aMap [amap.org.uk] is a new venture designed to promote the art of arguing by mapping out complex arguments in a simple visual way across social media. aMaps come both in printed and internet formats. The printed, pocket-sized series of aMaps cover a mixture of weighty and not so weighty arguments including: Does God exist? Cat or dog? Is modern art rubbish? Beatles or Stones? Are children worth it? The interactive aMaps allow people to create their own interactive arguments so they can argue with friend (or foe) online.The initial aMap project was set up to look at how “visualization techniques” could be used to help create simplified visualisations of complex arguments, with the overall aim to help the average man on the street be able to engage and participate in complex policy issues. The current goal is obviously to investigate different routes of how to best visualise arguments in a social, online medium context.
See also Narrating Bits and Verbal Conversation Clock.
Thnkx Adam.
I’ve been using this for a while now, I might have posted something about this before too maybe. This has been working out great for recording my thoughts down really quickly, and gathering my notes in one place. Hope it had a search feature and category/tag/folder so that I can organize my notes. Hoisting is another feature that all outliners should have. But I do like the simplicity and fast keyboard shortcuts.
Checkvist is a web-based to-do list manager that’s easy to navigate, simple to export from, and smart when it comes to organizing your tasks.
The first thing you might notice at Checkvist’s site is the support for keyboard shortcuts that allow for quick task and sub-task creation. Everything is displayed in hierarchical, first-things-first fashion for easy review and navigation, and collaborators can add to and work with your lists. But the best feature by far is the ability to import and export your lists easily in plain text, HTML, and OPML formats—a welcome bit of openness for anyone who doesn’t pretend to live entirely online. And when you’re copying from list to list, Checkvist’s copy-over tool transfers only the uncompleted items, saving you a whole lot of checkbox toggling.
For more to-do list options check out the Hive Five best to-do list mangers and to keep your to-do list under control take a peek at the art of the doable to-do list. Our apologies for the dupe.
