I wanted to work on my attention span over winter break, I started (and finished) a 270-unit Sonobe ball.

I can’t be the first one to have thought of this. Some context. And more context.

An enjoyable film on frames of reference from 1960, with Donald Ivey – for the Canadians, he was the original Nature of Things host – and Patterson Hume. Internet archive says it well:

The fine cinematography by Abraham Morochnik, and funny narration by University of Toronto professors Donald Ivey and Patterson Hume is a wonderful example of the fun a creative team of filmmakers can have with a subject that other, less imaginative types might find pedestrian.

I came across a neat browser plugin recently called 0Boxer. Available for Firefox or Chrome, the plugin adds game mechanics to one’s Gmail inbox. It’s a little bit of fun that assigns points and awards badges for dealing with your email. There’s even leaderboards, but good luck getting on them. At the very least, though, the leaderboards show what you already knew about battling email: we’re all in this together.

One feature that I’d love to see is some sort of relative statistics, rather than a constantly rising point count. In my spare time, I’ve been creating a Remember the Milk based to-do list app that shows you a progress bar of your completed tasks relative to all your tasks for the day. It strikes me that something like that might motivate people to clear more emails than they receive.

On the topic of neat Gmail plugins, Graph Your Inbox is a Chrome plug-in that provides inbox statistics. The screenshot above explains it best: it shows a graph of my mailing list emails, which peak each year in March. This is the sort of functionality that I wish services had built in, that offer insights into your habits. Currently, the only case of built-in usage stats that comes to mind is Google Reader’s metrics, for other site you need to find external services like TweetStats or LastGraph.

TAToo is an embeddable text analysis widget which allows basic page analytics to be easily integrated alongside the text that it analyzes.

The tool, spawned from the mind of Geoffrey Rockwell and begun as a side project during my work with him, is APACHE licensed and includes a basic wordpress plugin.

Feature requests and bug reports are appreciated.

Here’s a chart of my past year in music listening habits. Note the explosion in late July when I started subscribing to Rdio.

Generated by Lastgraph, recoloured in Illustrator.

I’m always impressed with the cleverness of hacks that repurpose a tool for a use completely foreign to its original function. Things like fluffing your pillows with tennis balls in the dryer or keeping moisture from brown sugar by adding grains of rice. One particularly neat area of late is in mobile devices. With smartphones piling on all sorts of trinkets and sensors, people are finding subversive uses for them. Here’s a few that I’ve been amused and impressed by:

Instant Heart Rate (Android): We can all recognize the bright red orb of a finger placed over a camera lens. This app uses that for practical purposes: a user holds their finger over the lens and it tracks their heart rate through changes in color. Neat!

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