Sikuli: automating GUI interaces

Wow! This demo video is impressive. You can write code to interface to anything you can see.

I wonder if I could use this to write a facebook-bejeweled-cheat-app in a matter of minutes...

Nexus One versus iphone: technical specs chart

I know, everybody is doing it: but here's a side-by-side comparison of new Nexus One tech specs versus the iphone. Green bold text highlights a superior feature. The summary is that Nexus if cheaper, smaller, lighter (if only marginally on all three), with better camera, bigger display, faster CPU, bigger battery, and more RAM.

We have to hand it to Apple for re-defining the worlds expectations for cell phones. Good job Apple, you blazed the trail again, just like you did with mp3 players, USB support, and the GUI. Apple is a leading innovator.

Google's advantage is that the iPhone's specs are public so Google knows exactly what they need to beat, and they do so in every category but base storage.

Also the wishlists for iphone are well-published, so Google can one-up Apple in categories that users actively complain about: removable storage, camera flash, battery life. Smart.

Why I like real, physical books, and resist Kindle, Nook

I like technology, and would probably be a regular early-adopter if my budget wasn't already focused on my family. ...but I resist e-book readers, including Kindle, Nook, and smartphones, even while my wife reads books on her iphone weekly.

Tycho explains why in his post today. In most cases, new technology is presented to the public as beneficial to us, but the peddlers of said tech are focused on using it to restrict our liberties in an attempt* to increase their profits.

Here's the whole (long) quote:

I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

There are other reasons too: I like how real books look on the shelf - I'll re-read my favorites just because I saw them on the shelf and was reminded of a great story. I like how how favorite volumes wear their stains, creases, and worn bindings like medals for the hours of wonder they provided to readers. The Nook allows limited lending, and only to people with similar hardware, but I can lend a real book to any one at all.

Long-term, I hope ebook readers only supplement printed literature, not replace it.

*while correlations between DRM & profit aren't necessarily supported by research, anyway.

Backblaze custom storage: 67 TiB for $8k

This article on the Backblaze Pod includes 3-d models, part lists, and some assembly details for building your own scalable multi-petabyte SAN for about 4% of what you'd pay EMC2 for the same number of bits. I love the idea of using off-the-shelf components to tune computer hardware to specific needs.

Now I just need a method of stuffing dozens of CPU cores on as little accessory equipment as possible, to max out my distributed computing scores.

edit: added link to the backblaze article

Brilliant design: folding power plug

This is just brilliant engineering: not only does the designer make this plug form factor tiny, it produces great auxilliary options with USB slots and power squids:

Seam Carving: when do we get it in-browser?

It seems to me like it's about time that our web browsers supported seam-carving, and it's about time that JPEG & PNG supported advanced seam-carving metadata.

I guess the corollary to that argument is that Firefox and Chrome are open source, so I'm supposed to just write the code instead of complaining about it. The video is impressive.

Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing:

Comcast broadband is baffling

My Comcast cable modem is fast - I get about 6mbps down and about 300kbps up, which is usually bout 45 kib/sec upload. I used to pay a $10 premium to bump that upload to about 60 or 90 kib/sec.

For some reason today I'm getting speeds at close to 300kib/sec upload on compressed files (i.e. I'm not enjoying escalated speed because of modem compression or other tricks). That's over 600% of the speed I bought.

I don't get it. Is the cap broken? Have they bumped the speed all basic accounts?

Faraday bags

This is a great product for the paranoid - these handbags block RFID transmissions.  I should get one for Rachel.

They should make RFID blocking backpacks, toolbags & briefcases, too.

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5260703

The Singularity approaches

Well, this is weird news. There is actually a NASA-sponsored university of singularity, if this website is not a hoax. If you know me in realspace, you probably already heard me warn of Ray Kurzweil's expected technological singularity (where I may have appeared to be a fanboy who'd been reading a little too much scifi), but I'm still very surprised that an organization exists to teach people how to cope with it. I mean, do we have a global warming university yet? It seems out-of-order.

Plants twitter you when they need water

If I ever bothered to plant any houseplants, I would absolutely depend on these sensors that twitter you when the plant needs water. Too bad it's almost $100 and requires assembly.

MiniDV still alive for some reason

I looked at some digicamcorders recently, and found a lot of them still on the miniDV standard that was popular when I first looked into these cams in 1999.

I don't get it. Magnetic disk drives have reached impressive capacities in tiny footprints, flash memory costs nothing and is fast, even smaller, and very high capacity. Why bother putting a tape in the camcorder anymore ?

I'm still using this old Sony MiniDV DCR-PC101 cam, and my number 1 problem is that it won't record because of some issue with all the moving parts on the tape writing mechanism. I fix it by literally banging it on hard surfaces until it works again, (which is the most accepted method of repair on the internet). I can't imagine buying another video camera that relies on tape at this point.

Disassembling the Sandisk Sansa Sanmeister

I bought a Sandisk Sansa e260 from woot.com recently, even though I agree that the mp3 player is an obsolete technology. I really like the UI. They copied Apple's click wheel design, but used an actual plastic wheel that spins (instead of the stationary touch-sensitive wheel Apple uses.) I actually prefer it because of the physical feedback you get from spinning it.

It has a small, sleek design, very bright display, and does a great job at all it's tasks: video playback, photo slideshows, music, radio, voice recording, 4GiB USB drive.

Also, Sansa let's you use the USB Mass Storage Device Driver to copy music, instead of enforcing MTP like they did on previous players. MTP completely sucks in comparison.

The downsides: custom cable. Why does anything have a custom cable? Everything should use the USB mini-b so we don't need to keep 20 cables on our desk to plug in all our gadgets.

My particular e260 also had a problem: only 1 channel of audio would play. I took it apart to see if I could fix it. Disassembling things is always fun. Here are the pictures:



The electronics in this thing are tiny. Almost all of the weight is in the heavy steel case back and the battery, and almost all of the volume is in the frame & battery. I had fun pushing the battery back onto the power terminals and running it naked:



I eventually decided the problem was in the stereo headphone socket, which has 3 conductors for left audio channel, right audio channel, and a common return (see TRS connector). Looking down into the socket, I can see that a contactor is broken off. I couldn't get a focused image with my digicam though. Here's a shot of the back of the electronics, at least:

I think that the stereo socket needs replacing, and I'm not going to try to remove and solder a new one in place. I hope Sandisk will do it for me. I wonder if there were any hidden warranty-voiding stickers that I broke when taking it apart . . .

Cory references X references Cory

Cory Doctorow seems to be caught in an elaborate palindrome with the internet. Today I noticed it with Bruce Schneier.

Of course Cory already blogged about Bruce's blog (and he must have referenced Bruce in Little Brother, I'm sure ... almost sure... ok, not sure). Today Bruce blogged about gait recognition applied to shadows read by satellites, and he threw Cory a bone with a link back to Little Brother's discussion of low-tech gait recognition defeating techniques (i.e., rocks in shoes).

Cory already played this palindromatic game with Randall Munroe's webcomic. Cory blogs XKCD (actually a few times), XKCD comics Cory¹, then the comic is cosplayed by Cory and readers alike.

If the rate of references continues to accelerate, this could become an internet stability problem. Let's call it the Doctorow Vortex. Who will make a wikipedia page about it for me?

1. Yes, 'comic' can be used as a verb, just like blog. Thanks for asking.

Not a Singularitarian

I've been telling my friends for years that nanotechnology is the going to cause the end of the world (any programmer who has had to reboot a computer stuck in an ill-programmed infinite loop would be scared to death of nanobot designers. See Grey Goo.)

Wikipedia reinforced my claims by stating that "Many Singularitarians consider nanotechnology to be one of the greatest dangers facing humanity." That's on their page about Technological Singularity. Does that make me a Singularitarian?

I don't think so. I think that if Ray Kurzwiel's Singularity ever comes, it will be marked by rapid discoveries in science & tehnology because of human specialization & advanced tools, not because of the construction of advanced artificial intelligence. I suppose we could create advanced AI once we can completely reverse-engineer the human nervous system (and then synthesize it at high frequencies on electronic hardware), but I tend to think this complicated work would be a result of the singularity, not a cause of it.