I’m a Cory Doctorow fan. Not a raving fanboi type fan, but I will say that there have been a few things I’ve been waiting for for a long time, and this evening (specifically this book) has been one of them. Cory is a certain kind of nerd-hero/celebrity. The kind where he’s famous in nerd circles and people would be excitedly star-struck, but outside those circles all you get is weird looks. This was punctuated by a situation that actually became an on-going joke between my wife and I. A number of years ago I was talking about something that Cory was involved in (rather excitedly), and she looked at me and said “Who?” It hadn’t occurred to me that she didn’t know who Cory Doctorow was. Since then, it’s always been our joke whenever I bring him up.

So – Sometime between Cory coming out and getting started, he came over and introduced himself and thanked us (myself, and Dean Pierce – the current ‘head’ of BrainSilo) for coming. We had about 5 minutes before the official beginning of the event so we chatted… about nerd stuff.

He pulled out his phone and I was curious what his preference of device was: “A Nexus 4″. He went to show us it’s useful features and between unlockings I commented at the complexity of his lock pattern.

Most people’s lock patterns look something like this

Cory’s looked something like this

He said “Well, you know what they say: ‘Go big or go home.’” It was something that I hadn’t really spent much time on. A few years ago I started using a pattern lock after getting concerned at the latitude that police have when not-arresting people. My pattern lock was simple because I wanted it to be easy to unlock. A truism of security is that you have to sacrifice convenience for it. How secure was my unlock really? And here was this person (whose views on security and privacy I respected) inadvertently teaching me the value of a strong password. Given a few days pondering over the matter, I switched from something that was like the left-hand picture to something more like the right-hand.

After the event began, Cory gave us the option of him doing a reading or him giving a talk. The vote was unanimous in favor of a talk – Hykel mentioned that she’d wanted a reading, but hadn’t dared raise her hand without at least one other person. I suspect that more than one person felt the same way. Cory’s talk moved between a number of topics, but the one that seemed to stick with me most had to do with privacy. He talked a bit about abuses of privacy that come with power, and about how (as parents) we can’t teach our children that they need to value and protect their privacy from everyone except when it comes to us. He also spoke about Aaron Swartz and what his loss means to the world.

After a half-dozen questions, we were orderly corralled into a line to get our “property defaced” (in his words). I got a picture with him and he thanked me again for sharing about Dorkbot.

I had him sign a copy of Homeland for me, and a copy of Little Brother that I wanted to give to my sister’s family. In spite of being firmly placed in the “Young Adult” category, Little Brother has gained the award of “my favorite book”. I want other people to read it, and I wanted to give my sister and her family a copy so that they could read it. My sister’s family contains 2 kids, a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old. I mentioned this to Cory and he responded that they were probably a bit too young. I happen to agree with him, but it brought up a question I’d had in regard to it. I wanted to know when he felt his daughter would be old enough for his books. More specifically, I think I asked “When would you say to your daughter ‘here, go read this’”. He said he didn’t think he would ever give her his books, but that if she wanted to read them he hoped that she would at some point grab a book off the shelf and that he and his wife could help guide those decisions so that there was trust there. Sounds like a pretty dang good approach to me.

Hykel and I spent the rest of the evening talking about the things that were discussed, and over the last few days we’ve had more discussions. She’s read Little Brother and I’ve finished Homeland. They’re both wonderful books that bring up a lot of valuable questions. If you get a chance, go see Cory Doctorow talk. You may get a lesson about privacy, security, parenting, all kinds of stuff. His website can be found here.

The difference between the internet and the public library in terms of accessing information is likely lost on a lot of people. Getting what you want at the library requires:

1. Going to the library
2. Searching the topic that you want
3. Finding a resource that matches that
4. Taking a alpha-numeric identifier to the shelf to find said resource.
5. Looking at the book to determine if it’s what you actually want.

And that’s on a per topic basis. Sounds pretty exhausting. The Internet has a seemingly less complex process:

1. Go to Google.com
2. Search for your desired topic
3. Click link

Google has gotten very very good at indexing information. So much so that often what I’m looking for can be found in the first two or three items. There’s a problem though, that most of us skate over…

The Internet isn’t curated

That last word may be unfamiliar. I jest of course, I’m sure you do all know what it means, but think about it for a moment. Everything on the internet was put up there by someone, anyone really, who wanted to. There is no obligation for it to be correct. And when it comes to Google’s deciding where it falls in the search results, in a lot of ways it’s a popularity contest.

The public library, on the other hand, has a large store of specific titles. Those titles end up there for lots of different reasons, but in any case they are there because a person specifically decided that they should be. On top of that, each title had a somewhat large expense associated with it. Even in the era of on-demand-publishing, most books remain published in large runs by large publishers. That means the book is reviewed, edited, refined, and a lot of people’s time and money go into it.

The other part of that is that the library is organized. When you find one book on a topic, it’s almost guaranteed that to the left or right of that book will another book on the same topic. Written by someone else, or for a slightly different audience, or maybe just more on the same.

Despite the value of a well organized and curated collection of books, movies, and music, public libraries are facing hard times. Budget cuts across all publicly-funded institutions combined with dropping attendance make our libraries a dying breed.

So where do Libraries go from here?

There seems to be a lot of talk about what libraries have to become or how they should change. A couple of years ago Phillip Torrone wrote an article about reinventing public libraries as makerspaces. I’m in support of the idea for no other reason than I love the idea of having makerspaces everywhere. There are lots of inherent problems with the idea though, because makerspaces are a different challenge. Equipment upkeep, training, and materials are all problems to be tackled that probably don’t fit well under “Publicly Funded”

Another story I came across this afternoon discussed a library in Colorado that has started to offer seed packets. It’s a novel idea, you get a packet of seeds and then are expected to bring back the next generation of seeds from your labors. It never occurred to me that people would be interested in seeds, but this kind of opportunity homes in on what a library is and what it can become.

Libraries function best as central locations for communities. It’s a space where members of the community can gather, and as a result it needs to be a place where physical items are curated and accessible. Because of the internet’s ever-increasing informational presence, our libraries can fill the void by becoming a little more niche and a lot more valuable.

The box before opening.

The presentation of the box with the lid off.

Woot-Off Power Problems

Woot.com is a website that sells 1 thing a day until they run out. Occasionally though, Woot will have a “Woot-Off”, a day where they sell tons of different things, each in succession until they run out of inventory. One of the mainstays of the Woot-Off is a pair of rotating siren light gifs on the page. Amusingly, Woot at some point decided to get some real-world woot-off lights manufactured. The lights are a pair of USB powered rotating siren lights. They stand at about 2.5″ and are each made of an LED, a DC motor, and plastic component that rotates on the motor providing directional control of the LED’s light. As they’re USB, I knew immediately that I could run the lights off of 5v. I also knew there was no way that the Arduino’s pins could supply enough juice (current) to power those motors. I immediately jumped into finding a solution.

First, I tried some transistors I had lying around. I had some 3904 NPN transistors. A single 3904 wasn’t enough. I knew next-to-nothing about darlington pairs, but upon my attempt, I didn’t get very far (In hindsight, I think this setup didn’t work because of voltage drop, more on that later.) I thought the problem was that I didn’t have enough current, so I tried a number of solutions. After a lot of frustration, I ended up buying a TIP-120 transistor. It’s a Darlington Power transistor intended to deliver a good amount of power for any project. I chose it after looking at a number of tutorials on powering heavier-duty devices from an Arduino. With my TIP-120, I was sure all my troubles were over.

Aside from a minor hiccup routing the power through ground instead of source, I still couldn’t get them to run reliably. The LEDs would light up, but one motor wouldn’t work all the time. After puzzling it out, I realized that there was probably a voltage problem: Every device you put into a circuit requires some amount of the “electrical pressure” provided by your power source. Using the classic water analogy, imagine you have a tank full of water, and a trough going to a water wheel. When you open the tank, water comes out and starts to force the wheel to rotate. The wheel uses up some of the energy that water has in order to turn. In the electronics world the “consumption” of voltage is called “Voltage Drop” and refers to the amount of voltage that a device needs to operate. You can usually find this information on the datasheet for the device. I was running on a 4-cell (AA) battery pack. If you’re not aware, each AA battery provides 1.5v, giving my a total of 6v. That should be enough, but if any of your batteries aren’t fresh you may find that you’re not getting what you expect. Between the transistor and my under-performing battery pack, I was probably getting 5v, but just barely. It was clearly not reliant enough to get both lights lit up and rotating.

I decided to take the Tim Taylor approach: MORE POWER. When I was out picking the TIP-120 transistor, I also got an 8-cell battery pack. Now I had a slightly different problem. My lights ran on 5v. I’d seen the inside of the lights and knew there was some circuit protection, but I didn’t think going from a 6v to a 12v pack was a great idea. Applyiny 12v to the LEDs and motors would probably have burned them out after a short time. The easiest (and hackiest) solution was to improvise a 5 or 6 cell pack by putting a jumper between the last battery in the series and the end of the circuit. These packs rely on the 8 batteries to function in series to provide a full 12v. By using 5 batteries and completing the circuit, I got ~7.5v, and was perfect. I gave it a shot by attaching my battery to the Arduino and running slightly altered “Blink” program. The lights lit up and rotated for 2 seconds, went dark for 2 seconds, and then repeated. It was exactly what I was looking for.

Automatic Switch-On

Now that I had enough power to operate the lights, I needed a mechanism for making the box turn on. Initially I thought about utilizing a limit switch triggered by the lid being taken off. While it was a valid approach, I was concerned about mechanical problems. If the switch wasn’t positioned right, the whole thing would fail. Instead I decided to utilize an photoresistor. When the lid came off, the resistance on the LDR would lower and I could use that as a trigger for the Arduino to fire the event.

The internals of the “It’s a Trap” box. Blue Painter’s tape is a great/terrible means of mounting stuff.

 The presentation

I did my best to secure the electronics in the box in some sort of orderly fashion. If I’d had more time (and planned it out a bit better) I might have actually mounted the items in the box properly. I ended up cutting apart one of the many boxes that we’d received this year to use as a mounting plate. With my calipers in hand I measured my various components and did my best to cut out holes for the speaker and the lights. The Arduino was mounted on the back with a spare of screws and nuts (yup, I bolted my Arduino into cardboard.) Beyond that, I tried to tape everything else down and isolate the alligator clips so the box didn’t short out. It’s a bit of a mess, but it was going to be a one-time deal so I didn’t want to spend too much time working on it. (Also, it wasn’t until Christmas morning that I actually finished all this up, so it was a time-crunch too)

As it was, everything turned out very well. The event fired perfectly. Here’s a video of my brother receiving it:

As a endcap to this, the expression on my brother’s face and his reaction is probably the best Christmas present I could have asked for.

If you’re interested, File Downloads here (The code portion is really hacked together from existing adafruit code, just a warning):

As you may have noticed above by the icon, I showed off my project on Adafruit’s “Show and Tell” show last Saturday night. You can view that here.

I’ve always enjoyed cooking and baking. It’s a creativity thing, and a making thing. Bread has remained as one of those things that was mostly out of reach. At some point during my formative years, I was taught that baking bread was an order of magnitude more difficult than other kinds of baking. I’d read cookbooks and talked to people on the subject. I’d walked away thinking that yeast was a fickle creature that was likely to ditch you at the first sign of too-hot of water or not-enough-rise-time, or that the total preparation time for bread was somewhere between 5 and a million hours, and that you need the knead the dough until the cows come home*. These things are mostly untrue, but they scared me off from trying to bake bread for a long time.

I don’t know why I was captured by the idea of making the rolls for Thanksgiving. It was just sort of something that kept pinging at the back of my mind. The day before Thanksgiving I searched around for a recipe that would fit the bill. I found this one and it looked simple enough that I couldn’t get it wrong (easily). I had to double the recipe because we were going to a somewhat large dinner and I wanted to make sure that everyone got some. The rolls were baked that morning and done early enough that I got to make an Apple Pie as well.

My mixer, which is an amazing machine.

And here I have to make a confession to my relatives. We were given a fantastic KitchenAid mixer for our wedding by my Aunt Barb and Uncle Bruce. It is a mechanical marvel of engineering and the staple of any well-equipped kitchen. We had left it in the box for a very long time. We’d also received a hand-mixer, and as previously mentioned I didn’t find many opportunities to use it. That morning I decided what the heck, I think I’ll pull that out and use it. This in fact may be the saving component of my baking skill. The mixer basically does all that hard kneading work for you and you get to simply throw stuff in there. Thank you Bruce and Barb for your wonderful gift. It’s awesome.

My rolls turned out tremendously well. Way better than I imagined they would. Golden-brown, and dense-but-delicious. I was very pleased with them. They were also a hit at dinner. On a whim I mixed up some honey butter to take with us and it was the frosting on the cake (or… butter on the bread I guess). Folks were surprised to find out that they were made from scratch. I was reminded of that feeling that bread from scratch was a fine and impossible art.

My Thanksgiving day rolls. Right as they were going from rise to bake.

Realizing that I was, in fact, capable of making bread, I decided that I should attempt more bread adventures (or “breadventures” as I now must call them). Attempt #2 was another thing that had long been of interest to me: French Bread. This time, I found a recipe on allrecipes.com. The recipe went almost without a hitch. I ran into a problem towards the end.

Bread has to rise (as mentioned above). This is the process in which the yeast consumes sugar and turns it into CO2 that makes your bread puff up. During the rising, you typically cover your bread with a damp cloth so the outer dough won’t dry out. You want it to be moist so it can expand during baking. I did cover my loaves, but I just laid the cloth on them. It was too heavy and prevented the loaves from rising up. Instead, they did a lot of rising out. I pulled the cloth off the dough and it pulled a lot of the dough with it. I did my best to scrape it off and put it back on the dough, but it didn’t go well. After baking I had two great, but very flat loaves. The internal texture (or crumb as I’ve heard it called) turned out great, needing (in my opinion) just a bit more salt. The crust also turned out fantastically. Making a good crust on french bread is done by brushing egg white on the loaf before rising and during baking. The more you brush on the crunchier of a crust you get. I put quite a lot on, and I’m not sure if it was too much or not.

My flatish french bread.

Attempt #3

I was not so discouraged by the problems I encountered with the French bread so as to not continue on. For my 3rd attempt, I decided to try and replicate a bread that I absolutely love. With an Entree, The Cheesecake Factory serves you a couple of appetizer breads. One is a tasty sourdough, the other was (I thought) some sort of pumpernickle. After doing some research I found that it is not a pumpernickel  but just a dark sweet bread of some kind. I scoured the internet looking for more information on this bread and learned a couple of things:

1. The Cheesecake factory doesn’t make this bread. They buy it from a bulk bakery somewhere in the midwest.
2. There are a lot of “copy-cat” recipes for this.

We ate these so quick that I forgot to get a picture.

So now I’m a bread maker. My mom gave me a compliment at our weekly family dinner this past Sunday. She had mentioned to my grandmother how my rolls had turned out, and my grandmother had told her about how her mother (my great-grandmother) had a great talent in roll-making. My grandmother said that I had inherited the skill and I am very flattered by that.

My second shot at rolls. This time with the suggested melted butter on top.

*This is a metaphor. We own zero cows.

I was going to say that this is the nerdiest thing I’ve done in public in a while. But I was presenting at MakerFaire just a couple of months ago, so I guess not. I digress

Hi-definition TVs have been around for long enough that they’ve actually become pretty affordable. You can find most of your favorite shows on Blu-Ray, and most any broadcast or cable channel provides an HD version for viewing. A suspicious missing entrant was Star Trek: The Next Generation.

It turns out that while TNG was shot on film, and had the necessary resolution for HD, it was edited on video. That means the resolution of the final cut was really lousy for anything beyond your run-of-the-mill 1987 television set. So Paramount and CBS (who own Star Trek) have been tirelessly working to get your money produce new HD versions of the episodes. As a pleasant promotional side-effect, they’ve been holding movie theater screenings of restored episodes.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the season 1 release.  But a week ago I decided that I might in fact be interested in watching some season 2 episodes at a theater. The two episodes to be shown were The Measure of a Man and Q Who.

The line interrupting the image here is showing the difference between the old and new. The remastered effects are georgeous.

We arrived at the Theater about 30 minutes early. It was a good thing too, because there were still some decent seats left. We sat through many minutes of Star Trek trivia and some commercials, interviews, previews. Tragically, somewhere in the middle of that stuff something broke. We got to watch the first 2 minutes of Q Who a couple of times, and due to satellite problems the theater manager said that they were going to try and download the episode again and just move us onto the second part of the presentation.

There were a lot of funny outtakes, an interview with the cast (Michael Dorn does a dead-on Patrick Stewart) and we got to The Measure of a Man. The episode went off without a hitch. There were (apparently) 13 minutes of extra footage. They had been so well-woven in though that I didn’t know what was new or old. The episode really is a great one as Picard argues for Data’s right to explore his potential as a sentient being. It’s taken me a  while to understand the final point of the episode, because I don’t think that Picard makes the case that Data is sentient. His point (and I think I must be the only one thick-headed enough not to see this) is that we don’t know what Data is. We don’t know if he’s sentient, we don’t know if there’s more to him that stored information and heuristic methods. And we might never know. The point is that because we don’t know we can’t decide. I’m also a little disappointed that we didn’t see Captain Phillipa Louvois after this. She and Picard had some interesting chemistry that I thought would have been worth exploring. (of course, they barely managed that between Crusher and Picard in 6 seasons and a movie 4 movies)

My friend Cecily (who’s picture I blatantly stole from Facebook) next to the best-dressed guy of the night. Before the show started, he responded to a call from the audience with a hearty QaPla’! It was one of my favorite parts of the evening.

After Measure I was pretty much ready to call it a night. It turned out to be a mixed-blessing that the theater failed to get the other episode. I found as the night moved on that I was in fact really disappointed that I didn’t get to see Q Who on the big screen. The Borg have always been my favorite TNG villains. Q Who isn’t a fantastic episode, but it is the introduction to the Borg. I remain disappointed this morning.

Hykel said on our way home “I love Star Trek”. I do too, and I think I never appreciated how many people did, and still do. Though I camped myself over in the “nerdy” group growing up, I think quite a few more people than would admit it watched Star Trek The Next Generation. It was a brilliant show.

I’m looking forward to the Season 3 special event.

Also, event producers: I don’t care how you do it, but you sure as heck better put on a special event to show both episodes of The Best of Both Worlds back-to-back. I know they’re not in the same season, but I want to watch that as a cinematic experience. Those episodes deserve it. Make it happen.  

Now that we’re several years into the smartphone era, there are dozens of devices to choose from. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all make operating systems. More companies than I can count on both hands make hardware for those OS’. While I love my current phone (an HTC One S), and I loved my gen 1 iPhone, I still have a picture of my perfect device…

Wireless Charging

There are a few phones out there that do this. The most famous of them perhaps, was the Palm Pre. The Pre had a simple pedestal called “Touchstone” that you placed it on, and it charged by virtue of just being there. The technology behind this is inductive charging. It’s not new, but it is (to me) one of the most obvious ‘innovations’ you could add to a phone. Any manufacturer who added this into their stock   It requires almost no thought to place it down on this thing and it improves your battery life by keeping you topped off all the time.

NFC

Near-field Communication. This seems to be the technology that’s looking for a purpose. When people ask me why I want it, sometimes I can’t come up with a good reason. Contact-less payment systems utilize this. My vision couples with a contact-free dock. A dock at work, a dock at home, a dock in my car. Each dock has NFC in it telling the phone where it is. Right now location-aware tech uses GPS (which is power-hungry) and Wi-Fi mixed together to determine about where you are. NFC narrows that to a very small space.

A Dock (and maybe Docking Pins)

One of the things that I really loved about my iPhone was the dock. Quick drop and pickup. Coupled with the things above, various docks would be awesome. I want a dock at home with real buttons to serve as an alarm clock at my bed, so in the morning when I want to hit the snooze button I can without having to look at the phone. In my car I’d get buttons  for play/pause, next, and back for whatever app I’m in. At my computer, it’s just a charging pad. Barring the perfect wireless world, give me a handful of pins that I can use for whatever I want. The Nexus phones and some of the HTC One line have these, and I wish I did too.

Whatever magical screen the iPhone 5 has

If you haven’t seen one in person, you’re missing out. Apple pulled off some technical magic with the iPhone 5 by merging the LCD, digitizer, and glass. Couple that with Retina™ super-dense pixels and you get a display that is really really gorgeous. The first time I saw it, it looked like a sticker had been laid on the screen – the kind they put on the fake phones for display, except this is a real screen.

A reasonably-sized screen

Smartphone screens have gotten out of hand. The Galaxy S III has a 4.8″ screen. I recently picked up my old iPhone and realized how functional it was to use with one hand.  My currenty phone’s screen is 4.3″. I like it quite a bit, but it’s a stretch to get my thumb across the diagonal. I don’t want my phone to have a huge screen. I do like high resolution, but I want my phone to fit in my pocket, and my hand.

These requests all kind of focus on usability. You shouldn’t have think while using your phone. The experience should be seamless in the rest of your life. Likewise, the features shouldn’t be getting the way of using your phone. There are lots of wizbang-cool demo features that are cool when you see it once, and lose their coolness the more you do them.

I should start out by saying that I have a mild fear of heights. I can stand at a railing okay, but generally speaking I’m not too comfortable with being high up. This didn’t occur to me until after I’d setup the appointment. By the time I did realize that I would be up in the air for most of this, I decided that I was going to do it anyway.

We arrived slightly before 1pm, and signed in. We were given our harnesses and walked over to a tent where we met our helpful guide (Kate) and learned out to put on our harnesses. The harness has a pair of “Lobster Claws” which alternate locking. Each has a switch on it which is triggered by placing it in a special key to engage the lock. When you engage the lock on claw A, claw B unlocks and vice-versa. This is great because once you get started on the course, it means you can never be unattached to a safety cable.

Hykel also wants me to note the likeness of said claws to Acromantula pincers.

You also get a “trolley”, which is that cool thing you get to put around a zip-line to slide down.

With harnesses and helmets, we learned exactly what it was that we were about to do. Tree-to-Tree is (as mentioned above) an aerial obstacle course. It’s like an obstacle course on the ground, except you’re suspended in the air and you’re moving between trees.

Each tree has steel cables wrapped around with one of the special keys which would switch our claws. Kate made our first training task look tremendously easy. It wasn’t nearly so, but we both managed to across without incident. There was also a zipline test.

After effectively proving that we could scale the simplest of obstacles, we were set loose to take on the four courses offered (if we wanted to – it was assumed we’d do at least a couple of them). Each course was a graduated difficulty, and we were encouraged to attempt the obstacles without hanging onto the support line. Hykel was very good about this, I on the other hand, used it all the time.

My least favorite obstacle (of the ones which I traversed) was a horizontal climbing wall. I’ve only ever attempted climbing walls twice. Once at the state fair this past September, and the other being this very day. I can’t tell you what exactly it was. Lack of footholds, awkward body position…either way it was lame. I still got through it.

My favorite obstacle was a slide swing. The idea behind this was that you pull it back to you, step on, and cross the gap. In part I liked to because it was a stable platform. The real reason I liked it is because of the ease with which I accomplished the feat. I don’t know how I figured out the trick to this thing, but basically you  have to step on it, and lean forward. I glided across the chase like a viking on the bow of his boat. Hykel was impressed

There were 4 zip lines that I got to go on. They’re mostly at the end of the courses because they’re a convenient way to get back to the ground. They’re all a bit nerve-racking. Unlike the other obstacles, you don’t have anything to grab onto except the trolley which is zipping you down the line. I found that I had to just take a breath and push myself off of the platform. On the first major zipline Hykel forgot to ‘hug the tree’ (not a euphemism) and ended up sliding back into the middle of the line. She had to walk herself across (which I think she secretly wanted to do anyway.) For a bit of fun on the last one I did, I made a bit of a face cause Hykel had her camera.

I went through two of the courses and declared that I was spent. Hykel, feeling camaraderie with a group of women in front of us decided that if they would take on the next step, so would she. “The Junkyard” was the qualifier to moving forward in the course it consists of a wall made of rope ladders, tires, and a climbing wall.

The reward for climbing the Junkyard and making the trek across the way was another zipline!  Hykel was amazing climbing up. It was a tremendously difficult obstacle and I am forever impressed with her.

It was occasionally scary, but a lot of fun. I discovered an interesting perspective that probably applies elsewhere in life. When you’re moving from tree to tree, you can’t really give up and stop. You either have to go back, or go forward. You might as well go forward and finish the course you started.

I really glad we had the opportunity to go. It was an experience never to be forgotten. A couple of recommendations if you ever manage to find yourself out at Tree-To-Tree:

1. Wear gloves. We were the only couple with gloves and I cannot imagine running the course without them. Even with, my hands got sore and tired.
2. Trust your equipment. Lean on it a little. Recognize that if you make a misstep, you’re not going to fall. When you learn to depend on your equipment, it’s a lot easier to move around.

I think she had fun.

Things that you want to know:

• Crystal Clear Pepsi premiered in 1992 and only lasted until 1993
• Wikipedia’s List of Pepsi Types is an intriguing read.
• Pepsi Next premiered in March 2012
• This was recorded in July, and released in late September – I can’t remember remotely what Pepsi Next tastes like.
• Tony Danza in a Diet Rite Commercial.
• It Turns out both feedback@aaroneiche.com and podcast@aaroneiche.com work. Choose the one you feel most comfortable with.

Thanks again for taking the time to listen. Shoot me some feedback – it’s very welcome.

Several months ago, someone had floated the idea of holding a MakerFaire in Portland. I had been contemplating such an event myself, but hadn’t taken the idea to anyone else. I’ve found often that if you have an idea, someone else has the same (or a very similar) idea. It turns out that the folks at OMSI had been thinking the same thing. As they had resources and space, they took it upon themselves to play host to the madness.

I asked to be included on the list of people to contact once they got the thing rolling. When it came time, I didn’t really have anything to show off, so I passed up the opportunity to get myself a booth. A hobbyist group I’m a part of, DorkbotPDX, decided to have a booth hosting anything its members wanted to show. At this point I didn’t have anything.

Preparation

I’m the kind of person who likes the spotlight. It’s funny, because most of the time I’d tell you that I’m not very social or outgoing. For some reason though I really enjoy talking, teaching, and performing. I really wanted to have something to demonstrate and so I started thinking about different things I could do. My makerbot was in storage, and they’re pretty much everywhere anyway. I had been working on a software project – but that wasn’t really in the realm of MakerFaire. So I decided to start on a new project.

For our 5th anniversary, Hykel and I got an Xbox 360. I admit that I was as interested in the consol as I was in having the Kinect to play around with. The Kinect became very popular in the maker community following the release of open source device drivers allowing users to write their own software for it. That was a couple of years ago and interest has waned a bit. I still wanted to do something.

My first idea was to do a telepresence arm. This would have taken arm and hand position and reproduced it on a robotic arm. This idea didn’t last long as I couldn’t find all the servos that I thought I had. So I moved on to a different idea – controlling a Roomba via Kinect.

I’ve been in this position many times before. A deadline that was very close, and project that was too big for the time.  More often than not, I fail to meet my deadline. This time was different though.

Because I wasn’t familiar enough with anything else, I decided to write the driving application in Processing. After several evenings of programming, many in which I stayed up much later than I should have, on Friday night (the night before the faire) I had a working application.

Going to the Faire

I didn’t sleep terribly well – MakerFaire falls just under Christmas and Halloween in my book. It’s an exciting time, and I’m pretty much still a five-year old in that respect. Hykel was going to do a service project for church that morning, and had invited her friend Jennifer over for breakfast before they went. I made waffles (a tradition which has become known as “Waffle Saturday”). They left around 8:45 and I figured I had a little time to look for some last minute bugs. The faire started at 10. At 9, I re-read the email about setup, and realized that setup didn’t start at 9, but ended at 9:30. Whoops. Time to go!

I tried to pack everything I needed and rushed out the door. I even brought a bunch of spare stuff in case someone needed something. I thought I had it all covered – but after I got all my gear out at the faire, I found I was missing the power cable for my iMac. One of my fellow Dorkbotters, Scott, had a spare. Disaster 1 averted!

Once I got setup, I tried to run a quick demo and ran into my first problem: The Kinect performs very poorly in daylight. I woke up about 5:30 that morning with the thought “Oh no! Will it work outside?” The answer it turns out, is “maybe”. The Kinect relies on Infrared Light being reflected back at it’s sensor to read depth. Aside from an occasional bout of cloud cover, most of the morning rendered the Kinect driving a no-go. I had a backup available as I’d written a program earlier to test driving the Roomba via Mouse Movement.

Fortunately, around 2:00pm the sun went behind the overpass on the west side of OMSI and The Kinect started behaving. At this point was able to give a number of demonstrations and Laen was kind enough to run the booth while I got some lunch.  (He even made some fixes to my code!)

We hit about 4:30 and it was back to sunny time again. Hykel watched over the booth while I walked around a bit to look at things that other Makers had made. I tweeted this weekend how delighted I was to be wearing this badge:

I’ve identified with this crowd for a while, but a series of half-finished projects or ideas that never come to fruition left me with a sense that I was at best, an imposter – a poseur trying to fit in with the crowd of true geeks, real makers. Dale Dougherty (founder of Make:Magazine) had come out to speak, and a friend of mine related something from his talk: MakerFaire is an encouragement to finish your project. I finished this project in time to show it off. This weekend I felt like I was finally able to say “I am a Maker.”

This failure coincided with friends coming in from out of town, so while my laptop filled the void, I wasn’t missing it as much as I normally would. Once our guests were gone, I settled into the reality of living without my main machine. It towards the end of it’s life being 4 years old, but I wasn’t in any position to replace it (And I was eyeing a $3200 configured MacBook Pro Retina).

Listening to a podcast mention the Apple Store I thought to myself “Oh yeah… Maybe they could look at it”. I had significant doubts. Following Apple’s recommended steps, I rebooted, rebooted into safe mode, cleared NVRAM and PRAM, booted into verbose safe mode, swapped out ram, and finally slumped down in my chair. I packed up my iMac in it’s box and carted it off to Washington Square.

The store was crowded, and I was early. I checked in with an employee, and then checked out Apple hardware that would probably never cross my home’s threshold. I was meeting with an Apple Genius named Patrick. I read his nametag from afar and briefly got annoyed that he was still talking to another customer.

The fact that my appointment started a little late was the very very worst part of the experience. If you didn’t read that right, I had an amazing experience. Patrick was exceptionally knowledgeable and very friendly. I think I was among the last appointments of the evening so I suspect he’d already had a day full of problems.

He hooked my computer up to the Apple Store network and booted up. The computer continued as I expected it to with plenty of failure. Patrick however, effortlessly moved into netboot (something I’d never seen before) to get access to his amazing arsenal of Apple  store tools (alleration FTW!) I was delighted and dumbfounded by the different tools that they have available to them. The hardware diagnostic boot tool was fun to watch (also – a little throwback to Mac OS 9!), The iPad based parts and components tool was all of a day old (and apparently it spent most of yesterday down).

All while doing this, we talked back and forth about what had happened, what might be the cause, what steps I’d taken. He spoke to me right at my level.  Not trying to show me up technically, not below me. And I’m sure that if I’d been a clueless fool he would have shown the same kindness and helpful spirit.

The problem, we concluded, was a video card failure. The repair weighed in at $170 including labor. It was almost a no-brainer. My iMac remains at the Apple Store awaiting it’s replacement video card. I honestly expected the appointment to go poorly, for the employee to tell me there was nothing to be done, I should get a new Mac, and they’d be happy to recycle this one for me.

Instead, I had a fantastic experience that helped me understand the options I had and made me feel good about a computer that’s more than 4 years old. How’s that for awesome? Thanks for your help tonight Patrick, you’re doing an awesome job.

There’s a noticeable lack of pictures in this post. I didn’t think to pull out my camera until the end of my appointment, and Patrick is unfortunately not allowed to have his picture taken at the Genius Bar.

Update:

Here’s the happy ending to my tale. Having gotten my iMac back, I decided to wipe it and do a clean install. So far, things are great!

Clean installs are a rarity for me. Though my data was fine, it was a good opportunity for a fresh start.

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