Jon Udell, a technology writer, covers web tools, data, Postgres, and the Fediverse, along with long-running experiments in using software for everyday work.
HN commenters mostly cite his posts as references, including his writing on Resolver One and his Postgres PL/Python series, and no one criticizes him in these comments.
Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile.
I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total.
Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok.
I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/
In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish.
And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away.
I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly.
One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" - it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a…
Hypothesis is going strong. They have smart people working on it, it's fully open source with open APIs and data available over anonymous RSS, the culture is nothing like rap/bro culture, and the founder is independently wealthy from winning the startup lottery in a past life and seems to be running the thing as a passion project no matter how much it makes. (Their main commercial play right now is selling higher ed. on the idea of using Hypothes.is for scholarly criticism.)
See "Notes for an Annotation SDK" from a couple weeks ago <https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/09/03/notes-for-an-annotation-sdk/>
I did a similar thing (with Bill Zeller and John Udell) as a ubiquity/twitter extension a couple of years earlier[1]... but in practice the low resolution of the standard unicode caracters makes them just a novelty; the technique's been reinvented several times but hasn't found a niche.
Even this font doesn't quite hack it for me - the curves are too wide to take in the time series at a glance.
[1] http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/01/13/fuel-prices-and-pageviews/
Follow up:
Looking over the old SIMILE site I couldn't find the original project. Also David Huynh didn't mention it in his own website, but some searching yielded the original project, "Parallax"
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FZPtpgntwC&pg=PA36
More from the era: https://blog.jonudell.net/2008/08/25/motivating-people-to-write-the-semantic-web-a-conversation-with-david-huynh-about-parallax/
That's a really good point. I wonder if folks would intuitively get it if you provided little data visualization (visible on hover or whatever). Like:
Result 1: (4.5 )
Result 2: (5.0 )
edit: HN stripped out the unicode characters :(. I was using something like this: https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/05/the-tao-of-unicode-sparklines/.
There used to be a python spreadsheet that worked as a spreadsheet - Resolver One.
It was .Net based but did not make enough money. I wonder if done now there would be enough support to open source something like this.
For a review see https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/27/first-look-at-resolver-an-ironpython-based-spreadsheet/