Author: earthpeople
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Stupid Hackathon Sweden
In February 2016 an event took place in New York called “STUPID SHIT NO ONE NEEDS & TERRIBLE IDEAS HACKATHON”. The stuff from this hackathon both made me giggle and gave me hope. The last 10 years on the web has been mostly about Salesforce integrations, paywalls, content marketing, gulp-or-grunt, webscale NoSQL and a/b-testing. This is all…
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Time tracking via Slack
Time tracking in general sucks. And we don’t timetrack unless we work in projects that we bill by the hour. Since we live our lives in Slack, and are pretty decent developers, I figured we could make this suck slighty less. Each channel has a command called /timedude which takes a few options: /timedude add…
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Botanical – vår nya familjemedlem (in Swedish)
I snart tio år har Earth People skapat och utvecklat verktyg för att hjälpa tjänster att prata med varandra. Ofta utan att tjänsterna egentligen stöder detta. Vi har byggt feta amerikanska bilkampanjer med konversationsteknik, reverse-engineerat Snapchat’s API till Europas första SnapChat-kampanj, hackat ihop det enda rimliga sättet att hitta bra band på SXSW, typ kopplat ihop MatHem med…
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Throwable images
I have been playing around with the idea of instant communication between devices/browsers for a while now. Trying to find new ways of using WebSockets further than just text messages. Suddenly realized that an old invention of “throwable” images between devices would be possible today with the illusion of instant data sharing. This video demonstrates how an image can…
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My family uses Slack. It’s pretty interesting.
Everything changed for the better when we started using slack at work. We’ve made countless custom integrations; doorbells, intercoms, travel cards, reddit, lunch menues, git hooks, server monitoring, you name it – we haz it. My family has been using Google Calendar for a few years. Me and my wife used to think that we…
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Syncing your Korg Littlebits to external trig
Syncing your Korg Littlebits sequencer can be a bit tricky unless you have the official break-out bits, or a SQ1 sequencer too hook it up to. I multimetered the cables between the breakout bits: Red = DC current. Orange = trig. White = ground. Turns out the kit actually speaks normal trig signal, and the internal trig is about the same as the trig…
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Self-generating recursive art using Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is an amazing API. It’s an API to humans, and yup that sounds super weird. I programmatically create a HIT – a Human Intelligence Task, using their API. Typical HIT’s are “sort these files by cuteness”, “listen to these audio files for NSFW material” and other things a computer can’t do well (yet).…
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Making a silly game using Google Cloud Vision and Instagram
I was recently invited to the first alpha release of Google Cloud Vision, which is a game changing new API from Google. I can programmatically upload any picture and get this kind of stuff back: Face detection, with pixel annotations of the corner of the mouth etc, plus unexpected values like sorrowLikelihood Landmark detection, with LatLon polygon boundaries…
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Mandatory reading for PHP devs
I just wanted to give this site I stumbled upon some credit: http://www.hackingwithphp.com/. I’ve been developing with PHP for about 15 years, but still the part about performance taught me quite a lot. isset() is apparently faster than array_key_exists() and $i++is slow compared to ++$i. These are micro-optimizations, sure, but there’s no reason to rub PHP the wrong way… /Peder
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Finding out sentiment
Say you want to find out if a user generated text is happy, sad, upbeat or hateful. Not so easy is it? We were given this task as a part of a recent project. And to make things even more challenging we needed to do this in both Swedish and English. After a bit of research…
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Hooking up the voice intercom to Slack
The intercom from the street to our office was connected to an old GSM phone, and letting people in required us to pick up the phone and press the digit 5. Simple, sure, but it doesn’t feel like 2015. I had also been meaning to try the Twilio API for some time. Task: Connect the…
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Figurerunning a corgi
I like running, and figurerunning makes it even more fun. Don’t know what figurerunning is? Oh! Basically it’s just GPS tracking helping runners draw dicks on maps while running. What’s not to like? We made a tool helping runners being creative while planning their routes. In this proof of concept we let users draw figures which automatically snap to roads…