Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

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Getting Back Your Lost Camera

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

This is not only a great idea, it could be a real hoot putting it together!

A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss

Have you lost your camera recently? Mislaid it somewhere in a national park? Left it in a taxi? Dropped it in the gorilla pit? Anyone can be a victim of the thoughtlessness and/or sleepiness that can lead to Camera Loss…

Of course it’s not sure-fire, but it at least gives you a better chance of getting back a lost camera than the ordinary assortment of anonymous images normally found on a camera.

All kinds of clever things come to mind for a little slideshow on my camera… The only problem I’d foresee is having to change my practice of letting iPhoto remove the photos from the card when it’s done importing them. But I can change.

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Pick A Resolution, Any Resolution!

Monday, January 4th, 2010

This is kinda fun…

res_generator

For those (like me) who have so much that needs improvement, they don’t know where to start.

It’s funny that that resolution came up (after several clicks on the “GIMME MORE” button), because I had already started this post about resolving to add to my blog more often/regularly. I’ve got a backlog of about 40 or so draft posts waiting to be finished & published (even after weeding through them a few weeks back), plus a number of others that I’ve got in my head and collected supporting files, links & images on my drive for… After giving this issue some thought, it seems that I get stuck most often because I’m trying to be too thorough in what I assemble for a post. Maybe I need to think of this blog as more of a step above a Tweet or a Facebook Status post than any kind of journalistic endeavor, because a journalist I am not.

If I check Google Analytics or Sitemeter to see what brings people to my site, it’s usually for the somewhat random stuff I’ve posted about in the past, like the Citroen 2CV Rat Rod that I know next to nothing about, or fixing the instrument cluster on the Plymouth van we no longer own, or wiring the trailer lights on our Ford Freestar van. A few people jump here directly, but lately more people are interested in how I painted my BMW with a roller than what I think about the latest political development… I don’t expect this blog to ever be anything more than just a hobby for me, so it really shouldn’t matter whether people hit my site directly or via a search engine. If I spend several hours composing a post in order to share my two cents’ worth on a given topic, it really doesn’t do much more than get it off my chest. So maybe in the big scheme of things — in blogging anyway — less is more.

So, I’m off to get a cup of coffee to tip my cup to this new resolution, and to get me past my post-lunch slump. Cheers!

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Posted in About This Site, Fun!, Geek | Comments Closed

Cool Flash Presentation — International Space Station

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

space_station

Somebody posted a link to this interactive Flash graphic on the USA Today website that shows the growth of the International Space Station since the first piece was put in orbit in 1998. I knew pieces had been sent up and added to the station over the years, but I had no idea it had become that big. Amazing!

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Robots in the Cowshed

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

A couple of years ago my sister-in-law met and married a Dutch dairy farmer; around here that wouldn’t be much of a feat because there are plenty of Dutch dairy farmers in Northwest Iowa… but they now live on the farm in Holland! Keeping up with family means Skype and long airline rides are pretty much the norm. They made the trip back for a holiday visit a couple of weeks ago, and had some fun showing off (via photos & video anyway) the new toys they installed in the dairy barn; two milking robots.

astronaut-3

The robots were designed & built by Lely, a Dutch farm equipment manufacturer. And they truly are robots; aside from routine maintenance, they require no human intervention to milk the cows. They and the cows just hum along, day and night, and in the process milk production is bumped up by a decent amount, which allows the dairyman to increase the size of the herd and focus on other details of running the farm. They really are pretty amazing:

  • The cows are trained to walk into the machines when they feel the need to be milked (on average, 2.8 times a day)
  • RFID tags allow the machine to recognize individual cows as they enter.
  • A portion of feed is dispensed that is custom blended to meet that particular individual’s nutritional needs.
  • The robot cleans the udder & teats,
  • It then uses a laser tracking system to locate the individual teats and attaches a suction device to each and begins milking.
  • When finished, it detaches from the cow and turns her loose from the stall.
  • The robot then cleans the suction devices and prepares for the next cow.
  • As the milk is drawn, the quantity tracked, and the chemical composition is analyzed to diagnose potential health problems in the cow.
  • If the analysis shows the milk fails to meet predetermined quality standards, the milk is discarded.
  • The computer controlling the robot also keeps statistics for the entire herd, allowing the dairyman to keep track of trends and potential issues with individual cows.

Since the thing is controlled by standard PC hardware, they were able to pull up the machine via VNC to check up on things; it was evening when he was showing this to me, but about 3 am local time at the farm, and we saw that a cow had just stepped into the machine. Apparently one of the things that helps to boost milk production is that the old way of doing things — milking twice a day — doesn’t really fit with a cow’s natural cycles, as is shown in the stats with the robot; on average, they will go in to be milked 2.8 times a day. And they will go in at all times of the day and night, whenever they feel the need to be milked, which I would think makes for happier cows!

The video below shows the machine in action;

Posted in Gadgets, Geek, The World | Comments Closed

WordPress 2.8.4

Friday, September 11th, 2009

How about a break from politics today…

wordpress

I took the dive yesterday & updated my WordPress install. I’ve been a little lazy about that lately… Came to rely on Powweb’s InstallCentral to do the updates, but that method tends to lag pretty far behind. When I updated yesterday, InstallCentral only took it to v.2.7. While there was an interface improvement over the 2.6.x install I had been using for a while, it was still months behind the current version; with the security holes in earlier versions I wasn’t eager to find out how bad things could get, especially after the trouble the sfgroove.us website had a month or so ago — hackers completely took it over twice before we got the Joomla install updated & locked down. I’ll take their advice & stick to taking my vitamins and avoid the open heart surgery.
The upgrade wasn’t without glitches though; since upgrading, Google and the other search engines seem to have forgotten me. According to Sitemeter, yesterday saw 41 unique visitors and 78 page views; today, 5 and 5. Since most traffic here is from search engine referrals, things have been a bit quiet. Once I update the code for Google Adsense and all that, things should improve. Until then it’s just the handful of faithful direct hits from various places and the RSS subscribers; thanks for clicking, people!

The other glitch was with the Akismet antispam plugin for WordPress; it was deactivated by default after the upgrade, but when I activated it, all the admin pages came up totally blank. The site was working fine, but being able to see things on the admin side is somewhat important. Things were working fine before I clicked to activate Akismet, so I figured that wasn’t up to date, so I had to go in via ftp and kill the plugin folder for Akismet before I could get back in and see anything. Very pleased that it wasn’t any more complicated than that! And installing it again was again, easy.

One of the beautiful features introduced in v.2.7 is the one-click upgrades; inside the dashboard, WordPress will throw up a flag when an update is available, and present an Upgrade Automatically button that will do the hard work to bring an installation up to date. You can also download the update from the same screen, but why bother? Of course, it’s a good idea to use the Export Tool in the dashboard to back up all the data that makes my blog mine… Just in case, you know. Hopefully future upgrades won’t include surprises like today’s did.

Just for fun, I downloaded the current version and put a second install on my (hosted) server; had I realized it was that easy I wouldn’t have bothered with the InstallCentral dance… Why did I wait so long? And that’s another one of the goofy things with Powweb’s InstallCentral control panel; it will only do one WordPress installation for you. That second install is for testing and setting up a replacement for the Joomla-driven Groove website; I’m getting tired of wrestling with Joomla just trying to put up the simplest content, so I’m making the executive decision to move the site to WordPress. A couple of weeks ago I tried adding some YouTube videos to an article on the site, and for some reason Joomla decided after I pasted in the code to link the videos that one line of that code wasn’t needed. That would be fine if the embedded video would show up in the article, but it doesn’t. I tried every trick I could think of and searched around to no avail. Other articles with embedded videos continue to work fine… Anyway, I’m moving the site to WordPress because using Joomla is like having a bureaucracy the size of the Federal Government to manage a small company; way too complex and way too many hoops to jump through just to accomplish something simple. WordPress is a great tool with lots of expansion possibilities, and I think it’ll be perfect for Groove.

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How About A Local Area Network RAID Array?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I was in the process of setting up another new iMac for a user at work the other day, and got to looking at the hard drive — the ‘entry level’ 24″ iMac comes standard with a dual-core 2.66GHz processor, 4GB of memory and a 600GB hard drive. Much of that capacity (other than that memory) just won’t get used. There will be times when the processors will peak a bit, but most of the time they’ll be just barely above idle. And the hard drive… 600GB? On a desktop machine? If the computer were used in a home setting, that might get utilized, but here… Boy could I use some of that capacity for other stuff on the network! I guess I could just buy some cheap 100GB SATA drives and swap them out, but I’ve seen the gymnastics necessary to replace a drive in an iMac, and I don’t want to go through that any more than absolutely necessary.

I remember back when Apple was first rolling out OS X, there was talk of these super apps that would allow us to tap into some of that unused processing power by creating a distributed network computer by linking the computers on a network together; if one computer had a huge task of some sort to complete and other computers on the network had spare processor cycles available, there’d be some sharing going on, and you could get more done. At least that was the idea, but I haven’t heard much about distributed computer grid clusters since the big splash about using a host of Macs to create a monster grid computer. Xgrid sharing lives on, and even has a checkbox to enable it in the Sharing Preference Panel in Mac OS 10.5 (and maybe earlier.) Years ago when it might take a raster image processor (RIP) multiple hours to chew through an eight-page layout I would’ve have loved to put something like this to work, but today with the typical tasks done on the typical desktop computer in a print shop or an office environment, and without some monstrously processor-intensive task that needs to be done, I don’t really see much point in messing with it.

What I would like to see though is some kind of distributed disk sharing; that iMac I set up today starts out with a whopping big 600GB drive; after loading all the software on it there was still an easy 500GB… And that computer is one of three that I set up recently, and one of five of the same configuration. If I were to partition the disks in each of those machines to set aside half of the available space I’d have an easy terabyte and a half of disk space that could be used for other stuff.

What if there was some way of joining the disks on multiple computers over the network to create a disk array of sorts… A local area network RAID array. Think of a RAID array with the network acting as the interface card and some software on a server striping the bits & bytes across the disks. In all my digging through Google and other search engines, I haven’t found anything like what I’m thinking of; either I’m not asking the right questions or it hasn’t been done yet. If not, that’s too bad, because I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I can also understand some of the obstacles to making it work. The biggest issue is probably that the network can be a lot more fragile than the hardware & software that it takes to make a RAID array in a server or external box work. A mirrored drive in a RAID 1 arrangement would probably work best, as the other RAID levels with the data striped across multiple volumes would require a higher level of availability for the disks than might be possible.

But you know, since it doesn’t look like using that disk space for live files will work any time soon, maybe I can still put it to use for backups; set Retrospect up to use that space for backing stuff on the server up to disk, just for extra redundancy… Hmmm… Might have to play with that a bit…

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Posted in Computers, Cool Technology, Geek | Comments Closed

Gremlins In My Garage

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Saw these guys hanging from the shelf in the garage a while back, and had to do a double-take.

I feel like I’m being watched. Any guesses on what they are?

Posted in Fun!, Geek | Comments Closed

Pause, Stop, Play

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

I think I want this on my car. No, scratch that; I need this on my car!

Posted in BMW Of The Day, Cars!, Fun!, Geek | Comments Closed

Progress Bars Gone Wild!

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

One more thing that drives me crazy; progress bars that don’t give a realistic indication of your progress.

Case in point; today I was doing some maintenance on one of the laptops at work, and part of that was updating Adobe Acrobat Standard on an HP laptop running Windows XP Pro. It downloaded the 8.1.3 updater and proceeded to apply the update.

First, a larger status box came up and showed the status bar progressing quickly from left to right. But when the bar got all the way to the right, it just started over again. Over, and over, and over, and over…

Then after a while, a smaller dialog box came up showing a slower moving progress bar, plus a “Time Remaining:” line; at first it showed 2 minutes, then about five minutes later it dropped to 1 minute.

Then about 10 minutes later it dropped to 50 seconds. And then about 5 minutes later it’s down to 1 second remaining.

And all the while the larger status bar is zipping right along, zip! zip! zip! zip! Hmmm. Not a confidence builder.

Finally, after about 20 minutes it throws up a dialog box saying it needs to restart the computer to complete the install. Good thing; I thought perhaps I’d been transported into something akin to the Groundhog Day story.

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Digital TV In Sioux Falls

Monday, January 26th, 2009

I’m way too cheap to spend the $30-plus a month for cable or satellite TV services. Besides, the kids & I waste too much time watching TV with the dozen or so stations that are broadcast locally, so why would I want more choices? To waste more time? No thanks.

With the impending conversion to digital TV looming, I finally bit the bullet, applied for my rebate card, and bought the converter box. Thankfully, I had submitted my application some time ago and beat the rush that caused the shortage of rebates earlier this month. The money for the program is gone, so until they get more appropriated, it’s a waiting list.

But I got mine, and after buying the converter box a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t in a hurry to set it up because according to the clueless salesguy at Best Buy, there were only one or two stations in Sioux Falls that were broadcasting digital anyway. Why bother if that’s all there was? So the converter sat on a shelf, still in the box…

Until last week, that is. I got a burr under my saddle & decided to try it out, and it actually works very, very nicely! Add to that the surprise of finding 10 stations broadcasting locally in the digital spectrum. The expected local stations are there — KELO (CBS), KSFY (ABC), KDLT (FOX), KDLT (NBC) & three PBS stations (your tax dollars at work) — plus a few others that I hadn’t expected. UTV is one (broadcast on a KELO subchannel), KWSD (CW & RTN), and two bonus PBS stations, PBS World & PBS Create. Not a lot more channel-wise that we got on analog, but it’s an improvement. When I first hooked it up, a couple of the stations had good signal but were broadcasting absolutely nothing, and a couple others had very weak signals; I rewired things a little so that the antenna feed was going directly to the DTV box, and that gives us solid signal on all 10, and they all work!

Another thing I hadn’t expected was the picture; much better than standard broadcast TV! Many of the channels broadcast in HD, and although ours definitely is not a high-definition TV, it does make a noticeable difference. And the functionality of the little set-top box is pretty incredible. I got the Insignia brand box, and the remote that comes with it can be programmed to turn the TV on & off and control the volume; it only controls the volume of the audio signal going to the TV, so it’s still necessary to tweak the volume on the TV from time to time, especially when using the DVD player. The really neat feature with this box and digital TV is you can push a button on the remote to get TV-Guide-type info on the fly. You can scroll through the channels without leaving the one you’re watching and see what’s on now and what’s coming up next. If you see something you like, push another button (just one) on the remote, and you’re there! So cool!

So all in all, things are looking good for digital TV in Sioux Falls. Many who are already using cable and or satellite TV with newer TV’s probably are thinking, , but for someone like me with a 6-7 year old TV, and is too cheap to buy cable, it’s a great thing. My kids even like it!

One last thing; found a nice listing of broadcast TV info for the Sioux Falls area at RabbitEars.com. Not complete, but helpful.

Posted in Cool Technology, Gadgets, Geek, Home Life | Comments Closed

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