hacker class

Makeshift Camera Cover

2009-07-19T09:22:00.001-07:00

Just in case it rains.

I added a camera that keeps an eye out on one of our doors. I didn't have a lot of time but wanted to make sure the camera didn't get destroyed if it rained. Luckily the camera came with everything wrapped up in little plastic bags. I used a couple of those bags to drape behind and in front of the camera. There is enough room for airflow so it shouldn't get too hot. The lens isn't covered so it doesn't obscure the image.

Hopefully this will hold until I have a chance to find a better solution or the wife find it.

The camera caught a snapshot of me attacking it. :-)

SMS Camera Alerts

2009-07-18T09:06:00.001-07:00

As we pulled into the garage early on Friday morning my iPhone chirped the arrival of an SMS. I thought this was odd since it was I don't usually get text messages at 1am.

Silly me, I forgot that I had setup the camera to send me text messages when it detected motion. We've been out of town for most of the summer so I wanted to know if there was any action inside my garage. I was pleasantly surprised when it worked so well. In the photo above, you can see me telling above telling my wife what just happened.

I'm working on a website that will let you do this kind of thing, and a whole lot more. If you're interested in trying it out, go to sensr.net and request alpha access. We're slowly opening the doors to a few alpha users.

Cool Augmented Reality with Pacube

2009-07-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

I've been following Pachube for a while now. They put out this video recently showing how Pachube data could be combined with augmented reality.

Imagine folks walking down the street with those augmented reality glyphs printed on their clothing. If you had the right camera setup, you could check out the data feeds represented by their t-shirts. I see a computer art project in the making....

Rubicon Misadventure

2009-07-03T01:39:00.001-07:00

On our way out on the last day we got stuck behind this rig (above). I didn't have any pictures of it so I didn't include it in my original Rubicon post. The guy pictured above was stuck on Cadillac Hill. He only had 4wd high with no breaks. This is an example of how not to do the Rubicon. His engine (below) was held in with the yellow strap. The engine eventually shifted and the fan started hitting the radiator. Our guys helped jury rig it so it worked a bit. Notice the jack and the newer orange straps holding it together!

The guy was nice enough but he just wasn't nearly prepared enough for the trip. After a couple of hours we were able to get him to a wide spot in the trail so other folks could get by. On the Rubicon you can never be in a hurry.

Rubicon Trail Adventure

2009-06-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

I just got back from five days of 4x4 action on the Rubicon Trail. We had our mobile tribe of Jeeps. The drivers were Jefe, Mark, Brent, Danny, Chris and Tom. I rode along with my cousin Mark in his classic Jeep CJ-8, pictured above. We started at Loon Lake on Thursday and ended with Cadillac Hill on Monday. The first night we camped at Buck Island and the rest of the time we were based at Rubicon Falls.

I met a lot of great folks along the way. Among others, our group included a factory worker with a Star Wars fetish, a university employee with a knack for welding, cryogenics lab (sperm bank) owners, a lawyer, an internet guy, a retired fireman, a Jeep and bicycle mechanic, a structural engineer, and a classical musician.

Offroading seems to have it's own vocabulary. Here are a few terms I learned along the way:

rig: another term for your vehicle. "Nice rig, is that an '82 CJ?"
flop: when a rig turns on it's side. "Get the wench, Brent had a flop."
break: some kind of failure or breakdown. "Sherman had a break. Good thing Mark was nearby with his welder."
stocker: someone driving a unmodified (stock) jeep. "Those stockers don't know what they're in for."
lockers: device to lock your differential so the wheels spin together.
open diff: an unlocked differential. "He couldn't make it over the rock because of the open diff."
comfort shovel: shovel used when you need to do your business in the woods.
Jethro: a hick or hillbilly type of person. Usually broken down in front of a group of rigs trying to make their way along the trail. "That Jetrhro is using a strap to hold his engine in."

The scenery is amazing and the challenges of getting vehicles through the trail keeps it interesting. There is driving skill involved but there's also an element of camaraderie that goes along with it. You need to be prepared, but you can't bring everything with you, so it's important to have a group of folks. When someone has a break or a flop, the group pulls together to help them out.

All in all we had a great time. I'm thinking I might just need to start looking around for my own Jeep.

Video of Mark making his way down Million Dollar Hill.

Brent and his flop near Buck Island. Thankfully no one was hurt.

It seems orange was the official Beguelin color for the day.

Ibis on Flume

2009-06-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

First ride of the season.

Update: I took this shot yesterday on my way up. The weather was moody and I was glad I wore my warm biking shirt. I started at the home and made it to the Flume trail in about 70 minutes which is a good reference. Perhaps I can improve on that time over the season.

On the way back, around 4:15 p.m. it started to spit rain. Not enough to pull out the jacket, but it was close. Overall it was a great ride. I love the new Ibis. I found myself aiming for rocks just to try to test out the ride. On the way back down Tunnel Road I caught air a few times. Nice!

GitHub: You Know, For Code

2009-06-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've been working with git, the source code control system, for about a year now. There are things I love about git and things I hate about it. Using GitHub is one of the things I love about it. Git was designed to work for very large distributed projects and teams. Building a social coding site around it makes a lot of sense.

I'm sure I'll post more on Git later. But for now I would recommend you check out GitHub if you're looking to learn more about the new hotness in source code control. You can see my public projects here: http://github.com/adamb

Does My Brain Look Fat?

2009-05-26T17:08:00.001-07:00

In this strange article they are trying to get at the size limit for human brains, assuming brains were cooled like computer chips. Human brains are about 1.5 kg while the study points out that the thermal limits for mammalian brains (cooled like computer chips) are about 5 kg. They then point out that sperm whales have brains in the 9 kg range. Great, another thing to envy about sperm whales.

I guess the real take away is that mammalian brains are not cooled like computer chips. That explains the lack of ungainly heat sinks sticking out of our skulls. Probably a good thing, although it could make for a more interesting hat industry.

1 Rule for Weight Loss

2009-05-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

I just saw this annoying advertisement. I don't know what they're selling, but here's the rule that really works: eat less and exercise.

The trick is getting yourself to follow that rule. In a previous blog post I shared what works for me. Skip the colon flush and just find a way to keep your intake less than the number of calories that you burn and you'll loose weight.

Transfer Big Files

2009-05-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

My brother the playwright is working on some new songs and wanted to send them to me. (Such a nice guy!) Of course they were too big to send in email. I found a site called Transfer Big Files and it worked like a charm. No registration required. No weird software to download. Just fill in a form with an email address and upload your files. They make money from advertisements.

Sweet and simple.

Rattle Snake Again

2009-05-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

We saw this rattle snake today while mountain biking. This is the second time Tony and I have seen rattle snakes at Waterdog. At least we didn't run over it.

Click the image above for the full size version.

Twitter Circa 1935

2009-05-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

Just thought this was funny.

locate and updatedb on CentOS

2009-05-08T09:38:00.001-07:00

If you have a CentOS 5.x box and locate doesn't work. Try this:


sudo yum install mlocate
sudo /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

The first line will install the locate and updatedb commands. It will also setup a cron job to re-index your disk once a day. The second line runs that cron job immediately, so you can start using the locate command right away.

Now you can easily find files on your system. Just use the locate command.


$ locate mlocate.cron
/etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron
$ locate updatedb
/etc/updatedb.conf
/usr/bin/updatedb
/usr/share/man/man5/updatedb.conf.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/updatedb.8.gz

Thanks to my friend Peter Stephan for educating me on the locate command. I don't know how I got along without it.

Enjoy!

Ibis Mojo

2009-04-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

Looks like I won a Mojo in a raffle for the benefit of Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship. Mountain biking is one of my favorite activities. My buddy Tony has been making fun of my bikes lately, so now he'll be the one with the old bike!

Note the mismatched logos I'm wearing. The Truveo fleece and the Yahoo hat don't really go together. Truveo is an AOL company. My brother-in-law Chris gave me the hat, that's my excuse!

Thanks to Ibis for donating the bike! Thanks to Nica for organizing the trail days, and Passion Trail Bikes for such a great newsletter.

Funky Camera

2009-04-13T22:23:00.001-07:00

Here's a clever network camera, the Digital Window D7, that captures a bunch of different views at once. According to the Times article the images are stitched together and streamed as one. They call this technique Scallop Imaging. I call it clever.

This is a great alternative to fish eye cameras or PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom). I can understand that PTZ would be an issue if it's not pointed where you want it. Fish eye distortion is ugly. It seems to me that the fish eye problem could be taken care of in software though. I would imagine that removing the distortion wouldn't be that difficult. (Maybe less difficult than stitching together 5 images in real time.)

I've been playing around with network cameras and this one looks like a winner. Of course at $800 it's a bit pricey. You could buy more than 8 decent network cameras for that price. Of course you would have to deal with a jungle of wires and mounting all the cameras would be a nightmare. (Even the WiFi cameras need power cables, at least until we get that wireless power working well.) The photo shows an Ethernet jack on the bottom. The data sheet says it supports Power of Ethernet and H.264. I want one.

Thanks to CAK for pointing this out to me.

Tesla Model S Ride

2009-04-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

Just got a ride in the Model S prototype at the Menlo Park store.
Spacious and zippy. Can't wait for production. Thanks Zak!

Noisebridge

2009-04-07T06:35:00.001-07:00

Fun with circuits at the hacker space in SF.

Agile Development, Hitler's Build

2009-04-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

If you've ever worked on a software development team, you should find this entertaining. At Inktomi we used to hang a cute stuffed pink fuzzy pig above the cube of the developer who broke the build. This was a much more gentle reminder than a Hitler rant, but effective none the less.

Yes on S

2009-03-26T23:08:00.001-07:00

We liked it so much we decided to buy one. We're on the Signature 1000 list now. Dang, that's a sweet ride. Can't wait to get it. Good luck Tesla. Make it so.

New Tesla Model S

2009-03-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

Elon next to the S.

syslog for your body

2009-03-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

I ran across this interesting post. Basically the point is that we don't really have any good monitoring for our bodies. Wouldn't it be cool if we had some devices that could monitor a bunch of health related stats and report them to some centralized dashboard? In Unix there is a system called syslog, where significant events get logged. It would be cool to have something like this for our bodies.

I wonder how difficult it would be to design a small sensor that you could swallow each morning like a vitamin. This sensor could dump stats when ever it's connected. Maybe it could be WiFi enabled, so you would just need to walk through a WiFi hot spot during the day to get your latest stats.

Wattvision and The Others

2009-03-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Wattvision presented at YC Demo Day. They did a great job presenting the company, which provides a device for monitoring your home electric usage in real time. They have a device that attaches to your electric meter and optically reads it, sending back data through the internet so you can graph it in real time.

I was particularly interested in Wattvision because I've been trying to find a solution like this for a while. There are a few options out there. Here's what I've found so far:

The PowerCost Monitor from Blueline Innovations also uses an optical sensor but it reports back to a device in the home, so it's not internet enabled but has the same ease of installation as the Wattvision solution. Similar sensor to Wattvision, but closed system.

The Energy Detective (aka TED) from Energy, Inc. is a hard wired solution. You open up your circuit breaker box and put a couple clamps on the incoming power lines to monitor the electricity. The sensor then reports back to a display unit (like PowerCost) or a USB doohickey that plugs into your computer. This this is better than the PowerCost solution as you can get the data into your computer. However, you have to buy extra software from Energy, Inc. that only runs on Mac or Windows. (No linux support.) It would be much better if they opened up the protocol so anyone could use it. I'm sure it could be reverse engineered, but they should just support something like Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) and/or Pachube. Compared to TED, the Wattvision solution is better in that it connects directly to your WiFi.

In England there is a device called the Current Cost meter. The Current Cost solution has a single clamp rather than two smaller clamps like the PowerCost meter. See a picture of the clamp below. Presumably, this solution won't work in the US because of the differences in the electrical systems. It seems to have quite a hacker following in the UK, which should be a clue for the US vendors. Open your systems and you'll have a much better chance of success. Hopefully the Wattvision folks will take a more open approach. The fact that they're using WiFi and the Internet are good indicators that they may be more open than their competitors.

Front Door Camera

2009-03-18T16:51:00.001-07:00

Our neighbor had a rude awakening this week. Some burglars started breaking into his house while he was asleep. Luckily they ran away when he came to the door.

I've had a security camera on the font door for a while. I figured I should do some testing to make sure it was still working. Here's a shot of me sitting on the front steps looking at a picture of me, sitting on the front steps.

There are a lot of cool things you can do with these cameras. More on that later....

ZigBee Internet Gateway

2009-03-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Rob Faludi of ITP is working on a ZigBee internet gateway. See his original post here. This is a great solution for getting those XBee widgets onto the net. I've been wanting something like this for a while. I would like to use it so I can create little XBee sensor devices and have them report back to a server on the net, maybe Pachube.

Adruino and Ultrasonic Sensor

2009-03-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

In this video they have hooked up a motion sensor and are using the inputs to drive a display. The computer reads the motion inputs and then simulates the grass movement as if the motion was actually moving the grass. Very clever.