I love thinking up ways to display interesting data that continuously updates. Browsing through the Dribbble API I thought it would be a lot of fun to see everyone’s shots pass through a display as they’re uploaded.

bbbrowser hits the Dribbble API every 24 seconds and displays the newest shots in your browser window. I like to leave this window open throughout the day and watch all the new artwork roll in. It’s a great source of inspiration. If your browser supports fullscreen mode, even better.

The layout is tailored to widescreen monitors. The images do stretch as your browser is resized, however, so make sure you find that sweet spot between size and aspect ratio. (I’d hate to see someone’s beautiful typography get all squishy.)

Jump in and start exploring!

I’ve been wanting to build some type of container for my Ardiuno/LCD combination for some time. A couple weekends ago I finally bought some plexiglass and machine screws and made it happen.

The plexiglass is more fragile than I expected. It’s extremely scratch prone and cracks easily with just a slight bit of pressure. Scoring and snapping was actually the easiest part of dealing with the plastic. Drilling holes produced small cracks on more than one occasion.

Eventually I got it right and now the Arduino and its components have a solid base to function on.

A former Apple employee has created an app called iPhoneTracker that pulls data from your iPhone backups in iTunes and then displays pretty much everywhere you’ve been lately. There’s a huge storm of privacy concern going on as a result.

You can certainly tell what cities someone has been to, but most of the location data is way off. Hundreds of miles off in my case. I can’t imagine anyone finding much use in this as local data is grossly unreliable.

Here’s my map. Larger dots are correct. I have been to Birmingham and Jacksonville, but the smaller dots in places like Northwestern Alabama and the central panhandle of Florida are completely incorrect.

Select photos from the Continental Tire Sports Car Series Race and the PORSCHE 250 Race (Grand-Am Rolex Series) on Saturday at the Barber Motorsports Complex in Birmingham.

The Nissan Leaf Drive Electric Tour stopped in Franklin this weekend at Nissan’s North American headquarters. I signed up to drive some weeks ago and our group was the first to drive Saturday morning.

In short, the Leaf felt like any other small car.
It felt good. The Nissan Leaf feels just like any other small sedan on the market. And that’s a good thing. Actually, the car is quite a bit smoother and feels more solid than most. (The Chevy Aveo is a nightmare on the interstate). But all things considered, aside from the dashboard, there’s nothing else about the drive that tells you you’re steering an electric car.

The test drive lasted approximately two and a half miles including some interstate time. Acceleration was excellent. I had no trouble getting up to interstate speeds (70mph).

Range Indicator needs work The only thing that really bothered me was the range indicator. The car indicated 103 miles in available range when we left, yet after returning 2.5 miles later, the car indicated 78 miles available. I’m sure the range algorithm is to blame. Even our tour guide said it was just recently updated to factor in hills. And granted, it was a cold morning (low 40s) with interstate driving and heat blasting. That would take some time to get used to. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more acceptable as a simple full/empty gauge rather than trying to indicate range down to individual miles. Even most gas cars don’t try to do this.

A Different Driving Interface The gear shifter was another oddity where Nissan is trying something different. The car can be in park, drive or eco drive. But it’s not your standard shifter. To shift from park to drive, the “shifter” is more of a nob that you drag in a “C” shape, then the nob retracts to it’s original position. The car is placed back in park by pressing the “P” button located in the middle of the shifter nob. That’s all fine once you get used to it, but if Nissan really wants to get people into electric cars, giving them unfamiliar controls seems to take away from the goal. It’s just one more excuse for someone not to buy.

Reverse and Neutral were not readily obvious. I was so curious with Drive and Park that I didn’t even think to ask about those other two.

This photo from Nissan is actually a bit different from the actual model I drove.

Minimal Maintenance, Awesome Accessories With an electric car you do away with oil changes, radiator fluid (and leaks) and lots of other little sub-mechanics like fuel pumps, water pumps and thousands of moving parts that make up a gasoline engine that inevitably need to be serviced and maintained.

You can basically control the Leaf from your phone. The car can notify you if you forget to pug it in at night. You always know where the closest charging station is, and here’s the interesting part, Nissan can tell you if someone is using a specific charger. This is huge because this means Nissan knows when, where and how much electricity each car is acquiring (and spending). The data Nissan is collecting is impressive. I assume they’ll use it to learn the habits of drivers and to make improvements over time.

I’d Buy One If I had an extra $32K hanging out, I’d absolutely buy a Leaf. I’d be paying an early adoper fee at this point, but that’s okay with me. My commute length (30 miles round-trip) is ideal. Even with our current cars, we rent when taking long trips, so no change there. The Leaf has a funky look, but it could look twice as weird and still not matter as long as I never had to pull up to a gas pump again.

All in all, the Nissan Leaf feels like a great car. The issues described above are just nitpicks which I would love to have the chance to get used to. Hey Nissan, can I barter some design work in exchange for a Leaf? I think that’s fair.

Sorry for the lack of photos this time. We arrived so early, our group was ushered through with zero waiting and I never had time to even pull out my phone. Nissan also didn’t have the “Win a Nissan Leaf Booth” manned, so unfortunately, I won’t be winning a Leaf. :)

Here are a few photos from the Leaf tour from last year:

Normally I swap between two different batteries when using my MacBook Pro. Today I opened a drawer to my desk to fetch one of the batteries and found a bulging surprise waiting for me. From the photos below you can see the results of some type of internal reaction.

Luckily, the reaction wasn’t enough to burst the battery or start a fire. Thankfully, the battery wasn’t in my laptop at the time.

It only took about 2” of snow to turn a 30 minute afternoon commute into 2, 3, 4 or more hours. I spent 2 hours in the car after leaving the offive at 8:30 last night. Merredith spent over 4 hours trying to get home.

Nashville snow at I-65 near Armory Wednesday Afternoon

Nashville snow at I-440 near 21st Ave Wednesday Afternoon

Snow and traffic on Murfreesboro Road entering the airport tunnel

Snow on I-24 Wednesday night around 10:00pm

Snow in LaVergne Thursday Morning

Compilation of video and still images taken at this year’s Rolex Series race at Daytona.

We ended up with 2 inches in the La Vergne area. Definitely a good snow for Middle Tennessee. Here’s some HD footage from around 7:00 this morning.

Roads were still bad this morning, despite looking clear. The Tennessee Traffic Camera Widget caught this accident.

Tennessee Traffic Widget v2.0 has been released. On the front-end, this new version restores Memphis and Knoxville camera images to the widget.

On the back-end, this version of the widget is a complete rewrite. The city and camera list is now dynamically generated each time the widget is accessed. This will result in much faster update times on the periodic occasion that camera image URLs change.

Visit the Tennessee Traffic Widget site to download the new version.