Posts Tagged: making
6
Aug 11
LEDs
The Wikipedia entry on LEDs has the basics I need for converting a couple of old flashlights to LEDs.
25
Jul 11
There’s an App for That (That You Made)
When I am doing just about any kind of reading or film watching, I find that having my iPhone or iPad handy is really about having Wikipedia handy.
(If you haven’t donated yet, you should. Do it now. Give them $5. $10. It’s easy. I’ll wait. Really. No, really, I’ll wait. Go donate something.)
Occasionally I have my MacBook with me, and I actually find myself looking for the Wikipedia app that’s on my phone and tablet. Crazy, yes, but when you want to look something up quickly, it really is nice to go straight to where you want to go.
With that in mind, I would like to thank Andy Ihnatko for point out how easy it is to create desktop web apps in the latest iteration of the Mac OS, Lion. How easy?
This easy:
Launch Automator.
Click on create a new App.
Find and drag the “Get Specified URLs” action into your workflow. (Just type the name into the search box until Automator finds it for you.)
4., Paste in the URL of the site you want to view.
Find and drag the “Website Popup” action into the workflow. Choose a size for the window.
Save. Done.
Here is what you get:
wikipedia-app.png
And it pops up this:
Wikipedia app using the iPhone sized screen
19
Jul 11
What I Did Today
I am three days behind the schedule I set out for myself on Monday of last week, but the revision of the essay for the Journal of American Folklore is done, with one exception that I will discuss in a moment. The prose revisions were difficult primarily because I have not had my head in that essay for so long. The materials are interesting, however, and I find myself really drawn to linguistic work. There is simply so much one can do with it.
After the prose, it was time to turn my attention to the two illustrations that accompany the essay. The first figure is a map:
Like its companion, the map was a little, hmmm, sophomoric in appearance. It worked, but it was neither professional looking, to my mind, nor compelling. The same could be said for the diagram:
It took me an hour or more to decide not to try some sort of multi-dimensional version of this figure. In the end I decided to keep it two-dimensional because I had neither the data to explore more dimensions — pwned as I am by one Tim Tangherlini — nor did I have room in the essay to explore yet more analysis of the limited data I had. Even so, the line I drew to foreground the shifts in discourse genres needs explaining and it raises some important possibilities for analysis within the overall study.
17
Jul 11
Other Aspect Ratios
Another number, a ratio kept popping into my mind as I wrote the previous post that featured the golden ratio of 1.618. The number was 1.4. It turns out that there is another “golden” ration based on 1.414, which is the square root of 2, which also happens to be the length of the diagonal of a square with sides of length 1.
Wikipedia lists a few more aspect ratios of note:
Other Aspect Ratios
From left to right:
1.3 = 4:3: Some (not all) 20th century computer monitors (VGA, XGA, etc.), standard-definition television
1.414 = √2:1: International paper sizes (ISO 216)
1.5 = 3:2: 35 mm film
1.6 = 16:10, widely used widescreen computer displays (WXGA)
1.618 = Golden ratio, close to 16:10
1.6 = 5:3: super 16 mm, a standard film gauge in many European countries
1.7 = 16:9: widescreen TV
17
Jul 11
Chains of Events
Chains of events are interesting. The historian of ideas James Lee Burke once called his own particular take on such chains of events the “ping pong theory of history.” If you have planned any project of some complexity than you are somewhat familiar with such chains: you begin, for example, with wanting to replace the tile countertops in your kitchen with something with fewer cracks in it, some lovely solid, smooth surface like granite or quartz or formica. You can do that, but then you realize that that will change the overall look of the kitchen and perhaps now would be a good time to change out the cabinet doors. But wait, can you simply change the cabinet doors or do you need to reface the cabinets completely or do you need to replace the cabinets? And if you are going to do that, then it might be time to replace the dishwasher. Of course you have to balance this with what you can afford, but you also want to do things in a logical order and do it right. And so you begin with an overall outcome but then you have to backtrack to the correct beginning of things, with the first nail to be pulled that will begin a complex series of events that will eventually give you the kitchen of your dreams.
Of you can have happen to you what happened to us yesterday.
On Friday afternoon the new monitor for the kitchen computer arrived, a lovely 24-inch Viewsonic. The thing is far wider than we imagined: it’s like having the windshield of a car in front of you, but the clarity of the screen is so much better than the old 19-inch Dell VGA monitor we had. The width of the thing meant it spreads across the small kitchen desk quite a bit more than the old monitor, which left little to no room for the old Cambridge SoundWorks speakers we had. They weren’t great speakers, but they served well.
But they no longer fit. I dug out a pair of Apple Pro speakers which I’ve had lying around for several years now, ever since retiring my Power Mac Dual G4 at work. They look great and fit perfectly under the monitor, as you can see in the image below, but they require hacking to work with a regular stereo minijack port, because the Apple Pro speakers came with one of Apple’s limited life special dongle/ports — I forget its pretentious name. I have a dead Power Mac somewhere that I saved for express purpose of taking the digital audio connector out of it so I don’t have to cut into the wires of the speakers.
But as long as I am interested in hacking speakers, why not hack those Cambridge speakers? I’ll need an amp for the Apple Pro speakers, I believe, having researched their hacking a bit. And so I destroyed the cases of the Cambridge speakers, took out the amp and the speakers and then quickly re-soldered things to see if they worked. (They did!)
To see if they worked, and here at least we turn to the ostensible topic of this post, I needed a mini-jack output device into which I could plug the speakers. But I wasn’t so sure of my wiring, especially my soldering, and of the consequences of a short-circuit, that I felt comfortable plugging the speakers into the kitchen computer or my phone or my laptop or any other hand device.
Ah! I thought. I have an old iPod Video somewhere. I haven’t used it in years and I would be willing to sacrifice it for the sake of this experiment. I dug through the usual collections, and then I turned to the less usual collections. No iPod Video. (I still don’t know where it is.) But I did come across a 4G iPod and a portable CD player. It turns out that the iPod has a bad hard drive — I remembered it dying after I plugged it in and saw the unhappy face on the screen — and the CD player proved my wiring, and soldering, was good to go.
Fortunately the CD player worked and after some confusion, due to having the wrong power cord plugged in, the newly hacked speakers were producing sound. Here they are in their new enclosure:
5
Jul 11
TechCrunchTV
TechCrunchTV has a series called “Founder Stories.” The one with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot Industries, is quite good. There is some discussion of the difference between being a software startup and a hardware startup.
30
Jun 11
Getting Started with Arduino
It’s hard to say which is more interesting right now: Lego Mindstorms or the Arduino stuff. Once the book is done, I want to spend more time exploring both before deciding to invest in one — and they do represent an investment of money and time. I definitely want not only to play and learn for myself but also to make it possible for Lily to play and learn, if she is so inclined.
The Maker Shed has a slightly expanded version of the Getting Started with Arduino Kit on sale right now.
17
May 11
Android Just Got a Lot More Interesting
At last week’s I/O Conference, Google had a variety of announcements, but the one that caught my attention was that they are releasing a developer’s kit to allow Android devices to interact with the Arduino platform. Long-time readers of Make magazine know about Arduino: it’s an open source hardware platform. Think of it as the next step after Lego Mindstorms. (If Genius Loci is finished by then, and I hope it is, I am so putting Mindstorms on my Christmas list.) The Make Blog has excellent coverage.
Here’s a link to the live coverage. If I have done my job right, then the link will take you right to the 36:00 mark where the keynote speakers talk about the ADK and Arduino: watch the video.
14
May 11
Of Rocks and Cathedrals
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
19
Apr 11
A New Kind of Album Art
In this case, part of the album art is that the wedding invitation is/includes an old-fashioned pressed disk audio recording that the invitation itself plays:
Paper Record Player from kellianderson on Vimeo.
3
Mar 11
Asus Shipping Box Doubles as PC Case
You have to admire the ingenuity of the folks at Asus: they have developed a shipping container that doubles as a computer case for a range of the their motherboards:
2
Feb 11
Low-Tech, Low Energy Transportation
Ropeways are a low-tech, low energy form of transportation. Most of us know them only as ski lifts, but in previous eras, ropeways (and cableways) were used for moving just about anything because they were, are, so inexpensive to install and run. Another “low” feature is that they are low impact. A cableway can be run through a forest, or through a town, without having to change much of the landscape through which it passes. A post on Slashdot turned me onto Low-Tech Magazine, which specializes in stories like this. The essay on ropeways, “Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain,” is well-written and well-sourced. It’s really great to see that there is a ground swell of interest in these topics. (The arc of the essay, by the way, is that the ropeway is making a comeback.)
Engraving of a Ropeway (source unknown)
26
Jan 11
The Future of Film Making
The usual arguments about lowered costs of production and distribution. All valid. What’s nice is the number and variety of examples collected on one page.
25
Jan 11
Added Anxiety
As if concerns about the rising disparity between the haves and have-nots in the developed countries of the world, and most especially in those countries that led the industrial revolution, the U.K. and the U.S.A., were not enough, now comes a piece by Norm Augustine in Forbes magazine which adds to the anxiety: “America Is Losing Its Edge in Innovation.” Essentially Augustine observes that while we still train much of the world’s scientists and engineers, they are no longer choosing to remain in the U.S.A. and work here. The result is that their application of their knowledge is happening elsewhere. Augustine blames American culture, i.e., parents especially, and educational institutions for not making it clear that science and engineering are great lives to lead. Along the way, he uses some interesting, if not particularly coherent, statistics:
- U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.
- In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
- China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter.
- Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S. Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.
- The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.
I’m with you, Mr. Augustine, that we have allowed, I don’t know, bankers and lawyers — and athletes — to become the praetorians of American capitalism, but I don’t think its education’s fault. I think the problem is much more complex and knotted and it’s going to take the kind of serious long-view thinking that there doesn’t seem much interest in embracing at the moment. As a folklorist, I feel like much of my job is to take good notes and try to describe all this as best I can, in hopes of beginning to understand it over the next decade. As a citizen, I’m kind of okay with America “losing its edge,” if by edge we mean domination. I would rather see our fine country decline a bit, retreat from imposition of empire by might, and re-emerge as a world power in ideas and production of things that matter. As a parent, and someone looking at retirement twenty or so years from now, I don’t like that I think it’s exactly during that span of time that my chance to save money for myself and my family is going to be most tested.