Tag Archives: mashups

Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram | TechCrunch

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What do Instagram, the Raspberry Pi and the movie “Up” have in common? When you mash all these things together, you get Upstagram, a neat hack that the Hackerloop team just unveiled.

First, the team made a replica of the house in “Up” using paper and foam. It was just big enough to fit a Raspberry Pi and its camera, a battery and a 3G hotspot. The Raspberry Pi, an open source and very cheap mini-computer to tweak, experiment and try new things with, is a hacker’s dream.

Then, the team used about 90 helium balloons to make the house fly above Paris’ landscape. While Instagram is only available on iOS and Android, they reverse-engineered the posting process to transform the Raspberry Pi into an Instagram-taking machine.

Read more: Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram | TechCrunch.

TechCrunch | White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More

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The Canadian Government needs to pilot a program like this! Unfortunately, I can’t imagine this happening with a Harper government. We need to advocate for more open data and a transparent government, especially with government budgets and programs funded by taxpayer wallets.

White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More | TechCrunch.

N.B. At the bottom of the article is a map of America…all the cities that have signed up are quite similar to the distribution of Democratic states.  Also can’t see a Republican government launching a program like this. Obama rocks.

GTA Technology Topics, Tips & Tricks: Protopage

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I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! I would like to recommend to you a free tool called Protopage, which allows you to create your own personal Internet landing/home page using mashups of widgets. Think of it as similar to Google Chrome. Protopage has the added feature of multiple tabs of mashups though.
 
mashup = “A Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services.” (Wikipedia)
widget = “In computing a web widget is a software widget for the web.” (Wikipedia)
 
You can add widgets such as web links, clocks, bookmarks, maps, etc. There are thousands of sources for widgets and you can personalize colours and themes. I think this is a great tool for those of us who like to access information all in one place.