Category: Open Source

Zeo Personal Sleep Coach – Hacking Your Way To A Better Night’s Sleep

January 2, 2011

Reading Time: 5 minutesWhat’s a better way to kick off the New Year than by giving tips on how to improve your overall quality of sleep? I decided to write this post as a mini-review of the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach and share some open source tools and APIs to help with saving your Zeo data for your…
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Learning Faster – Automatically Extract Highlighted Text from PDF Documents

December 17, 2010

Reading Time: 8 minutesOverview I never really considered myself a “highlighter” until a couple years ago. Back in school I would, on occasion, highlight some interesting passages while doing homework or reading books and jot them down later. More often then not though many of those highlights would go to waste. After all, what good are highlighting interesting…
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IPad Tip: How To Convert HTML to PDFs

May 3, 2010

Reading Time: 2 minutesSince I bought my iPad a few weeks ago, you can’t seem to pull me away from it. I have a number of computers, and while I still use my Netbook quite a bit, I’ve found that the iPad really is a fantastic consumption device. It’s great for downloading books from Amazon (via Kindle), reading…
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How To Create Your Own Personal Document Viewer (Like Scribd or Google Books)

January 3, 2010

Reading Time: 3 minutesLike most people, I have a large number of personal documents in a variety of formats (PDF, Excel, Word, RTF, PowerPoint, etc.). For the typical user, organizing these documents in a ‘My Documents’ folder and having MS Office/Open Office/Adobe Acrobat installed simply gets the job done. However, I’ve been looking for some sort of “Web 2.0” solution to view my documents while I’m on the go. And, since my <a href=”https://eric-blue.com/my-projects/personal-memex/”>knowledge manager is web-based</a>, I’d like a way to browse and embed personal documents directly in my wiki without needing any special software.

Fitbit – Perl API Hosted at GitHub

June 30, 2010

Reading Time: < 1 minuteLast month I announced a new “hacking” project – creating a Perl API for my FitBit device. Traditionally, whenever I host one of my projects I usually include both the project page and source code all from my site. I’ve had a number of requests from various people to help with contributing changes on this…
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Example Document Browser Code

February 12, 2010

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSince I posted my article last month on How To Create Your Own Personal Document Viewer, I’ve had a few inquiries on how people could have a similar setup themselves. I thought it might be helpful to .zip up the docbrowser project and show some of the code that does the conversions using the utilities…
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Information Visualization Toolkits for Mind Mapping

June 4, 2009

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe other week, I wrote a blog post The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor For Knowledge Access and Management. At the time, until I read the paper in depth, I hadn’t realized that this was about a project that I had blogged about last year: Thinkbase – A Visual Semantic Wiki. In a nutshell: “Thinkbase…
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Document Management Systems (DMS) and Knowledge Management

March 3, 2008

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen I first started using knowledge management applications (mainly traditional outliners), I had hoped that I could find the “One True Application” or OTA. The OTA is the single killer-app that contains all the features I could ever hope for, solves all of my problems, and automagically helps organize all my information. Well folks, I’ve…
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