June 29, 2008
Saturday afternoon I went out on a kayaking trip. The trip was through the Urban Ecology Center and organized by the UW Milwaukee outreach program. When I was younger a friend and I got the idea of taking a raft down one of the rivers in Sheboygan. We planned to build the raft out of wood we found. The idea sounded great to us, we were at that age that anything seemed possible and no idea seemed like a bad one. Eventually the adults got wind of the idea and put a stop to it, but did not completely kill it. The home-built raft was replaced by a inflatable raft. We took a few river trips in it and had a lot of fun.
Recently I’ve been keeping on eye out for deals on a canoe. I was nestolgic for getting out on a little river again and thought a canoe would work better than an inflated raft. I signed up for a canoe trip through UWM but it was cancelled because of all the flooding we have had recently. They did give me a slot in the trip they are doing later this summer though.
While waiting for that I thought I would also give kayaking a try. A kayak is much easier for me to carry on my car because its smaller and I can get the kayak mounts that go on my Yakima racks. I’ve never been kayaking through so I thought I should give it a try first. What is really nice about the trip through the Urban Ecology Center is that they supply the kayaks and give you some pointers on how to use them.
Here we are getting the kayaks ready to go
After this I put my camera away in my car because I didn’t want to worry about taking pictures while trying to figure out how to drive this thing for the first time. I had my old camera along so I wasn’t worried about something happening to it. I just didn’t think it was the best idea to be distracted while doing this. I figure I will bring one along the next time.
In hindsight I should have brought my GPS so I could have a track of the course but, as with the camera, I wanted to focus on the kayaking for now.
I did take my phone along and kept it in a ziplock bag. I figured I could use that to snap a few quick shots while I was in the water.
We started here
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And continued down-river until we reached this point, near the Milwaukee Ale house.
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At first the kayak felt really wobbly but after some time I started to get used to it. Its been so long since I was canoeing that I don’t remember if the kayak felt less stable than the canoe but I think the kayak is less stable. I have a canoe trip coming up so I will be more sure then.
The trip was fun and it was amazing seeing Milwaukee from this angle. As we got farther down stream the amount of traffic increased which caused some annoyances. I have a new appreciation for the no-wake rules on the river. There were a fair number of boats that seemed to not care at all. Some people even seemed to think it was funny seeing the kayaks having to go through the wakes. There even was one guy in his boat that was clearly drunk. I wonder if anyone enforces the law on the river. It didn’t seem like it.
On the way back the sky started getting darker and it was clear some thunderstorms were coming in. We worked to get back up stream as quickly as we could. By the time we reached the docks and got the kayaks out of the water the rain started to come down.
I think I would enjoy this more on my own. Seeing that we were in a group everyone had to try to keep together. There wasn’t a lot of time to stop and drift. This was fine for my first time out. I know now that I would love to do this again. I did have some problems with my hands. They went numb at one point and felt some shooting pain. I might have to hold off on another trip until after my hands are fixed, something that I really need to arrange but was holding off on until a point opened up in my project schedule at work.
The instructor said that the Urban Ecology Center loans kayaks and canoes to members and rents them to the public so if I am interested I don’t even have to buy one. Personally I would like to try doing this farther up stream on the Milwaukee river. Maybe closer to my house or in Cedarburg. I have to get some river maps to see how clear it is farther up stream.
UWM has a kayaking the Horicon Marsh trip planned for late summer. After this trip I am thinking that might be a lot of fun.
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April 29, 2008
Recently I finished working on a broken Karaoke machine that belongs to a co-worker. It was an interesting challenge, mostly just finding the replacement parts. It is now working and back with the owners. I hope it lasts a long time but I can’t be sure about the work I did. I had to do some creative soldering to get the thing back together.
The hardest part of the repair was fixing this circuit board.
What I do in this case is scrape off the insulation on the board and then solder bridges across the cracks using little pieces of wire. Unfortunately I didn’t take any after photos showing my repair job.
In the end it was about $20 in parts and a few hours of labor. The most important thing was the excitement on the young girl when she finally got it back after all this time being repaired.
With that out of the way it is time to start on a group of special projects I have planned for the next few months.
Most of these projects involve a class of micro-controllers known as AVR’s from the company Atmel. I became interested in them because they are cheap and come in a huge variety of sizes and capabilities. Another nice thing about these micro-controllers is that they are used in a device called the Arduino.
The Arduino is a unique combination of hardware and software to create a very flexible platform for doing micro-controller development. You can build your own boards with the Atmel chips but the Arduino gives you the opportunity to dive right in an start working on code and design.
The final device I am working on won’t use the Arduino but having the Arduino makes it much easier to play around with different ideas and come up with some working prototypes.
One idea I had was to use a wireless communication device called the XBee to build some interesting wireless networks. The XBee is an amazing device. It can do point-to-point communication or it can do ad-hock mesh networking.
My original idea is something I call MotoNet. The concept is to have a small box that I can attach to motorcycles. As the bikes get close enough to each other they would automatically join together to create a mesh network. The networks would then trade information on position, direction and also short message bursts such as “I need fuel”, “I need a break”, “Exit on the next exit”, etc. The idea is to save someone from having to use hand-signals.
You can achieve the same thing with wireless headsets but they can be pretty expensive. In addition I planned to connect the MotoNet transceiver to a GPS unit so that all the members of the mesh network could automatically keep tabs on each others positions. This way if they get separated between cars or someone turns down the wrong street they can find each other again quickly.
The original plan was to also offer voice communication and streaming music so that all the members of the mesh could listen to the same music and ‘chat’ if they wanted.
That is what I originally planned for the XBee. I think I really overestimated the range and data transfer rate of the devices. I knew what each where when I bought the modules but I think I figured the bandwidth was plenty to do all that. It might still be but I am starting to doubt it.
I wanted to do some experiments with them to see how much range and what kind of data rate I get in the real world. The first step was to build a ‘shield’ so that I can plug the XBee into the Arduino. I ordered a pair of XBee shields from NKC Electronics. They come in pieces that you nave the assemble yourself.
The kit looks like this when you receive it
The final assembled kit along with the Arduino and XBee looks like this
The Arduino on the bottom, the XBee shield on top of it and the XBee Pro module plugged into the XBee shield. The soldering took longer than I originally thought. Some delays were caused by the lack of a diagram showing what parts go where. Plus I do not have my magnifying desk lamp setup yet so its tricky seeing the details and being sure you got everything right.
Here are the two together.
I plugged one unit into my iMac and the second unit into my Macbook Pro. I then configured the two units and started sending messages back and forth between them. Everything is working great. So far I only have them a few feet apart but these are just preliminary tests.
This week I hope to program them with some simple code that keeps them chatting back and forth with each other and then I will start doing some range and bandwidth tests. If I can get decent enough range and bandwidth I might still be able to achieve my original goals, if not I will see if I can come up with another use for these guys. There are plenty. They can be used for remote weather stations, home automation, robotics, the only limits are your imagination.
Hopefully I will have enough time to keep the momentum going on my experiments and be able to post about them here.
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October 22, 2007
This morning I decided to head back home from Texas. I could have stayed a few more days but spending the weekend at the Faire made me long for being home with my equipment and a chance to start working on something myself.
The Faire was a great experience. I have lots of pictures that hopefully I will find a decent way to post. Plus I will have a post in a day or two, after I get back home, with more info. For now I need to get some sleep so I can get back on the road tomorrow.
One of the best things about the Faire was being able to talk to people about all their crazy ideas and not feel like anyone thought we were crazy. The only other time I have experienced that feeling is when I go to Science Fiction conventions. The difference here is that there was a much wider cross-section of people and interests. There were lots of art projects, science projects, weird inventions and lots of unique ideas.
Hopefully I will be able to go next year. I am not sure I will camp again. I now am considering just staying somewhere in Austin. There really were no after-hours activities that I was aware of. Maybe there were for the Makers themselves.
In closing here are just a few of the pictures I captured.
This was the middle section of the arena. It was the most dynamic and chaotic area. It appears that anyone who wanted space was welcome to setup a display.
In this area folks were encouraged to hack apart electronic noise makers so that they created new, unusual, sounds that they were not originally intended to make.
This is a home-made rear-projection display. It was connected to an x-box. I would have liked to try it but it was pretty popular with the kids.
This is a Robot that two sisters programmed, one is behind the table and the second is standing watch. The robot paints random patterns onto cloth and then they use the painted material to create other things.
As I said I have many more pictures. Hopefully I can post some in a few days.
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October 18, 2007
After a long day of driving yesterday I managed to get to Houston by about 10pm.
I had a few wrong turns. I was trusting my GPS more than I should have I guess. Its been a while since I drove down here so I was depending on it to give me directions. There has been a few instances of it giving me directions that either don’t make sense or end up being wrong. Wrong street names, stuff like that. I know the database is out of date on it but when I go to the Garmin web site it has no updates available for my GPS unit. Considering what I paid for it I am really disappointed that they will not, apparently, update it. I need to double check that.
I think I might even be willing to pay for an update but so far I have not found one available. The next GPS unit I buy I plan to take a close look at the competition before buying another Garmin. I might consider a unit from TomTom.
Not many pictures yet. This is from the Arkansas welcome center.
It was under construction but still a nice stop. The folks there were very nice. Something odd though. When I went into the bathroom there were stick-it notes on the urinal and in the stall with a phone number and just “local” written. I figure it was someone hoping to ‘hook up’ with someone passing through the area.
That is stupid on so many levels I could not believe it. I gathered up the ones I saw and tossed them away. I can’t believe anyone would be so desperate that they would do something like that but I guess bathrooms are popular stops for some people looking to score. Sometimes I am amazed at the lack of self control people have over a purely biological function.
Driving through Arkansas I went in and out of storms most of the day. At one point the rain was so bad I had to pull off. I used that as an opportunity to get lunch. If the rain was not so bad I could have made better time but it didn’t matter really. According to the GPS I was going to arrive at 10pm and not a whole lot would change that. In the end it was right. I ended up arriving right around 10pm.
The drive down to Houston on 59 was uneventful. There was a point for a few hours where I could not pick up anyone on my HAM radio so my APRS position did not get out. I guess there must not be much HAM activity in the area around Texarkana.
Now that I am in Houston I can relax until the main event, the Maker Faire in Austin. The weather is much warmer and humid at night than it has been so that might impact my plans for the Faire. Spending two hot sweaty nights in a humid tent is not exactly a lot of fun.
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October 16, 2007
I decided to stop and stay overnight instead of sleeping at a rest stop. I figure this way, hopefully, I will be fresh and ready for a day of driving tomorrow.
So tonight I am in Perryville, MO. If everything goes well I will make it to Houston tomorrow. I don’t have any pictures to post yet plus the Internet here is buggy, I am actually using my cell phone to get online. So it would take forever to post anything anyway.
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October 16, 2007
I had hoped to spend today packing and getting everything ready for an early Tuesday morning departure. That didn’t work out quite as planned. I slept in, I was pretty tired from the last two weeks, and I had to visit the doctor because I was too busy to go last week Friday.
By the time I was done running errands and taking care of other preparations it was getting late. I still managed to do most of the packing. I also pulled out the seats in my car and put in the bench that I use on road trips. I mounted the Yakima cargo carrier on the roof and went through my gear one more time to decide what stays and what goes.
I think I have about two hours of packing left and then I have to load the gear into the car. I might try for a late morning departure but my guess is it will be closer to noon by the time I get on the road. Hopefully things go more smoothly once I am on the road.
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October 15, 2007
This week I head out onto the road to drive down to Austin, Texas for the Maker Faire.
I am looking forward to this event. I wanted to go to the Spring event in San Mateo but the timing didn’t work out for me. I love Make magazine and I look forward to being surrounded by other crazy folks who love to tinker and build things. I plan to stop in Houston along the way and pick up my friend Chris. From there it shouldn’t be much of a drive to get to Austin.
I originally hoped to be packed and ready to go by now but events at work conspired to keep me busy up to the last minute. Now that I am officailly on vacation I can focus on finishing up the packing and getting everything ready for the trip.
As part of that I was planning on bringing along a propane water heater. This is a nice unit that allows you to have warm/hot water to use for cooking, cleaning, showers, whatever you wish. Its worked well in the past but I don’t find myself that often in situations that call for it.
I was running some tests on the water heater and everything seemed to be working fine until I suddenly had piles of blue smoke poring out of the unit and then, for a second, flames. I stopped that pretty quickly but figured the unit was dead for good. I decided to crack it open to see what caused the problems.
I am not sure why it happened. As near as I can tell there was a design flaw in that two sets of wires were too close to each other and too close to the heating elements. The insulation must have started metling and once it melted enough to create a short-circuit the whole thing went up pretty fast.
Actually I believe I can fix it. I just have to replace the wires that melted and when I do that I will re-route them so they stay away from each other and the area they were in. The problem is that I don’t think I have enough time to get that done before I leave. I could try but that would take up most of my time and its not for something that is critical to the trip.
Having hot water is important but there are other ways to achieve that.
For now I plan to continue packing and I will leave this piece behind for another day. I will finish re-wiring it when I get home. Maybe I will add some additional protection to the power circuit to see if I can help prevent this from happening in the future. A master power cutoff switch would be nice too.
For now its off to bed. Tomorrow is packing and preparing in hopes that I can leave on Tuesday morning.
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May 28, 2007
I am still in the process of moving to the new server. It was going slow because I didn’t want to break my current email. To speed things along I used one of my backup domains. I usually point my zilla.net domain to my house but for now I am pointing it to the new server. As soon as everything is working I can switch over to the new server with my main domain, deltae.org.
Two interesting things I noticed while working on the new server.
- From the moment the server was online I noticed attacks against the server. Mostly they are low-level attacks looking for the obvious weaknesses. There are a few things I could do to make my server more hidden but I am actually allowing the attempts and collecting the IP addresses of the machines. I might email the owners of those domains but its probably not worth it. Most of the time people have no idea, or care, that machines on their network are being used as a staging area for attacks against other machines.
- From the moment email was functioning on my machine I started receiving SPAM mail. I haven’t installed the spam filtering yet. I am still evaluating different filtering techniques. For now I will just shutdown mail services because I don’t need them.
None of this really surprises me. It is a sad state of affairs that we live in a time that it is routine and expected that hack attacks and spam are configured the norm. There really is a massive lack, in the electronic realm, of the concept of moral behavior. I don’t believe you have to have a religious background to believe in moral behavior so it is especially disappointing that it seems to be missing in our society these days.
Hacking, spam email, software piracy, coping music, etc, it is not seen as being as bad as breaking into someone’s home, putting fliers inside someone’s mailbox, stealing software from the store, stealing CD’s from the store, and yet, ultimately it is exactly the same thing.
Somehow there are a whole lot of children, and adults, that don’t have a strong concept of morals. The idea of what is right and wrong is less clear. Moral relativism becomes more and more prominent. You are told it all depends on your perspective, that you need to consider how the other person feels, what are their motivations. I believe there is such a thing as right and wrong, that there is evil in the world, that there are things that you shouldn’t do and those believes have nothing to do with religion its about being a good person.
I can’t help but think that something needs to change otherwise no-one will care about anything anymore and our society will fall apart.
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May 25, 2007
Soon, maybe even this weekend, the site will be moving.
If I do everything correctly anyone reading will not notice. The domain will be the same and the URL will be the same. In fact I probably shouldn’t post any notification and just move the site, but this is more of a ‘just in case’.
So what is happening. Well. I am moving to a new provider. I still have my account at the current provider. In fact its a lifetime account so in theory I have it until the company goes out of business. The thing is I wanted something a little more flexible. The current hosting account is fine for most things but I wanted to do something a little different with my email. I am on a shared mail server right now and its starting to limit what I can do. Most times its fine but there are days when it seems a little off.
Plus the return address’s don’t match the outbound address and some systems end up thinking that is spam. What do I mean?
Well, imagine I send out an email with a return address of gator@deltae.org but the mail system receiving the message receives it from gator@howe.textdrive.com. Some systems see that and think it must be spam.
Now I have a virtual server. That is like having my own server plugged into the internet. I can do whatever I want with it as long as I have enough space and memory. I could do the same thing with a server in my house but then I run into a different problem. That problem is that the mail comes from deltae.org but when the recipient does a reverse lookup they see the message is coming from my cable company.
Years ago I had my own server sitting in a rack at a internet company run by a friend. At that time I had the most reliable, dependable, steady, access. Mostly because I had total control over everything that was happening.
So I decided to go back to that. It costs me a little more per month than what I was paying before, but in the grand scheme of things I spend much more per year on Soda then I will on my internet server and seeing I like to play with the stuff to keep my skills sharp it has multiple benefits.
So if the site is down for a little while don’t worry it will be back soon.
On the other hand you won’t be missing much seeing I only have about one new post a month.
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May 12, 2007
Its an interesting book. Many people end up reading it eventually in their lives. Some understand it, some I suspect just read it to appear they are hip or special in some way.
Even for me my first brush with this book was not a completely independent act. It was, as is often the case, about a girl. I was in High-school, working at Woodlake Market and there was this girl. Christy Mueller, it was so long ago I don’t feel any concerns over the real name being here. She approached me in the break room. Something I was doing, or reading, must have made her decide to chat with me that day, or maybe she was just bored. Whatever the reason I was immediately enthralled. I found myself coming up with any excuse to talk to her, visit her, whatever. In the end she moved on as quickly as it had started. She was after someone older, sophisticated, an artist.
There was no chance I would ever compete, I hated the guy without even knowing him. Supremly unfair but not untypical for someone in High-school. She was also a year ahead so she was gone and off to college and I still had a year left. Years later I ran into her again. She was back in my home town, living with the artist. I visited a few times but then I finished college and went off on my own adventures. Oddly enough I ran into the artist a year or two later while at a conference in Appleton. I wasn’t sure why he was there, but he remembered me. We didn’t talk about Christy, I don’t know what happened to her. I feel bad because I know that we could have been friends, but it was clear that I had projected the wrong image to her along the way, and I never had a chance, never the opportunity, to change how she saw me.
Along the way, in one conversation, the topic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came up. Maybe because I was driving a motorcycle at the time and she was reading the book. At that time I read the book but it was not for the right reasons. I just wanted to have something in common, some common ground to help relate to this fascinating girl.
Years later I read it again and that time the book was much more relevant to me, had more to offer. Its one of those books that means more to you as you read it in difference stages of your life. Tonight as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep I started to think about the book again and one of the concepts from the book that I always thought was interesting.
The book talks about how the idea of Motorcycles is firmly in our head. You could take all the Motorcycles off the road, destroy all the factories, but people would still know what a Motorcycle is, still have a concept of them. The thing is that idea was not always there. At some point in time, which varries based on who you give credit for the invention of the Motorcycle, the idea came into existence and people started building the machines. Once that started there is no going back.
Now the book is much more than this one, simple, idea. This is just something that came to my mind as I fight a bout of insomnia and try to get some sleep.
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