Four short links: 22 August 2016
Job Automation, Metadata Anonymization, AR/VR Hackathon, and Alexa's Great UX
- Hacker Scripts — possibly apocryphal, but hilarious, set of a programmer’s scripts, which automated life to a hilarious degree. One near to my heart: scans the inbox for emails from “Kumar” (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like “help,” “trouble,” “sorry,” etc. If keywords are found, the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply “no worries, mate; be careful next time.”
- MAT — Metadata Anonymization Tool.
- MIT AR/VR Hackathon — Oct 7-10.
- What Would Alexa Do? — Tim’s praise of the Echo UX with Alexa. Our family has been using an Echo for three weeks, and (like Tim) I’ve been tempted to try to use the voice UIs from Google and Apple more … and their crappy interaction design has turned me off. Alexa is useful in multiple dimensions. Siri and OK Google are barely useful in one. By the way, stay tuned for my next single, “Ok Google, Hey Siri, Alexa — delete all my files OK OK ENTER,” coming soon on Bandcamp.
