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October 13, 2008

HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets

One of the most convenient features in Google Spreadsheets is the ability to pull live external data sources into any worksheet. Instead of copying data into your worksheet, when the linked source changes, the cells in your spreadsheet will automatically update, which can save a lot of work if you pull reports regularly. This external data can be pulled from XML, other spreadsheet documents, and even (assuming you can bear to look) current and historical stock quotes from Google Finance.

Linking a worksheet to Google Finance is as simple as calling the GoogleFinance spreadsheet function. There are two ways to use it: you can pull current information on a ticker symbol, or you can pull historical trade data for a particular date range. Here's how:

Retrieving Current Stock Information

If you call the GoogleFinance function with two attributes, you can link to current market data for a particular ticker symbol. Just open any cell in your worksheet and enter the following:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute")

Replace "symbol" with the ticker id, such as GOOG or AAPL. The attribute parameter determines what information will be retrieved for that symbol. There are a number of supported attributes, including price, volume, tradetime, beta, pe (price to earnings ratio), and changepct. If you omit the attribute parameter, it will default to "price". There are a number of other possible attributes which I haven't listed, including some specific to mutual funds, so check the documentation link below for the full list.

Pulling Historical Stock Data

Another thing that you can do is retrieve historical stock data over a large date range. Once you have this in your spreadsheets, you can use formulas to process, compare, and chart this information over time.

Here's the syntax for pulling historical stock data:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute", "start_date", "end_date", "interval")

As in the previous example, "symbol" needs to be replaced with the desired ticker ID. The "attribute" parameter, however, works a little differently. It's possible values are limited to high, low, open, close, vol, and all. "start_date" and "end_date" define the range of data that will be retrieved, and interval should be set to "DAILY", "WEEKLY", or a number from 1-7, which represents the number of days between measurements.

When the stock data is retrieved, a number of columns and rows will be consumed to capture the linked data, so make sure you have room to accommodate the data you've requested. It's not a bad practice to contain this data in separate sheet. One thing I noticed is that the column names always appear in French for me, despite my language preference settings. If you notice this as well, you'll just have to ignore it until it's fixed.

You can have up to 250 of these Google Finance feeds in a single spreadsheet. It's not an unlimited amount, but it's not exactly lightning fast to pull that much data anyway. If you need more than that , one possible option is to separate your report data into different spreadsheets and then refresh them as needed.

Example Google Finance Spreadsheet
GoogleFinance Documentation and Examples

September 17, 2008

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

Standford's Stanford's School of Engineering has released a number of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering courses online, in their entirety, called Standford Engineering Everywhere. The online program includes all course materials—notes, tests, and complete lecture recordings—free for students or educators to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

SEE users may pick and choose the materials that best meet their needs and interests. Want a refresher course on a particular programming concept? View a video lecture that covers the basics. Are you a programming novice? Spend several weeks viewing lectures, reading course materials and tackling class assignments. Test your knowledge by taking quizzes and exams.

As an example, here's the first lecture in the Machine Learning course, taught by Professor Andrew Ng:

The ten courses that are available cover a healthy range of topics. It's basically 3 or 4 semesters worth of EE and Comp Sci. education that you can brainload for free. Here's the current selection:

Introduction to Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

Linear Systems and Optimization

If you've ever wanted to go to Standford, but didn't have the time, money, or grades, here's your chance.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere [via Creative Commons]

Previously
Lecturefox: free university lectures
Bootstrap Education

July 24, 2008

Farm Fountain - edible eco-sculpture

Equal parts hydroponic garden, aquarium, and interactive art, the Farm Fountain is an experiment in self-contained, indoor ecosystem design created by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. The idea is that you can raise edible fish and cycle their waste nutrients through a hanging garden which filters the water before returning it to the aquarium.

Their 4th generation Farm Fountain is currently on display at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand until January 2009. From the Farm Fountain website:

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans. The work creates an indoor healthy environment that also provides oxygen and light to the humans working and moving through the space. The sound of water trickling through the plant containers creates a peaceful, relaxing waterfall. The Koi and Tilapia fish that are part of this project also provide a focus for relaxed viewing.

The plants we are currently growing include lettuces, cilantro, mint, basil, tomatoes, chives, parsley, mizuna, watercress and tatsoi. The Tilapia fish in this work are also edible and are a variety that have been farmed for thousands of years in the Nile delta.

A Basic Stamp program controls the pump mechanism, allowing the plants to be watered at regular intervals for a set period of time. Depending on available natural light, supplemental lighting can be provided by a combination of fluorescent and grow-spectrum LED lighting, switched from a standard light timer. Ken and Amy worked out a lot of the details during the construction of their 3rd Farm Fountain design (pictured above) and they've assembled a how-to instructional gallery which you can use to design your own Farm Fountain system.

There are a lot of external inputs required to keep the ecosystem healthy for a long period of time including fish food, PH and nitrate monitoring, and general gardening tasks. Once you've gotten accustomed to it, though, it's probably not much more work than maintaining a lawn, and a lawn can't give you tomatoes in the middle of winter.

Farm Fountain - a sculptural ecosystem you can eat

July 22, 2008

PocketMod and Mapufacture: the anti-iPhone

Here's a clever way to fold an 8.5x11 sheet of paper into a small book. The way it's folded, all of the book's 8 outward-facing pages are from the same side of the sheet of paper. This allows you to easily construct a handy little daily planner by printing a single sheet of paper. When you're done folding, the first and third leaf will have a little pouch that you can shove a business card or two inside.

The PocketMod website has a flash application that lets you quickly build a layout for your planner. You can drag calendars, todo-lists, grids, conversion tables, and even RSS feed articles to the page and print it directly from your browser.

I love it. It's the iPhone for the mobile Luddite.

You're probably thinking: this pocketmod thing is awesome and all, but what about maps? Well, PocketMod does maps too. Or rather, a cool Web2.0 mapping service does PocketMods.

At mapufacture.com, you can create and manage custom maps and import data layers from news sources, geo blogging services, and Google My Maps. In addition to all the normal embedding and sharing tools that you'd expect, they also have a PocketMod export, allowing you to convert your map into a handy format that you can put in your back pocket.

You can't make phone calls on your PocketMod and it doesn't hold any songs you can't sing or whistle yourself. On the other hand, it's crazy slim, 3rd party application writing is a cinch, the data plan is affordable, and you won't believe the battery life.

PocketMod
Mapufacture - create custom multilayer maps (with pocketmod output support)

July 6, 2008

KidWash sprinkler toy

Just because it's hot doesn't mean the kids have to stay indoors in the A/C. There are a number of worthwhile summer projects, but the KidWash looks like it has a particularly high fun/effort ratio. A trip to the hardware store for some PVC and mister jets and you can give the Wii a run for its money next weekend.

I headed down to the PVC section of the local home improvement store to pick up supplies. While browsing the adjacent sections for interesting stuff I noticed the micro-irrigation section and inspiration struck: KidWash with mister jets!
The modification worked great. We turned it on and kids from up and down the block started showing up to help with the testing. It's a lot of fun on foot, but my kids also get a blast out of riding their bikes through it.

This would be great to combine with a DIY visqueen slip and slide.

KidWash 2 : PVC Sprinkler Water Toy

July 1, 2008

Swurl - scrapbook your digital life

Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he's been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digital life and assemble them into a sensible whole. You could call it an aggregation tool—which, deep down, it is—but it does a little more than other things I've seen. Namely, it does a really nice job of taking in a wide range of relationship oriented services and turning the their inherent lock-in inside-out.

You just do your normal stuff online, Digg stuff, Delicious stuff, favorite Youtube videos, Twitter, rent videos on Netflix, bookmark songs on Last.fm, post photos on Flickr, etc. And Swurl brings it all together in a really deep way. We also enhance data, adding trailers to movies you rent and Lyrics to songs you bookmark.

All of these services get pulled together into a blog format and discussion and commenting can take place around any item. I think the idea is to help centralize the conversation instead of having it scattered about your different networks. Depending how busy your various online activities are, this may help you or it may just add yet another place to track comments.

What I like most, and the real hack from a Web 2.0 startup perspective, is that they programmed this to encourage you to maintain friends and use features across a number of social networks and easily traverse the relationships and data in all of them from a single location. Flikr is good for storing photos. Del.icio.us is great for bookmarking. Facebook is awesome for tracking friends. Swurl aggregates the relationships from all of the networks you inform it about and it recognizes when those users are also Swurl members. This encourages network growth, but isn't so greedy that it forces you to work only inside the Swurl fence.

Swurl [via Ryan]

June 13, 2008

Milk plastic

Casein, a protein found in milk, can be easily precipitated from standard moo juice with vinegar and turned into a malleable homemade plastic. Coffeebot wrote an Instructable that shows you how:

The final product is quite rigid when it's thick (1/8 inch or thicker), moderately pliable when it's a little thinner, and brittle if it's paper thin. It's also sandable and paintable.

I guess casein-based plastics used to be all the rage for buttons, jewelry and pens at the beginning of the 20th century.

Homemade Plastic From Milk [via MAKE]

June 10, 2008

Free magazines for iPhone users (and fakers)

If you have an iPhone, or the handy User Agent Switcher for Firefox, there are a couple of sites that offer free digital versions of several popular magazines. I guess the idea is to try and capture email addresses, but you can cancel through the input boxes and get straight to the content fairly easily.

If you are using Firefox, you can fake your browser into reporting itself to web servers as an iPhone by downloading User Agent Switcher and adding an "iPhone" entry with the following user agent string under Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

Once you've switched to that user agent profile, most sites will think you are browsing from the iPhone platform and display the content that is targeted to that device - in this case, free magazines. The two sites that provide magazine content targeted to the iPhone are:

I should mention that there are a couple of racier magazines to be found in there, so I'll stamp this one with a potential NSFW factor. I'm sure you were going to just scroll right past and check out the Reader's Digest anyway, so it's probably not worth mentioning.

[via LifeHacker and Geek.Phatus.com]

June 7, 2008

Turn a Brita filter into a reusable activated carbon filter

We filter our drinking water at home, though it's not because there's a risk of giardia or heavy metals in the tap water where we live. Personally, I just like the taste of water that's been run through activated carbon. If your own water is safe from heavy metals, but you still like the way water tastes when it's been through something like a Britta filter, there's an easy way to convert the filter to be reusable, saving a ton of waste and a bit of money.

Your standard Brita pitcher filter contains two components, an ion exchange resin that is used to reduce heavy metals, and a bunch of activated carbon which is used to remove chlorine and various organic impurities that can affect the water's quality and taste. I'm not sure about how to go about recharging or replacing the ion exchange resin, but activated carbon is available in any pet store, where it is sold for aquarium water filtration.

Below is a link to an Instructable which shows you how to convert a Brita pitcher filter into a refillable carbon filter. You'll only need a couple standard tools to do the conversion, and when it's complete you'll have great tasting water, you'll be able to do refills for about 50 cents a cartridge, and you won't be tossing a one-time-use hunk of plastic in the landfill.

Refill A "Disposable" Brita Water Filter With Activated Carbon

June 6, 2008

Electronic embroidery

I'm told that one of the most popular projects at the CRAFT table at Maker Faire is our friend Becky Stern's electronic embroidery. If you're into crafting, all it takes is a little conductive thread and you can make your own fabric gadgets.

Becky posted an introduction to electronic embroidery on the CRAFT blog today and I think I just learned how to backstitch. Her introduction shows how to wire up a couple of LEDs and a switch, but there are a lot of directions to take this. Of particular interest is the LilyPad, a tiny sewable Arduino board that's about the size of a half dollar. There are also various sensors designed around this platform, including sew-friendly accelerometers. There must be a good running jacket idea in there somewhere.

Electronic Embroidery - CRAFT Video Podcast
Conductive Thread and LilyPad Components at SparkFun

May 27, 2008

Conquer jet lag with a 16-hour fast

There was an interview with Clifford Saper, a professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, in last week's Science Friday. The discussion was about a study which was just published in the journal Science about a second circadian clock in mammals that is driven by food availability. The research suggests that this second clock evolved as a sleep-cycle "reset" mechanism which allows mammals to very quickly adapt to optimize their wake period and maximize the chances of finding food during times when food is scarce.

This starvation override can take effect after only 16 hours of fasting. When the fast is cancelled by a sufficient caloric intake (read: real food), the body will shift its natural wake time to coincide with the event. So if you want to ditch your jet lag, or if you want to get up earlier in the morning, it might be as simple as fasting for the 16 hours prior to the time you would like to wake up, then eat a big meal. Your body will then override its normal light-based rhythm and wake at that same time going forward.

I'm going to give this a try. I've struggled all my life with getting up in the morning. Interestingly enough, I've also never eaten breakfast. My first meal of the day is lunch, which means I am basically fasting for over 16 every day between dinner and lunch the following afternoon. Perhaps if I skip dinner one night, eat breakfast early in the morning, and then start eating breakfast regularly, I'll turn into a morning person. I'm not really expecting results, but it's worth a try and I'll let you all know how it goes.

Science Friday: Circadian Clock Sets at Lunchtime [via ParentingSquad]

May 22, 2008

Keywurl: keyword search for Safari

Keywurl is a nifty little Safari plugin that adds simple keyword search to the address bar. Say you wanted to pull up the Wikipedia entry for hacks: just type "wiki hacks" into the address bar. Looking for photos tagged with makerfaire? "flickr makerfaire" will take you to the appropriate place.

The latest beta version for Leopard allows you to right click on any form field and add a search shortcut keyword for it. This would easily let you add keywords like "hacks" or "slashdot" that would let you query for articles on your favorite sites. Unfortunately, there isn't a Tiger build of this version yet, so revision slackers like me will have to wait. You can also get at the keyword settings manually through a new button in the Safari preferences panel.

I haven't been using this long enough to tell if I'm going to keep it, but so far it's really promising. At the very least, it sends me to the right place when I type in a search term into the address bar instead of the search bar by accident.

Keywurl

May 21, 2008

Aluminum foil is a scissor sharpener

I got sucked into reading one of those 15 amazing things you never knew about aluminum foil articles. One of the claims was that you could sharpen a pair of scissors by cutting aluminum. It sounded about as plausible as mending a broken leg by driving it over with a station wagon, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work.

It's as simple as folding over a sheet of tinfoil a couple times, and then cutting it repeatedly with the dull scissors. It doesn't really grind a new edge or anything, but it has a similar effect to honing a knife edge on a steel sharpener. What's nice is that you get the honing result without needing to get a precise angle on the honing tool. The scissors push against the foil and move past it at the right cutting angle and you get a sharper edge.

I wonder if this is how the Ginsu knife could slice a tomato so darned thin after grinding on a sheet of marble and cutting through an aluminum can.

15 awesome uses for aluminum foil

May 17, 2008

Protect your luggage with a starter pistol

I can't say how realistic this is, and I probably won't be using the advice myself, but Jon Udell wrote about a plausible strategy for subverting the TSA rules into protecting your check-in luggage. The trick is to declare a firearm (in this case a starter pistol) which, by policy, forces your bag to be inspected in your presence and then locked in transit.

I'm given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.
That's the procedure. The case is extra-tracked...TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It's odd that you can't request to have any check-in inspected and secured for flight in your presence. It'd only be worth the hassle for a few people, and it'd save them a lot of grief. Then again, why can't we expect the same level of accountability and professionalism from security-cleared baggage handlers and TSA officials as we can from anyone at DHL or Fedex?

Personally, I just bring any laptops and cameras with me in my carry-on. It presents its own hassle during screening due to the asinine "remove all electronics and put them in separate buckets" policy, but at least they show up on the other end of the flight.

Pack a starter pistol to deter luggage theft

May 16, 2008

Python pizza status

Nothing goes better with some Python hacking than a little pizza. Nick Jensen couldn't wait for his pizza to arrive to begin hacking, so he spent the 30 minute wait-time writing a Python script to track the pie's progress:

I discovered an interesting XML feed the other day when I ordered a pizza from dominos. After seeing a dumb commercial about what some idiots do in their 30 minute pizza-waiting time, I remembered hearing something about being able to "track" your pizza online. So what did I do during my 30 minutes you ask? I went on over to dominos website to check out this amazing tracking device. It turns out to be just a flash app hooked up to an XML feed and Tamper Data revealed it was coming from here.

The details and the Dominos python script are below. Suffice it to say that you can pull an XML status on your Dominos order by hitting http://trkweb.dominos.com/orderstorage/GetTrackerData?Phone=phonenumber (where phonenumber is your 10 digits). You can easily parse this from other languages if you're not the Python type.

You've got 30 minutes... to write a python script
dominos.py

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