Lucid Dreaming for Fun & Profit

Categories community, mind, public-speaking, sideprojects
I gave a talk at Ignite Boulder 28 last week.  This was my 2nd Ignite talk; my first one was about something very serious and personal, and I wanted to do something that was fun & light the 2nd time around.  It's on Lucid Dreaming, here it is: Transcript of the talk is below: - When I was a kid, I used to dream a lot about superpowers. As an adult, in the year 2002, living in Philadelphia. was Read the article >>

Monetize Adblocked Space with Bitcoin

Categories sideprojects, technology, tools
UPDATE 1/11/2016: Check out ad block to bitcoin's wordpress plugin and chrome extension. I built a fun little tool that turns ads into bitcoin donation solicitations when adblock is enabled. So becomes: If you're into supporting publishers as they transition to the new economy, micropayments, or bitcoin in general, check it out here: https://github.com/owocki/adblock-to-bitcoin Read the article >>

Weekend Project Report: Cryptocurrency Mining Rig

Categories sideprojects, technology
I've been cautiously optimistic about BlockChains since Boulder Startup Week 2016 when I had core contributors of both Zcash and Ethereum presenting at one of the Future of Tech Events.  Trustless decentralized financial instruments have the potential to be an 'internet of money' and massively disrupt the financial system. Several months ago, I wrote and open sourced pytrader -- a cryptocurrency Read the article >>

Technology & Camera Creatives Meetup Group

Categories art, photography, sideprojects, tools
As a techie who has been getting interested in photography the last several years, I've been looking for opportunities to learn from other photographers in the Boulder community.   What I've found is that most of these people are usually either (1) creatives with BFA backgrounds who are trying to learn more about technology / gear or (2) techies like me who are trying to learn more about composition Read the article >>

ColoradoEngineers.com Slack Team

Categories engineering, sideprojects
Following the success of the Data Science Slack Team, I am working on another experiment to bring engineers in the front-range software community together: ColoradoEngineers.com is a, free, private slack team that we will use to Kick around startup ideas. Debate the merits of different tools. Receive mentorship from other engineers. Share job and event information. There are only Read the article >>

HNTrends: Google Trends For Hacker News

Categories data, sideprojects
I've been brushing on technologies since putting in my notice at Simple Energy, and I'm proud to announce the launch of my latest product, built in Ruby on Rails with gratuitous reliance on Amazon CloudSearch as my persistence layer : HNTrends.com: Google Trends for Hacker News TLDR -- Check it out here, click here to download the source data as a PostGres Database.  The thesis behind this Read the article >>

The data will set you free. What does Twitter sentiment analysis say about major Airlines?

Categories data, sideprojects
This Twitter data was scraped from February of 2015 and contributors were asked to first classify positive, negative, and neutral tweets, followed by categorizing negative reasons (such as "late flight" or "rude service").  Thanks CrowdFlower for the data. Raw number of tweets, segmented by Sentiment Comments United had the highest raw volume of negative tweets. US Airways had the highest Read the article >>