Monthly Archives: July 2011

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Satellite Tracking on Android

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For those with an Android smartphone out there, with an interest in Astronomy, the Heavens Above app is something you should install immediately.

It provides look ups for satellite crossings based on your location, as well as the ability to set alerts based on search conditions. I’ve had it installed for a couple of weeks, and have used it to catch half a dozen ISS passes and an iridium flare. While you can always go and look for these things online, having your phone give you a 5 minute alert when one is coming in your area is very cool.

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Why you need an API

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I’ve been playing around with Thinkup, which you should too, if you value any content you create for Twitter or Facebook. For the twitter side they’ve got this nice graph of clients you’ve used. Here is mine:

This, as far as I’m concerned, explains why you need an API. Less than 10% of the content that I’ve created in twitter comes from their official web interface. And even my most used interface only represents 1/2 of my content. This is only possible because Twitter has been API strong since the beginning.

If you are building a platform to publish information, it has to have a web services API. Otherwise you are going to massively limit the ways that your users can and will publish information.

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New Indian in Rhinebeck

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While we seem to have 2 (sometimes as many as 5) sushi restaurants in every town in Dutchess County, we’ve been really lacking on good Indian restaurants. Our favorite up until this week was Tanjore down in Fishkill. But this week we have a new winner.

Cinnamon is the name of the nearly reopened Indian restaurant in Rhinebeck. It’s actually a little south of town, in the location where we’ve seen a couple of different Indian places over the last decade. We hit it up Thursday night as Susan wanted to scout it for possible future catering. I decided to go vindaloo, which I don’t do that often any more, as my spice tolerance isn’t quite what it used to be. But it is a pretty good measure of spiciness.

Wow. The vindaloo was spot on, and definitely good and spicy. Everything we had there was great. I’m already excited to go back there for one of their buffets. If you like Indian, and live in the mid hudson valley, please go there. We need to keep good Indian places around like this one.