The Factr Blog
Bringing Halloween to life on Factr
Timothy Weber
October 31, 2019
The Factr team connected with member, Timothy Weber, on his most recent endeavor, a Halloween project centered around the creation of a skull whose eyes followed movement. We asked questions regarding his project and the role Factr played in bringing it to fruition. This conversation took place approximately midway through the project which has since been completed, successfully spooking unknowing trick-or-treaters on Halloween!
Q: Why did you decide to back Factr on Kickstarter?
A: Factr initially caught my eye on Kickstarter because I’ve been thinking critically about social media for several years now, and more particularly since I worked at a computer security company. The political, social, and cultural effects of the current crop of popular platforms and apps seem substantially negative to me. So I was already asking “What would an ethical social media site look like?” And I’d already come to the same preliminary conclusion that I saw in Factr’s Kickstarter--that a free service, paid for by advertising, has inherent limitations, and charging a small fee is a more ethical and practical model that focuses the platform on valuing your attention instead of on commoditizing it.
What I didn’t know was how Factr envisioned their product working. When I saw the beta, I liked the design--it seemed easy to use and the concept set was clear, and I could easily see how to use it. But I wasn’t sure why I wanted to use it. It seemed clearly useful to people who need to collect a lot of links about a topic, but I don’t often do that.
So, I wanted to get to know Factr in more depth and to do that I’d have to really use it for something. I was about to start a new spare-time electronics project, a skull with glowing eyes for Halloween, and I realized that I do collect links to reference data about such projects, which I usually keep in a bunch of browser tabs while I’m working on them. That’s pretty awkward and makes switching to a different computer a bit hard! So, I figured I’d store the links in a Factr stream, so I could look at them from there when I needed them. Then I realized I could make the stream public and use it as a Work In Progress blog as well.
Q: Where are you at with your skull project?
A: As I'm writing, I’m waiting for a ten-hour 3D print to finish. The print contains the skull’s eyes and nose--where all the action happens. The electronics are functional, and I’m generally working on the physical portions now--3D printing, building up the parts and figuring out how to make it hang together as seamlessly as possible (literally and figuratively). I’m getting nervous about the looming deadline!
Q: Has using Factr altered or had an impact on your workflow?
A: Since I made the stream public, I fell into a goal of posting something every time I had a chance to work on my project. I’ve rarely done that for past projects. I think Factr’s informal “the whole stream could be just links” design, plus its solid visual design (making all the content types look good together), felt freeing, like I could post something short or long, visual or textual, and it would all be OK.
Committing to that frequent-posting goal, in turn, has made me focus a bit more on visualization and documentation--I’ve taken more videos and done more detailed 3D renderings. In some sense, that’s a distraction; I don’t need cool animated GIFs to make a prototype. But it’s also possible that I’m learning from that pre-visualization. For instance, after doing a slick-looking 3D rendering with good light simulation, I realized that the glowing eyes would light the eye sockets, and they, in turn, would reflect off of the front surfaces of the LCD displays. Knowing about that potential problem earlier helps me think about ways to solve it.
Q: Can you share the process of your project (beginning-middle-end)?
A: That kind of iterative problem-solving is central to designing a new electronic gadget. There are always new discoveries and unanticipated consequences of combining things in a certain way. That’s why I generally try to tackle the riskiest things first. In this case, I wasn’t sure the thermal camera would really be usable to direct the eyes; would it be too slow? Too narrow? Not sensitive enough? There were plenty of things that could go wrong. So, I got that working before anything else. My next big question is, will it work well outside at night? That’s why my next step is to get the whole physical object ready to test, as simply as possible.
Q: What have you enjoyed most about using Factr?
A: I've enjoyed the way that Factr seems to get out of the way during this process. I can easily post something at the end of a work session, even though my brain is mostly fried by that point. Then I can share the stream with someone else, and they don’t need to make an account or learn any terminology or even be aware that they’re using a new social media site. And when I’m telling friends what I’m working on, I can easily bring the stream up on my phone and show the latest images.
In that past, I’ve wondered about publicly documenting these kinds of personal projects. On the one hand, it brings some feedback and some enjoyable attention. On the other, it takes time. Sometimes it seems like it takes as long to document a project as to do it--which means if I didn’t share my projects publicly, I could do twice as many!
But this time, with Factr, I don’t feel like it’s cost me a huge amount of time to do that documentation. And it’s been fun and rewarding to post more detailed progress to Factr. So maybe Factr is improving my whole process!
Ask me again, though, after Halloween, when we see how much I was able to finish in time--and wish me luck! Five hundred trick-or-treaters constitute a very hard deadline.
Gathering the Occult
Kevely Ferreira
August 30, 2019
For over a year now, I’ve been drawn toward all matters of the occult and spirituality--from astrology to divination to, currently, studying the cultural roots and anthropologies of ancient civilizations. My findings and understandings have come from a handful of books and literary pieces, but mostly from diving into the abyss that is the internet.
My internet searches would force me to leap from page to page in order to research content, and I could only bookmark the website for future reference. But bookmarking wasn’t an efficient method either, unless I wanted to have dozens of bookmarks for topics of such a broad spectrum. Since I was learning, I also wanted to organize my thoughts into one collective medium, as a way to revisit my findings and notes, especially since one source could be parallel to another. I considered using a journal to store the data I was gathering, but realized a journal could easily become disorganized and incoherent, since my research was too scattered for the organizational limitations that paper poses.
I needed a platform that allowed me to store all my findings--images, videos, links, my own interpretations in one space that I could refer back to and investigate further. I also needed the versatility and flexibility to curate my findings into subcategories, so that my research and mental flow could be organized and concise, regardless of the number of branches that a topic like spirituality has. I needed a platform that was easy to use, and that helped me manage my time and the information I was building upon, while also being accessible to my friends if I wanted to share content.
With Factr, I’m able to break through all those virtual and concrete limitations. By starting a stream for my findings, I can post and organize a system of content and links efficiently and without hassle. Features like activity options, folders, and hashtags make it easy to access everything and anything simply based on category. In addition, I can include my voice and thoughts in all the content I post, as well as links and images, without having to worry about the minimal character limit that most social media platforms place.
Joining Factr made me realize that I wanted to keep my content more exclusive than what most social platforms allowed. At first, I needed to have an outlet to curate all of my research in one medium, but I began to want to share this content with my friends who also were interested in spiritualism--specifically those who were at the very beginning of their journey. I wanted to have a safe network for myself and my friends, without too many prying eyes, especially since esoteric knowledge is so controversial with the broader public.
Along with enabling me to curate my content, Factr allows me to curate my stream’s audience. I have complete control over who I want to share access with--the general public or specific individuals, based on direct invitation. I can also control the type of access people have to my stream--whether they will be a viewer, contributor, editor, or administrator to the stream. This feature will allow me to expand my network letting others post content collaboratively, and it will make the stream as a whole much more knowledge-filled and diverse.
Updating the family scrapbook
Deborah Grossman
May 7, 2019
My cousin Miriam and I have always been the genealogy geeks of the family, independently finding and sharing little bits of our family history as we discover them. Miriam, a graphic designer by trade, even made a photographic family tree at one point, as well as publishing a booklet of her mother’s story about the tiny Russian village she and my grandmother (and their five other siblings) grew up in.
Over the years, we’ve had countless emails between us, sharing photos, answering questions, sharing links to articles. I have a copy of the booklet and photographic family tree and many, many family photos, going back to my great-grandparents in their youth. I’ve done some research on Ancestry.com and JewishGen and I’ve saved and printed census documents, ships’ manifests, marriage license applications, and saved screenshots of written histories. The documents, photos, and links are all over the place. And while some of those sites allow you to save documents into files within the site, they’re not easy to share.
My Factr stream “Grossman Family Photos” collects all of those bits and pieces, scraps of paper, and links in one place. I went back through my emails with Miriam to collect the links to articles about a particular street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my great-grandfather lived for a while when he first came to the United States. I added the links as posts to the stream. I posted a link to the digital copy of my great-aunt’s memoir booklet. There are links to articles about the history of the village that the Pilchman family came from. The links appear as distinct posts, with editable images, titles, and descriptions—clean and clear.
I posted a photo of my grandmother on her wedding day on the stream. I was looking at the photo and wondering about her attire, wondering what year she married my grandfather. I know from the 1930 census (a photo of that census page, describing the members of the Pilchman household, is also on the stream) that my grandmother still lived with her parents. I know what year my father was born, after my grandparents were married, but I didn’t know the year of the wedding. So I went looking for the New Jersey Marriage Index, and once I located it, I was able to find the year my grandmother AND her sister (Miriam’s mother) married, and post a photo of the marriage index page on the stream. Using the Factr browser extension makes that easy. I can save any page to my stream while I’m on that page. (See article “How to Install Factr’s browser extension for Chrome”).
With Factr, I’ve been able to start sharing and combining all of our joint research. I recently learned that my cousin has original documents I’ve never seen (the visa application form that my great-grandfather submitted to bring my great-grandmother and the seven children to the U.S.; the embarkation cards for the ship they sailed on). Those items are now part of the stream.
I’ve realized I can use Factr for all sorts of joint research projects. For a more general project, we could create a public stream. For the genealogy project, we can create a group that encompasses more members of our family and create other family streams to share with them (photos, artifacts, informational writings).
I chose Factr for this project, rather than, say a private group on Facebook, for a number of reasons. One of my friends has a group on Facebook sharing his family history. He’s invited all the members of the family line to join his private group, which is open only to the family (and a few honorary members), but he doesn’t really have control over the information, nor the group, other than determining who is invited to join. It becomes much more conversational and ragged (and impossible to search). On Factr, I can determine the order in which the posts the appear, I can easily edit the posts, including dates. I can invite people to be viewers, contributors, editors, or administrators--I can share, while still maintaining control of the stream content. The members of the stream can still have conversations about the content—there is a comment feature under every post—but it can’t go off the rails like other comments sections. Even better, the information is not shared with anyone you don’t want to share with. I’ll never see an ad for Ancestry.com pop up in my Pilchman Family stream.
I’ve been casually gathering genealogical information for years now. I’ve had information scattered to a lot of places--old-school paper files, digital files, in my “shoebox” on Ancestry, and in emails. Now I’ve put all those pieces of information in one place. As I continue to fine tune my family genealogy stream, I’ll put the entries into chronological order and edit the captions and descriptions to be more uniform. I’ll tag them so I can I can filter for information about specific family members.
But the big achievement so far is this: I’ve gathered my file cabinet, my bulletin board, my notes, my shoebox, my photo album, all into one place. It’s been a little like switching to a smartphone from a paper datebook, digital watch, wall calendar, notebook, and alarm clock. Using Factr, I streamlined, collected, and archived my big genealogy project. I’ll continue to work on it in much more manageable, shareable, and enjoyable format.