Category Archives: Technology

I am Apple (or my experience with several Apple products)

January 8, 2010Technology, ThoughtsTechnology, Thoughtswarren

So, I have become “that guy”. You know, the guy with the phone the size of an old-fashioned walk-man cassette player, strapped to his belt. I am that guy who walks with a funny gait because the extra weight of the thing has totally rearranged his spinal column. I bought an Apple iPhone and it is currently strapped to my hip. Yes, I know, you thought I was so hip that I already had one of these modern miracles. But actually, I have always been a phone-luddite. Some friends have shamed me into entering the modern wireless age and I have to tell you, I am already hooked! Yes, three days in and I am hooked!

I set up connections to Facebook and to this blog, to my personal and work emails and my personal connection to Barry Manilow’s fan club is in progress. I can find the closest dollar store wherever I am driving and it will even allow me to text silly stuff to my wife annoying her greatly! It’s genius!

Being the benevolent husband that I am, Emily also got a new iPhone and, while she doesn’t have a connection to Barry Manilow, I think she is just as excited to be able to check her lotto numbers and order more kippered herring at the touch of a button from wherever she is!

01_08_2010 001 — My Macbook running the Mac OS

I got a macbook awhile earlier also. I have been tinkering with writing iPhone apps for awhile but I have always had to “try them out” on the emulator that comes with the development tools. I earn my living writing software on Microsoft Windows machines right now, so I will always be prone to Windows evangelism, but the mac is a lot of fun and may make me a little more “computer-religious-war” tolerant.

Now, then topping to all of this is that I absolutely hate the touch of my new HP laptop. Most keyboards have a certain feel to them and one can get used to them pretty quickly. Even so, the differences are typically minor. Laptops take some getting used to but they typically are “do-able” as well, but this new HP is awful. To register key strikes, one needs to absolutely pound the keys. With the amount of time I spend on computers, I need to be able to touch a keyboard and move on. I do not need to get finger calisthenics each day as I try to do my job.

01_08_2010 002 — Windows XP running in a virtual machine on my Macbook

Now the mac laptop, on the other hand, has a brilliant touch. It’s sort of like giving my fingers a massage each time I type on it. Imagine the possibilities then, of running Microsoft software on my Mac…and it is possible. I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion which allows one to install any operating system into a “virtual space” while running the Mac operating system at the same time. I was skeptical at first, but I am now a believer. I installed Windows XP and all of my database and development tools and it runs brilliantly! I can share folders between my Mac desktop and my XP desktop. I can print and hit the Internet and do absolutely anything I can with a typical XP machine. The coolest part is that I can switch between Mac and XP instantly…both systems are running simultaneously!

Don’t tell my wife, but I think I am in love. I am Apple!

(but don’t worry Microsoft, I still love you too…I swing like that!)

Hot and bothered…or frigid?

December 14, 2009Green, House, TechnologyGreen, House, Technologywarren

Shortly after we received our first gas bill after moving into our house in WV, we started on the path towards reducing our energy usage. The house was built in 1939 which is apparently before anyone invented insulation as our house had absolutely none. I have been tearing things apart and installing new insulation in every nook and cranny. We have replaced and sealed most of the windows and all of the little entries into the house, we replaced the ancient furnace with a new, high-efficiency one and we have installed CFLs everywhere. It has made a significant difference in our energy bills so has been well worth the effort.

The family room, office and lower bathroom are the worst as far as cold goes. The walls are solid masonry…outside->brick->block->plaster->inside…basically a huge cold conductor into the house. We demolished the office and bathroom first and have studded out new walls from the masonry and added water-proofing and insulation.

For my birthday, my brother-in-law and his wife bought me a thermal leak detector…one of those devices that can take instantaneous temperature readings from a distance. So, now that I have the office studded out and insulated, I thought it might be fun to compare the wall temperature of the new area with the uninsulated space of the rest of the area. The entire area is basically unheated now as we are working so I suppose the difference would be more significant if we separated the areas a bit more and actually heated the area properly. Anyhow, in the new area, my temperature reading was 64.7 deg F. Not more than 5 feet away, I took a reading on the uninsulated part which was 54.5 deg F! So, without separating the areas much at all, I can still see a 10 degree difference!

I took some additional readings which I thought were interesting. In our bedroom, we suffer the same problem as the other rooms…the walls are uninsulated. Although the are made of different materials, none of those materials is warm! So, I took a reading on the bedroom wall which was 64.9 deg F. I then moved to the new insulated window that replaced the old fashioned original windows. The temperature of the window (windows are generally considered not to be great at keeping cold out) was 70.8 deg F! I couldn’t believe the window was a better insulator than the wall!

So, I am certain now that the insulation projects I am doing are beneficial and the new windows I installed are well worth the money!

So what about you? Ever quantify changes you’ve made to your place? Have any good insulation stories to tell?

Got my motor runnin’

October 9, 2009Green, Technology, TinkeringGreen, Technology, Tinkeringwarren

I volunteer a bit of my time each week at Emily’s school. There are a number of folks who work with individual kids on numerous topics. I met a student who is interested in green energy so we are studying green energy topics. In particular, we are building green energy sources or projects that use said sources. In other words, we are building a generator like what might be used in a windmill. We also plan to build a solar battery charger to keep my student’s portable video game system charged. Part of my goal, of course, is to teach my friend about electricity and windmills and solar power, but a part of my interest is expanding my understanding of the topics as well.

I remember back when I was in 4th or 5th grade. We were messing with electricity (and not in the back of the classroom with paperclips and the wall socket) and learning how it works. I remember one assignment for extra credit was to build an electric motor. My Grandpa and I spent hours trying to figure out how to make one work. We tried all sorts of combinations and variations but could never make it spin. So, as a part of learning about electricity and generators, I decided we needed first to build a motor. A motor, of course, is sort of like the opposite of a generator. Put power into a coil and it will spin. Manually turn the coil and it will generate electricity. Anyhow, it seems that building a motor is relevant to learning about generators. This had nothing to do with my long-standing feelings of inadequacy regarding motor building…no indeed, this was all about educating my student. It’s about the kids, right? Ok, so I think it is pretty neat too.

As I looked at electric motor plans, I quickly discovered what Grandpa and I did wrong…it’s all about ease of turning the motor. Our motor turned pretty smoothly by hand, but there was a great deal more friction than what our set-up could handle. I found all sorts of ideas on how to make a motor, but I wanted to make something that looked as close as possible to the one that Grandpa and I tried to make…I mean, I wanted one that my student and I could learn from…

So…here’s what we did. I bought magnet wire from Radio Shack (now, they are calling themselves “the Shack”…yeah, that’s more hip). Magnet wire is just copper wire with super thin insulation. We used a middle weight wire…the green stuff. The package that The Shack sells has three colors/weights. We left a six inch tail and then wrapped 30 turns of the wire around a AA battery that we were planning to use to power the system. We left a 6 inch tail on the other end as well. In order to make sure the coil stayed together, we wrapped each tail around the bit of coil on each side. Basically, I just took the tail on each side and ran it through the middle and back out 2 times to hold the coil on each side.

We bent a few paperclips (you could use any conductor) to hold the coil and put a few magnets between the paperclips. Since our motor has magnets vertically placed (i.e. not on the side), we had to hold the coil straight up and down with the tails sticking out to each side. I stripped the insulation off of one tail the entire way around the wire. On the other tail, I stripped only the top half of the wire. We hooked a few beads to each tail to dampen vibration (which we learned was necessary). Regarding magents…I just bought run of the mill magnets at a big-box home improvement store. Bigger, badder magnets would change the dynamics of the motor for sure!

(or try this version if you have trouble with the one above)

Once we hooked the battery pack to the paperclips, we dropped the coil onto the paperclips and gave it an initial spin. It quickly “catches” and starts spinning like crazy! You can imagine, I danced like Brittney Spears…only without the nastiness. I made a motor! I made a motor! I mean…We made a motor! We made a motor! No longer am I burdened by 5th grade motor-failure-angst! We both had a good time just watching it spin and it was educational indeed as it was a perfect segue into generators (I knew it would be!). Next week, we’ll start tinkering with our first generator. I am so excited!

Meet Steve…he’s green

September 22, 2009Green, TechnologyGreen, Technologywarren

We’ve been a 2 car family for some time. I typically drove the tan colored Dodge man-van and Emily drove a green Chevy Lumina. The van was fairly new but we had the Lumina for awhile…it was 10 years old and starting to get wrinkles and excess gas. I mean that…the old girl had a few dings and started smelling like gas. We did our duty and took her to the mechanic to find the gas leak problem. They spent all sorts of time (and all sorts of our money) looking for the problem to no avail. We coped for awhile but finally decided that our family going out in a fiery car crash was not the way to go (at least until I get much older).

We started doing our homework and decided we needed a few things in our new car. First, we needed space for Isaac to grow. He’s becoming gigantic with no signs of a slowdown in the near future. He wears the same size shoes as I do (he’s 9) and he’s approaching Emily’s height. I didn’t want the backseat to be too large though. Isaac will be driving before too long. Enough said. We also decided we wanted a car with all-wheel drive. Winters here aren’t awful, but we do definitely get snow and it can be a problem at times. Safety was important because we figured Isaac will learn to drive on this car. By the way, 15 year olds should not drive. It’s crazy! And boys especially should not drive until they are 30. I once was a boy and I remember some of testosterone induced stupidness of 15 to 30 year olds. Finally, I wanted a car that polluted as little as possible and got good gas mileage, etc.

We looked at the Honda CR/V, the Toyota Rav/4 and the Subaru Forester. We didn’t like any of those options for various reasons. While we were at the Subaru dealer, we spotted an Outback that was beside the Forester on the showroom floor. It looked cool.

We decided to drive the Outback and that was all she wrote as they say. It had all those things I mentioned above plus heated seats! There were a few other cool features that made it even better…it is a PZEV car (partial zero emission vehicle) which means there are times when it runs that it release no emissions. It also has a continuously variable transmission (CVT). The details are fairly interesting but let’s just say it is heavy on cool and also enhances fuel economy.

So we drove Steve home. You see, like many people, we name our vehicles and this one is named Steve. He’s green and he’s green. We like Steve!

And of course, in typical fashion, the man-van (Bessie) started slipping out of gear right after we trade the car. Mind you, this is not an old van. We bought it new and have had all of the maintenance done on it since day one. It is a serious heap. We’ve had one problem after another but keep thinking, “this will be it…once we fix xyz, it will be fine.” I will never buy another Dodge again (sorry to all my Dodge friends). We may go have a look at Steve’s twin Ronny…

My Lucky Cricket

August 27, 2009Nature, TechnologyNature, Thoughtswarren

I woke up this morning and the crickets were absolutely marvelous. There must have been a couple dozen of them, all chirping their own way. Their sounds were different and sort of surrounded me as I stepped outside.

(click to hear my crickets)

One of my favorite Disney movies is Mulan. I’ll leave you to find the details if you haven’t seen it. Anyhow, Mulan’s grandmother gives her a lucky cricket. The poor cricket goes through all sorts of things with Mulan and her “guardian dragon”. When things are at their worst, they all have a time of confession at which point the cricket admits he’s not really lucky. But really, they had gotten lucky over and over as the story progressed.

I was a bit of a pre-caffeine philosopher this morning, but it occurred to me, as I listened to the crickets, just how lucky I am. I have a great family, good health, incredible good looks, a good job, nice house, etc. I couldn’t really ask for more. I suppose I must be surrounded by lucky crickets…

I Flipped

February 5, 2009TechnologyTechnologywarren

As I have mentioned before, I check woot.com about every day to see what sorts of things they have that I can’t live without . The other day, they had a Flip video cam on sale for $79.99. That’s somewhere around half what one would usually pay. Awhile back, D.A. wrote a post over at Farm Natters where she recommended the camera. So, woot + recommendation = “it’s cheap and you can’t live without it”.

There are a couple of really nice features about the Flip cam:

-It is very small and easily fits in my pocket.
-It uses AA batteries which I like since my previous camera is out
of commission with a bad (and expensive to replace) battery.
-It has a slick little usb connector so I can connect it straight to
my computer to download the videos.
-It takes really nice video and audio, especially for $79.99.

There are a couple of things that aren’t so nice, but are absolutely acceptable to me for the price:

-It has a slick little usb connector so I can connect it straight to
my computer. That’s a plus but the connector is hard-line
connected to the camera (read: it is not flexible so hangs by
the connector. It seems like it could break if I let go of it as I
download videos).
-It records only one hour of video at a time. I am not too torn up about that as there is little worth recording that is that long I think.
-It only has 2x zoom

I just received it yesterday and it is, as D.A. puts it “hella fun” to use. I took a bunch of silly videos including the ones below. I’d say it is even worth paying full price for one of these cameras if you need something quick and easy to grab quick videos of the kids doing fun stuff or the goat climbing on the roof of your new car, etc.

Note: If you have trouble viewing these videos, please let me know. Emily said she couldn’t view them without an upgrade to her software.

DIY Automatic Cat Feeder

January 29, 2009Technology, TinkeringTechnology, Tinkeringwarren

So, our cat Mohinder is a growing boy. He wants to eat constantly. It’s not actually constant eating of course, but he always seems to be hungry when we want to sleep. Madeline has become patient with our sleeping/feeding schedule but Mo is terribly persistent about eating whenever he is hungry. Typically, he will jump up on the bed and carefully grab a bit of Emily’s hair in his mouth and gently pull it. It’s not meanness and it doesn’t hurt, but it is annoying to be sure. Of course, I have no hair so he can’t wake me in the same way. On the few occasions he has picked on me, he gently nips on my nose.

As you can imagine, that has gotten pretty old so I started to tinkering. I am going to post some ideas that I am fooling with and will show the finished product at a later date. The basic idea I am working with is to have a digital alarm clock trigger some electronics to open a stripped down computer cd-rom tray. I think the mechanism on a computer cd-rom is pretty nice and will work perfectly as a gate to let the cat food fall from a hopper into the cat bowl. I started by salvaging an old cd-rom from the junk bin at the office. I stripped all of the electronics out of it (basically, I just pulled off anything that wasn’t the mechanical stuff that opens the tray. With a little experimentation using a 9-volt battery, I was able to find the motor that drove the gears to open the drawer.

I bought a new alarm clock to trigger the electronics to trigger the motor that opens the cd-rom. I opened the alarm clock and found the wires that connect to the speaker for the alarm. A quick hole in the sidewall of the clock allowed me to pass the wires from a 9-volt connector to the wires that used to connect to the speaker. I closed the clock back up and was able to measure the current in the 9-volt connector when the alarm was (silently) going off. In other words, when the alarm goes off and would normally sound the alarm, it now send an electrical pulse out through my 9-volt connector which runs outside of the clock.

My plan is to have the power from the intercepted alarm signal drive a relay which allows a larger current to pass through it and a transistor. The relay and transistor work as a basic switch to send power to the cd-rom motor. I wired this all up last night and all of this stuff works just fine. I am sort of experimenting now with how to get the drawer to actually deliver the catfood. My plan is to have the drawer push open a slide or else be the slide that opens the hopper of food. The real challenge is to figure out how to make all of this stuff cat-proof. Mo is persistent and has a lot of free time and has gotten in to the most unusual things. Anyhow, these pics are an overview of the project, meant solely to both confuse and amaze. I’ll post the actual schematic and the finished product another day when I get it all figured out. Anyone have any thoughts about cat proofing stuff?

Ham sandwich and a big screen tv

January 12, 2009Fun, TechnologyFun, Technologywarren

Almost a year ago, Emily had a training where they served box lunches from Heavenly Ham. Inside her box was an entry card for an Oscar party prize pack. It included a big screen tv and a party tray from HH. We didn’t think anything of it at first, but decided to enter.

Usually we don’t enter those sort of contests because there are 200 million people entering and someone in some far off place usually wins. Anyhow, this time we did enter. A few weeks later, I got a mysterious email from a HH address. At first, I thought it was spam and nearly deleted the message.

The text in it was typical spam-talk, but they listed a few pieces of information that caught my attention. We were the grand prize winners and they didn’t need our bank account or social security information to award us the prize…it must be real! I responded and emailed back and forth with the company representative. A few days later, we received a generous gift card to Best Buy to choose a big screen tv on which to watch the Oscars with a few friends.

That’s sort of the funny part really…we don’t watch tv much. We haven’t had cable in 14 years. We do get antenna reception but find that there is little on worth watching. To be fair, HH said we could spend the money on anything at BB. Still, it was an Oscar party prize so we decided to go ahead and get a big screen tv and a surround sound system with an upconvert dvd player. We took all sorts of goofy pictures of the buying process including posing with the Geek Squad car, the BB sales guy, picking up the food, etc.

So, we invited family over and watched the Oscars and had a good time. The HH party tray was awesome. If you’ve never had Heavenly Ham, try some…it’s a little pricey but so good. I’d eat there every week if I could! I especially love their ham salad.

We still don’t watch much tv on it, but we love an occasional Netflix and it’s hard to beat the Dukes of Hazzard and Daisy Duke in big screen form! Thanks Heavenly Ham and Best Buy!

Honeybees under a microscope

December 31, 2008Bees, Nature, TechnologyBees, Nature, Technologywarren

It was pretty nice last weekend and my bees were flying around to “clear the pipes”. In addition to that task, they also groom the hive and remove any bees that had expired. As I watched them bring out their dead, I thought it might be cool to dissect a bee under a microscope. I don’t have a microscope with a camera attachment though. I am, however, a determined and fierce cheap-skate and I have a web cam.

I gathered a few of the recently deceased bees and dissected and mounted various parts that I thought would be cool. It took some messing around to get the focus right, but I was able to hold the webcam to the eye piece and capture some pictures. Have a look at the shots and see if you can figure out what the parts are in each picture. The answers are at the end.

pics from top to bottom:
-bee knee (a joint on the bee’s leg)
-bee toes (the very end of the leg)
-bee tongue (they have several)
-bee stinger (I have seen this after being in me…you can see the barbs then)
-bee wing
-girl hair (yeah, not a beepart , but a hair from Emily…she conditions!)

Browser Issues

December 17, 2008TechnologyTechnologywarren

There are tons of reports out that there is an Internet Explorer (probably the web browser you are using) exploit that allows hackers to take control of your computer, steal your passwords, take pictures of you as you trim your nose hairs and may even allow them to launch missiles from silos in Nebraska. Of course, there is always stuff going on out in the ether but this defect apparently impacts all versions of IE and there is not yet a fix.

I decided to take this as an opportunity to explore other browsers that are not currently suffering the problem. I do not intend to bash Microsoft or IE. Since they are the biggest player, it should not be a surprise that they get the most negative attention from the bad guys. Still, since they have the spotlight, I think I will try to avoid some of the negative attention.

I have off and on used the Firefox browsers and the latest version mostly works pretty well. However, firefox is also becoming more and more popular so I figure that they will soon be getting more attention from hackers as well.

I have also tried Google’s Chrome and the Opera browser by…Opera. They are both very cool looking and sort of sexy and fringe-popular. For now, I am planning to use chrome just because I have a chrome dome (bald is beautiful!), but I’d recommend that anyone who hasn’t tried one of these alternate browsers give one a shot. Microsoft’s IE is still my favorite, but I don’t want to harass any cows in the fields of Nebraska when the silo doors open. Stuff just looks better in IE also. There are many sites, this one included, that don’t look exactly right when viewed with non-IE browsers. I know, people say that firefox et al. render pages according to the standards and IE does not. I don’t really care much about the standards though, if a lot of sites I visit don’t look right. I am using WordPress and it handles a lot of the layout issues internally so how some of the layout details of this site work are out of my hands.

Anyhow, make sure your spyware and antivirus programs are up to date, consider checking out other browsers, and think about whether you want IE or any browser to save your passwords. Bad guys are out there and my virus issues of last week are still fresh in my mind!

My Home Among The Hills

Life in WV!