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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Fri, 20 Jan 2012Basically since getting back from all the end-of-year holiday madness, I've been trying to buy a Kobo Touch e-reader. I was initially all set to buy one from Kobo itself, but discovered that they charged tax on top of shipping when you buy it from their website. I'm not opposed to paying sales tax necessarily, but it feels silly to pay sales tax and shipping on an online purchase without a pretty good reason. I figured there had to be a cheaper way. So, I hit up Amazon, of all places. There I found a used Touch from what looked like a reputable company, for $105, with $4 shipping. Ok, that's a deal I can get behind. I placed the order and waited. What arrived was a Kobo Wifi, which I'm pretty sure is an entirely different model. I contacted them the same day and got a return authorization -- the Wifi model would have been acceptable if I just wanted an e-reader, but for a variety of reasons, I had my heart set on a Touch. Fortunately, they were easy to deal with, immediately apologized for their incorrect listing, and I moved on. What I would have preferred was to buy a used one. This comes from both price and resource-wastage perspectives. On the one hand, $150 is more than having one of these things is worth to me (the new price from Kobo including tax and shipping). On the other hand, buying a used one means one less thing headed for the landfill. So, I hit up Ebay. What I found was a lot of people selling this thing for $140-200. Now, it costs $129 from Kobo, at least that's the listed price. You can also run down to your favorite Target or Best Buy and get one for the same price. I'm not sure why Ebay sellers think people are excited about paying more than full price, but there it is. I looked around, until I found one that was available for the surprisingly (suspiciously) good price of $85. At this point, I should mention that Kobo sells two models: the Kobo Touch, and the Kobo Touch with Offers. The difference is, like the Kindle, you can get one with or without advertisements, and you have to pay more to avoid ads. I personally abhor advertisements, so I was uninterested in the "with Offers" model. Without thinking too hard about it, I ordered the $85 one from Ebay, through a seller who had a lot of them he was selling off for a charity. It occurred to me about 20 minutes after I'd placed the order (I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to check this before hitting the button) that it was too good a deal, and I'd probably ordered a "with Offers" model. I double-checked, and indeed. Fortunately, it was so shortly after ordering it that I was able to cancel, to the consternation of the seller, who didn't understand why I was so unhappy. They had listed the item as a "Kobo Touch." No mention of Offers. Although when I double-checked the model number they listed, the results that came back were overwhelmingly "with Offers." So, lesson learned, thought I. Suspiciously good deals are suspicious. I looked around some more, and found one for $115, which made no mention of Offers, and the model number checked out: N905-KBO-B. If you look that up, you'll see a page of full-price Kobo Touch readers. Awesome, thought I, and pressed the go button. It was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but I figured I was avoiding the scourge of Offers. That one finally showed up, and I happily unpacked it, and started playing with it. All good, fun device, well built, etc. That evening, I sat down to get it registered, as apparently you can't use the wifi feature without registering it. That finished up, and I had a twinge of unhappiness as I saw the Recommended for You list that had suddenly appared on the home screen. That was ok, though, there was a way to turn it off, and just show books you already own. I was mostly hopeful to use this device to read PDFs of scripts, and to read classic novels, which are freely available via Project Gutenbert and Archive.org, so that worked out fine. However, I turned it off, and what should appear on the screen, but an advertisement! It was supposed to show the cover of the book I was reading. Nonplussed, I called up Kobo customer support, and talked with a sympathetic young woman, who explained to me that unfortunately the Recommended for You section was non-negotiable, and received my (polite but plain) ire with aplomb, and promised to forward my complaints to the development team. Key point that I missed in that phone call, due to the rage and whatnot: she was talking about the recommended titles list. She didn't once mention advertisements on screensavers. So I reloaded the thing to factory firmware, and determined that I would simply live without wifi, but I was pissed. I wrote a scathing journal entry (next one down from this, which I've since removed as being incorrect and unfair), and contacted a couple of websites about this: Kobo was forcing advertisements (the key differentiator between the $100 and the $130 model) on people who'd paid the extra fee to avoid ads! If it had been true, I believe it would have been the downfall of the company -- you can't steal 30 bucks from thousands of customers and laughingly tell them to suck it up. However, as my glowing resentment slowly cooled, I started to get hints, possibly delivered via sledgehammer, that I had been too hasty. Finally another call to Kobo delivered the true result: I'd purchased a "with Offers" model, without knowing it. There is no indication anywhere on the box that this was a "with Offers" model. There was no indication in the model number (which had been different, in the $85 listing). It was only by combining the information from call #3 to Kobo that my model was "affiliated with Target" with the Target website (where the only black-colored model like mine I could find was the ad-supported version for $99, with, damningly, the exact same model number as the full-price versions in different colors) that I finally got the hint that was confirmed in call #4. Fortunately, my ire is fungible, and was immediately redirected on the Ebay seller, who finally agreed to a full refund under threat of negative feedback (and what would have been an equally scathing diatribe here). I'm sending that thing back today, ads and all, and they're welcome to it. $115 for a $99 device doesn't sound like a particularly good deal to me, even if I decided to live without wifi. So, what is this lesson I've learned? One I already knew, of course, but have to re-demonstrate to myself every once in a while: people are deceitful bastards, and will cheat you any way they can, particularly when it's via an anonymous, faceless transaction on Ebay. I found lots and lots of "Kobo Touch" listings, and not one of them included the words "with Offers." Care to wager how many of them were actually the ad-free, full-price model? Me neither. Posted at 09:16 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 17 Jan 2012I've removed my post on this, in which I incorrectly assumed that Kobo was forcing screensaver ads upon non-ad-supported readers. After working with Kobo to figure out what the problem is, it turns out that I was duped by a false Ebay listing. I apologize to Kobo for my harsh words, they were unwarranted given the full facts in the case. Posted at 20:24 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 13 Jan 2012I am ridiculously pleased at this moment.
The new printed circuit board works perfectly! Well, very close, and close enough that I could slap this thing into a case and call it done! Initial smoke testing (apply power, see if anything goes foom) came back negative, no smoke in evidence. Swapping the ATMega chips around proved to be more troublesome than I'd expected, but careful perseverence paid off. At first, the LCD wouldn't display anything, and I had this overwhelming moment of, "Oh jeez, where do I even start?" I don't have an oscilloscope any more, so I was limited to a multimeter for testing. Fortunately, the first thing I tested ended up being the problem. The LCD's RW line (read-write? something like that) was at +5v, when it should have been at ground. I checked the layout, and, sure enough, that was the second LCD pin that I had incorrectly routed to power instead of ground. I clipped the wire, jumpered it temporarily to ground, and voila everything worked! Final tally: two mistakes total, and both of those easily worked around. Not bad for my first-ever PCB design! I've already corrected both pins on the 1.1 version of the design (which will also include an ICSP header). I'm also pondering how this thing is going to get cased, and thinking about going with a premade case for simplicity's sake. That would also mean that anyone else who wanted to build the project would have one less step involved. Overall, obviously I'm completely pleased. I didn't expect this thing to work right out of the box (to the extent that it does). Aside from two jumpers on the LCD, it's working exactly like I thought it would. When does that happen? One interesting factor that's pretty surprising is the power consumption. I figured this board would be pulling down 100-150 mA, but even at full backlight, it's only drawing 40 mA at 7-15VDC in. There must be some power-hungry component on my cobbled-together system that's not present in this board (the USB chip is the only thing I can think of), but whatever it is, it's great news! At 40 mA (call it 50 for a bit of safety-factor), a set of 3AA batteries would theoretically power this thing for 50 hours! (Not really, of course -- once the voltage drops below about 4.3, it'd probably stop working.) Any vehicle's electrical system will take this load without even noticing it. Just shy of .03 watts! That's not a typo; point-zero-three. I can't wait to get this thing in a case, although that is a completely different challenge, and one which is roughly commensurate with making the electronics in the first place, depending on how I go about it. I'm just amazed that it works, and so pleased I can call it "good enough," and move on to the next phase! Posted at 22:11 permanent link category: /gadgets Thu, 12 Jan 2012
The Penultimate in ADI Progress
After a fairly annoying day, I came home with a freshly-printed transparency of the top paste layer for the ADI board -- that is, what would soon become my solder stencil. I'm using solder paste on this project, and this allows me to apply it in a single swipe. The advice from Sparkfun on creating a solder paste stencil is that you send out your stencil files, and have a production house do it. They also say, several different ways, that this is nowhere near the critical step you might think it is -- in other words, that close is good enough. I took that advice to heart, and decided that I would give it a try in the most homebrewed way possible. I opened up the circuit board in Eagle, and selected only the tPaste layer to view. I printed this out, onto a standard laser jet transparency that I picked up at an office supply store. The box claims that it's a 5.3 mil thick sheet. When I got home, transparency and new X-acto knife in hand, I very carefully cut just inside the tPaste lines (and only cutting out a smaller square in the middle of the CR2032's minus pad). This resulted in a somewhat amateurish, but serviceable-looking stencil. Granted, I wouldn't want to do this for hundreds of SMT devices, but for my three devices, it wasn't bad. After that, I just swiped away with the paste (also from Sparkfun) and a utility razor blade. Voila! I did it twice, rejecting the first one as being a bit too messy on the BMP085, which has miniscule pads. The second attempt wasn't any better, so I just very carefully separated the adjoining solder paste blobs with the razor knife, and called it good enough. I borrowed a hotplate from a friend who's treaded this path before me, in order to do the heating. The idea (as documented by Sparkfun here) is that you apply the paste, drop your components in place, then stick the whole mess on a hotplate or skillet. You heat it up until the solder liquifies, then you pull it off and let it cool down. That is, more or less, what I did. I had checked beforehand with my handy IR thermometer, and found that this particular hotplate had a hotter spot in one area, so I determined that I would stick my board there. I cranked that sucker up to HIGH, dropped the board on the hotspot, and watched it carefully. Within about a minute, all the solder had gone liquid, and I pulled it off.
I actually think the heat was up too high (the plate itself got up over 320°C), as the board got a little scorched-looking on the bottom. I think it could have been set to a lower temperature and still done the job just fine. But scorching aside, the board looked great, and testing revealed no solder bridges on the BMP085, which was my only real concern. The downside to this approach is that I now had a handful of components stuck to the board, and any real chance of doing a phased installation, with intermittent smoke checks, was gone. So I stuffed the whole board and soldered it all up. It looks great, but I haven't taken the final step of applying 7-30 VDC to the input terminal to see what goes foom.
In documenting the LCD connector, I did discover that I made one mistake: the pin 12 connection should be to ground, not to +5v. It's easy to work around, just don't attach a wire from pin 12 to the LCD, but it's a little silly. That fix will go into the next version. My next step is to take my fate firmly by the horns, apply power, and see where the smoke escapes. For now, I think I'm going to go to bed while I can still ride the good feeling of making progress, without the disappointment of destroying components. Leave that for another day. Posted at 23:59 permanent link category: /gadgets Sat, 07 Jan 2012Once again, I'm reminded of the amazing opportunities I get when taking pictures at theatrical events. From 14/48:
Posted at 13:47 permanent link category: /theater Wed, 04 Jan 2012I finally had some time this evening to sit down with my new ADI board and see if everything actually fit (it looked like it did on paper, but you can never tell for sure).
It actually all looks really good, with only one exception -- the potentiometer in the upper right hand corner doesn't fit into its space very well, the holes for the leads are a bit too skinny. I can make it work for the first version, and be perfectly happy with it, but I'll tweak that on the next version (which I've already started modifying, and will include an ICSP header above the processor, in that blank space toward the LCD connector). Now I'm just waiting on getting a hotplate to do the surface mount parts (which I'm hoping to document for the ADI page). Well, I still have to confirm all the connections with a continuity tester, but I don't expect any problems there. I may be only a day or two from having a working one-board ADI! Update: Three things, actually. First, by straightening out the legs of the potentiometer, it slid right in, so no changes required there. Secondly, out of curiosity, I piled all the parts onto the balance to see what they weighed. Including too-long leads on most of the components, and a paper package around my 2032 battery (but no solder), the entire ADI weighs a mere 71 grams. Of course, a case and some wire is still required, but that's pretty light. Finally, I did a quick sanity-check of the connections on the board, and they all look good. I still have to do a proper checklist, but things are looking very positive for this board actually working like I want it to. Posted at 20:16 permanent link category: /gadgets Tue, 03 Jan 2012I knew this day was coming: the PCB has arrived! Only I was in for a surprise when I opened the package:
I ordered one, but I got two! Woot! Double woot! I guess they must have been shy a few square inches, so they doubled up at least my order, probably a few others too. BatchPCB aggregates a bunch of small designs into one big board, which is the size preferred by the fabrication house. I guess mine was the right size to fit into an otherwise to-be-wasted space. Hooray! I know how I'll be spending my evening... Posted at 13:55 permanent link category: /gadgets Fri, 30 Dec 2011I had a headshot extravapalooza (I'm quite sure this is a real word) a few weeks ago, and I finally had the right confluence of time and energy to develop a few of the shots tonight. I did most of the headshots on the DSLR, but brought along the 5x7, since I need the practice. Here's the sneak preview shot of the first four negatives I developed:
Posted at 00:30 permanent link category: /photography Thu, 29 Dec 2011I'm pondering getting a new bike in the near future, which means I'm also looking around at new accessories. Recently, that's been bike computers.
My two current bikes have Sigma Sport computers on them, largely because I had good success with the Sigma Sport I installed on my motorcycles many moons ago. The Sigmas are pretty basic, with two lines of information and one of "title," telling you what the second line is showing. As far as display goes, this is great. No information overload, just your current speed and something else. Unfortunately, the "something else" I want to see 99% of the time is the clock. This is unfortunate because with the BC800 (pictured above) or the BC905 (which works about the same way), in order to see the clock, you have to hit the mode button 4 or 5 times, depending on the model. So every time I get on the bike, I have to cycle through a bunch of crap I don't want to see. This gets old. In addition, the 24h vs 12h format for the clock is tied to whether the speed is displayed in metric or US units. Whuh? I guess they... saved a menu item there? So I set the speed units to metric and use my math powers to have the speed displayed in US units (despite the little KPH icon), because I'm a nerd, and prefer my time in 24h format. So, I started looking around at other computers. Approximately one million and one years ago, I had a CatEyeMate computer, which was the size of a charcoal briquette, and might have shown current speed and maybe an odometer. I was terribly proud of it, but I was also 12, and would have been proud of damn near anything electronic and cool I could strap to my handlebars. But I decided now, 1,000,001 years later, to check back with Cateye.
Over the Christmas break, I found myself in an REI store, and perusing the bike section. I spotted this little number, and was actually kind of excited. Wireless! Small! Calorie count! CO2 offset! Neat! It's a Cateye Urban, and it's very nearly the right thing. The reason I say it's nearly right, is I found this shortly afterward:
This is the Cateye Commuter. Even better than the Urban, it always shows the time, and even shows temperature! Cool! Then I read the reviews: to do a bunch of basic things with it (which you'd normally do with the computer on the bike), you have to dismount it to get to the four switches recessed into the back of the thing. There's one switch you can hit while the device is mounted to the bike, and it only covers about half the functions you want to do. Not so cool. A bold and worthy concept, but poorly executed. And that kind of left me scratching my head. The ideas shown in the Commuter (clock always displayed, temperature readout) are compelling, and now I don't want to go without them, but the Commuter is clearly not the right thing (and anyway, it's $70, vs. the $15-30 range I'd previously been looking at -- I'm not honestly sure why it costs so much). There are other computers out there, but they all have weird weaknesses, like buttons that can't be operated with gloves on (WTF, yo?), wireless systems that aren't very reliable, etc. I really don't need anything fancy, but I really want it to work well for me. So, I have been formulating Ian's Manifesto of Bike Computer Goodness:
Honestly, about half of these things are complete and total no-brainers. Non-volatile memory, for instance. This seems to be complete anathema to bike computer makers, but it would not materially change the cost of their devices to include a dozen bytes of EEPROM memory. Get with the 1970s, guys. Instead, I get to lose my odometer every time the battery goes south (often without any warning, despite the "weak battery warning systems" theoretically in place). And the wake-up mode thing. Do bikers really want to always see their trip odometer every time they start rolling? Is that really the most important thing, or is it the most convenient thing for the programmers? Feels like lazy programming to me -- you're already maintaining memory registers for a bunch of stuff, use up another byte to store the current display mode. Of course, I haven't had much experience with non-Sigma brands, so perhaps I've just been using the wrong brand all this time. Further research will see. It's fun to research stuff like this, although it's frustrating as I realize the extent to which these manufacturers are not interested in the commuter market. Apparently all bikers (or at least those who buy computers) are training for the Olympics. Kudos to Cateye for the nod to utility riders, but maybe hire a new UI guy next time. Posted at 01:01 permanent link category: /bicycle Fri, 16 Dec 2011
The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Or, How Apple Cost Me a Week)
If, like me, you prefer the Apple OS to the Microsoft OS, you might also be a super-duper Unix nerd like me. That means that you're going to install Mac Ports, and then you're going to beef up Lion's stock of Unix commands. One of the commands I use a lot is Having installed Mac Ports, you just type in But what's this? My install failed halfway through. I tried invoking Ports on the specific package that failed, but no luck. That package, as it happens, is one called pkgconfig. I had never heard of this program before, but there's a lot of software that just comes on a computer that I've never heard of. Now, I should say at this point that I'm using a new computer (thanks, employer!), with a brand new, fresh install of Lion on it. This is not an upgrade from Snow Leopard (10.6). I think that caused all the ensuing trouble. So, pkg-config (as the program itself is called, no idea why Ports calls it pkgconfig) repeatedly failed to build. I went and tried to build it manually, and came across the following bit of beauty:
Ok, so, what does that mean? Well, it references this line in the
So what? I hear you saying. Well, so this: $PKG_CONFIG should be set to the path of the pkg-config binary. In my case, it was set to "false," since apparently Apple decided that pkg-config didn't belong on their fancy new OS. There's a test command three lines back that should have taken care of this little problem for me, but for whatever reason, it didn't. The
That is, check to see if pkg-config exists, and if it does, go on to use it to set some variables. If it doesn't issue a warning that -- wait for it -- pkg-config isn't installed! Now, follow along with me here: I'm trying to install pkg-config, and pkg-config is complaining that it can't find pkg-config. Or, as I put it on Facebook, in a fit of concise frustration: Wassup dawg, I herd you like installing software, so I made it so you have to install the software before you can install the software I, of course, had no clue how to set GLIB_CFLAGS or GLIB_LIBS --
it's been ages since I've actively dabbled in open source software
builds, and I have far more important things to do, which my employer
is paying me to do. They are not paying me to debug someone's faulty
Long story slightly shorter, I found and downloaded the previous verison of pkg-config (0.25, in my case), configured it, built it, and installed it with no problems. The 0.26 version, as I discovered with a ridiculous amount of digging, suffers this problem I ran into in a variety of situations, and the developers respond with scorn to the idea that the problem might exist. No mention was made of the problem in 0.25, so I gave it a try, and it worked a treat. So, with my slightly out of date version of pkg-config installed, I was suddenly and miraculously able to install pkg-config. My installation of ImageMagick continued, and I went on to other, less fixable gripes about Lion (they took away Spaces and replaced it with the gratingly inferior Mission Control -- I know how to manage my virtual desktops, Apple; been doing it since you were a moribund company making shitty Mac SE knock-offs that ran a 5 years out of date operating system). All told, this move from 10.6 to 10.7 has caused me a bunch of grief, and no particular joy. I don't care about any of the new features. Unfortunately, in the computer game, you can't simply squat on an old version and hope to remain victorious. The world moves on, and happily leaves you behind. Running as fast as I can... Posted at 10:12 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 12 Dec 2011
Well... Huh. I Guess That Didn't Work.
I recently re-trued the rear wheel on my commuter bike, as I'd noticed it was a bit wobbly. I looked down the other day to see that the wobble was back, and worse, so I put the bike up on the stand tonight to fix whatever was wrong, and mount the snow tires (it's been getting frosty every night). Either those spokes were way tighter than I thought, or I got kind of a crappy rim. I'm actually going to vote a bit from column A, and a bit from column B. I guess the commuter's out of commission until I rebuild that wheel.
Posted at 22:23 permanent link category: /bicycle Thu, 08 Dec 2011Progress indeed! I just uploaded my first PCB design to BatchPCB, and $27 later, I should be getting a shiny new PCB in the mail in about a month. I updated the ADI page with the new circuit board layout files, and this puts me on hiatus until some time in January, when I'll get to experiment with surface-mount soldering and other such fun things. Who knows, the board might even work as expected! (I'm not holding my breath for that to be the case.) I suppose in the mean time, I can work on things like the Construction Guide, or updating the web page to be a bit more useful and less "Hey, look at me talk a lot!" Posted at 11:27 permanent link category: /gadgets Wed, 30 Nov 2011Things have not all been quiet on the Air Data Instrument front, although I haven't mentioned any of my progress here. Well, I change that now! It's not done yet. But it's getting much closer. I decided a few months back that I wanted to come up with a printed circuit board of my own, to make a much more compact version of the ADI. The whole "stick a bunch of breakout boards together" method is fine, but it's kind of bulky, and suffers from some pretty obvious weaknesses when it comes time to package it all up. I've finally (I hope) come up with a schematic and a PCB design that I think will work. I've ordered all the parts I need to finish a couple of ADI boards (so I have spares for when I release the magic smoke -- I have no plans to offer anything but documents to anyone else). Next step is, once the parts arrive, to print out a copy of this board at life size and place all the parts to see what interferes, what doesn't line up, etc. Then, if it all looks lovely, I can send the PCB design off to be fabbed, and if it comes back functional, I can confidently publish it as being finished, which would elicit a huge "Woot!" from me. Of course, that leaves the whole "putting a case around it" problem, but that's an issue for a different day. For now, I'm content to say, "Oooh, pretty PCB."
Posted at 08:56 permanent link category: /gadgets I've spent some time considering how to scan negatives. I have a bunch of old 35mm negatives, but much more importantly, I'm generating new 5x7 negatives. I have access to a scanner, but it's at work, and sometimes I really want to see how things turned out sooner than that. So, I've explored various ways of "scanning" negatives with what I have on hand. And what I always have on hand is a digital camera of some variety. The problem is lighting the negative. I've got a piece of white plexiglas I can use at home, and I eventually broke down and bought a very small light table a while back, so I'm pretty well set. However, over Thanksgiving, I was at my parents' house, and I was not well set. We were going through old boxes of photos, and found some 120 size negatives of my grandfather that we wanted to see properly. I had a camera, but I didn't have any of my diffusing materials. It only took a few minutes to come up with what I thought was a particularly good use of improvised materials: plastic bags. We located a smooth, white plastic bag, cut it up into a single layer, and taped it to the window (it was still daytime). Then we taped the negative on top of that (careful to apply tape to the smooth side of the film, not the emulsion side). I set my G11 to "macro" mode (mostly for the decreased focal distance), and took a few pictures. I had my netbook with me, which has a copy of The GIMP on it, and used that to invert the image, and adjust the levels and curves to come up with a nice-looking photo:
Et voila, there you have it! A pretty decent reproduction of a negative from 1956, using just a digital camera and a white plastic bag. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Posted at 08:36 permanent link category: /photography Tue, 22 Nov 2011Every once in a while (perhaps every year or so) I find myself in a situation where I want to hand out a business card, or something like it. A card with my contact information on it. I have some business cards through my work, but I don't usually meet people outside of my company, and no one trades business cards internally. Anyway, those cards are from about 10 years ago, and I didn't have a cellphone at the time (just a pager). So I decided to look into getting some more current cards. I came across moo.com, and about $25 later, I have some cards that are much more like me than some generic cards from my employer:
As I said on Facebook, "Now with beauty on the back." I stand by that. Posted at 18:07 permanent link category: /misc Thu, 17 Nov 2011With a bit of scanning and tweaking, I give you the Contrasy Negative:
This was shot at Hurricane Ridge in May 2011. In order to get this picture, I found myself standing on the side of the road as rain pelted my umbrella, which was carefully held to cover myself and the (wooden) camera. I was also, as is normal, juggling the light meter, focusing loupe, dark cloth, cable release, film carrier, dark slide, and focusing and re-focusing. Even so, the dark slide (which is what keeps the film from being exposed in the carrier before it's in the camera) was stiff to pull out, and I think that in struggling with it, I managed to bump the camera out of focus. As a result (although it's hard to see at this resolution), there is not actually a single element in this photo which is in focus. Still, it's a cool photo, and at small resolutions (the opposite of why 5x7 photos are neat), I quite like it. I'll take it as a learning experience, though, and also take it as a hint to retire that film holder. Posted at 08:56 permanent link category: /photography Wed, 16 Nov 2011My history with gadgets is long and varied. I've owned pocket-size computers for as long as I reasonably could, starting with the venerable HP 200 LX, which I purchased in early 1995. This tiny (for its time) wonder (for its time) ran DOS and sported a CGA screen, running for 20 hours on a set of AA batteries. It had a set of built-in apps which, if not perfect, were at least pretty good. And it had a full (including numeric pad) keyboard, which was quite typeable. I actually still have that wee beastie sitting in a box in the basement, but the lack of a backlight keeps me from seriously considering it anymore. I graduated to a Compaq iPaq running Linux (deep, deep nerd), then to a Palm Tungsten T5, and finally, after many years of holding out, to an iPhone 3GS. Now, I find myself in possession of a Motorola Droid X, which was the white-hot coolest smartphone in the world for about three weeks in late 2010. Up until the iPhone, none of my pocket computers (which I have variously called "Palmtops," "PDAs," and "smart phones") were particularly connected. The iPaq came closest, with a backpack that doubled its sleek, curved volume and would take a full-size PCMCIA card, including a wifi card. But really, I never had a connection until the iPhone. And, as things have progressed, the first really "cloud-enabled" device I've had has been the Droid. The problem, for me, is that "the cloud" is a term which is roughly synonymous with "blind trust in people who have no vested interest in your privacy." Granted, the data connection to the Internet is paid for, but the services of Google's cloud are, only in the most tenuous way possible, tied to any sort of financial transaction. Thus, Google's interest in my privacy is largely academic, or at least reputational. So, I have been unhappy about the idea of putting my data into "the cloud." Some of it, sure. Facebook, whatever. I don't put anything I actually care about there -- what goes up here (which is imported into the cloud) and there (which is the cloud, and with a decidedly antagonistic view toward your and my privacy) is, more or less, fluff. I do have data I care about, though. Obviously financial data, social security numbers and the like, sure. But I care about my schedule. It does a couple of things: first, it tells me where I need/want to be, so reliability is high on my list. Second, it tells anyone who cares to look at it exactly where I am to be found, and when. Without engaging full-on paranoia mode, there's a lot of value to certain other people in such data. For instance, people who are interested in liberating you from whatever material possessions you might not be actively guarding at a given moment. I'm sure there are many other more-or-less-frightening uses for someone's schedule. So it was with a great deal of trepidation (as I wrote about before) that I started using the Droid X, with its inherently cloud-based everything. I refused, in fact, to use the calendar, instead buying a classy paper calendar book to carry around for my personal use. But I wasn't happy with that. I don't want to carry around extra crap. So I was very pleased when the calendar silently upgraded itself to suddenly include a "phone" storage option for the calendar. This was several months ago. I gleefully ditched the paper calendar, and shoved all my temporal data into the phone's little memory banks. For a few months, all was good with this little world. My schedule was safely under my control, and unlike a paper calendar, the phone would actually make little beeping noises at me to remind me of things I'd scheduled for myself. But you can see where this is going. A few weeks ago, for no apparent reason, the alarms stopped feepling and jingling. Then they'd go off 23 minutes after the event had started (and not the 15 or 30 minutes before that I'd requested). Sometimes they didn't go off at all. It got to be very discouraging. Then, tonight, I went to look up plans around Christmas, and discovered that, to my horror, events I'd placed in September were showing up (sometimes having moved, sometimes having been duplicated) in December. You may recall that I said earlier that reliability is one of my watchwords. If I put an event in the calendar, it damn well better stay there. And you know, until this Android wheeze, it did. The iPhone, the Palm, the iPaq running Linux, the 80186-based HP 200LX, they all kept my schedule exactly as I'd entered it. Without fail. It wasn't always pretty, I didn't always love the interface, but the data was always there. Well, without belaboring the point any further, Google has failed me. They may be striving to do no evil, but neglect is about as bad, as far as I'm concerned. The paper calendar came out tonight, and I'll be transferring everything that may or may not be correctly recorded in the phone's little scattered memory banks, and acquiring a fresh 2012 calendar on the morrow. I'm no longer interested in being subject to Google's whims, evil or not. Posted at 21:34 permanent link category: /gadgets Mon, 14 Nov 2011I finally got my lazy butt back into the darkroom to finish processing the remaining pictures from Hurricane Ridge. I only took them in May, after all. What's a few months' wait? They're still drying, but I was so excited to see actual contrast in one of my negatives that I just couldn't wait to share it. This is definitely one of the weirder ways to present 5x7 negatives, but I give you the Sneak Preview (Of Sorts):
Posted at 23:37 permanent link category: /photography Tue, 08 Nov 2011
An Argument in Favor of the Metric System
Ok, so you're sitting around with your friends, right, and bragging about this and that, and you let drop, "Just the other day, I was doing 100 down the freeway!" Your friends gasp in awe at this preternatural feat of speedliness. 100! Wow! Of course, you have snookered them, for you were using the metric system! 100 km/h is about 62 mph.
You're filling out your online supervillain profile, and you get to the "height" section: 185, RAAAAAR! Fear me and my toweringness! Centimeters, of course (about 6'1"). But a hundred and eighty five of them! Holy crap!
Or look at the reverse kind of situation. You're filling out your online dating profile, and the site very inappropriately has a "weight" item for you to fill out. You casually fill in "100," which is of course true. 100 kg. You know, about 220 lbs. Doesn't it sound better in metric?
And imagine how much less your electricity bill will be when you can set the thermostat to 20° instead of 68°! That's a whole 48° less! And the thermostat monitor (every house has one) will smile their beatific smile and say, "Oh, what the heck -- let's crank that sucker up to 21!" And again, snookered! Each Celsius degree is worth almost two Fahrenheit degrees.
As for the rest of that crap, Joules and Pascals and whatever else, who cares? Scientists are the only ones who care about that stuff, and they're already working in metric anyway. Don't you owe it to yourself to be taller, thinner, faster and warmer! Go metric! Posted at 16:42 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 07 Nov 2011A friend just pointed out the following video series to me: Machine Shop 1 10 videos, each about 40 minutes long. The machinist nerd in me is giggling in silly anticipation. Go MIT! Posted at 17:20 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
