Archive for the 'Science' Category

A couple of days ago as Ben and I were biking into work, we stopped at an intersection and chatted with one of the folk who maintains the stoplights in the Cupertino / San Jose / Sunnyvale area.

He was in the process of changing out some of the lamps in the cross walk signs, eliminating at least one incandescent lamp and replacing an LED element with a newer model.

I took a moment to examine the LED element that he had removed and he gave it to me. SWEET!

It is somewhere around 60+ reddish-orange LEDs arranged on a printed circuit board in the form of the standard “don’t walk” hand. It is backed by a power supply such that it can be plugged into a standard 120v outlet.

And it is bright. Seriously, blindingly, bright.

I figured it would also make a neat light source for photography and decided to use it as the sole source of illumination for a self portrait. I put the camera on a tripod, used a remote switch to control the shutter, and aimed the LEDs at my head from a slightly down and off-to-the-left position.

Interesting shot. I dig it.

That is pretty much the natural color of the image. I did very little post-processing beyond cropping the image.

The one processing parameters that I did tweak that had a major impact on the resulting image, was to use Aperture’s RAW 1.0 processor instead of the 2.0 processor.

Much to my surprise, the difference between the two is huge!

Normally, I use the 2.0 processor and don’t think much about it. It does a great job, to these unprofessional eyes.

However, it appears that photos in the extremes of range are not necessarily best processed by the 2.0 pipeline.

Specifically: the only difference between the image on the right and the image above is the use of the 2.0 (right) vs. 1.0 (above) RAW processing pipeline. All other adjustments are the same.

That is a significant difference!

Certainly an eye opener and I will be re-evaulating certain images in light of this.

A bug? Hardly. Converting a RAW image to something that can be rendered on screen requires a relatively complex bit of math that is specifically designed to yield reasonable results given a wide range of reasonable inputs.

This is not a very reasonable image. It is lit by an intense light source comprised of relatively narrow bands of color; mostly orangish red.

I wonder what other RAW pipelines might do with this image? I dropped the original RAQ (w/sidecar) in a zip file on a server, if curious.

I played with the image a bit with both the 2.0 and the 1.0 pipeline. I couldn’t post-process the 2.0 image to bring out the level of detail/features found in the 1.0 image. Caveat: I barely know what I’m doing.

Honestly, I’m not sure which image is “less correct”. I like the 1.0 image a lot better in that I like the range of oranges that seem to be utterly missing in the 2.0 image.

My general impression of RAW pipelines is that there is a tremendous amount of math behind the RAW conversion process, but there is also a whole bunch of tuning for aesthetics. Camera sensors simply do not have the dynamic range of the human eye and, thus, RAW conversion is partially about compensating for the limitations of the sensors.

Prior to prohibition in the United States, gathering together in a party atmosphere, collecting fine quality ingredients, and precisely mixing/serving cocktails was a popular pastime.

Much like microbrewing, much of the lore of fine cocktailing was lost during prohibition. After prohibition ended, the large liquor and beer companies lobbied like hell to pass laws to prevent the resurrection of the craft alcohol and microbrew markets.

In the past 15 or so years, we have enjoyed a huge resurgence of craft brewing. Similarly, about the last decade has seen a growing interest in the art of fine cocktail mixology.

While this has included the rise of some very fine drinking establishments focused on classic cocktails, the hobbyist mixology market is growing rapidly, too.

If you are going to get into Mixology, you need a good recipe guide. Many paper guides exist, the best (that I know of) being Cunningham’s Bartender’s Black Book.

However, you can’t easily search a book by ingredient or flavor. You can’t be standing in a liquor store and think “I have bourbon, what do I need to make a couple of fine cocktails”. Nor can you experience a minor quake while in the liquor store and immediately look up quake related cocktails.

For that, you need an electronic guide and, with the advent of the iPhone application store, wouldn’t it be nice if such a guide were to be available in a device that you are likely already carrying anyway?

Enter Skorpiostech’s Cocktails.

With over 1,400 cocktail recipes, Cocktails contains a fairly comprehensive list of classic and modern cocktails.

Drinks are indexed by ingredients, flavors, base ingredient, and several other categories.

It is easy to search for a particular ingredient, making it possible to get an idea of the set of drinks you might be able to make given what you have on hand.

As well, you can easily share drinks via email or twitterrific.

All in all, the app is a very solid offering for 1.0. There are some obvious areas for refinement or expansion and I’m looking forward to watching this app evolve.

However, that isn’t the reason why I’m reviewing this otherwise very useful application.

Specifically, I’m calling it out because of the design value.

Cocktails is simply a beautiful app to look at and use. While the list of cocktails is relatively normal looking, the glass icon being the graphical element standout, it is really the recipe page — seen to the right — that shows an incredible attention to detail.

The typography is precise and crisp, with appropriate bits of unicode characters used when necessary.

Also, the background changes color depending on the age of the drink. For example, the Manhattan cocktail dates back to 1888, yet there are many modern versions, too. If you were to flick that recipe to the left, the backgrounds of the recipe would become lighter as the age of the recipe lessens.

A minor detail, sure, but it actually contributes considerably to the usability when simply browsing for a recipe!

This morning, my software update queue was full of goodies.

Notably: iTunes 7.7, iPhone 2.0, and an Apple TV software update! And the App Store is live!

After the updates, the first App I downloaded was the Apple Remote.

Flat out brilliance.

Much like pairing the Apple TV with iTunes, you enter a 4 digit pin number displayed on your iPhone (or iPod touch) on the Apple TV.

Once paired, the user interface is very similar to the iPod UI. Playlists, artists, songs, etc… select what you want to play… displays art work, yada yada.

And in well fell swoop, every other remote (there are 5, if you include two Apple IR Remotes) was obsoleted.

Having bi-directional, fully stateful, communication between the remote and the media playback device is a gigantic game changer. It means that the remote can actually meaningfully tell you what is going on and and can provide UI pertinent to the context implied therein.

That is, you can touch your music, scrub a track with your finger, flick through a playlist and otherwise get your fingers right into your media playback.

You can even update ratings. For me, being able to update ratings is a huge feature. I have smart playlists that put together random selections of tracks over a certain rating, in a certain genre, that I haven’t heard in a while. It creates a set of personalized radio stations out of my music collection. And now it’ll be even more effective because I’ll be rating many more tracks much more quickly!

This changes the game in my living room. Completely. My media center’s remote is now more powerful than any computer I bought in the 1990s. And every one of my friends who has a similar device can now be a DJ.

It isn’t perfect. At the moment, it doesn’t appear that you can play rental material from the remote interface and you can’t create on-the-go playlists. Nor can you set ratings when controlling an Apple TV (but that is an Apple TV limitation).

Sure, as one commenter pointed out, there are other products that offer this style of remote control.

But I don’t want an expensive, dedicated, limited capability, complex remote with a shoddy user interface. I want the power of a computer to control my media playback. In my hand. Only I don’t want to know it is a computer — I want it to just work. With a high quality user experience and seamless network integration.

You people have dirty minds! The !Adult smart playlist merely filters out all songs for which the word adult appears in the comments. For example, Nine Inch Nail’s Closer has adult in the comments and will never play when that playlist is selected.

Our neighbor, Ron, gave us a couple of these ball cactus that had sprouted off of a cactus he has had for year. Ron said it had really pretty flowers, but it had only bloomed a few times in the decade plus that he has had it and it probably wouldn’t bloom for a while.

Apparently, this particular cactus has other ideas. Or maybe it just didn’t like Ron (just kidding, Ron!). It bloomed once last year, impressive tall pink bloom.

This year, it set two buds prior to WWDC and, of course, bloomed during WWDC when I was in San Francisco. Bummer. I figured i had missed the blooms for the year.

Not so!

In the spring, the cactus covers itself in about a dozen little hairy potential blossoms. Most of these will fall off and, typically, all of the remaining ones will fall off after the cactus blooms once in the season.

Not so this year!

The week after WWDC, two of the remaining hairy buds turned into bloom stalks and, sure enough, the cactus bloomed again!

The bloom stalks shoot up to that height over the course of just a few days, literally growing an inch or two per day.

Then they pause for a moment with a bit of pink showing at the end before bursting into the flowers seen at left that only last for 2, maybe 3, days.

Awesome flowers, too. Beautiful pastel pink, with a deep deep throat. These blooms evolved to be pollinated by very large moths (hummingbird sized moths) or bats, apparently.

Our neighbor has an epiphyllum — a night blooming dessert plant (not a cactus) that is pollinated similarly.

When it bloomed a year or two ago, I took a handful of photos.

While taking some long exposure photos, I was buzzed by something that sounded an awful lot like a hummingbird. Of course, it wasn’t.

It was actually one of the moths coming in to consume whatever the plant had to offer. It doesn’t appear to eat the pollen, but douses itself in pollen as it climbs all the way into these deep blooms.

I even managed to capture some photos! I can affirm that it is, in fact, very difficult to take a picture of a rather large, very fast moving, insect in the pitch of night.

Just like the cactus.

I keep hoping that such a pollinator shows up for the cactus blooms, but so far it hasn’t happened. The blooms have faded since the above photo was taken and I suspect this will be it until next year.

I cancelled our Netflix subscription today.

In answering their “why terminate service?” survey, it really came down to several reasons.

The Apple TV has spoiled us. Even with its currently limited (though growing) selection, we can make a decision about what we want to watch less than 5 minutes before we want to start watching it.

Too often, we would look at the three Netflix envelopes and say “No… Nah… Uh uh…” and then either watch some stupid TV (back when we still had Direct TV) or grab something via Apple TV.

Given the 50,000 movies delivered per day to Apple TV and iTunes users, it is clear that we aren’t the only ones seeking immediate gratification.

Sadly, the once nimble Netflix doesn’t seem to really get it.

Their “primary reasons for canceling” selections do not include Apple TV, Amazon’s Unboxed, or any other “the market has evolved beyond physical media” selections. And their “what will be your new primary source?” question has “I will download movies over the internet” as the only appropriate answer. Hopefully, Netflix won’t dump that list on the MPAA as I’m sure they would interpret it as evidence of further supposed infringement!

I was really hoping that Netflix’s online delivery play with Roku would be compelling.

Not to be. The diskless set-top box does not have the space to fully download any given piece of content. Thus, the box requires that the internet connection provide a stable, consistently high bandwidth, connection. In the face of lower bandwidth connections, it compensates by dropping back to fairly low quality bit rates.

My experience with all of the broadband internet connections I have ever had is that they tend to get very bursty in the evening hours as the whole neighborhood takes to their internet connections.

The last thing I want is to deal with an angry family when the quality of some movie drops to crap or drops out completely in the middle of playback.

With the Apple TV, we frequently had playback of an HD movie catch up to the download because available bandwidth dropped off during playback. Of course, the Apple TV has built in storage capable of storing the full movie and, thus, fixing this is as simple as starting the download of the movie before taking the ten minutes to make a bowl of popcorn!

None of this is to say that Netflix is a failure. It isn’t. If you are really into movies are like to watch lots of TV Shows, Netflix’s selection is unparalleled and the price can’t be beat.

I’ll revisit their service if they release a device that offers reliable playback compatible with realities of US broadband service. We do watch enough movies that Netflix’s monthly rates combined with such a device would be fiscally attractive.

In any case, farewell for now, Netflix, it was sometimes fun, but mostly disappointing.

I am seeing an increasing number of spammy comments that are obviously written by a semi-intelligent human actually responding to the content of the targeted post, but for which the content is almost completely devoid of useful signal. Almost, but not quite.

So, I have decided I’ll employ a new policy.

I’m going to let such comments stand. Especially when they bend over backwards to complement my work. I like that. I’m shallow that way.

However, if the URL and/or email address associated with the comment is nothing but a marketing splurb, those particular fields will be deleted.

I recently acquired a new pinball machine. Got it in unrestored condition for a decent price; low enough that I could make my money back and then some by parting it out. Don’t want to do that, though, as it is always sad to see something of limited production be destroyed.

Specifically, a Williams PIN-BOT. PIN-BOT was a very popular– 12,001 units made– pinball machine manufactured in 1986.

As always, the Internet Pinball Database has a complete set of information, manuals, ROM images, and pictures of PIN-BOT. Love that site.

Now, this particular PIN-BOT is a rather odd machine, when it comes to unrestored pinball machines.

Notably, the machine is beat to hell. Detailed pictures of exactly what I mean on the click through. It is missing the arch assembly entirely (the purplish plastic thing normally found on top).

The playfield has quite a few bare spots — heavy wear — and it is obvious that mylar was put onto the playfield after a number of spots had already worn through.

However, just about every lamp works. And all of the mechanics work just fine. Sure, it needs a flipper rebuild, but that is too be expected!

Hell, even the plastics are in good shape. The only plastic with damage is the spiral ramp and that was quite competently repaired! I have never seen a PIN-BOT with an intact spiral ramp.

Finally, all of the displays work and the ground-fault noise is present, but minimal. A couple of new capacitors and the audio should be clear as a bell. Beyond that, there are a couple of switches out, but that is it for electrical faults.

Once I replace all rubber rings, do a flipper rebuild, and fix a few switches, there is nothing about this machine that should negatively impact play. And a great machine this is!!

Of course, nothing beyond these photos will happen until post WWDC.

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For mother’s day, one of my wonderful wife’s requests was to have a bit of a Ms. PacMan marathon.

So, out came the ghetto arcade controller and, a bit longer than expected later, a Ms. PacMan marathon she had! (A bit longer because a nasty latency bug has cropped up in MAME OS X somewhere along the way. I found a workaround. But, yuck.)

Now, MAME is full screen and pausing the game just to deal with iTunes shuffle play song selection suckage (since iTunes on the MAME machine sends tunage to the garage workspace) is not considered good gaming etiquette.

Clearly, I need a shell script to control iTunes. Remote Buddy is cool, but it is too slow, requires too much configuration, and, after much use, has proven a bit flaky. A simple, straightforward, shell script is sufficient and, certainly, I cannot have been the first too think of this.

I wasn’t! I found this ancient hint on MacOSXHints.com.

David Schlosnagle — who seems to have disappeared — wrote a very useful little shell script that can play, pause, go to the next track, and set the output volume. The script, as posted, doesn’t quite work all the time due to (I presume) shell changes between 10.0(?) and Leopard.

So, I grabbed a copy of the script, dropped it in my hacques repository, and have updated it for Leopard. I also added the ability to set ratings from the command line (and the status command will show the currently playing track’s rating). Minor changes, really.

The latest version can always be had at http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/hacques/itunes.sh.

Thanks to David for doing this in the first place!!

Over the weekend, I received one (1) box of electronic junk. Not just any box of electronic junk (as I have many of those, as it is), but one Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk.

As per the TGIMBOEJ rules, I took some junk treasures and replaced it with a bunch of my own junk stuff.

And, as per the rules, I took a handful of photos of some of the stuff I pulled out. Not all.

I did not take photos of the stuff I put in. That is for the next person on the list to discover fully. Some vague clues, though: I added some antique semiconductors, some power management related componentry, some completely random small bits of goodness, a working caseless gigabit switch, and a purely mechanical device that is gloriously elegant in its implementation. And some other stuff, too.

More TGIMBOEJ pr0n on the click through….

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Quite a while ago, I wrote about fatblogging and, as of about a year ago, that my attempts to get myself below my then 240+ (247 peak in years past) lbs. Not a healthy weight for a 38 year old, even at a relatively tall 6 foot+ in height.

Well… I did. I dropped below 230 briefly and have since climbed back to 238. Why? Not keeping track of my weight on a daily basis diligently enough, not responding appropriately when my weight was heading in the wrong direction, and not exercising with any consistency.

I had been using Google 15 to track my weight. Neat. Basic. Flash. Yuck.

Now? I’ll be using a Wii Fit to, at the least, track my weight. Not only is it a fun little set of mini games that are focused on various dimensions — strength, flexibility, balance, endurance — of exercise, but it has a great user interface for tracking your weight over time.

But I’ll also be using to track much more than my weight. It actually has an awesome set of random exercises that appear to be really well suited to keeping on top of flexibility, balance, and basic strength training.

Does the Wii Fit replace going to a gym? Hell, no. But I never go to a gym. I hate gyms. And, if statistics are any indication, most of the population hates gyms, too. I’ll hike and bike instead, thanks.

We did find a few bugs in the Wii Fit’s “health quantification” algorithms. The Wii Fit assigns a “Wii Fit age” to each user based on performance, age, and BMI.

The initial set of tests don’t so much capture your initial physical condition as they do your ability to comprehend instructions for a wildly foreign user interface quickly.

My wife (who is nearly the same age as me) ended up with a Wii Fit age of 54 and my 7 year old son, Roger, turned up a 23.

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