Will’s Web Miscellany

Thanks to all the people who emailed about the release of the Recycling Group Finder, it was great to receive so many positive comments!

Due to popular request there are two new features. First, group member numbers are automatically updating. This takes a maximum of about 48 hours or so to update, so don’t worry if your membership numbers have changed and the new figure isn’t appearing on the site, it will.

Second is the group owner/moderator admin section. If you are a group moderator you can now signup to edit details of your group including member numbers, name and location. To start just enter your yahoo group URL, or find your group on the site and follow the link included with the rest of the group information.

Comments and feedback welcome as always!

I feel for you Ciaran, I really do:

<ciaran>: OH FUCK YOU PHP
<ciaran>: FUCK YOU
- ciaran: stabs

It is my pleasure to announce the Recycling group finder, Something I have been working on for the past couple of weeks with my wonderful employer 29degrees. For those of you who don’t know, Freecycle is a worldwide recycling network, in their own words:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,205 groups with 4,211,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people).

As the name suggests, Freecycle Group Finder is a new way to find Freecycle groups.

Finding a group - the old way

To find a group you enter a location to search for in the box on the Freecycle homepage. I live in Romiley, so I enter that and click search. But it can’t find any groups!

In order for it to find my local group I would have to guess it was called ‘Stockport‘ and search for that. I could have used the Freecycle group browser but who browses anymore? People demand search! I wanted to make this better so I wrote the Recycling Group Finder.

Finding a group - the finder.overcycle.com way

Just enter any location into the search box on the homepage and it will find all your local groups:

The Freecycle search gets it right sometimes. Take a search for Alameda, CA. It lists all the groups nearby, but Freecycle Group Finder does better. Freecycle Group Finder shows you a map of where all the local groups are! It lets you scroll around and visually determine the closest group (Try it for yourself!). An improvement we feel, and one that will help more people join up and start recycling.

What keeps it rolling?

At 29degrees we’re big fans of Ruby on Rails. It helps us make web applications faster, and with more fun, and it was no exception for the Freecycle Group finder. We are using Postgres for the database and serving it all with mongrel and of course Apache. Of course if wouldn’t be anwhere near as good if it wasn’t for Tony, 29degrees co-founder and designer extroadinaire!

Well, could ya?

I got 88% correct, or a B+.  How embarrassing :)  Scores in the comments please! 

The Asus LS201: Punchable ’scratch-proof’ monitor:

… the Asus LS201 – a TFT monitor with a protective panel made of crystal-sapphire. Our Asus rep says not only is it scratch-proof, but it’s also ’punch-proof’. 

Excellent You Tube Video

[09:16] carl: my god, that video is excellent.[09:16] carl: In soviet russia, the monitor hits you! 

Monkey tennis bum gravy

Hilarious.

flagitious (sometimes to be found in #codegolf on irc.freende.net) has released GolfScript, in his words:

GolfScript is a stack oriented esoteric programming language aimed at solving problems (holes) in as few keystrokes as possible. It also aims to be simple and easy to write.

This is pretty impressive. According to Carl it can solve the codegolf grid-computing challenge in 21 bytes. The next best effort would ba a Perl solution in 43 bytes. It hasn’t been implemented as an allowed language yet though, maybe in codegolf V2.

Chat Noir and Sphere [Escape from the locked room]

Fun flash games.

Book Autopsies

I might have posted this one before, but it is so good it is worth seeing again.

When Robot Programmers get bored

UNICAT

I want a truck like that.

Sprint Waitless

Save some time.

The Right Angle

Well timed photos

Unconventional Dance Moves

All better than anything I have.

Fiat Rocket Cars

Moving sculptures

Badly parked Aeroplanes

Rollaway Skateboard Tube

Don’t try this at home. Or anywhere.

Fashion ads from Ebony Magazine, 1970 - ‘76

Napkin Notebook

Good idea.

Novelty Plasters

Almost worth grazing your knees for.

Utterly wrong, but amusing.

Bourne Shell Server Pages are ordinary ASCII text files, with the special extension .shit, which denotes “Shell-Interpreted Template.” The result of invoking the page compiler on a .shit file, is, naturally, a shell script. (It occurred to me that this file extension might seem objectionable to some, but since it quite accurately—if unintentionally—conveyed my sentiments toward Web technology in general, I decided that it should be left unchanged.)

A small one this week, and I missed out last week, sorry!
Origami CD Case

Unusual Weapons

Unpleasant, but ornately so.

MXC - TOP 25 most painful eliminations

This is hilarious.

Football, Thru Binoculars

The England team at their best.

Top 10 Bizarre Mental Disorders

Pimp My Card: How to Skin Your Credit Card

Top 10 Most Extreme Custom Cars in the World

Supervillain Henchman Training Video

Tesla Coils Playing the Mario Bros Theme are Unsurprisingly Awesome

Nerdy pleasures.