08:30 pm - White Elephants

I think it’s written into the Geneva Convention that every garage sale must include one stationary exercise bike. And every swap meet vendor must have an old inkjet printer. It’s like a prerequisite to participation or something.

06:36 pm - Om nom nom nom

Paying nomage: v. to exhibit respect for someone by giving them food.

02:20 pm - Turdlets

Oh yeah. So Scabrous was invited to a rather unconventional wedding last Sunday at the Maker Faire. That was pretty neat. In prior years I’d wished there was some fitting excuse to have Scab around. And, having done it…65,000 people, no handler*…can definitely say this was among the more retarded ideas I’ve had, and any such impulses are out of my system. For now.

* missmonstermel did wrangle for the first hour or two. After that it was just unmitigated lunacy.

Have I²C stuff working in Linux. No Windows yet.

Also, I hate wikis, especially open source project wikis which tend to suffer from a condition I’ll refer to as “MOAR TEXT!” This is when bulk takes precedence over clarity, and obsolete and even patently wrong passages will be left in-place (and usually before the correct information) for no good reason. Maybe it’s that the original author’s ego is bruised when such passages are removed and they immediately restore them. Maybe it’s other authors’ concern in bruising others’ egos that they don’t want to strip out the incorrect passages when replacing the information. Most likely though…having been and worked alongside programmers for multiple decades, and understanding a bit about what makes many of them tick…I suspect a “MOAR IS BETTAR!!!1!11” attitude among many contributors. If our project has like a billion pages of documentation, it must be that much awesomer! Creeping featurism at its worst.

Hypothetical example:

How to make Foonting Turlingdromes

1. Find a joyful and innocent child with a balloon…and pop it. (If they have candy, take this as well.)


2. Fill sack with kittens and throw in the river.


3. Slap your mammy.


4. Stand in bucket of water. Insert fork into electrical socket.


5. The previous steps are wrong. Under the Application menu, select the item labeled “Foont Turlingdrome” to initiate the foonting process.

08:02 pm - For flipperanubi

Spotted in the parking lot at this past weekend’s Maker Faire:

12:21 am - Actual CNN.com Headline

130-million-year-old poop sells for $960

05:49 pm

Pet Peeve for the Day™: taking someone to a pizza place you consider notable for intricate and sublime flavors, and first they order pepperoni and sausage (basically spiced fat and more spiced fat on top of shredded, molten fat), then when it arrives proceed to angrily wring it out while complaining how greasy it is and berate you for having dreadful taste in pizza joints.

Last time I had sausage pizza that was dry was in middle school.

12:30 pm - Oakland Causes Fatness?

Neighborhood affects diabetes, obesity rates, study shows.

Maybe they have it backwards. It could be that a disproportionately obese and diabetic neighborhood is just naturally conducive to the success of certain types of business. Correlation does not imply causation.

In the future we’ll all eat Nutri-loaf™.

08:05 am

On the value of lolcats.

11:08 pm - Is it just me?

Left: impending development in San Jose, California. Right: Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars.

04:01 pm - Thrift Store Horrors

Spotted this clock at Darth Paul:



The Creation of Adam, abridged edition.

11:22 am - Ego Stroke

Posted a summary of my cheap I2C hack to Instructables late last night, and just a few hours later it’s already had well over a thousand views. Groovy. The writing kind of jumps around a bit, but whatever…there it is. Recoil in horror at my coding style.

And hey, if folks vote for it in Instructables’ robot contest, maybe I can win some crap!

01:21 am - Yeah, I said I’d shelve it for a bit…

…but I lied. Curiosity got the best of me. Now successfully programming and verifying serial EEPROM chips using half a VGA cable. Rock solid.

09:37 am - You Oughtta be in Pixels

Me in the Google Maps Street View

One afternoon last summer when I was out to get a soda or go to Darth Paul or something, I remember this unassuming car coming around the corner with an aluminum and PVC contraption strapped to the roof which I surmised was a panoramic camera. Although there was no signage on the car to indicate its origins, I figured there was a good chance it was from the Google Street View project (though I’d always pictured they’d be in ominous black vans or something), and so maybe once a month or so since then, whenever I happened to be using Google Maps and remembered, I would check that spot and see if Street View maps were available for the area yet. Well, as of this morning, there it is (along with nearly all of the metropolitan bay area)!

And no, I’m not picking my nose or using a cel phone. I was peering over the tops of my sunglasses with a “is that what I think it is?” stare.

This amuses me greatly. Over a quarter century ago, a bit on Nova or some other science program about the Aspen Movie Map is one of the key things that got me fired up about computers, graphics and interaction design. At the scale Google has taken it to, the storage, bandwidth and computational requirements just break my old man brain, and now there I am gawking like a yokel for everyone to see.

12:45 am

(missmonstermel started it. Srsly.)

11:29 pm - Ah, bugger.

Okay, after much banging of head on desk, I think I figured out the problem.

Discovered in the fine print of the Apple developer documentation somewhere that whether or not a user-space application can address the outside I2C bus is entirely optional and at the whim of whomever implements the specific video driver, but with no clear outside indication. It just so happened that the first system I tested this stuff on permitted this (MacBook w/Intel GMA950 graphics) and that initial success led me down a path of irrational exuberance. Same code on the Apple TV, no such luck (NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300). My roommate’s current-generation iMac worked (ATI video), while my prior-generation did not (NVIDIA). Took a while before I noticed the pattern and correlated it with the initial fact.

This still has a great deal of usefulness for some specific things I want to do, and I’ll still write up about it because, c’mon, it’s a pretty funny hack. But the willy-nilly driver support does limit its general utility outside these walls, and I’m a bit bummed that it can’t work on the Apple TV, which really needed a set of mechanized spider legs, y’know?

Need to get caught up on some other projects, but I’ll come back to this later and see if and how the same capability exists in Linux…hopefully more uniformly regardless of the graphics card vendor. It’s the kind of thing that might appeal to the tinkery Linuxy Lego Mindstormsy sort of mindset…it’s just code, wire and cheap sensors then to put together a data-logging weather monitor or things like that. Then you just need a gray beard, suspenders, recumbent bicycle and subscription to Home Power magazine to complete the effect.

02:37 pm - Version 2

02:51 am - Follow-Up to Prior Geekery

Okay, figured out how to access those lines without needing a second screen to be attached. The code needs a lot of cleanup, but basically works. This means I only need one side of the DVI cable as originally planned. Small is good. If I wanted to be exceedingly anal-retentive…I could dissect and do the same to the Mini-DVI adapter directly, so just a tiny little nubbin would be required to interface with the servo controller!

If one’s computer has a full-size DVI port, all that’s required then is the DVI cable ($4.56 from monoprice.com)…but since it’s cut in half, that’s actually enough for two interface cables. So going in with a friend, it’s a mere $2.28 for such an interface! For us poor sods with only a Mini-DVI port, I found the Dynex Mini-DVI to DVI adapter at Best Buy for $16.99. This can be used as-is with the half DVI cable, or cut apart as previously mentioned for maximum smallness. Unfortunately I don’t know of a source for just the Mini-DVI plugs, else I’d be buying a crapload of them right now.

The HDMI breakout cable should hopefully arrive tomorrow, so I’ll be able to try this out on the Apple TV as well.

One slight downside to this implementation is that the resulting I2C bus is “single master,” meaning the computer can poll devices for their state, but there’s no means for the computer to respond to events that originate elsewhere on the bus (“multi master”). A lot of systems work in this manner anyway, so it’s not necessarily a huge downside, just mentioning it to avoid any impression of this being a be-all, do-all I2C interface for all occasions. For things like sensors and servos, it’ll work fine.

02:35 am - Any Port in a Storm

Macs, microcontrollers, embedded systems and assorted hacking. ( This is not an April Fool’s joke. It probably should be, but it isn’t. )

04:46 pm

R.I.P. A.C.C.

10:04 am - For flipperanubi

Because this probably isn’t funny to anyone else: If an iPhone ends up in your butt, it’s because Steve Jobs said that’s where you want it.