I love hackathons. I love winning them. I love competing in them. I love winning them. I love judging them. I also love not losing them. This weekend, I am acting as a mentor to the first Health 2.0 hackathon in Houston Texas. As far as I know (which is not that far, really) this […]
Category: Programmable Self
This child of the quantified-self movement is all about using behavioral economics/psychological principles to modify your own behavior. You can change yourself by programming, but you have to recognize that, like any platform, programming a human has unique constraints and issues.
Where I blog
Just so my RSS feed readers know, I will now be blogging at Programmable Self and at O’Reilly Radar. I hope this helps everyone to keep track of what is going on. -FT […]
Radar Interview
Hi, I have an interview up at O’Reilly Radar, talking about programmable self. I am also quoted in a Forbes article about Google Health. Busy week. -FT […]
Making QR code stencils
I have been on a quest to be a able to spray-paint QR codes, in mass production. I recently demoed my QR code stencil work at Maker Faire. The secret, in short, is chicken wire and caulk. I tried the following methods unsuccessfully: cardboard cutouts (subject to the island problem) suspending wires across a board and […]
Announcing Open Glaze
Hi, I am here at the first ever Quantified Self Conference and I am announcing a new Open Source Game Layer project called Open Glaze. Here are the basics of my Game Layer philosophy that are influencing my work on Open Glaze. This is not one monolithic system. Its a Unix software development philosophy. It […]
Programmable Self Reading List
Hi, I am preparing for my talk at Quantified Self about my work on Programmable Self. I was asked to make a “reading list” for the people who were interested in this subject so I wanted to create that here. Please add links in my comments section for titles that I have omitted!! Requirements for […]
Health Foo Camp
I am happy to announce that I have been invited to the first ever Health Foo Camp. There is not even a web-page for this yet, but it has been previously announced on the RWJF blog FOO stands for Friends of O’Reilly. It is an invitation event that puts some of the top geeks and […]
Calorie counting by taking a photo of food
Is apparently now possible with Meal Snap. […]
QR code stencils, the problem
I love QR codes. I think the notion of simple graphical URLs is beautiful and elegant. If my wife were a graphical data object, I think she would be a 2D QR code. Think of it, you can put links anywhere you want, in the real world! You can put them on tshirts, coffee mugs, […]
Thinking about commitment contracts
Commitment contracts are a way of limiting and shaping your own behavior. If you know that your “future self” (a useful Behavioral Economics concept) is going to be weak willed, you can make a commitment that limits your future behavior to do the “right” thing. The classic example that everyone always uses of this is […]