Lifehacker has a good roundup of iPod/iPhone apps for installing post-jailbreak. I use nemus sync and mobile scrobbler.. I hope to try the rest soon.

SensibleUnits.com converts measurements into relative units that are easier to understand. For example, if you type in “20000 miles”, it’ll tell you that’s a bit more than 5 times the radius of the earth. 2,000,000 miles is 8.4 average Earth-to-Moon distances, etc. My apartment is a bit less than 8 parking spaces in area.

FiveThirtyEight.com has some interesting analysis of the electoral map for this election.

This map compares Obama/McCain polling numbers to 2004’s election. Blue states are ones where Obama is doing better than Kerry was, red means McCain is doing better than Bush did:

For reference, here’s the current Obama v. McCain map from the same site:

If you haven’t already, check out lastgraph3, especially if you have a last.fm account.

The site analyzes your historical music listening data and then gives you visualizations based upon that data, most notable “posters”. Here’s a part of my poster:

The X axis is time (each gray line is a week), and the y axis shows the amount of music listened. You can view the full PDF of my listening over the last year here. There are some times I didn’t have the last.fm plugin installed, so it looks like I’m listening to nothing, plus some of the music I listen to doesn’t get reported, but for the most part I find it really interesting to look at.

I modified the ID3 tags on my MP3s for the Ogontz playlist to have the artist “Ogontz” (so as not to clutter my ipod navigation), so an interesting side effect is that you can clearly see when my two trips to Lehigh this year have been.

I’d love to see the same visualization for my AIM logs, though they’re a bit fragmented (I have logs going back to 2002).

A short video going “behind the scenes” of the signs at Times Square.

A tour of Times Square from Keyframe on Vimeo.

(via Boing Boing)

I’ve been searching for places to live lately, so I thought I’d share some of the tools that I’ve been using. Most of my searching has been on craigslist and housing lists at Google (internal).

Yahoo Pipes with Google Reader
Since I’m looking in several areas, I can use Yahoo Pipes to combine and filter several housing feeds. After doing a search on craigslist, I take the feed at the bottom of the results page and copy it into Pipes. I then Union the feeds, then run them through a filter. The filter lets me weed out things that are hard to do with the craigslist search feature. For example, if the word “female” is in the subject, it’s almost always someone looking for a female roommate. But I wouldn’t want to filter “female” in the description because people often request a male or female roommate.

The output of the pipe is an RSS feed to which I can subscribe in Reader. This lets me check the listings whenever I want, and not worry as much about checking too much or little. I browse through the items, star the ones I’m interested in, and view the full listings for all the starred ones when I’m writing emails.

Google Notebook
Notebook lets you collect snippets of text, parts of web pages, and links in one place. You can categorize, edit, annotate and share items. Girts and I used this to coordinate our search when we were looking last (our notebook from that search). If you install the (optional) firefox extension, you can just highlight text and images on the (craigslist or other) listing page and save it for later. Then you can update the notebook with the status of your communication with that apartment.

Google Maps Street View
Street View lets you explore the neighborhood without actually visiting. Obviously this is only useful if you live in an area that is covered by the feature, but when it’s available, I’ve found it to be really useful.

My Maps (Google Maps)
Another way to organize the leads you’re following is by creating a custom map. It’s pretty easy, and lets you visualize the locations of the places you’re looking at. I’ve found it useful to make a map of places I’m considering and send it to a friend for feedback about the neighborhoods.

I went to Seattle last weekend to visit Peyton and Matt who were also visiting that weekend. I arrived downtown before they did, so I walked around the city a bit and took some pictures. Saturday night we went out to eat and drink for a while (not pictured). We spent Sunday recovering from Saturday and then took the Seattle Underground Tour, which was quite enjoyable. A portion of downtown Seattle was raised so that the current road and sidewalk is now where the second floor used to be, leaving the first floor underground and partially preserved as a historical park. Our tour guide reminded me of Norm MacDonald.

The Space Needle does not really tower over the city as it does in all the pictures. It’s very tall, but certainly oversold a bit.