Sometimes, when tracking down a bug, you’ll get a bit of console spew, an exception log, or a crash log that contains a ridiculously large number. Sometimes, that is the result of a memory smasher.

Sometimes, though, it is because of a type conversion problem.

For example, if you see a log message indicating that the value 4294967295 is causing a problem, it is probably because something archived -1 on a 32 bit system and then unarchived it on 64 bit improperly.

This has come up often enough that I like to leave the Calculator app open in Programmer Mode. Then, I can copy/paste the value into Calculator and see both the bit pattern or the hex value (which will often show patterns that base-10 does not).

An aside, I have generally tried to break myself of the habit of relying upon knowledge of magic values (like 4294967295). Sure, I’ll use ‘em as clues, but I focus much more on refining my tools to make recognition of said values unnecessary as there are a slew of different values that look non-obvious in decimal form that become darned obvious in binary or hex.

Dead obvious, I know.

As we start into the second phase of remodel where we are living in the house, there is the occasion when there are stinky fumes from the work site that I want to keep out of the livable areas.

Enter the Air Mover.

Now that I have one, I’m stunned that I didn’t pick up one before! In particular, our climate is such that it can get really damned hot during the day and still cool off at night. Even with all the windows and doors open, the interior of the house can still take a bit to cool down.

No more.

With the 1600CFM air mover pictured at left, I merely drop it on the picnic table outside our back door and put it on high. Within 20 minutes or so, the temperature inside the house is down to something quite comfortably cool.

Better yet, our garage faces south west and, thus, gets baking hot by the end of the day and doesn’t cool off until after midnight. Again, no more as the air mover does a brilliant job of pushing cool air from in the house, through the garage and out the front.

Brilliant tool. Why the hell didn’t I get one years ago?!

I picked up the one at left from Home Depot for $199 (7/17/2010).

@Ian: We have an attic fan in Missouri, too, but it tends to pull ash out of the fireplace(!!). Of course, an Eichler has neither an attic or a crawl space….

@Philippe: Push air into the house, though I’ll sometimes set it up to pull air through the house, too. As far as pushing dust in the house is concerned, we leave the doors open anyway. There aren’t really very many bugs in California (save for swarms of June Bugs this year) and the dust doesn’t seem any worse with the fan on (i.e. it is still quite dusty around here).

When remodeling our house, one goal was to move to the highest efficacy lighting while remaining cost effective. In terms of pure lumens per watt — pure efficacy — LEDs are, by far, the winner on the commercial market and have been for the last decade.

Up until two years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen), though, the cost per lumen of LED based lighting has been prohibitive outside of things like rope lights or other installations that had tons of low power, cheap, lamps. Unfortunately, rope lights and christmas lights just don’t make for good task lighting in your typical kitchen. CFLs, though, pretty much suck. After 18 months, the lamps are starting to fail, they are sometimes noisy, and their warmup time can be annoying (contrary to reports from the energy & incandescent lamp industries, CFLs are actually not terribly toxic — the amount of mercury is tiny).

I have been watching the LED market for quite a while. In particular, Best Hong Kong has an interesting selection of relatively current and relatively reasonably priced lamps. I’m using some of their products to illuminate the hand blown glass pendant lamps at the top of this picture. Thank you to EMSL for suggesting Best Hong Kong in the first place!

In monitoring the technology, the one name that came up over and over is CREE, who seems to be one of the leaders in manufacturing LEDs and LED fixtures. At least, CREE is the name that comes up most often for products targeted to residential applications (Phillips and others seem to be big names in the commercial space).

Now, if you search Amazon for CREE lamps, you’ll find a bunch of units, but the state of the art tends to be about six months behind and, frankly, comparatively expensive (of course, if anyone happens to stumble on the above link a year or two after I wrote this, I hope the prices are reasonable and the technology current).

Since the technology existed, the issue was then a matter of figuring out where to find lamps with the latest CREE LED technology integrated into a package compatible with standard home lighting fixtures. After having found some CREE 3x 1 watt GU-10 (i.e. track light compatible 120v AC lamps) and found some 3 watt CREE LEDs with the same form factor as the 1 watt LEDS, a bit of searching revealed that, in fact, if you are willing to import lamps in lots of 10 (or more), you can buy the latest lighting technology

Through Alibaba.com, I found Ledsion Lighting Technology Co. Ledsion manufacturers a ton of LED based lamps, both for home use and in various commercial applications.

Not having ordered product from Ali Baba or — frankly — ordered anything direct from the manufacturer in this fashion gave me a bit of trepidation. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

CFL based illumination; not as bright, no highlights.

I ordered 10 (minimum lot size) 3x3w (9w) CREE based GU-10 120VAC lamps. It took about 10 days for the company to make and ship the lamps (yes — make — a lot of the manufacturing is pretty much on-demand). It came to about $19.00 per lamp. While just about 2.5x the price of the 7w CFLs they were replacing, the LEDs generate 150% the light output and have a rated life of 50,000 hours vs. the CFL’s 8,000.

I.e. the performance and long-term cost– the efficacy — of the CREE based 3x3w LEDs completely dominates CFLs. Better still, the light quality is just stunning compared to the CFLs. The LEDs are “on” instantly and provide a very even light. Frankly, it looks better than 50 watt halogens original to the track in that the light is, for lack of a better term, more comfortable; less harsh.

The image at left was taken while the counter was illuminated by the old CFLs with considerably more light coming from other sources. No highlights on the counter, to speak of. With CFLs, the track lighting was nothing more than ambient overhead lighting. With the LEDs, it provides more ambient light and enough directed light to provide for highlighted spots.

Long term viability obviously remains to be seen, but I remain optimistic.

I returned to the Lesdion Lighting Technology to order more lamps and see if I could grab some 12vAC or DC MR-16 CREE based LEDs for other applications and, via AliBaba’s built in chat system, ended up chatting with the seller. Extremely professional, patient, and helpful. Answered a handful of technical questions and I was able to customize my order a bit to meet my needs. (And, really, I’m still a bit in shock that, through Alibaba, I can talk directly to a manufacturer to get a relative one off of a product with the custom color, lens, and wattage I desire. I feel like I just experienced a bit of Blade Runner from my living room.)

All in all, I’m extremely happy that LED technology has advanced to the state of being usable in “normal” home applications. While still slightly initially pricy, the long term costs may be significantly less and the reduced energy use is attractive. Because of the increased light output from the track lights, I’m finding that I no longer need to use the 30 to 40 watts of florescent tube under-lighting!

At left is a screenshot of the iPad application LightTrac.

LightTrac displays various information about how the sun traverses the sky in any given location, along with moonrise/moonset times.

When doing any kind of outdoor photography, it is extremely helpful to know exactly how the sun is going to track through the sky. Obviously, while in the field, you can just look up to figure this out. Having an application that models the sun’s traversal such that you have an idea of how the light will change throughout the day is tremendously useful.

On a vacation or any kind of a planned photo shoot, this application makes it easy to know what photo opportunities might be optimal in the magic light of sunrise and sunset. When visiting a city for a day tour, it can help you decide on an optimal path through a city; if you travel primarily east to west in the AM, returning in the PM, you’ll maximize time with the sun at your back illuminating what is in front of you!

Beyond photography, LightTrac has also answered a question I’ve long had about my garden plot; exactly how does the sun traverse the plot and where should I plant tall stuff to minimally shade shorter stuff (the answer is that my garden’s rows are likely to be on a diagonal to the plot in the coming years!

While there is always room for improvement — knowing where the moon is can help to plan for long exposure ghostly night shots, for example and the app “only” gives phases, moonrise and moonset — the application is intuitive, useful, and generally pleasant to use.

• The Baen Free Library contains quite an amazing selection of donationware ebooks from many well known science fiction and fantasy authors.
• Feedbooks contains a ton of public domain and original content as they are also a publisher of ebooks. Their blog is pretty interesting, too.
• A one-off; Charlie Stross’s Accelerando comes highly recommended.
• In the meta-category; a weblog post claiming to point to the “top 20 websites for DRM-free Sci-Fi Books”.
• This list is impressive and also leads to cheap sources for ebooks, too. I’m perfectly happy paying for ebooks (just like real books), though I’m not at all happy about paying more than the paperback price for an older book.
• Tor books — publishers of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series — has embraced ebooks to a large degree.

I know lots of people that have picked up iPads — no surprises there. What is surprising is that just about everyone has something for which their reaction is “the iPad changes everything”.

I have several of those, but — at the moment — the biggest is reading. I used to read tons and tons of books, but gradually tapered off because I carrying around a couple of books was a pain in the ass and, for vacations, I would need to take up to a dozen, depending on duration.

That and, frankly, it has been bloody obvious for years that an e-book read that is “good enough” would provide a portable library and a decent reading experience. The Kindle was almost the one, but having 40% of the front surface area covered by a keyboard seemed like a complete waste to me. I did, however, use the Kindle app on the iPhone to read a couple of books — good, but not great.

I find iBooks to be a wonderful reading experience. Easy on the eyes, very nice user interface and — with the versatility of the iPad — I can read Kindle books, and do a myriad other things on the device. Haven’t spent much time with the Kindle app, but if it is like the iPhone, it’ll be just fine, too!

I, however, am a cheapskate. I haven’t quite brought myself to drop money on books. Fortunately, there is a large number of freely available books in both the iTunes and Kindle stores.

With a bit of hunting, I have also hit upon a treasure trove of mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy — my favorite genres — books! In particular, Baen Books made available a large number of their books in many formats! In particular, you can find a list of the participating authors, click through to their titles, then select the EPUB/Nook/Stanza Format on the download page.

Note that the books have covers as in the picture on the left, but the cover art doesn’t show up in the iBooks application on the iPad.

I donated $51 in return for a ton of books.

Our solar installation came with a neat little device that interfaces between the panels and the Enphase’s central web site.

Like just about every other device with a network connection, it offers a simple interface for monitoring power stats and seeing any recent power related events, including low/high voltage or out of phase events caused by the grid!

Interestingly, I can easily scrape the event log to grab a pretty decent estimate of when sunrise and sunset happened. The panels boot at sunrise, logging and event, and they emit a low voltage emit at sunset. (Obviously, the times will be slightly skewed by installation angle, etc… but, still, neat!).

And, of course, the interface has an “Administration” button. Password protected and the customer isn’t given the password. Hmm…. yup… it is entirely as dead obvious as you might imagine.

This allows for the network interface to be configured and gives access to slightly more raw bits of info. By clicking a link for the power meter monitoring feature that isn’t set up yet, it throws an error with stacktrace. Top frame is /opt/emu/httpd/rhtdocs/index.rb:28.

Looks like it is implemented in ruby! Neat.

There also appear to be some other URLs that lead to directory listings and the like.

Also not mentioned in the manual is that it has port 22 — ssh — open. The username/password on that appears to not be so obvious.

Our installers were Horizon Energy Systems. Kurt Newick (408-761-2029) was our liaison with Horizon and he was wonderful to work with. Kurt seems entirely committed to the widespread deployment of Solar power generation more-so than grabbing commissions. Good dude. Do recommend.

Full disclosure: We did have some difficulty during the install. Horizon was extremely forthright in dealing with the situation and I would have zero hesitation in working with them again. Actually, we are already talking about upping our system’s generation capacity.

As of the last couple of days, our household has gone from a consumer to a producer of electricity. Our 3.2kw, 16 panel, solar generation system is now online! With a peak generation of 2.7 kilowatts, we generated about 21.6kWh today alone.

You can see both current and historical data via this this site (iPhone app, please??!?!).

Beyond being good for the environment blahblahobviousblah, the solar system will pay for itself in something pretty close to a decade (the huge rebates help alot!). If PG&E actually starts paying for surplus electricity in the next couple of years as promised under AB 920, it may pay for itself sooner (and we might add panels to accelerate the payback — more below).

As well, it is just really satisfying to watch the little dial on the electric meter run backwards. This morning as the panels started to warm up and the meter was just starting to tick backwards, I had Roger watch the meter while I toggled the electric dryer on/off. “Holy cow! That makes the dial go the wrong way really fast!”. Yup, sure does– now think about how fast/slow various devices make that dial go!

No, I don’t entirely believe these numbers… but, better than being just a consumer!

Our installation is relatively straightforward, though there are elements on the cutting edge at this time. Namely, it is using Sunpower panels combined with M210 micro-inverters from Enphase.

That warrants explanation; there are two sorts of common solar installations; large inverter (potentially multiple) and micro-inverter.

In many, there is a single inverter that converts the DC electricity generated by the panels into AC to be fed to the house and grid. Single inverters are typically measured by the kilowatts they can handle and, not surprisingly, the more power they can handle, the more expensive. Not only that, but inverters often achieve peak efficiency at somewhere around 70% to 90% capacity.

I.e. single inverters are fairly cost effective and SunPower’s inverters have nice web based monitoring tools (our panels are from SunPower), but don’t often give you much of an upgrade path.

Micro-inverters are — as the name implies — small inverters where there is one inverter per panel. The inverters are then connected together into chains and have the smarts to synchronize the phase of power generation before feeding the sum total generated power back to the grid.

Micro-inverters have several advantages. First, in a large inverter system, you typically have a series of panels that feed the inverter. If any one panel is dirty, shaded, or otherwise running inefficiently, it drags down the output of the whole system. Micro-inverters bypass that issue entirely in that every panel operates independently.

Secondly (and of potential critical importance depending on AB 920), micro-inverter based systems are significantly easy to upgrade in that you can mostly just add pairs of panels and micro-inverters into the existing system. There is obviously a limit as to the number of panels per run per phase and, at some point, you will need to run new feeder lines into the panel to handle the power.

In our case, we have room to add three, maybe four, more pairs without any additional hardware installed.

Finally, micro-inverters need to have quite a bit of smarts to be able to communicate with the other inverters and make sure all the power is being generated in phase, etc. Thus, micro-inverter based systems tend to have very good monitoring solutions. For the Enphase micro-inverters, our installation included an Envoy gateway that collects information about our system and relays it back to the Enphase web site.

Quite a lot of fun to see the animations and monitoring tools. Via the full administrative user interface, I can also see all anomalous events and the system will automatically call for help if something goes terribly wrong.

All in all, it is a really great system. The marriage of technology with production value on that web site obviously scratches my geek itch while feeding power back to the grid is good for the Bay area (notably, rolling blackouts occur during peak power demand which also coincide with peak solar power generation — little systems like ours will help to reduce the load on the overall grid by distributing power generation)!

The installation was done by Horizon Energy Systems. Kurt Newick acted as the liaison with Horizon and he is absolutely committed to the cause of seeing solar used far and wide. Kurt is professional, friendly, and an all around great person to work with!

We had a slight issue with our electrical during the installation — understandable given the goofiness of Eichlers — and Horizon took accountability for the issue and did everything possible to fix the problem while ensuring that we were completely happy with the installation.

If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

In particular, the Places feature allows you to import GPS data from iPhone photos or from GPS data captured by pretty much any device that can spew a standard GPX format data file.

Tagging from the iPhone is straightforward. With the iPhone connected to your computer, go to Places in Aperture and then select Import from iPhone Photos…. Aperture will then display all the photos on your iPhone that have GPS metadata and you can pick the photos from which the GPS data is to be imported. Once picked, Aperture will apply the GPS data to photos taken near the same time as the imported data.

However, one issue with the iPhone is that it really isn’t a terribly good GPS logging device. Using it as one eats the battery and the data generated often has holes. And, because the iPhone uses A-GPS (GPS assisted by cellular signal), it doesn’t work at all when hiking in areas without cell signal. Apparently, I’m mistaken about A-GPS — it should fall back to regular GPS behavior. My experience, though, is that the iPhone just isn’t a terribly good GPS device when it doesn’t have a cell signal and has often been off by miles when in the hinterlands. It works great when on the road or near cities, though.

Dragging a photo onto a track. Note that my camera’s clock was set correctly.

Importing a raw GPS Track is a slightly more involved process and, at first blush, doesn’t entirely seem as easy as it could be. But there is a good reason for the way it works; clocks on cameras generally suck and, thus, there is a need to effectively timeshift imported photos vs. the GPS data.

When you import a GPS track, the Tracks and Waypoints submenu will be populated with the various segments of GPS track data imported from the log. Once you select a GPS track that includes a location for a photo that you want to geotag, drag the photo to the exact location on the track where the photo was taken. Aperture will display the offset in time between the photo’s timestamp and the GPS data. When you drop the photo, Aperture will ask if you want to assign GPS metadata to all photos taken during the (potentially offset) duration of the GPS track.

Done. Photos geotagged. And, if you haven’t happened to reset your camera’s clock recently, you’ll probably be chagrined and amazed to know exactly how poorly your camera keeps time!

Of course, you need a source of GPS metadata. And this is where your fuzzy happy generally intuitive and “just works” experience ends. Frankly, the state of GPS support on the Mac just flat out sucks outside of a handful of navigation oriented devices.

After purchasing and returning two different devices, I finally settled on the Qstarz BT-Q1300S.

First, the good: the Q1300S has about a 15 hour battery life, recharges conveniently off of USB, and is conveniently small in size. Once you deal with the shenanigans that I’ll describe below, the unit “just works”. The LED indicators on the front are pretty straightforward. Overall, the passive industrial design — the case, the indicators, the static elements — are quite solid and attractive.

Now, reality:

Physically, the device is small and conveniently sized. The strap is too tight and, thus, doesn’t really swivel much. I can easily replace that.

There are two additional flaws that can’t be fixed. First, the unit uses a single button for power and other functions. It is of poor quality and, after only a few uses, is starting to stick. A co-worker with the same device has the same problem.

Second, the mini-USB connector is covered by a rubber shield (good!), but that shield flips open to cover the power button (which you need to get to) and actually gets in the way of sticking in the USB cable! Dumb.

From a User Experience perspective, the device is a train wreck. To turn on, hold the power button for 4 seconds. It boots and then it starts logging (the LEDs on the front do a pretty good job of giving status, though “solid” vs. “blinking” for “looking for GPS” vs. “GPS signal good” is non-obvious). To turn off logging (convenient for downloading or for just using as a BlueTooth data source), hold down the button two seconds. To turn off, hold down the button for four seconds. There is very little visual feedback during this process.

Horrible. Combined with a button that sticks and it is close to unusable. I would much rather have two buttons — power and mode — without the need to hold either down for any length of time.

To download data, requires that the device be on. Plugging in the device causes the Battery light to come on — almost looking like a power indicator. Of course, if you turn on the device, it’ll default to logging data. Expect to always have a dozen or so data points from wherever you happened to be when you downloaded the data. Remember that rubber gasket thingy from the USB port I mentioned earlier? The one that covers the power button? Yes, it is in the way if you need to turn on the device after plugging it in.

Why the damned thing doesn’t simply turn on when USB power is applied is beyond me. Better yet, why not let the device mount as a flash drive (some units do, but they had other flaws that made them even worse than the QStarz).

Since it doesn’t mount as a drive, that means you need some software to retrieve data from the device. Thankfully, HoudahGPS to the rescue. Once configured, it works quite well. Plug in the unit, make sure it is powered up, and then click the Acquire button. Done.

Configuring the device from a Mac is… unfortunate.

The QStarz device is based on the MTK chipset. This is a fairly standard chipset and, thus, there exists open source software for interacting with it. In particular, you’ll want BT747. It is a Java application that can configure, download, and otherwise manage an MTK based device (amongst other). Via the BT747 software, you can configure the sampling rate of the device. It defaults to once-a-second, but 2 or 3 times a second is useful for tracking relatively fast moving motion that changes directions quickly; biking or driving, for example.

If you want to communicate with the QStarz via BlueTooth (and maybe via USB — I didn’t try), go to the Finder and check the Open in 32-bit mode option.

Bottom line; with geotagging of photos becoming pretty much ubiquitous across both photo organization tools and the various websites (flickr, etc), it is only a matter of time — 12 to 18 months, I would guess — until pretty much every camera has GPS built in. Until then, the QStarz 1300S fills the gap. Not nicely, but it does work.

Heck, not only can I take can take a photo of Roger and one of the very few phone booths left in the state, but I can even show you exactly where it is (turn on “Hybrid” mode to see more than a green blob on the map)!

I am concerned about build quality. The company does monitor twitter, is aware of my power button issue, and is responding extremely proactively (so far). I’m impressed and, frankly, if QStarz comes through with their promise to replace my device, it will go far to assuage my disdain for the device.

Now, if QStarz would produce a useful — simple — Mac client, that would make me even happier.

Roger has always excelled in math and sciences — no surprise given lineage — and is of the age (9) where the science education is moving into bigger and smaller areas of study.

So far, he has gotten by with a QX-5 Digital Microscope
and mixScope. While the QX-5 is great for looking at money, the veins in leaves, bits of mushroom and tiny critters, high magnification is pretty much useless because the construction makes focus impossible.

Thus, the desire to get something more like a real microscope. In particular, I really wanted a microscope that allows for live viewing on a computer screen (like the QX-5). While, there were some good ones for less than $500 — 3MP digital camera model microscopes that included simultaneous use binocular eyepieces, even — their software is pile of Windows only crapware.

No, thank you. Next!

Close-up of cross section of spinal column.

Enter the Celestron 44340 LCD Digital LDM Biological Microscope. It replaces the normal eyepiece with a 2.1MP digital camera and a color LCD screen. More importantly, the build quality is actually quite decent such that focusing at, even, the 400x maximum optical zoom is quite smooth!

Unlike the QX-5, the Celestron 44340 is really only for use with proper microscope slides (The QX-5 still has a purpose!). blank microscope slides and slide covers are cheap, so I picked up a bunch of those, too.

The slide table includes a very nice set of caliper style adjusters for moving the slide around in a highly controlled fashion. Slides are held in place by an easy to use spring loaded caliper.

The microscope can illuminate the subject from either the top or bottom and the bottom illumination includes a variety of color filters that can be quite useful. Intensity of illumination can be adjusted.

The top illumination is nearly useless at all but the lowest magnification (otherwise there isn’t enough distance between lens and subject).

The digital controls include an EV adjustment, a digital zoom, and the ability to take snapshots. Digital zoom only works when the snapshot resolution is configured for less than 1600×1200. Digital zoom works by interpolating data across the sensor into a lower-than-sensor resolution image that provides a higher-than-optical zoom factor. It actually works fairly well (unlike most digital zooms).

Pollen. Evil, evil, pollen.

The unit also comes with a really nice hard sided carrying case, a dust cover, and power adaptors for global use. A surprisingly complete kit — I was completely blown away by the quality of the case for a device this relatively inexpensive.

My only real complaint is that the LCD is effectively physically attached to the camera & lenses. That, combined with the relative stiffness of the buttons means it is hard to take an image that isn’t blurry. However, it seems that the unit has a slight delay between button push and recording such that is isn’t as big of a problem as it could be. But, still… stupid design — just move the damned shutter button to the base. I’ll probably hack the unit to add an external shutter button.

All in all, I’m thoroughly impressed by the build quality and feature set of this microscope. I would still have been impressed if my $180 had purchased a microscope with this optical performance, sans awesome case and really nice slide table.

All of the images in this blog post were taken with the microscope, no surprise. It is a boxed set of prepared slides that I also picked up from Amazon.