I’m intrigued by the idea of self-improvement through self-awareness, and being a constantly sleepy geek, I’d been tempted by the Zeo Sleep Monitor for a while. The price dropped (to only $264) so I finally gave in and bought one.

My initial impressions.

• Nice, stylish packaging but lots of paper! How about just one page: “plug in, charge for 2h, put on headband, sleep.”
• “Zeo Personal Sleep Coach is neither a medical device nor a medical program …”  Who’s afraid of the big bad FDA?

Lots of dead tree

• My first few nights sleep were awful but I was already sleeping badly before the Zeo arrived and I probably had the headband on far too tight. I kept waking up to discover that I’d pulled it off. Sleep score of 40 –> zombie day.

I couldn't keep the headband on for the 1st four nights.

• I wanted to see pretty graphs online, but first I had to register and provide all sorts of personal information. Not cool.
• Using an online app is a cool idea, no Mac v PC problems. Although did it have to be Flash? Flash apps are starting to feel like the Java-applets of old.
• I’m not exactly sure who the target audience is for this device. The base-station user interface is more VCR than iPhone. It would be so much cooler if the headband could directly upload to the online app.

Now that I can actually sleep all night with the headband on, I’m excited to see if I can get some useful feedback on my sleeping patterns in the next few weeks.

Personally I think that Freebase would be an great platform for working on open government projects. Greg seemed very positive about Freebase too. Sunlight’s database IDs for US politicians are currently being loaded into Freebase as I type, so hopefully we’ll be able to make some nice political demos soon.

Greg’s talk was a very informative summary of who’s who in open data in the US, here are my raw notes:

The Sunlight Foundation give away ~$3m a year to fund tech projects in open government. They have a good summary of the government data out there.

eGovernment is generally supported in US, improvements rolling along, 1st generation IT initiatives, transparency is a given now, (especially thanks to the financial crisis) – but government big and slow and needs to be encouraged in the right direction, hence the Open Government Data Principles

Every big org’s website should have a “data catalog” page which is like an “about” page.
theinfo.org by Aaron Swartz – for people with large datasets (lots of government stuff) political parsers – critical mass of group of people parsing political data, NY times, FEC,  – code & techniques for parsing

watchdog.net data about representatives, cool visualizations + data feeds, big data dumps

public.resource.org – lots of bulk data

govtrack.us – xml dumps, scraps GEO, THOMAS –> XML

programmable web.com/government – tracking new government apis and mashups

everyblock.com – super local what’s new feeds

mysociety.org – high impact UK org, tracks foi requests, fixmystreet.com – tracks repsones very well

If you don’t know what Ubiquity is then watch the video.

Ubiquity is going to be awesome for Firefox power-users. One of the best things about Firefox is the extension eco-system and Ubiquity is going to make writing extensions much easier.

P.S. Ubiquity is only on v0.1 and executes 3rd-party code on your machine. You probably shouldn’t install it in your main Firefox profile just yet.