Moving images
A co-worker lent me his slick hard-disk camcorder for the most recent visit to China. I’ve posted a few scenes from the B-grade horror movie known as the Night Market.
See also Night Market Parts Two and Three, a funky physics-defying aquarium/fishbowl hybrid, and this nifty digital book interaction.
Pimp my rat’s nest of cables
Last year during our annual Christmas party the joy ended when our amplifier overheated and shut off. It was one of those record-needle-screeching-to-a-halt moments. I’ve been looking for a solution since then. I didn’t want to have to keep the component cabinet open all the time. For one, it looks bad; for another, an open door is an invitation for my children to practice their ad hoc rewiring skills.
I knew a fan was the key, but desktop fans were too big and loud. It seemed to me that internal PC fans would be perfect: silent, small, and made to cool electronics. Problem was (as I learned the hard way) there is no such thing as a PC fan that is powered from AC from the wall. They all use internal power connectors (duh). So that put the skids on that idea … until I found a G4 in my alley, souped it up, and plopped it in the media center.
The hardest part was obtaining internal power cables long enough to snake out of the Mac and up to the amplifier. Thankfully, case-modders sustain a healthy industry in wacky computer parts. (I was able to find custom length power cables here.) I bought two fans, complete with white LED’s (perfect for illuminating the connectors in the back) and voila! Instant cooldown.
You know, you’re not truly a dork until you post photos of your customized (and LED-bejewelled) hardware.
A stroll through the Night Market in Beijing
America’s Chinatowns have plenty of crittermeat, but they just don’t offer the diversity of skewered (and fried!) insects that you can find in China proper, you know?
I’d advise you to put down that snack you’re munching at your desk and view the full set of yummies!
TSA watchlist, here I come
So I’m packing for my flight to Beijing last night. I decide to wear my running shoes on the flight to Tokyo since I have a five hour layover there and can workout at a nearby gym. I get to the airport this morning and as I’m standing in line at security it hits me. These are my robo-shoes. The shoes I hacked (literally) to include the Nike+iPod pedometer. Not good.
I could see it all happening before my eyes. A vigilant TSA employee sees something odd on my shoe x-ray. He asks me to explain.
“Well, sir, see this thing in my shoe is a transmitter.”
A single eyebrow raises. “Continue.” He presses the silent alarm button.
“You control it from this remote here.”
“OK, can you show me?”
“Sure,” I say pulling out the orthotic insert. “See this is where I drilled a hole in the gel insert to put the transmitter in.”
“Gel, did you say?”
Gulp.
OK so thankfully that was only a vision. But the trickier problem was finding a place in line to take my shoe off, disassemble it, and pop the transmitter out without causing a panic in the line. Hi there, excuse me, sorry to bump you — just fishing a small device out of a hidden compartment in my shoe. Nothing to worry about.
Oh, colored terror alert scale! Is there any limit to the ways you can entertain me?
Threatdown
Amazingly today was the first time I’d flown since the terror plot in London was foiled. Certainly there was plenty of B-grade security theater from the TSA, but I was surprised to consider how all this threat level nonsense may fundamentally change how I travel and, possibly, how I work.
So I packed last night for a two-day overnight trip. Backpack for computer, small rolling bag for clothing. Nothing special. Once in the airport I realized I needed to dump the sanitizing hand gel from my backpack. Still no big deal. My fault for not remembering. Then, as my overnight bag was being scanned it occured to me that I had toothpaste, shaving cream, mouthwash, and other liquids in there that’d need tossing. Instead, I got out of line and checked it. OK, fine, so again I forgot. But that’s the thing. This latest ban basically means no carry-on overnight luggage. Which means no quick on-off of the plane or in-out of airports.
I know, I should have known and packed/checked accordingly. But the point is, this might actually push me to reconsider overnight trips. I’d rather destroy myself with a first-flight-out last-flight-back daytrip than have to wait at baggage claim or, worse, risk losing it because I checked it. And there’s a difference in the amount of work you can get done in one day than in two (or three). All because some idiot terrorists who never would have pulled off their plan succeeded in terrorizing us anyway.
The worst indignity? Well, I was smart enough to know that I could not bring a cup of coffee through security (though many others were pissed to have to dump out their fresh cups). So I bought a cup on the other side of security. Two sips in boarding began and I was told that I needed to dump it. Say what? Dump this coffee in a secure zone? What could I have done to it? Did they suspect the coffee kiosk has doctored the beverage? And if there is concern about liquids past security shouldn’t that problem be tackled at the source, rather than letting travellers buy the beverages in the first place? This is such lunacy.
Can’t wait for my international trip on Saturday.
A conversation between friends
Hey man, thoughts on the Apple announcements today?
A few things …
iTunes 7 is pretty slick, but I am disappointed in the high-end iPod. And I think they are over-thinking/over-engineering the iTV. All it needs to be is an Airport Express with HDMI out.
I thought you wanted my thoughts?
Go on.
The large iPods are nice. Nothing great. I was hoping for 60 and 120GB though.
Apple has purchased the 100GB Toshiba drives. We know this. So I was baffled at the 80GB.
Nanos are nice. Interesting color schemes, though. I think it’s funny that they reverted to the old mini colors. I love how they’re segregating the rich by making them black. Kinda reverse racism.
Yeah, no white anymore. There goes a truckload of color-matched addons. I swear, iPod add-on vendors must swerve between elation and complete horror during these announcements.
iTunes 7 is slick (good word). I like the new “views.” The new iPod management system is nice. I really hope they bought the guy who developed Coverflow out or hired him.
Yeah, I owned that. I should get a credit.
Ah, the site has been updated. Apple bought him out. Good for Apple.
Heh, good for Coverflow Guy.
iTunes 7 “transfers content from computer to (authorized) computer.” I guess they’re finally catching on to this …
No kidding. The gapless playback is a godsend. Have you tried it?
In the webcast Steve said that gapless playback was “encoded into the MP3” which is a flat out lie. I’m a little concerned by that. If you install Linux on the iPod you get gapless playback.
Well, I think it is not a complete lie. I believe iTunes is mucking with the ID3 header, ticking it so that iTunes and the iPod know what song to play right up against the end of the current one.
Hrm, the gap?
I could be wrong. I mean, if they put it in the iTunes XML file that would suck. That’s the reason ratings don’t transfer with the songs. But the jawdropper for me today was a friend who mentioned that iTunes actually analyzes the waveforms of the songs to make sure the transition is flawless. That’s amazing, if true.
I was never a big fan of the gap. I mean, when the pref pane gives you the option of “0” I would expect gapless.
You’d think, yeah. My trusty Audiotron even did that.
I haven’t gotten to iTV yet in the webcast.
Oh man, I am so ready for that. But again, I really wonder what the wait is. This is nothing more than an Airport Express with video out. Give me a break. 1Q2007? What kind of DRM hell are they negotiating on the device-side, I wonder. Why would you even need to?
Overall, a few thoughts. iTunes is becoming a whole new Finder. I mean, it’s almost it’s own operating system.
Interesting. It is fun to watch iTunes mimic the OSX interface and vice versa. And the PC version of iTunes is like a MacOS UI virus infiltrating Windows.
I’m not sure how I feel about the button-up. I kinda like the black turtleneck.
Nice observation.
Once again, the event didn’t live up to the hype. No full-screen iPod, no iPhone. But the iTV was a nice tease.
I think I cried when I saw that the iPod was not full-screen. Can’t recall through the haze of despondency. Good talking to you, Len.
SweatML
Cabel Sasser’s post about the Nike-iPod doodad turning the solitary activity of jogging into a multiplayer compeition got me thinking in general about the way technology has made exercising, if not easier, at least more interesting. And this, as with so many things, has to do with data — specifically what you can do with the data.
Fitness gadgets record all kinds of data: heart rate BPM, distance, speed, even elevation and lat/long if you have a GPS watch. (The new Garmin Forerunner 305 for example is a frankenstein of a cardio computer logging everything you can think of including compensating for GPS reception gaps using a pedometer.) Bike computers produce a whole lot more.
So there’s plenty of raw material and that’s where it gets fun. Sites like We Endure and Nike+ let you log workout data, view charts, and compare against others. The Forerunner (even earlier versions) let’s you race yourself using previous run data in a unintentionally hilarious visual of stickmen chasing each other.
Certain companies, such as IBM, offer physical activity rebates for consistent exercise. This too requires workout data. And that’s the thing. None of the fitness sites are interoperable and none of the data formats are standardized. It is a nightmare of multiple entry. Here’s an example. When I return from a run I pop my iPod into its cradle. Up goes the workout data to Nike+. OK, so I get a nice animation and some basic stats for my run in a totally opaque Flash interface. That data is stuck in Nike for all practical purposes. To track all workouts over time I have to enter data manually at We Endure. Then over to the IBM Wellness for Life vendor site. More manual entry. And then there’s Activtrax for gym workouts — a smorgasboard of manual data entry that talks to nothing else.
You’d think there’d be some effort towards standardization what with the ascendancy of microformats and the relatively high percentage of web geeks who are also cyclists, runners, etc. Maybe I’m missing some real work here. It seems so obviously needed. The place to start might be the geo data that is generated from a workout since there’s more standardization here (GIS, etc.) than elsewhere. Also you have to think that there are medical standards for biometric info (heartrate, etc).
Anybody really into microformats out there? How about hFit?
See also Veen’s entertaining rant Polar Heart Rate Monitors: Gimme my data!
A game called echo
It’s the plight of the comeback musician who’s trying to do more than just cash in on old material. The new music is what motivates the artist personally, but it is the old stuff that fills the clubs and pays the bills. Gary Numan, who you might argue established the bridge between a moribund punk scene and new wave, has been back for about a decade. He’s all goth now — dark and Reznory — and he admits that he doesn’t want to play much but his new music. Yet, his fans still crave the old stuff. Not necessarily the hits (Cars, Are ‘Friends’ Electric?), but classics, the music that made synthesizers cool before a single Flock of Seagulls video ruined it all.
Well, Numan thinks he has a solution. He explains the concept of a classic album “mini-tour”:
For quite some time I have been concerned about those fans, most of whom have been with me for many, many years, that would like to see more older songs played live. As you are aware, my own desires have been to play less older stuff as each new album comes along, especially since ’94 when things got much heavier and darker. I have struggled to come up with a solution. One that enables me to continue to play predominantly newer material at the shows and yet doesn’t seem to be ignoring the wishes of those people that are a, not as interested in the newer stuff or b, do like the newer stuff but would still like to hear more older songs. So this is my first attempt at trying to do something that is some kind of a solution.
I think this is a great idea. Four shows only. Non-reworked versions of the original material from the album Telekon. If you’re a long time fan this clearly will give you palpitations of excitement. If you’re a new fan (and in Numan’s case he really does have a lot of ’em, believe it or not) then this is a chance to dial the wayback machine to the left and hear the roots of his current musical incarnation. Either way the shows are going to sell out. And Numan who “hate[s] nostalgia with a passion” can accommodate his fans without giving up the style that keeps him playing.
My bet is that when Numan finally sits down and tries to get the band to play the songs as they were back in 1979-1980-1981 he’ll learn some things too. Diving back that deeply into an old style might not be nostalgic, but I bet it’ll be enlightening. Like meeting a friend years after a falling-out. Only the next new album will tell.
2.1
Blogchores. Nothing but blogchores on this Labor Day.
Some housekeeping notes:
- The main page has been tidied up a bit.
- Gone is the blogroll (it’s not you, it’s me).
- Search, feed subscriptions, and links to topics by date and by category live only on the archive page now.
- The photo sidebar now shows the five latest Flickr pics rather than a random one.
- The very bottom of the sidebar lists upcoming events, usually conferences I’ll be attending.
- Comments no longer need approval. Taking a gamble on this one, but with spam mostly curbed (thanks to this) it’ll be easier. Wish I could turn trackbacks back on, though. Sigh.
- Post titles in the title bar. I know, I know. Curb your urge to leap skyward in joy.
- Upgrade to Movable Type 3.32. This means virtually nothing to you, the reader, but it makes things a tad easier for me. Support for tags (about time), widgets (basically scriptable includes), and tighter external feed integration (promising but very 1.0) may lead to new functionality later on.
If you’ve made it this far, you clearly care way too much about my blog so … I have a question for you (way down below). You know the marginalia links, yes? Well they are powered by del.icio.us. It couldn’t be easier for me. But there are some drawbacks. The one that most irritates is that apostrophes (single quotes) get stripped out of the feed, presumably by the Javascript required to include it. Escaping the ‘ doesn’t work. Using the numeric code for the ‘ does work but makes the actual entries on del.icio.us and associated RSS look awful. Sucking the feed in using MT’s new feed integration doesn’t include the link notes.
Witness the marginalia, denuded of the single quote (thrice)! Top is del.icio.us, bottom is the sidebar run through the Javascript shucker.
I can’t abide this. Even the loss of one type of punctuation gets my dander up.
As I see it, I have three options.
- Live with the lack of apostrophe, losing my footing on the slippery path that leads to complete punctutaion anarchy.
- Use the del.icio.us blog function that posts recent additions once daily (like this). I don’t like this so much because, well, because it only happens once daily.
- Really drop the hammer by dumping del.icio.us and integrating links as quasi-posts right in the body, all Kottke remaindered links-like. The big advantage here is a more flexible format than linked title + short link-free description. But crap it is a lot of work to implement.
Thoughts?
Month of the monome
Today I packed up the monome music controller to send back to its owner. (You may recall the story of how I got it, here.) What a fun month it has been. The monome was a great excuse to convene friends for experimentation, drinks, and the pleasure of serendipitous music-making (in that order).
Here’s a condensed clip of various sessions over the past month. A magnum opus it ain’t, but it is quality nerdporn that’s for sure.
Craig puts it nicely. Chris shows it nicely.
Thanks for the device, Jesse!
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
