20 Sivan 5775 (June 2015) – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 20 Sivan 5775 (Sunday 7 June 2015) · 2 minutes to read

I think I may have made a promise to myself at some point that there would be no code on this blog.

Well, promise broken, because I want a place to document my side projects.

My current fascination has been with metadata.

In a nutshell, metadata is the information that gets collected when you do things like take pictures with your phone. It can be information like credit, shutter speed, or location, if you have enabled location services for your camera app on your phone.

Basically, everything you do has metadata attached these days. Photos aren’t the only information with metadata attached. Photos are just the best example I can come up with that’s not too far out there in geek world.

So, I have started playing around with displaying this metadata. What if I could take the information from photos for instants, and use it to plot a location on a map. Then display that map so the people who read this blog could then look at where I am, or where I was when I wrote a particular post at least?

So far, I think I have the location part working. If you look at this post, under the content, you should have the ability to hover over the location and see a street level view.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not exactly the way I want it, so I will continue playing around. And of course, I will document the whole thing here, complete with code examples.

Augusta, Georgia, United States

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Amanda CAARSON

· 26 Sivan 5775 (Saturday 13 June 2015) · 2 minutes to read

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of the quantified self. So this afternoon, I logged into TicTrac, (which is the software I use to keep track of all the random bits of data everyone else collects on me), and was looking over things, and found that no mood data existed. This would be because I’ve never entered any. So I looked at adding some accounts to pull it from, namely MoodPanda.

The first instance of nope, because while resetting my password, I realized that the iPhone app plus the website are both inaccessible piles of crap.

Back to the drawing board. So let’s try entering manually into Tictrac.

More nope, because it looks like there are only two options: happy and unhappy. Thanks, but my mood is usually not binary. Oh well.

Then I looked at sharing my well-being project. Big nope on that score too, because no RSS feed, and no WordPress integration yet. I may look at writing a plugin to do it, because they have an API. Don’t know yet though.

Playing with post formats again, so was playing around with the Post Formats UI plugin by Crowd Favorite. Then I remembered why I quit using it. If you pick “status” you lose the title field, which would be fine, since I’m not displaying status titles anyway. But when those posts tweet out, that could become a problem, because no title, and excerpt of the post instead, which I don’t want. So, more nope. Not really a huge deal though.

I think now would be the time to go back outside.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 28 Sivan 5775 (Monday 15 June 2015) · 1 minute to read

Figured some proper sleep and of course coffee and time off would fix this. I have code victory, nothing’s broken, and not only is it not broken, it works. Time and date now show up for my status posts, and date for aside posts, both are also not displaying the title. All of this is just what I wanted. Now I need to add support for the images, and I have to decide if I want to add a heading to the already-existing markup or just straight text with no decoration, or maybe something like another bit of HTML decoration. Will ponder that later on today and work on it this evening.

Welcome to Monday.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 29 Sivan 5775 (Tuesday 16 June 2015) · 1 minute to read

I was supposed to go work out this morning at 10. That didn’t happen. I finally got the cancellation call around 11:15.

Still tired, even though I slept reasonably well last night, except for that waking up at 03:15.

Going to the store later on to get necessities. We can’t have an apocalypse resulting from zero coffee.

Finally, I’m in an extremely synical mood today. I’m going through my RSS feed, and everything I come across seems like bullshit. This is probably not the case, and I will revisit later on. But the heat’s making me cranky as well. I would like to reboot today and start over.