Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the “Max Kaehn” journal:| ⇐ Previous 20 entries |
13:46 ※ It was about time I got a new laptop...
My old laptop, a Dell Latitude L400, was getting out of date: the fans were noisy, the boot time slow, the processor (a Pentium III Coppermine) had trouble keeping up with Flash video, and it only had 256MB RAM. So I decided to upgrade, and there was a sale at Dell on the Inspiron 1210 (“mini 12”), which looked like an adequate balance between “lightweight” and “reasonably large screen”, and I don’t really need serious horsepower in a laptop. Since they had recently added an option to buy it with Ubuntu Linux and avoid the Microsoft tax, I did so.
It showed up quickly enough (ordered on Monday, arrived on Saturday), and is quiet and lightweight. (They saved space on the keyboard by making the some of the punctuation keys half the normal width, including commonly used keys like comma, period, and slash; tricky to get used to.) Initially, the Ubuntu install seemed crippled: there was only Dell’s own custom launcher, and no Ubuntu menu (unlike the documentation in the box said there would be); the menu only appeared when the system started up with a hardwired network connection. (There’s also a hidden 32MB partition running DOS and some Dell custom stuff, and a hidden 2GB partition with a syslinux setup, presumably to restore the main partition.) Suspend does work, and leaves the power light fading on and off to show it’s not powered down entirely. It was only running Hardy Heron, though, and I wanted Intrepid Ibex anyway, so I set out on the odyssey of figuring out how to install from USB (since the system has no CD-ROM drive).
( Cut to avoid giving my mother a migraine )Bottom line: Ubuntu still isn’t ready to just shove onto a memory stick and use to initialize a laptop. I’ve started a thread at Ubuntu Forums for this, so hopefully I can save someone else the work.
Current Mood:  productive |
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| Tags: tech ⁎ | |
14:51 ※ My current morning workout
A few Sundays ago, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
obsessivewoman encouraged me to camp out in the early morning to pick up a Wii Balance Board and Wii Fit. (Went to my local Best Buy with a good book, got their at 8:30 and there were already half a dozen people ahead of me in line. More people trickled in after a while, and the line was around the corner by the time the employees came out at 10:30 and handed us tickets. The store opened at 11:00 and people came in to ransack their entire supply of 28 Wiis and 27 Wii Fits.)
Wii Fit is a very different experience from yourself!fitness and Eyetoy: Kinetic. The other games give you an entire workout, with warmup, exercises, and cooldown; you can exercise a bit of control over what you’re getting at the beginning, but once you’ve started, you’re committed to it. Wii Fit is more the buffet style of exercise: it gives you a collection of four categories of exercise (yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance), and exercises that last from 1–3 minutes (which you can gradually increase up to 10 minutes as you continue to play the game and unlock more exercises and extended play). It’s up to you to handle your own warmup and cooldown. I usually start with yoga until I feel like I’ve limbered up everything I’ll be using in the aerobics exercises.
The buffet style is very good at getting the “just one more turn” syndrome to make you apply your gaming addiction to exercise. Every exercise has a score, even the yoga (which is usually grading you on how well you kept your balance through a pose). Do you want to go back and try again to better your score? Or that of someone else who’s been using your Wii and has their name on the high score list?
The yoga and strength exercises are correlated, so if I do Warrior in yoga, it’ll suggest I do Lunges in strength to match. Doing workouts in one category will tend to open up new options in others; when you start Wii Fit, it only has about a dozen exercises, but over a couple of weeks it’s easy to get it to make most of them available. The aerobics have a good variety as well: a couple of hula hoop games, a couple of running games, a couple of stepping games, and a rhythm boxing one that uses the Wiimote and nunchuk.
The place where it really shines is the balance games, which put the most fun into the gameplay. They’re just minigames, but they’re still a good deal of fun, with things like a ski slalom, a “tilt the board to drop balls through a hole” game, and even a whimsical one where you tilt an iceberg to make a penguin slide around catching fish. There are plenty of Balance Board games in development, and We Ski is already available.
It also encourages you to weigh in every day and take a balance test to see how well you’re doing, and it calculates your “Wii Fit Age” based on how well you do in the balance tests. I recommend doing this after a few yoga exercises and a balance game, but before doing the aerobics; this gets your brain into the mode of controlling a Wii Balance Board, but your muscles haven’t gotten tired yet.
Current Mood:  tired |
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| Tags: computer games ⁎, doin' the darwin dance ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
13:13 ※ Do you think any journalists will have the guts?
The Daily Show are quite good at digging up politicians’ past statements and contrasting them with more recent ones, which is great after-the-public-appearance theater. But what if it were possible to do this on the scene to make them eat their words? Video iPod + Pico Projector = Schadenfreude Pie!Current Mood:  amused |
Current Music: Alan Parsons - A Valid Path | |
| Tags: future trends ⁎, hold your nose and vote ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
14:07 ※ Social networking or creepy Internet stalkerbot?
I just got invited to a social network called Spock, which is a Web 2.0-ish thing where you can establish links to people and tag them with various qualities, which people can vote on as relevant or not. In addition to doing this in a participatory manner, it also happens automatically as their search engine trawls the Net— even if you didn’t create a profile there already. You folks might want to check there and see what the “Spock Robot” has tagged you with...Current Mood:  cautious |
Current Music: Deep Forest | |
| Tags: tech ⁎ | ||
19:05 ※ Burning calories while avoiding boredom
Being Slothman means being easily bored by repetition. This is an advantage for recognizing places to make software more efficient, but makes it challenging to find an exercise routine that captures my attention— and being lazy doesn’t burn many calories. Aikido is great when my schedule permits, but sinceobsessivewoman needs to get to bed early and get up early, being out until 8 in the evening doesn’t work well for having much time together during the week. I tried yourself!fitness for a while, which was pretty good, but a workout video that changes the routine daily is still just a workout video. My latest routine has been EyeToy: Kinetic. This is a workout game for the Playstation 2 that uses the EyeToy, which is a USB-based camera that plugs into the PS2’s front panel. EyeToy games recognize motion and map it onto the screen, where you can interact with virtual objects. In the case of EyeToy: Kinetic, it has three kinds of games that give you a workout: cardio, combat, and “mind and body”. Cardio games last ten minutes and keep you moving around, dodging some objects and touching others. Combat games last three minutes and require more intense strikes and ducking, and can be exhausting. “Mind and body” games work more on balance and smooth motion, and are the only ones that don’t leave me drenched in sweat.
It also has some modes that put three windows on the screen, one showing the EyeToy view and two showing different angles on your virtual trainer demonstrating the exercises you should be doing; these are not interactive. The system always puts you through warmup and cooldown sequences from this repertoire, and it also has ones for working out your upper body, lower body, and abdominals, and some yoga, tai chi, and meditation sequences as well.
The nice thing about the workout is that live interaction is much more engaging than just trying to match up with a virtual trainer on screen. (It also grades you on your performance, A–F, as a source of motivation.) The EyeToy isn’t very smart about image motion recognition, though; it can’t distinguish between your own motion, that of your shadow, or of a ceiling fan in the background. It needs fairly high contrast, too; I changed my workout outfit to a white shirt and light grey sweatpants so I’ll stand out against most of the background of the living room, but wear a black biking glove on my right hand to stand out against the white wall. Direct sunlight will completely white it out; during early morning workouts, I need to put a black banner in front of the peaked window in my east wall. (That was a fairly cheap solution involving PVC pipe, a couple of yards of duckcloth, and a hot melt glue gun.)
Overall, I’d say it’s good value for $45 (including the game disc and the EyeToy camera). It runs just fine on the PS3 as well.
| Current Mood: tired |
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| Tags: computer games ⁎, doin' the darwin dance ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
00:00 ※ Hi, I’m Max, and I’m a book addict.
My darlingobsessivewoman got me a handy piece of software called ReaderWare for my last birthday, which can use a CueCat bar code scanner to identify books, music, and videos. In a fit of getting organized, I used it to catalogue my CD collection and my video collection. With those lesser tasks accomplished, I turned to cataloguing all the books in Maine Coon Manor. Turns out that the two of us have accumulated over 6,000 of them.
Last year, hypothermya introduced me to a rather interesting Web 2.0 site called LibraryThing. I had a go at entering a few books, but I just didn’t have the stomach for the daunting task of entering it all by hand. After getting my 3000+ works of fiction into the ReaderWare database, though, I checked back at LibraryThing, and discovered that they have a bulk upload feature that takes ISBNs. So I dumped the whole database up there.
ISBNs are not entirely unique identifiers, so it’s necessary to go over these things with a fine tooth comb. I’ve also been collecting relevant hyperlinks such as author home pages, weblogs, and wikipedia pages, though those are only in my ReaderWare database as there’s no useful way to put them on LibraryThing as yet. And I’ve finally finished my first pass through my fiction section, and I think I have at least 99% of the books in the house now in the database. (Next thing to do is to start tagging all the works that have won or been finalists for various awards.)
You can look at my LibraryThing profile, see the linear catalogue, or try the author cloud or tag cloud as alternative ways of navigating the collection. Feedback from my manga-literate friends on the manga collection is particularly welcome; I’ve been going by Wikipedia’s notions of shōnen and shōjo, but would appreciate the insight of the connoisseurs. obsessivewoman’s collection is mostly tagged cookbook and mystery; she hasn’t had as much time to get into the detailed tagging as I have.
Current Mood:  sleepy |
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| Tags: better moat and castle ⁎, books ⁎, connecting to me ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
17:55 ※ The best of disinfectants
The Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs project are working on some nifty technology to make it easy to stay informed about what our elected officials are up to; check out Popup Politicians. Open the Future (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
openthefuture) thinks they’ll have versions linking to sites like They Rule and Exxon Secrets soon.
| Current Mood: interested |
Current Music: Shakta - The Enlightened Ape |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: hold your nose and vote ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
11:35 ※ Who resurrected the electric car?
A recent article in Wired discusses the recent creation from Tesla Motors: a $100,000 all-electric sportscar called the Tesla Roadster. At those prices, it’s a status symbol: “My penis is large and environmentally friendly!” The really interesting part is the underlying technology: the expensive R&D is all done by established technology companies investing in making better batteries for laptops and cellphones. Tesla Motors is just spinning off the fruits of that R&D into electric cars, and developing the expertise in that narrow field. And they think they might have a reasonably-priced electric sedan in 2008.| Current Mood: interested |
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| Tags: car ⁎, future trends ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
11:44 ※ Mmmm... game tech...
The Bodypad is a game controller that works by strapping sensors onto your elbows and knees to determine your body movement, and holding a pair of handles for hand movement. It’s mostly used for fighting, dance, and sport games. It just recognizes arm and leg movements and pulling triggers on the handles, and movements on each side can be mapped to the four action buttons on a standard game controller; this means you can hook up leg movements to “kick” and arm movements to “punch”, but you can’t make your left leg control the onscreen character delivering a left-legged kick unless that’s a separate button in the game. There’s a directional pad on the left handle for movement and L1-L2-R1-R2 on the right handle, but no equivalent of the analog sticks. It’s only around $70, including shipping.Now, something that can recognize things like crouching, ducking, leaning, turning, and jumping would be really interesting, as that would let me play games like Ratchet & Clank using relevant body motions, but that’s probably a little ways off. Question for video gamers out there: do any fighting games for the Playstation 2 have an interesting storyline (more than just “I must defeat a bunch of enemies in a tournament so I get the prize I want to save my family/the world/etc.”) that would draw someone into a fighting game?
| Current Mood: curious |
Current Music: Synaesthesia - Desideratum |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: computer games ⁎, doin' the darwin dance ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
17:28 ※ A reputation management startup
RapLeaf are setting up a reputation management service for general commerce. I’ve syndicated their blog at rapleaf.
| Current Mood: interested |
Current Music: Steve Roach - On This Planet |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: connecting to me ⁎, future trends ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
13:50 ※ A strong America needs the dirigible!
divertimento, I thought you’d like this article in this month’s Wired about the Dynalifter, which is a hybrid of a blimp and fixed-wing aircraft. Not as stately as a dirigible, but it doesn’t need a docking tower, and it’s a lot more efficient on fuel.
| Current Mood: pleased |
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| Tags: nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
12:37 ※ Interesting bit of biofeedback technology
(Discovered this in IEEE Spectrum.) The StressEraser is a specialized biofeedback device that monitors the activity of your vagus nerve by its effects on your pulse rate. It’s down to $299 from the $399 reported in the article, but that’s still a bit pricy. I’m curious as to how the use of this widget relates to traditional meditation techniques...| Current Mood: curious |
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| Tags: nifty ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
21:28 ※ Taking control of a TiVo...
( TiVo hackery )| Current Mood: accomplished |
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| Tags: tech ⁎, video ⁎ | |
23:47 ※ Personal Aura Networking?
Just caught up on The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly, and found an interesting story: NTT have a “RedTacton” technology that induces tiny fluctuations in the body’s natural electric field. They claim they can get 10 megabits per second, which is as good as most home Ethernets today.This could be handy: just wave your hand over a sensor and the server in your pocket acts as keyring and unlocks a door for you. That’s even better than the skin-based data transmission, which is much slower and less hygienic when used by crowds. (I’m expecting telecommuting to take off in a big way when the next pandemic hits.)
It’ll also be good for “personal area networking” (or “personal aura networking”, as I’m sure this will be dubbed). Right now, if you want to have all your devices talk to each other, you’re pretty much stuck with Bluetooth, which means interference with everyone else’s favorite use of unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum: Wi-Fi, cordless phones, you name it. This will be more difficult to eavesdrop on (like with the BlueSniper), and less likely to suffer interference. It also means that devices will be able to specialize: you can wear something that’s just storage and a little data display on your wrist, and your headphones can talk to it for playing music, your phone can talk to it for getting addresses, and your headphones can talk to the phone when you talk. (But expect a very rocky start as the protocols all get shaken out.)
Other things to expect: high-tech pickpockets will specialize in getting close enough to people to try and hack any devices in their body network, or subtle devices will be planted at chokepoints to do the same to passersby. Demonstrations of ad-hoc packet switched networks across tightly packed crowds on dance floors will get about as much media attention and last about as long as flash mobs did.
| Current Mood: intrigued |
Current Music: Angel Tears - The Dreaming |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: future trends ⁎, nifty ⁎, science! ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
11:48 ※
The Etherkiller and Friends is a fine demonstration of intimidating technology. trogula, I think you’ll like these...
| Current Mood: amused |
Current Music: Steve Roach - Quiet Music | |
| Tags: tech ⁎, wild weird world ⁎ | ||
18:26 ※ Grrr...
Windows supports a file system concept called “extended attributes”. The basic idea is quite reasonable: any application can attach data to a file without modifying the file itself (as long as it has permission to meddle with extended attributes). Each application can add its own special data without interfering with other applications. Not all file systems support this: NTFS does, FAT32 doesn’t.At the driver level, you receive perfectly reasonable-looking requests with codes like IRP_MJ_QUERY_EA and IRP_MJ_SET_EA to manipulate them, or get them passed in at file creation time. Update: The kernel does have NtQueryEaFile() and NtSetEaFile() as undocumented APIs.
At the user level, if you want to write a reliable, runs-everywhere application, you get at them through the backup API. If you’re on a sufficiently advanced version of Windows and you know that the file system implements EAs as “streams” (a special feature of NTFS), you can use the new stream control API to manipulate EAs. But nowhere is there a straightforward way to manipulate these things the way they’re designed to be used. It’s like a filing cabinet where you have to remove the entire drawer in order to use it, even though you know perfectly well you should be able to grab the individual folders.
| LOATHE |
| Their developers are smoking advanced experimental prototype monkey crack again. |
Current Mood:  horrified |
Current Music: Tangerine Dream | |
| Tags: computers suck ⁎, microsoft windows hatred status ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
10:21 ※ A game I'd like to see
So while using responDESIGN’s yourself!fitness, it occurred to me that it would be entertaining to create a version of the game using characters, settings, and music from the Ratchet & Clank games. The main thing to add to get the Ratchet & Clank feel would be to have multiple characters on the mat doing the exercises, occasional banter between them, and the camera work to support it. (It’d be entertaining to see a Lombax do yoga... and even more entertaining to watch Captain Qwark collapse in a heap during the endurance parts.) Insomniac Games’ FAQ says “For legal reasons we are not allowed to take ideas or suggestions from outside the company. (We can't even read them, actually.) As a developer, taking ideas isn't really what we do. A publisher is who you would want to talk to.” Anyone know the most effective way to suggest a Helga!fitness partnership without causing them to ignore the idea due to potential legal entanglements? All I want is the game... I couldn’t care less about any rights going with this (rather obvious) idea.Current Mood:  creative |
Current Music: Kaya Project - Walking Through | |
| Tags: computer games ⁎, doin' the darwin dance ⁎, nifty ⁎, tech ⁎, where's my venture capital? ⁎ | ||
23:45 ※ So I've been playing with social networking protocols...
LiveJournal is already set up for FOAF (see the![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
ljfoaf community for more details); I’ve also started meddling with XFN as well. These are both ways of describing relationships between people on the Net. The information in these protocols is pretty much the same as you’d get if you looked at my User Info page, but in a machine-readable format. This is all part of the Semantic Web project for encoding knowledge (rather than just data) into the Web.
For example, my XFN profile allows me to list weregamer as a friend, as a colleague, and as someone I’ve met in the flesh. An application following that link could conclude that I’m willing to vouch for weregamer being a real person.
Let me know if you don’t want it to be easy for machines to figure out that we’re friends; I can easily take you out of my FOAF-knows group on LJ. All this does is facilitate hyperlinking; any personal information exposed is up to what you put in your own profile.
| Current Mood: busy |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: connecting to me ⁎, tech ⁎ | |
16:25 ※ It's all very clear to me now
I now know why people write Windows viruses. I was briefly marveling at how often how-to guides by people studying ways to write viruses turn up on search results when I’m looking at driver-writing topics (e.g. Ring0 under WinNT/2k/XP and Rootkit) when I suddenly experienced a moment of clarity: these people are hurting, and they’re just responding to the horror of wrapping their brains around the internals of 32-bit Windows. Writing a fast-propagating worm that brings corporate networks to their knees is just a cry for help.Current Mood:  insightful |
Current Music: Delerium - Poem | |
| Tags: computers suck ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
16:06 ※ Yet more incompetence from Microsoft
So in an effort to cut down on buggy drivers crashing Windows, Microsoft have created test suites to hammer on drivers to help shake out bugs. This is a good idea. One of the first things the DC2 utility does, though, is call ZwQueryObject() to obtain ObjectNameInformation about your driver. Where did I find documentation about this function? Not in MSDN. Not in the documentation for the Windows DDK and IFS kit. I wound up finding a web site called— I kid you not— undocumented.ntinternals.net. They even have all their information in a handy CHM-formatted file. Why are Microsoft mentioning the result of this in their test code if they’re not going to document the API by which you can make your code pass the test?| Current Mood: annoyed |
Current Music: Delerium - Karma |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: computers suck ⁎, tech ⁎ | ||
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