Tara Calishain

I dream in data flows

Wikipedia

Making the Trees Talk

A couple of days ago I took the #Raleigh #OpenData dataset of trees and connected it to the #Wikipedia geolocation API and from there to a ChatGPT API prompt so the tree could talk about the things around it. Find tree, find things near tree, have tree describe itself and the things nearby. The results […]

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Search

Making a MegaGladys

WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript. So I’ve been […]

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Search

9/11

What do you THINK I was doing on 9/11? I was aggregating and updating a resource list just as fast as I could. My stepson lived in New York City at the time and while he was fine we didn’t hear from him until late in the day (the phones were down) so it helped […]

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A screenshot of Mastodon Stadium Seats. It's very plain text in two columns; think Basic Twitter.

August 24, 2023

News

Mastodon Stadium Seats

Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]

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Mastodon

A Bookmarklet for Mastodon

I made a bookmarklet today! Do you know about bookmarklets? They’re like regular browser bookmarks, only souped-up with JavaScript. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript makes bookmarklets much more powerful than regular bookmarks. The bookmarklet I made was to address a Mastodon annoyance. Because Mastodon is decentralized, following a user on a different […]

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Wikipedia

Turning A Wikipedia Popularity List Into a News Search

Curly and I have been playing a game called “How much information can you get with no information?” A fun field to play this on is Wikipedia’s top 1000 pages list, which provides a list of Wikipedia’s articles by pageviews on a specific date. The information I’m trying to get from such a list is […]

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