Leftronic is a Y Combinator company that makes some nice business dashboards. I’ve been using them to keep track of analytics on some websites because they’re the only solid dashboard service with a free plan. I missed the ability to customize the aspect ratio of a dashboard, and wrote a Chrome extension that plugs into the dashboard Javascript to do that.

Leftronic Hack sets a custom grid size, so it’s also useful if you want to fit more or less data on your dashboard. It works great with Chrome’s kiosk mode. The other great thing was that the whole thing has taken a total of about four hours to make, starting from knowing nothing at all about Chrome extension development, up to what you see here:

GitHub: Source

Download it: Leftronic Hack

In Spring 2012, we’re building About.me for performers, starting at Princeton. (If you haven’t heard, About.me lets you make simple, attractive personal homepages. A few million people have them, and the site was valued at several million at acquisition two years ago.)

Our first product lets groups build a website to promote their group and their shows, and creates a showcase of their photos and vides by integrating with services like Vimeo, YouTube, and iTunes. It’s easy to use, visually stunning, and deeply customizable. Eventually, we hope to make it a network for dancers and performers, which you can traverse by following the relationships artists and performers have with each other.

Places where the Internet lags behind real life in capturing and sharing our everyday lives are great places to be for a media entrepreneur. There’s a huge opening in the space – arts groups have not traditionally been the fastest to adopt technology, but there are plenty of talented crews looking for a simple, easy-to-use, and impressive web presence. We can fill the gap between cheap templates and expensive freelancers, and by taking the burden of technical maintenance off their shoulders, we can build lasting relationships with our customers.

Performers: Build a portfolio. Showcase your choreography and arrangements. Show off some dance moves. Relive memories.

Everyone else: Think of this as a place to discover all the talent in the neighborhood you never knew about.

The current competitors on the market are Bandpage and Onesheet. Both of them are well-executed, very successful products, but they’re all focusing on professionals, and they only validate the size of the market. And, like About.me, they’re a bit simplistic. We can do better.

Are you a developer, performer, or event planner who would like to get involved? Let us know, leave a message (we won’t publish it).

Chaos Theory is a hip-hop crew which recruits from Princeton’s various dance groups. Started in 2010, the group has since opened for dancers including Kaba Modern, Pacman & Moon (from I.aM.mE crew), and Victor Kim (from Quest Crew). In summer of 2011 I started working with the crew to create a online presence for the group and its members.

Do It Live.

PITCH_Africa builds rainwater harvesting devices for rural Africa, ranging in size from a personal water collection kit to a soccer field that can store 1,000,000 liters of water.

The PITCH_Africa Rainfall Map identifies how suitable locations around the world are for rainwater harvesting using a heatmap generated with D3.js. Click on a country for a breakdown of rainfall and reservoir water levels by month. There are three choices for reservoir size – also try changing the number of people drawing water from the reservoir.

I built this map with Brendan Wright (Princeton ’15) at Random Hacks of Kindness, a Princeton hackathon in Fall of 2011. I made the map portion of the project in D3.js and also managed the overall design. It’s still under active development, and we’re working on algorithms to make the map look better and convey information more precisely.