Just My Imagination

It is strange to me that there are many digital picture frames that cost more than some laptops.

Curses! I thought I was very clever this morning for describing DIYers/Makers as "citizen engineers" (as opposed to the citizen scientist movement). The name turns out to be all over the place.

Here are my favorite sneaky travel habits. I forget how useful they are because they're so simple and I do them without thinking now, but they are pretty darn helpful.

-Print a 1-page street map with the place you are staying marked, and including the surrounding neighborhood. Print another page of driving directions from the airport to where you're staying. Doesn't matter if you're not actually driving or not taking that route, having both on the map helps give you a general idea of where you are. So far this has worked super well for me. When arriving at a new place I tend to just get on a bus headed the direction I'm going and see what happens. Most of the time this works and is a great adventure. I get lost sometimes (embarrassingly enough, the last time I can remember was in San Francisco ie. across a bridge from where I grew up) but it's a reasonable tradeoff in my opinion. When I went up to Seattle a couple weeks ago, taking the bus rather than a taxi led me to discover one of the best lunches I've had in my entire life. It was just a tucked-away cafe near the Bellingham transit station but the food was astounding. I think this was it.

-If staying at a youth hostel (only because I do this a lot), bring a shower mat/floor towel. You can grab a super cheap one at IKEA. Totally beats hopping around on one foot on a wet tile floor while you try to dry your feet and get socks on, or drying your feet on the same soggy towel countless other visitors have dried theirs on. Completely worth the small space it takes up in your luggage. Also: flip flops, a lock, and a laundry bag. But those are more obvious.

On another note, I just came back from CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) 2009. It's funny, these conferences and events that are all about the things I'm most excited about and full of people who are also excited about those things are awesome, but completely burn me out on the subjects for a couple days. I felt the same about Maker Faire last year: I was incredibly thrilled to go and to be there and to see everything, but after a couple days I really was done. Now that I'm back and have slept for a couple of days I am back to being stoked that I went and ready for more work.

Life is full of small and lovely pleasures. I am eating tomatoes with sesame-ginger dressing, and the sesame seeds blend in perfectly with the tomato seeds.

I'm the treasurer/fundraiser/inventor of fun ways to spend money/graphic designer for my university's Linux User Group. I just had some hats made for this semester's "Installfest" and I think they came out pretty well. :)
I really want to learn how to use an embroidery machine.

No "reed" per se, just magnets, but it works nicely.
Actual prototype currently inaccessible, will put a picture up when I get home.

Here is the only picture I took in Seattle (well, Redmond rather):

Snow! :)

Stumbled across this by accident, not sure how new it is but it is AWESOME. Beautifully simple idea for surveys/forms that cuts out all the middle layers. It lets you make a form for people to fill out and puts the collected data right into a Google spreadsheet.

Like this.

You can even fill it out right in your email.

Yo.

I'm using the Skype4Java API to write a Java program that talks to my Arduino board and controls Skype accordingly. Will explain why as soon as I have pictures to post.

This:
com.skype.NotAttachedException

means you need to sign into Skype.

*phew.*

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.