Below is a small experiment I’m currently running; very informally I’m updating a pachube feed (‘cups of coffee today’) with the current location data. It’s a bit of an odd experiment – I’m not really always drinking coffee, but once I set it up (using the pachube iphone app, which is pretty simple to use) I discovered that it logged the location of each coffee cup consumed. Not so exciting I know, but I’m interested in the notion that my daily activities and movements can be logged, tracked in some sense and collected to form an image – be that automatically or manually logged data. It’s by no means new territory, but I’m keen to see how it all works out. There’s a chance that the ‘update feed by twitter’ tool will come in handy, but who knows at this point.
So as I said, It’s a bit of a mish-mash, however there are a few things of interest. 1. I can log 0 cups of coffee, which will update the location but keep my caffeine intake low. 2. When i do have a cup of coffee the daily tally will increase and I’ll be able to see where and when it all happens (at work, that’s a no brainer..). 3. Along comes this openstreetmap based project from the pachube apps page – Trails.Have a look for yourself, just how well or unwell my coffee consumption is going over the last 24 hours.. Hopefully, if you’re reading this you’ll see a map below, with a gps overlay of location (x,y) and consumption (z) data. If not, then perhaps I’ve not updated in a while. Nonetheless, it’s got me thinking about these new consumer (no pun intended) tools which are now readily available – and free.Not sure where this will go, not exactly sure where it belongs, but it’s worth mentioning at least.Drink up!
Jasonmcdermott
Design, design, design.
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Hi Jason,Thank you for sharing this, I learnt about Pachube only yesterday and I’m very interested in exploring its potentials.In case you are interested there will be a workshop in Brisbane the first weekend of May about using Arduino with Pachube ( more info http://bit.ly/cmToEb )Cheers,Alessandro
Hey Alessandro, great to hear you’re playing with pachube – the platform’s come quite a long way since I first started using it. I won’t be able to make that workshop, but thanks for the tip. Ricky’s a bright spark at NICTA, so the workshop should be pretty good – let me know if anything cool comes out of the Edge!
You could also log your level of lethargy periodically, to see how well it correlates with time since coffee consumption, versus being at work.
Hey I like this idea, measuring a few metrics in parallel to see how they stack up against each other. I’m currently testing a few feeds (dollars saved in my piggy bank, current mood and coffee consumption), it would be interesting to gauge how these things correlate! Maybe we’ll see some sugar/caffeine highs and lows..?