Aaron Parecki

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. One of the formats allows your browser to add your site to its list of search engines, which Firefox displays in the top right corner, and Chrome uses in the address bar. Adding a small link and XML document allows your site to be added to a browser.

2015 Update: I've heard reports that this no longer works and may brick the device. Proceed at your own risk and keep in mind that this article is now over 4 years old.

Home Automation with SMS and GPSView more presentations from Aaron Parecki.

Presented at

Presented at Unplugged 2011

Today at Where 2.0, two data scientists announced a discovery that iPhones are recording GPS positions into a hidden file on the device. I'll save a summary for an update of this post, but go read the original article for now.

Nobody wants to be presented with a signup form when trying out a new web service. Even though in recent years many websites have trimmed down their signup forms to make them easier to complete, I think we can do better.

Electronics

@tantek has been using his Falcon project to create short-form and long-form content on his site, and syndicate it out to Twitter. Falcon is a personal publishing (tweeting, blogging, realtime syndicating) web application created in the true spirit of the Indie Web.

cyborganthropology.com is quickly becoming the default online resource for everything relating to Cyborg Anthropology. With over 800 articles and growing daily, it's possible to find nearly anything you can think of.

I recently spent some time at Souk, a co-working space in Portland. It’s a great space with lots of room and lots of light, which is important when you’re going to spend hours on end somewhere. Over the course of a couple days, it became apparent that there are several tools that can help facilitate the coming and going of people in spaces like these.

Loqi is an IRC bot that lurks in several channels on irc.freenode.net. He is mostly a utility bot, but occasionally enjoys a bit of playful conversation.

Note: This is a really old post! In the time since this was written, Apple acquired TestFlight and now provides a native way to distribute your app to beta testers over the air. The below should still work, but isn't really necessary anymore.

If you're like me, you've probably got a lot of bookmarks saved on Delicious. If you're not, you might know someone who does. With Delicious going offline, the question is where people are going to be taking their Delicious bookmarks? If you have a Delicious account (created after the Yahoo! acquisition), your only download option is a html download exporting to browser bookmarks. This doesn't give anyone much freedom in where you can take your data. To ease this frustration, caseorganic and I set out to solve this issue.

Many people keep asking me why I use Tropo instead of Twilio. It seems that Twilio does a great job of getting the word out about their service, so many people end up using them first. But there are a few reasons I'm using Tropo instead. Basically it comes down to features, scalability and support.

Say you want to register a couple different typos of your domain name, and redirect everyone seamlessly to the correct site. This can be done quite easily in Apache using ServerAlias and a simple RewriteRule. I just registered geoloqui.com after noticing a couple articles linking to it instead of geoloqi.com. But then I thought, wouldn’t it be useful if I could track these typos and see which ones are most common? Turns out it’s not difficult!

On the weekend of December 4th and 5th, people gathered in coworking spaces around the world for the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon. In Seattle, two teams worked on Population Centers in Disaster, and Mobile Assessment of Damage for the Public.

Summary

Dropbox is great. Most of the time. It's great when I need to easily share files with people while working on a project together. It keeps files in sync between multiple computers, and is the only solution I've found so far which works seamlessly and instantaneously. If you don't already use it, I highly recommend it.

Receive notifications to an IRC channel when posts are published or comments are posted. Configuration page allows for customizing the text sent to the IRC channel.