Isn't it just great that these days you do not need a truck to move stuff? As long as the stuff you are moving is digital.
I was thinking that in a pretty near future each house may include a giant mass storage that holds everything we own which can be digitized. Such are the books, photos, personal documents, bills, music, etc. All of those things are already available in a digital form, but what about furniture, kitchen counters, decorations, paintings, or the super-heavy piano for god's sake?
What if... the house of the future is a completely configurable and intelligent hardware device that can reconfigure itself to it's owner's liking and create those items entirely from it's own supply of materials? What if the paintings can be built into walls and show digitized image, books are digital single-page fold-out with downloadable content, furniture can be created from built-in modules...
Then - instead of moving your stuff you just have to download your existing house to the new house - and vola! It looks the same! Wouldn't that make moving easier?
Well, until the house is so intelligent that it can reconstruct itself to fit my personal furniture and layout needs, the digital move is limited to less extravagant things, such as music, documents, books and media. But that's already lots of really important stuff!
Which is why I think that the house of today should come with a built-in storage, that's remotely backed up and fully redundant. A built-in file server, just like a built-in washing machine. That's because just like everyone needs to wash dishes, everyone in this day and age also needs to backup their crap, and there's lots of crap to backup.
Go! - the digital movers revolution, just don't forget you can't microwave your hard drive.
Make Model What? If you like me were tasked with loading a database of recent car makes/models/years, you would start by looking on the web and seeing if someone else just has it out there, readily available, hopefully for free, but perhaps for a tiny nominal fee.? If only it was that simple... I looked and looked, and couldn't find anything that would fit the above requirements. So I thought, who would know about US car models better than Kelly Blue Book? So I went on their site, and sure enough they have a javascript file that lists all known to them makes and models of used cars. Since the file is public, I figured it's not really "evil" if I scrape and parse it for my own benefit. Disagree? Have a better source? Then leave a comment. Anyway, to cut the long story short, I'm hoping to save a day or so to someone else who may, like me, be looking for this information. The ruby module shown below retrieves and parses the javascript from KBB site into
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