🍕Techno Pizza, Life's Search Engine, and Abandoned Buildings

They all have stories

Nov 28, 2022

Hey friends!

I hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving last week! My family and I spent the day with some of our good friends and had a wonderful time.

I even printed a bunch of fun little snap-out kit turkey ornaments (you snap out the pieces and put them together) but I think I forgot them all on the roof of the car. I never found them . . . Someone is gonna be so confused when they find those on the side of the road.

My favorite dish of the evening was a slice of AMAZING cheesecake that our friend made.

Did you get in on any good Black Friday deals?

We upgraded our TV to a Samsung Frame - first TV I’ve ever purchased in my life tbh. Our first TV was given to us when we got married in 2016. The Frame is awesome! It sits flat on the wall like a picture frame and looks great.

Some crypto analysts seem to think that we’re nearing the bottom - here’s an interesting thread to chew on by CroissantEth.

It’s always fun to watch who keeps building even when crypto sentiment is at its lowest (Thanks Do Kwon and Sam).

I’ll happily admit - I’m mostly in the sit-back-and-watch phase to see which of my NFT purchases “pull through” the bear market.

It’s like Squid Game but maybe all I win is a T-shirt, or a 3X or something.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

🍕Techno Pizza

I. Love. Pizza.

Seriously, it’s my favorite food - and I’ll never say no (unless I’m on a diet) to a delicious slice of pizza.

My favorite “fast food” pizza place is Domino’s - and I love how easy it is to order from the app.

Unlike other fast food companies - Dominos isn’t afraid to experiment with how you order pizza.

They even have a whole site dedicated to all the options - here.

To be honest - you could probably put all the people who use most of these in a concert hall.

Seriously - when was the last time you ordered from Dominos by texting a pizza emoji or ordering through a Tweet.

The most intriguing of these options is the “Zero Click” option.

Just save your “Easy Order” (your favorite order from dominos) in the main Domino’s app - then sign into the Zero Click app to order your pizza with . . . wait for it . . . no clicks.

All you do is open the app - and a timer counts down to zero. Once it hits zero, your pizza is ordered. Voila!

This got me wondering - with all these awesome options - can I just create anything that will order a pizza as long as it makes the correct API call?

For example - it would be entertaining to build a big red button that orders pizza whenever you hit it.

Dominos already thought through this question - and created an official button for ordering pizza back in 2015. It doesn’t appear to still be for sale sadly.

I did find this article by Brody Berson about creating his own pizza ordering button from one of those old Amazon Dash buttons. Honestly, if you want to build your own - his Github looks like a great place to start.

One Reddit user created such a button - and locked it with a key so friends couldn’t randomly order pizzas. Smart!

I did a bit of searching on the internet, and there’s actually a few unofficial API’s that you can use to interact with Dominos.

I found this old hackernews thread with links to two separate Githubs.

Get a pizza while you’re waiting for your cloud infrastructure to spin up. The documentation is a pretty entertaining read ngl.
Use this API to add pizza ordering ability to whatever you’d like.

I don’t know why more people aren’t creating wacky ways to order Dominos pizza - it’s a hilarious use of technology, and honestly more useful than a lot of IOT stuff that we buy.

PLUS - I bet you could sell these . . .

Well, now that I’m craving Domino’s pizza again, I’ll leave you with this rediculous video by Gus Johnson.

Go check out the Dominos Anyware website - and order pizza from one of the integrations. Let me know what you think! Which method did you use?

Dominos Anyware

🧠Life’s Search Engine

Ever wish you could search through your digital life in a Google style search engine?

It would be nice - the best I come close to in my personal life is searching through my Google search history, Google Map history, or Google Photo history to try and figure out connections / correlations.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since I ran advertisements for that research tool Heyday.

Tools like Raindrop.io are great for saving links - but what about everything else?

Hypothetically, I could create a new file for every single day of the year and obsessively track photos, notes, journal entries, etc.

However, that isn’t practical at all.

Verge has a really good article about the Mem app by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu - and it raises some great questions about how a “search engine for life” would work.

Mem.ai is more of a productivity suite for work, but looks really interesting. It aims to try and organize all of your ideas, meetings, notes, and other scattered data points.

Anyway, here’s an interesting insight from the article describing the goals of Mem.

It’s more like a protocol for private information, a way to pipe in everything that matters to you — your email, your calendar events, your airline confirmations, your meeting notes, that idea you had on the train this morning — and then automatically organize and make sense of it all. More importantly, it’s meant to use cutting-edge AI to give all that information back to you at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. The most ambitious version of the product will require a huge amount of work and a lot of technology that either doesn’t exist or only barely works. It will require partnerships with huge tech firms that may be reticent to share their data, trust from users who have to compile it all together, and a user experience that is infinitely flexible without being too complicated or overwhelming. (source)

It’s a VERY ambitious idea - and this quote hits the nail on the head.

HOW can we make sense of the vast amounts of data coming into our lives, and give it shape in a way that makes sense and is useful to our brains?

“There’s all this data in the world about us,” Xu says, “and none of it we can actually use, right? It’s all trapped inside of Google’s servers or Facebook’s servers, Netflix, YouTube, all that. What we want to do is actually put that in your hands.” (source)

Based on the progress Mem has made over the past few years - I’ve no doubt it will be a pretty serious productivity app within a few years.

There are a few other apps worth checking out if you’d like to get started organizing your digital life.

Rewind.ai

Rewind records everything that “you’ve seen, said, or heard” on your Mac - and makes it all searchable. Yes, that does sound like a privacy risk but they say all recordings are stored locally! Unfortunately, the app only works on macs at this time. Check it out here.

Recall

Styled as a “personal encyclopedia” Recall is a mashup of a bookmarking tool and a RSS feed tool that will create links between notes for you. It will also augment your browsing with resurfaced content that may be related to your search. Though not quite a personal search engine in the Rewind sense, it’s certainly a step above the average bookmarking/RSS feed tool. Check it out here.

I’m curious to see how this niche will continue to grow over the next few years - which app will become the dominant digital life tracker?

☠️Abandoned Buildings

Do you ever pass a abandoned building and think to yourself, that would be fun to go explore?

I often think that, and then I think about the many slashers I’ve watched that take place in abandoned buildings and I say nope.

I found this really cool website called “Abandoned Southeast” that explores the history of interesting abandoned buildings, and it really intrigued me!

Created by photographer Leland Kent, he hopes “to preserve the past through documentation and photographs since many of these amazing places are often lost to neglect, demolition, or renovation.“ (source)

Here’s two articles that are REALLY good.

Krispy Kreme Coffee Bar - History of a really beautiful old Krispy Kreme that is currently vacant and empty - since 2005. The location is currently for sale, and I hope and pray that SOMEONE buys it and turns it into a delightful coffee shop or diner.

Read It Now

The Phone Home - History of an old home known for having old phone booths in the front/back yard. Turns out the owner had hundreds of pay phones, and kept some of the old ones in his yard. I kept digging after I read the article, and discovered that the owner David Swearingen was still mantaining them in 2009. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2020. Are any of the hundreds of pay phone booths still around? Who knows?

Read It Now

Additional readings for after you finish the article

I added Abandoned Southeast to my RSS reader, so I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of Leland’s articles in the future. Check out the site at the link!

Abandoned Southeast

🐙The Land of Random

Buckle up, cuz we’re heading into the random!

Get Flabbergasted

My good friend Michael Andreuzza who you might remember from his fantastic old newsletter unicornsfeed is getting BACK into the newsletter world. He finds and shares a lot of cool tools and tips for developers and designers. Subscribe at the link!

Get Flabbergasted

Generate a City

This codepen is awesome - I click, and a new city arises!There’s even little flying birdies . . .

Create a City

ASCII Video

This looks so much fun! This program will take your video file and turn it into a ASCII video WITH the audio. Here’s the example.

Here's the Github Link

LET IT SNOWWW

This chrome extension will make it snow in your browser.

SNOWTIME

A Dynamic VRChat world

A fascinating deep dive into the adventure of building a chiptune music visualizer world in VRchat. Based on this article alone, I may have to venture into VRChat soon just to experience it before it transitions out of its “geocities” stage into its “facebook stage.”

Music in VR