The Cup that gots you going. Some people like coffee the uninitiated. Some people love it - the converts. And some can't live without - it the high priests. As the company that publishes the paper that south Indians `need' with their morning coffee, in our office, we have a coffee machine that's been hacked to deliver filter coffee rather than instant coffee.

Well, if you were a geek what would you do? You'd do what these guys (http://colmeia.ty/caffeine/) did: hack the office coffee machine to show in real-time, over the Internet, the consumption of coffee, the frequency and the recency of the consumption, etc.

Not only did these guys create a hack to get this information but they also created different visualisations to help focus on and emphasise certain aspects of the consumption data. And they created an API that is available as a download so that you can create more visualistions or mash-ups.

A pity that the API will only read their coffee consumption, but now that you have the idea, you could perhaps write something similar for your coffee consumption and persuade your manager to give your team its own coffee machine.

Of course, make sure that your manger doesn't ban coffee because you are wasting your extra energy on things like this, though!

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