Accurate notifications: 249,561,088 Invitations!

It's always nice when applications give notifications which are useful and informative. In this example, I present a picture of a terribly useful notification from the FaceBook app on an iPad mini...

#iPad #Facebook

Kickstarter: Smoothieboard

This looks like a fun kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/logxen/smoothieboard-the-future-of-cnc-motion-control

I like modern phones

I really do like our modern era of customisable smart phones... The HTC One is truly the best phone I have ever owned.

The point if this posting: The recent Android 4.3 upgrade also upgraded the system apps. This meant that it came bundled with Google Hangouts and Google Maps 7. Both of these apps are a UI nightmare and so, I have removed them and installed the older Google Talk 4.1.2 and Google Maps 6.14.4 apps.

Much nicer!

#HTCOne #Android

Google Contacts UI fail

There is clearly enough room to not truncate the name if the name was shifted up.
#google #android #fail

The flute makers and the rebellious child.

I posted this text in a comment on Facebook. Perhaps I had heard it from somewhere or perhaps it is totally original. I don't know. I post this tiny story here for more people to enjoy:

Imagine a happy functioning society of flute makers, who spend their time toiling the fields, making beautiful flutes with intricate carved patterns and playing music which is a joy to listen to. However, they are all born blind but to them, this is completely normal.
One day, a child is born but she could see: She learned growing up to pretend to be as blind as her brethren but in her rebellious teens she decided she wanted to paint the colours she saw.
Such blasphemy! Colours! Her parents were so sad that they gave birth to such a deformed and mentally insane child that did not want to make flutes and play music but instead she wanted to paint imaginary "pictures" that no one can feel and she talked about "colour" nonsense that no one can hear. How does one hear the colour "red"?
The child was obviously insane.
However, the village elders know a cure. They can put out her "eyes", obviously a physical defect, and she would be just like everyone else: Normal.

Battle for the post smart-watch era...

I was considering how there are many players in the space, with Google acquiring a player, Samsung about to launch a product, there is also Pebble, Sony already entrenched and even Apple looking like it's interested in playing.

One of the biggest criticisms I have seen with several reviews of products is over integration and battery life. Random neurons fired and I recall reading that there was already a fuel cell developed that could generate electricity from blood plasma.

So, here is the idea: A subcutaneous implant with an OLED display, a digital smart tattoo, fuelled by the wearer's blood, Bluetooth connectivity to a phone and maybe a bunch of medical applications, like monitoring blood glucose, etc.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

While on FaceBook, I had encountered the following take on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and it didn't seem to flow right for me and didn't feel adequate, scientifically.

So I came up with the following variant:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!
Giant ball of incandescent gas,
Compressed under its own mass.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!

Glowing bright, nuclear fusion:
Hydrogen to helium, C-N-O!
Billions of years of fuel to burn
until the iron cools the core.
Red dwarf, white dwarf, Supernova!
Infinite universe, full of awe.

Twinkling star, far away:
Distorted by our own atmosphere.
Scientists with their adaptive optics,
study the night sky, beauty abound.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
Science tells us what you are.

I give it to the world under the following license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Modern electronics...

Modern electronics is so tedious to solder by hand. Here is a successful attempt to solder an extension to a microphone.

Recording ideas

Being conscious of the weird ways that our minds work is a useful thing. One if the more interesting studies in recent years revealed that our minds scrub some information when passing through doorways. Recently, I have adopted the policy of not passing through a doorway if I am incubating a new idea and will try to record the idea before I leave the room. For this, I have found that the Google Keep app is really quite useful.

Apple Yawn.

Apple iButt Yawn! Didn't their old Dot-mac, MobileMe do this years ago?

A tale of two Pis

Since I have two different Raspberry Pis, both model B but one is made in China, the other is made in the UK, I may as well post a picture of them side by side.

HTC One charging oddity

This is mostly just a post for my personal reference:
After mucking around with the phone, plugging in and unplugging things from its USB port, the port may suddenly stop working and the phone won't even initiate charging when the charger is plugged in. Soft reboots or soft power-down/power-up doesn't appear to fix it and the phone won't appear when plugged into a computer's USB port.
The solution is somewhat simple: Force a hard reboot by holding down the power button for 10 seconds. The following reboot, it appears to work again.

Goodbye 2012. Hello 2013.

It's that time of year again: Reflect on the year's successes and flubs... Of which some were "resolutions" and some were merely wish-list items.

Notable flubs:

• Practically all work-related items were flubs but there again, I didn't seriously expect Blizzard to give me the "pink slip".
• Most FOSS project items were flubs but there again, changing job and relocating puts a serious crimp on one's free time.
• Failed to maintain the fitness improvement - Finished 2010 at 235lbs, 2011 at 198lbs and I'm finishing 2012 at 206lbs. Could be worse, I suppose.

Hard pressed to think of any real successes which were on the 2012 list. There are a few work successes at my job at +LinkedIn but they don't count because this time last year, I was only a user of their site.

Anyways, on to non-work wish-list for 2013... Not solid resolutions because, meh.

• Would be nice to get back to under 200lbs again.
• I am going to make time for Free and Open Source projects:
• OQGraph for MariaDB
• Cleanup the v3 work
• Get it merged into trunk.
• External Stored Procedures for MariaDB
• Cleanup the current work.
• Include the proof-of-concept work to split the parser so that the stored procedure parser is plugable.
• Get it merged into trunk.
• Playing with Raspberry Pi
• I plan to outfit my Pi with more IO using cheap PIC16 parts and make all the source and schematics open.
• I want to make a small bipedal robot, powered by a Pi or two.
• Is it possible to use I2C as a Transport for NDBCluster?
• Just for fun:
• Participate in more get togethers with other Blizzard alumni who are now in the SF Bay area.
• Personal development:
• I'm planning to relearn the piano.
• Read more books. I have a backlog of books, including fiction books, that I want to read.
• Eventually get my home office organised.

I'll see where it leads...

What my Nexus One phone looks like right now.

Test post

Testing posting from Google's Blogger app while waiting at allergist's

Tip: Automounting NFS

Useful blog post for automounting NFS shares.

free gas at corner of collins ave and eckhoff st ... near gene audry jct off I5. 3600psig CNG today only!

Things to do...

Need to stop procrastinating and to create a VM image of my ol' trusty OS/2 machine, especially as it appears that the venerable Tyan Tomcat PentiumMMX motherboard has finally stopped working. Maybe I could try swapping the CPUs or something or there is the Intel OR840 PentiumIII motherboard floating around... The only real problem is that the old case is a AT Medium Tower and the OR840 is an ATX motherboard, so there is the issue of PSU incompatibility too.

An idea to increase power/efficiency of a Natural Gas (CH4) Internal Combustion Engine (ICE).

While I was driving to In-N-Out, earlier today, an idea struck me as to how to improve the performance of a Natural Gas powered Internal Combustion Engine...

Essentially, the waste gases of a natural gas engine is water vapor and carbon dioxide with trace amounts of other pollutants.
A major waste product of the engine is heat, especially excess heat in the exhaust gasses. What do I define as excess heat in the exhaust? Quite simply it is heat above the point required to keep the water content of the exhaust in its vapor phase. At standard atmospheric pressure, it would be 100ºC. With an engine with a 12:1 compression ratio, this temperature would be at least 182ºC, plus a bit more for the motive power of the engine - so lets say around 200ºC.

The exhaust gases could be condensed to form mildly acidic but otherwise pure water. This water could be warmed by the engine's cooling system up to equal the temperature of the engine block, which would be a little under 100ºC. At the point of the engine cycle just after the intake valves close at roughly the point where compression begins, a small amount of this warmed water could be injected as a fine aerosol spray. The subsequent combustion of the natural gas could provide enough energy to also change the injected water into its vapor phase, increasing the post-combustion pressure within the engine, providing more motive power.

The key thing to do would be to monitor the temperature of the exhaust from the engine to ensure that there is excess heat within the system to vaporise the injected water so that the water is not injected at a time when there is insufficient energy to support it as it would likely result in reduced engine performance.

How well would this perform? Well, to be honest, I have not run any detailed numbers but I don't think it would be too far fetched to imagine this improving power by as much as 10%, maybe even significantly more. Increased performance would mean less time spent accelerating and perhaps less fuel to maintain steady velocity which both would mean significant gains in fuel efficiency.

What other uses for the condensed water can I think of? Perhaps some form of evaporative cooling system for the intake air? Another idea to entertain.

If only I had the time to play...

At the Shoreline Amptheatre in Mountain View, almost at work but since it is a vacation day...