DIY Psudo-Album Project
Noise Addicts have posted a fun and bizzarely syzygistic (thats right, I just made a new usage out of syzygy. Your day was wasted in comparison.) tutorial for making your own fake (or perhaps real!) band, album title, and album art in a "what's your pornstar name" fashion.
I came across this via Make:, but the source, and a great gallery of examples, is over at Noise Addicts.
It's strange how well it works out, especially some they have posted. Here are three I did this morning (I could seriously make these all day):
Go try it out!
Maine Power Outages Map
Working in a NOC, I often consult the two Maine power companies that have online outage information (there is a third that does not have such a feature). If I see many circuits go down at the same time I'll check to see if there is an outage in the area by checking both those websites, then going to Google maps to see how far away the sites are from the current outages. This is a tedious process and I finally decided to do something about it by creating my own Google map with their wonderful API. I'd never used it before so this proved a great way to learn how to use it as well. After setting up the screen scraping to pull info off the power companys' websites, getting the app to do just what I wanted, and working around some minor speed bumps, it's done!
Google's API is quite easy to work with, and I'm very pleased with the results. For most people this map isn't very useful, and at any one time there are only a few markers plotted on it, but for myself it will be quite useful, and it was a great learning process. You can view the Maine Power Outages map at http://euicho.com/power







