So, uh... I guess this email would've been easier to write last month. Especially since Mr. Clancy was alive then.
Initially, the name was to joke around with how dramatic things sound if you say they're by Tom Clancy. "The Snow Was Falling, By Tom Clancy", and now you're thinking about snow landing on top of a crashed fighter jet on Christmas.
I guess we'd have a fallen drone and some sad operator. "This is where I lost J2D2 2. The first one was in Dumbo, on a dark and stormy night."
What am I even talking about?
Thanks to John Connolly and The Ladders for hosting the event. We had a great time and the space was awesome.
They're hiring, btw.
They sent John to Strange Loop
MapRoulette is a neighborhood discovery application. Written in Javascript, it takes start and end destination and creates a random route between them, using either Foursquare or simple latitude/longitude waypoints.
Pretty cool git repo exploratory tool written in R. There are some great visualizations on the repo's github page.
It's a site that helps you find the cheapest bus fare along the east coast, by scraping top bus sites and aggregating those results.
Automated metrics reporting via email. Provides a weekly report of new users and number of visitors and stuff like that.
Are you on the waiting list right now? This auto-RSVP tool might've been able to help. Doh, looks like we didn't get this out in time. Drat. So sorry...
Data and analytics on the Romanian political system. For example, 25 of Romania's Senate seats were decided by less than 500 votes.
A new take on replacing Google Reader. You list some blogs, connect your Gmail account and blog posts end up sorted into labels and sublabels in your email. In his words, "It's pretty [fracking] ugly", thus the repo is called "ugly".
Meetup RSVP sniper, as a service! Login with your meetup account and tell it where you wanna go. The service will be up soon.
Jacob has devised a clever hack to pager motors cheap and easier to use in projects. He has a lot of code for working with haptics too.
A visualizer for MIDI note data for a drum machine and an EWI. Every time the hi-hat is hit, it makes a line of birds that fly away randomly. It was flocking awesome. Jordan describes it in more detail (here)[http://www.meetup.com/hack-and-tell/messages/57357972/].
Lisp interpreter written for the Apple //e. It's called turtles because guess how slow it is.
New spots are Madison, WI and Seattle, WA.
We think it's great when Hack And Tell gets exported, especially by our friends. Both of these cities are lead by Hacker School alums who experienced Hack And Tell before going home and took it with them.
If you have friends in those cities, let 'em know.
Check out http://hackandtell.org for a list of places worth visiting.
Happy hacking, James and Andrew