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Night Riding and Moblog Image Uploading

Published January 21, 2009

Crossing back over the bridge from Clinton River Park to Dodge Park after a winter evening ride with Bob.

Today at lunch I made a quick trip home and plugged in the batteries for my bike lights so that I’d be able to see tonight when Bob and I met up for a bike ride through Dodge Park and the Clinton River Park. (For reference, the two are connected by the bridge above, which crosses the Clinton River.) I rode the Bianchi D.I.S.S., which was really great everywhere except for the 3″ thick glare ice in one of the flooded parts of the trail. (Bob had no problem riding over it with his Nokian Extreme 294 studded tires, though.)

That photo above was taken with the new-to-me Android / T-Mobile G1 and is at the heart of my biggest problem with it: getting content (namely pictures) off of it. The device works great, but it does not support Bluetooth OBEX, has no IR, and the SD card does not mount as USB Mass Storage when the handset is connected via USB. I’ve also had no luck with the now four FTP, SFTP, and/or direct-to-Gallery apps which I’ve tried.

The only current solution seems to be emailing the photos or copying them over USB using adb (Android Debug Bridge). Emails difficulties are obvious, and adb is just tedious, requiring full paths to the images (eg: c0nsumer@reason:~/Desktop> adb pull /sdcard/dcim/Camera/20090121185850.jpg 20090121185850.jpg).

I’d love a direct-to-Gallery uploader, but judging by the current state of the other apps in Android Market it looks like I’ll have to write one myself.

There is something called Bucket Upload which seemed promising as it could do custom HTTP multipart uploads, but as the Gallery Remote Protocol requires two requests for authenticated uploads (login then add-item) it wouldn’t work. It’s only designed to do single-request uploads.

UPDATE: It’s been shown to me that selecting the USB connectivity notification in Android after plugging the phone in allows one to dismount the microSD card from the phone and present it to the OS. This will be a good stopgap.

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12:00:44 EST on 20-Jan-2009

Published January 20, 2009

Driving north on M-24 listening to the inaugeration of Barack Obama. Fourty four seconds before this photo was taken Obama legally became president.

Wanting to listen to the swearing in and inauguration speech of the 44th President of the United States I decided to do something which used to be quite typical for me: go for a long drive while listening to the radio and eating fast food.

After picking up a veggie burger meal from Burger King I headed north on M-24 driving through suburban / rural southeast Michigan, looking at the sparking snow, listening to the radio, and eating my unhealthy meal. I don’t have much to say about the speeches, invocations, poems, compositions, and benedictions, except that I felt that it all had an overall message of difficulty ahead, a need for hard work, and a general belief that if people truly are willing to fix problems they can. Overall, I thought this was good.

Oh, and that photo? I took it just to show the sort of area I was driving through, but it just so happened to be at exactly 44 seconds after Barack Obama legally became president. Funny, that.

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Ordering Parts is Complicated

Published January 19, 2009

When working on electronics projects I tend to order parts from Mouser or Digi-Key, with a preference given to Mouser because of their lower costs and my familiarity with their site. However, the experience I’m having right now with selecting parts for building the AMB γ1 illustrates the complications one often runs into when ordering a large BOM.

Here’s the assumptions I must work under:

· Mouser is usually cheaper than Digi-Key.
· Mouser often has particular parts available in smaller quantities than Digi-Key does.
· Digi-Key has a wider variety of less common parts, like (in this case) a TOSLINK receiver.
· Digi-Key has what amounts to a $25 minimum order. Mouser has none.
· Almost every part I need is available from Mouser, making it difficult to reach the Digi-Key minimum.

This, combined with a 74-line BOM, makes for quite a bit of work just selecting parts for a hobbiest device.

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Selling More Salad Dressing

Published January 18, 2009

Spinach, watercress, carrot, and roma tomato salad I made for easter.

I have an idea for selling more salad dressing: suggesting that people combine dressings at home for new, exciting, experimental flavors. The key here is to cross-promote flavors so that people will buy both their normal dressing and a flavor which they wouldn’t otherwise purchase.

The marketing would be easy, as the salad dressing company simply has to supply a recipe book (such as the one which introduced us to the Fiberccino) which suggests multi-flavor dressing combinations. These combinations can be chosen by looking at data detailing who buys what flavors, then ensuring that only one of the two dressings for those chosen recipes are regularly purchased by a particular demographic.

Flavors such as Crete (Greek & Thousand Island), Morricone (Tuscan Italian & Ranch), and Absolute Power (Russian & Caeser) are sure to win people over and, of course, sell more dressing!

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Jacket Potato

Published January 17, 2009

My attempt at a jacket potato. It was baked for 1.5 hours, the topped with shredded cheddar and mushrooms and garlic and black pepper that were fried in butter and olive oil.

Danielle and I had some excellent jacket potatos at a pub we visited with Dominic on the same day we took a tour of Fuller’s Griffin Brewery. Wanting the same sort of thing for dinner tonight, I put together this, from a baked (Idaho) potato and shredded cheddar cheese, topped with mushrooms, garlic, and black pepper that were fried in copious amounts of butter and olive oil. The oil was poured over everything to lubricate the potato a bit more and give it that unhealthy pub food feeling.

To keep the experience as pub-like as possible I’m eating it (as I type this) with a glass of lager. Rochester Mills’ Lazy Daze Lager, to be precise.

The verdict? Outstanding. Absolutely excellent.

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High Android Phone

Published January 17, 2009

For some reason VMware Fusion identifies the T-Mobile G1 phone running Google's Android as 'High Android Phone'.

VMware Fusion, for some reason, identifies the G1 as ‘High Android Phone’ when connected via USB. OS X only sees it as ‘Android Phone’ and Vista (once the drivers are installed) sees it as both ‘Android Phone’ and ‘HTC Dream Composite ADB Interface’.

(Thanks to the generosity of a friend I’ve recently come into possession of a T-Mobile G1 phone running Google’s Android. It’s only costing an extra $20/mo for unlimited data, so I’ve been using full time since I received it. It’s really nice, and I’m sure I’ll write more about the phone, its OS, and the dev tools later.)

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Cold Night for Riding

Published January 15, 2009

Bianchi D.I.S.S. on a very cold night time ride around my neighborhood, no flash.

Being one of the coldest nights of the year (thus far), I decided to go for a bike ride. After a bit over a mile I had to go back in because my fingertips were becoming incredibly painful. At a few points while riding right into the wind my head became quite cold as well, but other than that I was quite comfortable. Something other than the waterproof / cold weather Gavia gloves and the thin head covering thing I have are definitely required if I want to do more riding like this.

(Here’s another version of that same photo, with flash.)

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x0xb0x #888 Is Complete

Published January 14, 2009

Completed x0xb0x #888 with red and black plastic bank/mode knobs.

That’s that. x0xb0x #888 is done. Now I just have to sell it.

Part of me hopes that this is the last x0xb0x that I ever build, but not the last 303 clone. More and more ideas have been swimming around my head about making a newer, better version of something similar to, but definitely not, the x0xb0x.

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