Just My Imagination

How can you make a simple circuit that turns something on when a switch is open, and off when the switch is closed?

Like this!



Diagramming took a few tries:


But I got it in the end, sort of:




Now, how do you make one that doesn't drain the battery the whole time?

There's a lot I miss about the Bay Area. But here are some things I like here in Tempe, AZ.

Rent is reasonable!

Cheap and interesting fabric at Fabric by the Pound.

Places to go mountain biking that I need to check out.

Tempe Yarn and Fiber.

Getting great seats at hockey games at the student discount (last time we were in the first row, up against the glass for 20 bucks!)

Foldable! I'll make a tutorial soon.

Time for Tea! Clock
Instruction Guide

Note: This is not exactly an instructable, it's an installation guide for a birthday gift I made. Thought I'd repost it here. The center tin (see pictures further down) is a working clock with one hand that points to a particular tin of tea appropriate for that time of day.


Step 1: Assemble components.
Includes: 6 metal tins, 1 clock tin, and 7 felt magnets.

If you cannot find the magnets, they are probably in the tin all the other tins are sticking to!


Step 2: Add tea
Add tea of your choice to each tin (not the clock one!). Recommend washing tins first.


Step 3: Grab pile of magnets.


Step 4: Place clock magnet on fridge.


Step 5: Place remaining clock numeral magnets on fridge.


Step 6: Place tea tins on magnets.


Step 7: Place clock tin on center magnet. Rotate tin to set clock to correct hour, if you care about that sort of thing.


Step 8: Identify tea according to time of day.


Step 9: Enjoy a nice cuppa.


Step 10: To replace battery (one AA), carefully wiggle open clock tin.

No the tiny pots of nutella have nothing to do with anything. Sadly.

Wish I'd figured this out ages ago. Every now and then a new application I install on my Mac won't open. It bounces on the dock for a bit when I try to open it and then quits suddenly and without explanation. The trick is to open it from the command line so you can see the message about why it quit. You don't have to know what that is. Just open the application Terminal, and then type in:
/Applications/name_of_app.app/Contents/MacOS/name_of_app
...and it should do the dock-bouncing routine and then tell you something extraordinarily clear and helpful like:
Unable to load nib file: Monitor.nib, exiting
(sigh)
and then you type that into your search engine of choice for much more helpful answers than you were getting when all you could search was "Application X is broken, help!"

Tada! Things work again. :)

I'm sure error messages are stored in a log somewhere if you open a program from the GUI, but I couldn't find it, and this worked.

It's Black Friday in the U.S. today, the first day of big holiday sales. I got up early and went shopping. I bought an external hard drive I'd been waiting on for a while and some clothes. It's the first time I'd been shopping specifically for this event, and I was a bit underwhelmed. Best Buy had a few deals on specific electronics and movies, but most items were just their regular prices...yet the store was very busy at 8 in the morning. Old Navy had some one-day deals but if you looked closely they weren't too different from its regular sale prices. I spent a couple hours looking around and then went off to a hockey game (go Ducks!)

Then I got home and found this on the news.

I want to return everything I bought. This makes me ashamed and sick. I'm grateful for handmade holidays growing up and I'm planning on one this year.

I was kind of excited for the economic crisis to lead to less
consumerism this holiday season, but it seems like people are running
scared and desperate.

Does this kind of stuff happen every year? It's the first time I've
paid attention to Black Friday. I went shopping today and now I feel
ashamed.

I just got back from the Big Scary Thing that was taking up most of my semester, leading a team for the previously mentioned Cluster Challenge competition.

Quick summary is: teams of undergraduates from different universities team up with vendor partners (who give them hardware) and build cluster computers, then optimize open source scientific applications to run on them most effectively. During the competition, the teams get about 45 hours to complete as many application data sets as they can on their machines, then answer questions about their preparation and knowledge of high performance computing.

I very much liked the "feel" of Austin (music and...hippies? in Texas?) although we didn't spend too much time outside. The competition itself was interesting. The way things turned out we were the only new team there (all the others had done it last year, although some of the team members were new). A lot of the work we put in throughout the semester turned out not to help us proportionally in the end, and some things we could have spend a little more time on and it would have gotten us far...like really understanding what the scientific applications did. Overall I think we did rather well considering we were working with a brand-new platform that the applications weren't designed for (the new Windows HPC Server). I feel like the whole process was a good application of the "wisdom of no escape" for me, I learned a whole bunch about hardware, compilers, and working with Windows that I would have had a hard time discovering with independent study. It's funny to think that almost exactly two years ago I had no idea what an operating system was, and after all this I honestly think I'm now capable of putting together my own cluster.

I'm really happy about the team who won (Indiana/Dresden) because they came darn prepared and were the friendliest, most helpful team we talked to.

I feel a bit funny now. I've been catching up on sleep since I got back and trying to figure out what to do next. I have a semester to finish and need to try to catch up on my other classes, but I still feel a bit at a loss now that this is over. It was supposed to be the last thing I did in the field of high performance computing, because I decided last semester that I wasn't as passionate about the area as I would like to be. I need to find a summer internship now, hopefully in something (as my boss would say) I'm relatively passionate about. I'd been waiting to be "free" to choose my next direction for a while, but now that I am I feel a bit lost. I think it's time to go find some inspiration and motivation so I can come up with some action items and maybe take on something new.

I'm off to Austin for a week for the Supercomputing 2008 Cluster Challenge.

We're the Cray and Microsoft team (don't ask!)

I'll write more when I get back, scrambling to get ready at the moment. The boys are packing their XBoxes and I'm bringing a bag of crafty stuff. Nothing like some Gears of War or an intense needlefelting session to destress. Man, nervous and excited.

My aunt sent me this cool but too-big shirt:


I used a Sparkfun shirt from Maker Faire and a silk scarf from the thrift store and made it into a dress:


I stitched down the sides of the shirt to make it more triangle-shaped and used the fabric from the sleeves to make it wide enough to be a skirt. I let the extra stick out as a sort of "tail." I traced a shirt that fit me onto the red Sparkfun shirt, cut off the sleeves, stitched down the sides, and attached two pieces of silk scarf to hold it up (they get tied together at the neck). I made a v-neck by wrapping some thread a few times around a few vertical inches at the middle of the neckline. I attached the top and the skirt to make a reasonably functional dress.

My room is terrifically messy.

Woohoo! Pipe cleaners are conductive, sez my lovely multimeter.
Edit: Gasp! It looks like not only are they conductive, but it appears the manufacturing process that wraps the wires around the fiber is precise enough that the two wires that traverse the pipe cleaner are actually electronically insulated from each other.
"Stress tests" (ie. me bending, twisting, and untwisting one for a while) indicate the wires break sooner than the fibers come out enough to cause the two wires to touch.

I guess I don't have to make my own, but I decided to try anyway.

How to Make Pipe Cleaners

Fold a piece of wire in half. Wrap felt roving (fuzzy bits of wool right before the spinning-into-yarn phase) around half of the wire. Twist the two halves of the wire (the fuzz-covered one and the other one) together until you feel they will hold the fibers on. Use scissors to cut the edges so bits of fiber can stick out. You can vary the thickness across the pipe cleaner for different effects.

My first attempt looks a bit like a shrimp.


Second came out more pipe-cleaner-like.

It's so teeny I had to set up the external monitor so that the cursor switches to the other screen when I drag it up rather than to the side. Awww.

Brilliant little user interface thing on Google's new browser (this may not be a new idea):

Woooooooo!! Victory! :)
I finally got wireless working on my new computer (which, that reminds me, I haven't even reviewed on here yet). I had to replace the wireless card so I could put Linux/Mac OS X on it, and Windows was being silly and not recognizing any of the drivers I downloaded or even the one on the CD that came with the wireless card.
Anyway I'm very happy. I'm not really used to messing with computer hardware, I've only owned Macs and they haven't needed tinkering. Fortunately I waited a while to get this computer and all of the tricky bits I've run into so far have been documented. This is a good thing because these little green chips that keep coming in the mail and need to be plugged in in particular ways are still a total mystery.
(I wonder if English is the only language that makes you repeat words like that "in in" in the sentence above. Ha, there we go again.)

Pictures soon but it's one of those itty-bitty inexpensive computers ("ultra mobile pcs") all these companies have been coming out with lately. It's called the MSI Wind and it's pretty darn cute. They are really hard to get in the U. S., I suppose because the dollar is low and companies aren't really targeting the U. S. market anymore? The one I finally found was what they called the "Love Edition," so my laptop is shimmery white with little hearts on the back, hehe. I feel out of place in my computer science classes. :) Seriously it's the perfect computer, and if I can succeed at making it a Hackintosh I'll be even happier.

Ran into another clever media art installation. It's called Nuage Vert ("Green Cloud") again from We Make Money Not Art. A waste incineration cloud emits colored vapor that changes based on the amount of waste being incinerated, making residents aware of their collective impact.



I recently figured out my apartment complex bills us for water/trash/sewer usage by dividing the total amount per building by the number of residents in that building. There's quite a bit of turnover in the complex, and in general not a very communal feel or many neighbors seen socializing. This makes the incentive to reduce consumption rather low: since we're going to be penalized if our neighbors use a lot of water even if we try to conserve, might as well get our money's worth. I wonder if there's a way to get access to water use data sooner than the total at the end of the month. I wonder if I'd get in trouble for trying to build one of these. :) Only for water it would have to be a fountain, maybe with one of those LED faucets from Thinkgeek.

I had an insight today about different argument styles a friend and I have (actually know a few people like this, so it applies to all of them), and found yet another reason why I can never seem to make a decision.

My friend looks at the general flow and the big picture. He makes careful observations and collects data about the world, and then bases his conclusions on where the evidence points.
He's the court lawyer, looking to establish a viewpoint with overwhelming evidence in his favor.

I look at the logical structure of things. I can't make a final decision on what I think because the nature of logic is that if I have a million pieces of information that seem to say one thing, a new one could change that conclusion completely.
I'm the detective, looking for the tiny piece of evidence that will flip the case on its head.

He gets frustrated with me (all in good fun) for nitpicking at logical inconsistencies and for refusing to be certain about anything. I get frustrated with him for being so obnoxiously sure he is right!

I have learned from him that I get lazy about doing my research because it's impossible to have ALL the data. It's like refusing to sit down because the object to sit on doesn't fit the Platonic Ideal of a Chair. :)

I read about many conceptual technology/media arts installations, and I'm not impressed by a lot of them. This one I liked. It's a little desktop application that plays videos of computer mice being destroyed in rather cruel ways (water, a power drill...). While the video plays, the application takes over your cursor and replicates the cursor movements made by the dying mouse. The movement across the screen becomes the ghost of the mouse, a small preserved final scream. At one point I accidentally clicked on another window while one of the videos was playing, causing it to block my view of the video. Since I didn't have control of the cursor I couldn't get the application screen back, so I was stuck watching the cursor flail wildly while hearing buzzing and crunching sounds coming from the hidden video. Honestly think it added to the effect. If my trackpad ever goes bad, rather than seeming like a mechanical failure it's going to feel like ghostly possession. Perhaps by a mouse I used to own? If it weren't for serious invasiveness issues they should have their application automatically trigger another cursor hijacking a little time after it's first downloaded and played. It would also be interesting to see what it would be like to run the application without forewarning of what it was going to do.

Edit: Oh, right, source. Came across that on "We Make Money Not Art".

My bike got stolen on the first day of school.

Grrrrr!

I guess it balances in the end, I've gotten some new and exciting back to school stuff recently.

Like this! New bag that fits in my bike basket (ok ok irony) so I don't have to carry a heavy backpack. I love it and I even got to pick the fabric, hooray for Etsy (a site for people to sell their own crafts and crafty materials, very worth checking out). Yay for places to buy creative, beautiful, unique things that help people make a living rather than manufactured, chemical-coated, sweatshop-producted crap. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything. :) I don't really understand the appeal of designer clothes/accessories and so forth when (if you're not inclined to make your own) it's possible and even more affordable to customize your own like this.

After a few mishaps in which I discover:

1. Always order spare breakout boards
2. Despite being ROHS-compliant, lead-free solder is a pain
3. I am not very good at soldering

...my RFID board works. Reader and breakout from Sparkfun, cute little tags (sticky black dot on yellow backing in image) from Trossen Robotics, instructions mostly from here.

Yeah my wire color conventions suck, I only had non-stranded wire in yellow and the other stuff turns out to be hard to use in breadboards.

It's still nifty! The LED flashes as long as it's reading a tag. Honestly this is a useless post as I haven't done anything interesting with it yet, but it still feels like magic when something works at all. More soon.

Doodle messaging!

(Sent from phone)