Joost Plattel

Data Strategist.

21 November 2011
by Joost Plattel
0 comments

Going interactive!

Some of you may have noticed it already, but from now on, I’m available as freelancer! I’ve made the last step towards it two weeks ago and I’m now registered at the Chamber of Commerce. Most of the projects are covered with this. And one of them is an interactive showcase for the Freemote festival in Utrecht in the beginning of December.

Together with my brother we are building a hybrid manifestation of visualizing brainwaves and other personal metrics. We combine our knowledge about programming, interfaces, visuals and self-quantification. Our project is called ‘hoofdbeelden’ which means: ‘head images’. In the future I’m hoping to extend this visual project to include more metric about a person, including sociale network analysis and realtime streaming of heartrates or other bodily things you can measure.

In the mean time enjoy our first image as a teaser produced at the ‘Premote’ event:

1 November 2011
by Joost Plattel
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Infographic van OV-chipkaart data

Ik heb al eerder met de export data van de OV-chipkaart iets gemaakt. Vroeger kon je de locaties van alle stations (inclusief steden en straten) exporteren. Tegenwoordig kan dat niet meer, dus werkte mijn gebouwde app niet meer. De kaart bevat echter teveel waardevolle data die als die op de juiste manier kan worden gerepresenteerd voor inzicht kan zorgen in je gebruik:

  • Heb jij een idee op welke dagen je het meeste reist?
  • Wat zijn je gemiddelde kosten per reis en wat kostte het meest?
  • Hoeveel heb je totaal uitgegeven met de chipkaart
  • Welke data reiste je het vaakst?
  • En wat zijn je meest bezochte punten?
Vaak allemaal dingen waarop de website van de OV-chipkaart geen inzicht in bied. Daarom heb ik besloten om een volgende app te bouwen die dit allemaal voor jou gaat uitzoeken. Hieronder een korte preview:

OV-Infographic

Wat ik graag zou willen weten van jullie is of er ook behoefte is naar een goede manier om reizen te kunnen declareren. Op de website zelf werkt dit niet erg lekker… Zal ik hiervoor een oplossing inbouwen?

6 October 2011
by Joost Plattel
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Moon phases and sleep patterns

Even before I got a Zeo, I was wondering if the phases of the moon are of influence of my sleep quality. With the Zeo that offers an API, I finally had a chance to investigate. As it turns out after four months of experimenting: the phase of the moon doesn’t have any influence on my sleep quality or the time it takes to fall asleep.

I’ve been building my own interface for the Zeo, because the flash based website doesn’t suit my needs, here’s a small screenshot:
Moonphases and Sleep

I plan on rebuilding this on Django, but I’m currently having trouble with MySQL bindings on python… The building of the bindings produces lots of errors. If I can’t get it done, maybe I’ll have a try at node.js.

27 September 2011
by Joost Plattel
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Publishing personal caloric values

I’ve started tracking my food intake with Foodzy about 13 days ago. And while doing that I already came across some interesting things. I’ve never been fully tracking my food intake, but the Foodzy app on my iPhone with extensive database (including typical dutch food) makes it quite easy. I’ve been tracking for thirteen days now.

The first step I wanted to take is to generate a baseline of my typical food consumption(and thus caloric values), this way I can see where I can make improvements and measure the changes. A few days after I got started I was already more aware of my eating habits and started to make small changes. We’ll see where everything ends up, but there’s one thing that I would like to share.

I’ve been thinking about making my data publicly available through a CSV-file generate by Google Docs. But until I’ve got everything working, here’s a temporary graph to enjoy:

The spreadsheet with data in available trough Google Docs, please read the notes in the second sheet as well, because I’m searching for a reason for the differences.