Free Outdoor WiFi in Downtown Lafayette

City of Lafayette

"Want to live in a progressive city with 21st century technology?"

That's Lafayette mayor Tony Roswarski's question, and if you live in Lafayette, "Now you do", as the City of Lafayette and Wintek announced the opening of "Free Wi-Fi on Main Street."

I haven't tried it yet, but I expect to do so today. There's a bunch of places I go downtown that are in that map, so I am sure that I'll have a great chance to do so.

As a reminder, though, if you are using free Wi-Fi, there are few controls to keep potential bad guys away from your system. Lifehacker has writeup on how to keep your system safe on free Wi-Fi networks.

Low Wattage Lighting from LumenCache

I've been thinking about the subject of lighting recently, looking to make myself a computer-controlled fading lamp. I've gone from thinking "I'll wire up a bank of modern LEDs" to "I'll figure out how to hook a digital potentiometer to replace the slider in a CF dimmer switch". I hadn't really given great thought about the future of how lights work.

Thinking about the future of lighting is what LumenCache is there for, and that's not at the lamp level, but at the building level. Let's hit a few ideas.

• LED lights have a life of 100,000 hours, but the drivers burn out more like 25,000 hours. (I'm reciting from a presentation where I didn't take notes, so I could have it wrong, but I believe I have the jist of it right.) So, we're talking about a quarter of the life of the bulb thrown away.
• So, we get better drivers, kicking out DC power, which does not have to be high wattage, and we put 'em in a central location.
• Lower wattage means lower costs for lighting (and LEDs are getting brigher for less all the time) and lower heat. It also means that putting a battery with the system means you can keep the lights on and the system going through small power interruptions.
• The wiring doesn't have to be the high-wattage wiring we use to push standard electrical power. It can even be kicked over CAT5. It isn't Power Over Ethernet^tm but it is power over ethernet cable. CAT5 has four pairs, and the standard only uses the outer pairs, so they're putting power over the center while keeping bits on the outside. (It has been a decade since I last crimped an ethernet cable, so I might have some of those details mixed up, please see your cabling professional.) So, you can use some of your runs to go to your WiFi access points.
• Control is also at the center, but definable to the switches (and they can be standard switches) and also (presumably) via computer controls, web applications and smartphone apps. Or at least in the future.
• And, it isn't just on/off. You can fade lights, too.

I don't expect that sort of wiring setup any time soon, but I hope it is clear that I love this idea.

We can Shoot Mosquitos OUT OF THE AIR with Lasers!

The laser here was pulled from a DVD player, if I remember right.

It is aimed by an older PC, using NVIDIA's  CUDA technology, which turns the GPU you're using to get lots of frames of 3D acceleration in your FPS games into a gob of massively parallel processors. This technology is being looked at for places where mosquitoes contribute to the problem with Malaria.

We're solving Malaria by blasting insects out of the sky with lasers aimed by video-game technology. We live in the future.

Everything Is Preceeding As Planned. Excellent! (Webcam hack)

I was just given this swing-arm desk lamp/magnifying glass.

You might ask yourself, "Why does Dave need a desk lamp/magnifying glass?"

In all honesty, I don't. Part of the requirements of this gift is that I return the magnifying glass when done.

What I need is the long arm.

What I want to do is replace the lamp part with a webcam, so I can move it around, set it up in a good angle if I'm doing a Google+ Hangout, or set up software to take a shot every few minutes when I'm doing a project, so I might blog it or make it an Instructable or whatever. (If I could do it over again, I'd blog the heck out of rewiring my Tele.)

I was inspired by this Instructable (linked from this Lifehacker post) but I'm thinking I have to do something better with the mount than a ball of Sugru (not that Sugru isn't magic). Thing is, I'm not sure what. A big part of it will have to rely on what sort of webcam I get to stick on the end of this. I have two cameras on eBay I'm following, but I don't know if I'll go for one or the other.

In other hacking news, I have an Easy button. I now need two things to create my one-button keyboard to handle my Unifying-vs-KVM issue: a Teensy microcontroller and the knowledge of how to send a Scroll Lock character in Arduino. One of those is only $16 away. The other? Dunno.

In barely-related hacking news, I've recently found a great thing. Ever heard of X10 home automation modules? At the most atomic, they're boxes you can plug a thing into and turn it on and off by your whim, being either via computer or via a remote. Their problem, by my experience, was that they talk over power, and this meant that you had to segment your stuff all over. I never got it working to the point I was happy with it. Imagine the same sort of thing, communicating over your WiFi network. Belkin calls it WeMo. I call it magic. There's also a motion-sensor module. Even better, they are connected to the magic of IFTTT, which makes scripting things so easy! Setting triggers on motion to do things like tweet or log to Evernote or even turn on a light with WeMo are such a good idea. I don't know if I can get conditionals, like if (motion && time > 6 && time < 23 ) { turn_on( light ) } , but I'd like to give that a try.

But, ultimately, I'm more interested in shades of gray than black and white. Or rather, variations of brightness over on and off. I have just found that there are dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs and dimmer switches for use with compact fluorescents. Now, if I could replace/augment the actual switch in that with a Netduino or something, I could make a lamp that's entirely controllable online. CF dimmer switches are $20, so I'd roll up my lamp first, have the non-networked dimmer implementation going, then work on tearing apart a second dimmer switch to Arduino-connect it. But that strikes me as the future.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/for-some-strange-reason-i-want-to-talk-to-my-ipad/246130/

I have headphones at work, which I use for the express purpose of filtering out the sounds of my coworkers, and the sound of them talking to each other is distracting enough. Voice control makes all the sense in a car, but on a tablet?

Configuration Joys

I just got a new remote. I don't suppose I really needed one. I have three in my bedroom (four if you count the wireless keyboard) and I'm more than fine with handling them. It wasn't "Hey, I need a new zapper in the bedroom" that lead me to jump on this.

It was my RSS feed.

I have Radio Shack stuck in there, mostly to see when Radio Shack starts selling the Arduino. What I saw was an announcement of Logitech's Harmony line of remotes. I had heard about them. A friend has a fairly advanced one that has a screen and allows you to combine button-presses for several devices into one action, such as "play movie" starting the DVD player and moving to the composite input.

I got the Harmony 200,  a much less complex and cool remote. Also, at $20, much much cheaper. It can control three devices, which works well for the bedroom (TV, DVD, Cable) but the living room has TiVo too and the four-device Harmony 300 is $10 more.

The selling point, the thing that made me go out and get it, was the programming. Well, the price, too, but that just meant it was possible. You plug it into USB and there's a quick-and-easy screen which lets you tell it this is my TV, this is my DVD player, etc. You can then customize the buttons. Then you sync the settings and you're done. No more messing with the "Press the Mode button for 4 seconds, look for the flashing LCD, then punch this four-digit number in" or the worse "Press Power then Down again and again until the TV goes off".

I'll mess with finding different combinations, but this is a solid, well-made remote whose ROM I flash to bend it to my will.

We live in the future.

Dialup Slowdown

This is the dialup handshake, slowed down 700x.

I used to have a 2400 baud (call it ~2Kb/m) and I'm now getting 5MB/s, which is more than a 700x speedup.

I Keep Telling People!

This guy on Reddit points out that, in 1996, a simple statement of many of our regular lives would be taken as science fiction.

Mary pulled out her pocket computer and scanned the datastream. It established contact with satellites screaming overhead, triangulated her position, and indicated there was an available car just a few blocks away; she swiped her finger across the glass screen to reserve it. A few minutes later, she spotted the little green hatchback and tapped her bag against the door to unlock it. "Bummer," she said as she glanced at her realtime traffic monitor. "Accident on the Bay Bridge. I'll have to take the San Mateo. Computer, directions to Oakland airport. Fastest route." Meanwhile, she pulled up Kevin's flight on the viewscreen. The plane icon was blipping over the Sierra Nevadas and arrival would be in half an hour. She wrote him a quick message: "Running late. Be there soon. See if you can get a pic of the mountains for our virtual photospace."

This is not a new thought. I worked in a used bookstore during my first sojourn in academia, around the summer of 1991, five years before the point in question. At that time, I was big into cyberpunk science fiction. Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. I was putting things away, cleaning up the place, when I saw a book centered upon a computer hacker. It wasn't in the science fiction section. It wasn't even in the true crime section like Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. It was in mystery. That was the point where science fiction stopped being about futurism for me.

The Future of Desktops

I don't know that I agree 100% with this assessment, but I can say that I agree at least 80% with it. The new form factors of laptops, netbooks, tablets, game systems and smartphones are doing most of what the desktop was doing. You want to browse and write something at the desk or do you want to do it on the couch in front of the TV? (The TV has it's own set of computing additions, as I've covered previously, so I won't go in depth here. Except to say that a friend has a Samsung Smart TV, and my goodness, what a sexy bitch it is.)

Here's the thing: I get my money to buy post-PC gadgets by doing one of few jobs I don't think you can really do without the PC. I am a programmer, and I have two PCs at my desk and three monitors. And I do use them. I have virtual desktops on each computer so I can switch between what I'm seeing on each. If I'm doing web development, I tend to have a web browser with documentation on one, editors on the other, and the page I'm working on at a third. One 13" or less screen isn't going to be able to take the place of 3 21"+ screens.

I like the modularity of desktop machines. You can open them up and tell that this is the power supply, this is the hard drive, this is the motherboard, this is the CD drive, etc. If you know which part I think I touch on how archaic this thought is by my using "CD drive" and not DVD drive, Blu-Ray Drive or Optical Drive. A laptop isn't. If the screen goes, if the drive goes, if the USB port is busted, your only choice is to get a new one. It is, in engineering terms, a black box. You know the outputs, you know the inputs, but you don't have an idea of what's going on inside or how to change or fix it.

A Black Box

Another Black Box

Not A Black Box

It is clear to me that, for most things, the desktop is a dead thing. And for most things, I don't mourn it. I for one welcome our new gadget overlords. I love having a screen in my car, streaming music and giving me directions. I love having our TV get content from Netflix and That Guy With The Glasses as well as NBC and Comedy Central. I love being able to go from "The guy who played Ted Bundy in that movie" to "Mark Harmon" with a quick search of IMDB, without having to get up from the couch. I like it all and I want more.

But the guys who tell the things how to do what they do will be sitting at a keyboard behind big screens for the foreseeable future.

Don't Throw It In A River

The ChromeBook. It's a neat thing.

As a CS guy, I spent a lot of time in the Sun Lab. There, there were row upon row upon row of then high-end Sun boxes, and a thing with them was that when you logged in on one, you had all the settings and configuration and background and files as you had when you logged on at any other machine, and anyone else who came after you had their own configurations. Since I graduated, I haven't seen that nearly as much.

That's what I like about the idea of the ChromeBook. I use it, log off, pass it to my wife, and her stuff is there not mine. It means that each setup isn't its own delicate little flower, which interrupts our sense of ownership, but that's OK.

I wonder if something like this is how we're going to handle car computing in the future.

Do People Really Want Geolocation?

Reading 2011: The Year the Check-in Died on ReadWriteWeb. Not too sure what to think of it. Of the people I know, only two people who live in the same city as I am have used any of the check-in services I've dealt with, and for neither was it often enough for the serendipity thing ("Hey! You're at the mall, too? How are you doing?!") to happen. I have yet to find another person who wants to share their lat and long via Google Latitude with me. And, I must admit, there's only a small set of people who I'd do that with.

The author lists four reasons why people check in to places — Finding people near you, Rewards, Remembering things and Personal Branding — then proceeds to explain why this is trivial and not lasting and nothing to base much on. There's just not much in it for people to tell others where they are.

But I want to know where I am. Or, rather, I want my desktop, home of my alerting crontabs, to know that I'm near my work, where it knows to alert me like this, or near my home, where it knows to alert me like that, or somewhere else, where it can alert me with a whiffleball bat. Or something. I don't need my friends to know where I am. I don't really want to tell advertisers or employers where I am. But it would be a great boon to me if I could tell where I am. Screen-based alerts are useless if nobody is at the screen.

Be aware that Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center for the Xerox Corporation, invented computing as we know it. One of the things they had were badges that could tell where you were in the facility, so if someone called for you, the telephone nearest to you would ring, no matter where. That's great and all, but today, everyone has their phone on their hip, so standard wired phones are more and more useless and less and less used.

When I used to work for the medical clinic, I tested badges that could unlock a computer when you got close, and unlock it when I walked away. It seems like it would be easy to write authentication modules that would allow the same thing with Bluetooth, but I'd rather have GPS rolling than Bluetooth most of the time.

There's a Latitude API, but I haven't done more than poke at it. But I suspect this sort of thing will be the real use of location-based computing.

Podcasts and Synergy

Image from vanRijn

I've put Google Listen on my phone, listening to podcasts while I drive. One of them is Spectrum from the IEEE, and the one that came on my player was about the Kinect. I have never used the Kinect, as I'm not much of a gamer. Sometimes I'll sit down and play the Wii with the boys, but I have used it more as a Netflix player. So, I'll never use it as intended.

But the interview is not about intention. It is about capability. The Kinect is able to multiple identify people, both by voice and by vision, in noisy, chaotic environments. People are already starting to hack the Kinect to allow Minority Report interfaces and the like.

The second thing I heard was on Hacker Public Radio, which I started to get into after Indiana LinuxFest. The podcast itself is a pre-interview discussion between KDE spokesman Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Nadeau of Frostbite Systems.

Accessability questions have been floating in my head recently. There's lots of buzz about Section 508 in the circles I float through, enough so I've attended two compliance talks in 2011, and my wife has been trying to be a productive person while having severe pain in her right elbow and forearm that keep her from being able to type. She's been playing with speech recognition software, finally trying the Windows 7 native setup that came with her new laptop.

But honestly, when thinking about accessability, I wasn't really thinking about accessibility. I think that there's research at the end of the line for this train of thought that will serve to help accessibility, but it isn't foremost in my head here.

I was driving. I was thinking about cars.

As I think I've mentioned, I've been looking at some travel applications. I tend to have either Listen or a media player of one sort or another playing when I drive, rather than CDs or even worse, radio. (I have only one objection to Amazon Cloud Player, which is that it wants to run only on WiFi, and by and large, I want to use my phone as a media player when I'm mobile, away from WiFi, but maybe the coming of 4G or the next software fix from Sprint will fix that.) I have a TomTom GPS showing my location and speed and I sometimes use Sprint or Google for directions, too. Also, I've been looking into Vlingo, which gives a voice interface to phones. I noticed a bug, hopefully fixed soon, where I hit the Talk Now button while listening to a podcast, and told it to call my wife. Normally, when you tell it to call, it shuts up the media player, Listen included, but here it didn't. So, I'm trying to pause the player and/or mute the player, while on the Interstate.

I know. I know. The point of the exercise is to keep from having this sort of attention-sucking frustration from occurring while I'm driving, because I don't want to hurt myself, my stuff, or other people and their stuff, pretty much in that order. Haven't been too keen of Vlingo since. It's cool enough, but you shouldn't have to press a button while driving to say "I wanna talk now".

And I don't think the Vlingo is alone. Watch just a few high-end car reviews on Top Gear and you'll know that the UIs for even fancy cars are crap.

Ultimately, to do a driving interface right, you have to assume that there will be no vision at all. Most of the things you do while driving (besides avoiding obstacles and other drivers) occur without vision: you use your sense of touch to feel the vibration and you hear the engine to know when to shift. You see the red Check Engine light but you take it in when it starts to sound or feel funny. You can even get away with not often checking the speedometer by staying at a similar speed to your fellow drivers. If you're going to do much computing while driving, it'll have to be via voice. And once that shows up in high-end vehicles, that browser is going to rival Firefox and Chrome and IE at the top of the browser food chain.

(As a pure aside, I think Opera will go there. I don't like Opera and haven't for over a decade, but I know I'm biased on the subject, but it seems like a place that Opera would go, more than anyone else.)

But as we needed the keyboard and then the mouse to get the WIMP interface for computers into the office and the home, we need to rock a voice interface to get the computer into the car. Which is where the Kinect comes in. I kinda think that the car will be a big docking station for future computers, as seat settings and address books and the like are highly personal but a great deal of hardware is there for anyone who sits down. Kinect-based technology would be necessary to distinguish between the driver, the passenger in the front seat who talks with his hands and the loud kids in the back seat. The recognition between conversations between user and computer and conversations between driver and passengers is crucial, and one I think that Microsoft Research and Kinect are closest.

There's going to be a small LED screen for the backup camera in the New Car's rear-view mirror (and some cars of today already have it) and a Kinect as well. Of this I am sure.

We Live In The Future Redux

I have my trusty netbook on my lap. In one of my USB ports, I have a thumbdrive with the Ubuntu Netbook Live CD on it. I'm installing Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 right now. But not on my netbook's SSD. I'm installing it on an 8GB SD card.

I remember getting hard drives smaller than that. Storage-wise, I mean. Physically, they were the size of today's DVD drives. I'm sure that the performance of an SD card will bed poor compared to an SSD card, but a second face for $20 is kinda cool. Dual-boot on the cheap. My friend Patrick put Ubuntu on a thumbdrive so he could have "GoodOS" on his work laptop. I wanted to have something that wouldn't hang out too much. I don't use my SD slot often, so keeping it there works for me.

It's still configuring, so I can't say much. But such powerful and modular hardware is neat.

The New Television is similar to the (Older) New Telephone

When I was in college about a decade ago, I knew some people who didn't have a "landline", or a traditional wired telephone in their place of residence. It made sense to me for college students. If you're out and studying, going to classes, working between classes, etc., it made sense that you weren't home enough to hear your phone ringing, so it's best to just have the mobile phone and not worry about it. For students, sure that made perfect sense. For adults, however, I wasn't sure. Come ten years after, you have more and more people who are dropping the landline that are out of school. There are sticking points, like how E911 for mobile isn't quite as far as for traditional telephony*, but it's a trade-off more and more making.

I have an adapter for my old-school TV that allows me to plug my netbook's VGA and watch YouTube, or whatever, on the big screen. My Wii can do Netflix, as can my friend's iPhone. Android is coming soon. Hulu can bring most of my favorite shows to me. Not everything, but close and closer all the time. If this is true, if you can get all the moving pictures you need from the internets and don't need the co-ax run. And we're not talking people who can't afford cable. We're talking people who decided that they just didn't need another wire run and time-sink in their lives.

The comments highlight a few of the hinderances with this. First, if you want to watch live events, like sporting events or news, you're out of luck. If there's a way to see Big Bang Theory or The Marty Stuart Show or new episodes of Discovery shows online, I've yet to see it. And this model is more-or-less fine if you know what you watch and watch what you know, but it locks you out of searching through and finding the next cool thing you didn't know existed. So, TV-wise, I'm not a cord-cutter yet. But I'm moving that way.

* The two times I've had to dial 911, I was calling because of a car accident.

The Trojan Phone?

Do you read Eric Raymond's blog? I put it on my Google Reader list, but I haven't hit it in a while, but I read a few in the last few days.

If you've been watching Google lately, with the joint take on Net Neutrality with Verizon, it's easy to wonder "What are they doing?" ESR's take seems to be that, by getting the phones cheaper, they're breaking the hold that the phone providers have. Combine this with Jeff Atwood's take that the fast OODA loop is beating the handset maker and service providers option-breaking "customization" and you begin to see a world with very powerful, very inexpensive and essentially unlocked phones. Which I think is way cool.

Captain Picard on the Internet

I do Twitter. Otherwise, I'm pretty much with him.

TV on my PC? We live in the Future

Several weeks ago, I got a Diamond ATA TV Wonder 650 PCI TV tuner. This means I can watch and store shows on my computer. I'm curious about workflow possibilities with this: I want to convert the files to smaller formats and copy them to better places. It will be a period of learning, I am convinced.

Gizmo - The Rest of the Story

I reinstalled XP on my netbook. I just thought about Gizmo. I've dealt with this before, but this time, post-reinstall, it works.

Just to clarify what I mean by "it works". I have called my laptop with my cellphone. I have called my cellphone with my laptop. I was able to call. I was able to answer. It works.

Google did buy Gizmo, so, like GrandCentral before it, it will soon be integrated directly into the Google stack. Expect it to be integrated first with Google Voice and then with the Android. Which ultimately gets to an interesting point.

My friend Patrick says that when VoIP becaomes universal, VoIP companies will be superfluous. Or words to that effect; I could look it up in my GTalk logs, but nah. When is easy and commonplace for people to call point-to-point via whatever networked device they have, with nothing but TCP/IP between them, what's the point of the AT&Ts and Verizons and Vonages of the world? And with Google making the OS for that device, plus the mechanism (Gizmo) and voice mailbox for this to work, it seems like they're pushing for that future.

Anyway, it's working.

Trying Dropbox

I'm trying DropBox. It seems neat. I'm at work. I have two machines running, my main Linux box and my XP netbook. I have a directory in Linux, /home/jacoby/Dropbox/, where I can put things. I put it there, and after some time for uploading and downloading, the items in that directory are placed in C:/Documents and Settings/jacoby/My Documents/My Dropbox/ on my netbook, and the ~/Dropbox/ directory at home.

Isn't that cool?

I can also tell DropBox to share a subdirectory or file with friends who also use DropBox.

This is where you come in.

Sign up and you get to share things with me, and we both get 256MB additions to our default 2GB disk quota.

The thing I'm starting to do is put the images I use a lot, my favorite user icons and background images, in ~/Dropbox/Photos? so that they're effortlessly spread across all the places I'd use them. I'm also considering a ~/Dropbox/bin/ directory that will hold the scripts I go to most often. A poor excuse to not sit down and learn to love git, true, but still kinda neat.

We Live In The Future

"Thank you, Mr. Robot Banker! Have a nice day!"