Blog of Andreas Thorstensson

Njuice - The quickest and most addictive way to discover news

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:46:00 +0200

I have finally launched my new project called Njuice.

It is based on the simple idea to get the news you are interested in, in one central place, with a clutter free interface on all major devices. My first take on this was a RSS reader called Geekboys that I launched in 1999:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991127200117/http://www.geekboys.org/

Yes, this field is getting crowded (and even more since I started to build the prototype over two years ago). But I believe there is room for more players. Most “competitors” are more of social readers based on who you follow (and more or less requires you to have a good list of people on Twitter). Njuice works straight out of the box, learns over time what you like and delivers personally recommended stories.

The Discovery Engine is built in pure C, and can handle over 1000 links simultaneously on very basic hardware. What it does, briefly:

Get URL and fully expand it
Detect language (we currently only store English news)
Create influence value on person who share the URL
Calculate final score, and make sure we don’t get duplicate data

Once DE have found an interesting URL based on the score, Webmine kicks in and:

Grabs relevant data such as title, preamble and related images
Extracts article content
Semantically analyses the URL

When that is done we know if that specific URL is a news article and if it is interesting enough to publish. Based on the semantic data we can also tailor the news to the user and his personal interest. We are aware of the filter bubble, which means the algorithm also delivers news you might be interested in even though it doesn’t totally fit your profile. It is also clever enough to understand that you like sports but are not interested in baseball.

Everything runs on Amazon EC2 and S3 using Ubuntu, Nginx, MySQL, Memcache and PHP. We tried most NoSQL solutions but did not feel the need for them yet.

Download the app & read more here:

http://njuice.com/about/

codingjester: it8bit: Super Mario - by Nicola Felaco My brain...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:07:46 +0200

codingjester:

it8bit:

Super Mario - by Nicola Felaco

My brain is simply unable to handle this…..

How to sync your calender and contacts from Google to iCloud

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:47:00 +0200

So you have just installed iOS 5 and want to sync your calender and contacts from Google to iCloud?

First you need to export all your contacs and add them to your address book:

Then you need to export your server-side calenders from iCal and then import them:

Open iCal -> File -> Export -> Export (not iCal Archive) -> Save -> Uncheck your server-side calender -> Import -> Import your file

Now open iCloud (Settings -> iCloud) on your iPhone and toogle off Contacts and Calenders. It will ask if you want to delete from your iPhone, do so (make sure you have a proper backup before you do this).

Now sync your contacts and calenders like you usually do with iTunes.

When that is done go to iCloud (Settings -> iCloud) on your phone and toggle on Contacts and Calenders. Click on merge.

Done.

Simon Dumont's custom half-pipe - Red Bull Cubed Pipe

Sun, 29 May 2011 12:36:48 +0200

Simon Dumont's custom half-pipe - Red Bull Cubed Pipe:

What began as a 22-foot tall, 550-foot long halfpipe turned into a meticulously cut, one-of-a-kind cubed pipe with a series of take-off and landing areas. With nothing in between, the pipe begs Dumont’s world famous big airs and tricks to rise to a new level. RedBullUSA.com

Scientists unveil most complete EVER map of the universe that extends to 380 million lightyears away

Thu, 26 May 2011 22:47:50 +0200

Scientists unveil most complete EVER map of the universe that extends to 380 million lightyears away:

The 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) from the University of Portsmouth extends to a distance of 380 million light years and has taken a decade to

New People Widget in Gmail adds context to your contacts - Google

Thu, 26 May 2011 22:13:29 +0200

New People Widget in Gmail adds context to your contacts - Google:

For most of us, Rapportive is the way that we bring context to our email. However, some of you are more interested about the interactions that you’ve had with a person rather than the