Occasional Comment

I’ve been a long time fan of Dave Winer. While I often agree with his insights on software, the internet, technology, etc., I always appreciate his succinct, well reasoned writing, whether I agree with him or not. His recent article on the iPad announcement is a case in point.

While I am still in the thrall of Steve Job’s reality distortion field, Dave’s article helped me to stop and think. I realized that the iPad was version one of a new category of product. As such, it is far from the ideal product that the category will eventually produce. After all, the first iPod was a shadow of the product that the modern iPod has become.

None the less, I will buy an iPad because I have been waiting for this product category to hit the market for at least twenty years. I want to write apps for it. I am not thrilled with Apple’s app approval process but I have gold fever and the rush is on.

I guess my point is that Dave’s writing provokes thought. The more thought provoking writing that you read, the more likely you are to write thought provoking essays yourself. At least that’s my theory. I guess we’ll see how well it works out.

It all started innocently enough. I had $50 worth of Amazon gift certificates so I bought an Arduino Duemilanove from Hacktronics with part of the money. It came and I was thrilled to start blinking LEDs with it right out of the box. I wrote a little program that flashed “SOS” in Morse code. My wife said, “That’s kind of depressing.” So I changed it so that it sent “LOVE” in Morse code instead.

I don’t know why I am so surprised when things work the way they are supposed to. I think it probably goes back to all the times I built electronics kits and had to troubleshoot them for days to get them to work (if they ever worked at all). In any case, the bug had bit me. I started scouring the Internet for Arduino based projects.

One of the reasons that I was drawn to the Arduino in the first place was the concept of shields. Understand that this was not a new concept to me. The robots at work had been expanded through the addition of daughter cards that plugged into the motherboard. But the Arduino had dozens of shields that interfaced to all kinds of interesting hardware. And the best thing of all was that they were affordable on my next to non-existent budget.

I decided that I was going to build a robot from scratch. I had built a BOEbot and I still love to tinker with it but I had the urge to create a unique robot that was my design from the ground up. Oh, alright. I intended to assemble it from parts but I intended to build many of the boards as kits and assemble all the various pieces to make a unique final product. And what is really exciting is that it wasn’t just possible, it was down right easy.

I decided to build my robot around a chassis consisting of a Clementine tangerine crate that I had saved. I decided to use Google SketchUp to build a scale 3D drawing of the crate so that I could better visualize how I planned to transform it into a robotic vehicle. I managed to draw the crate itself fairly quickly but I’m still working on drawing the rest of the parts of the robot.

I drew up a prioritized list of parts that I thought I would need for the robot. At the top of the list was a Proto Shield. A Proto Shield is a board that has many uses but is often used as a place to mount a mini breadboard for experimenting with various hardware interfaces. The other major item on the list was a Motor Shield. The Motor Shield that I bought has connectors for 2 PWM servos and can control up to 4 bi-directional DC motors.

While I waited for my new hardware to come in, I decided to play with the hardware that I already had. I took one of the Infra-red receivers that came with my BOEbot and an old Sony CD player remote that I found laying around (the CD player had gone to hardware heaven years ago) and decided to see if I could get them to work together using the Arduino as the controller for the IR receiver. I got the circuit hooked up pretty quickly. Note: when building a circuit on a breadboard of one battery operated robot for control by another battery operated device, make sure you use a common ground. I eventually decided to just use the USB power from the Arduino.

Now I was ready for software. I Googled Arduino and IR and found RTFA‘s video on YouTube. I followed the link to his site and downloaded his code as a starting point. I hacked it to work with the particular remote that I was using and before my Proto Shield had even arrived I had created my first Arduino based hardware hack.

Then the hardware arrived. As I was soldering the power plug on the end of the wires coming out of the  9 volt battery holder with switch that I had bought, I decided that I was going to need a better soldering iron than the little pencil style iron that I had used for 30+ years.

The two criteria that I had were that it had to have a switch so that I didn’t have to bend over to plug it in and unplug it every time I used it and it had to have a shielded stand so that I could safely set it down while it was hot. The next day, I want to my friendly neighborhood Radio Shack and decided that the difference in price between the iron that met my minimal requirements and one that was variable digitally temperature controlled was small enough that I couldn’t justify not buying the fancy one.

It took me two evenings working about an hour an evening to assemble and test the Proto Shield. It took about 5 minutes to move the IR receiver circuit over to the Proto Shield and get it working.

Stay tuned. More mania is on the way.

I finally figured out how to configure PHP on my server. It was documented in my provider’s help desk pages. I guess I won’t move yet. I will probably wait until I can afford to buy a slice and keep this site. “Don’t fix something that’s not broken” I always say. I promise I’ll write a post that is about something more substantial than my web hosting configuration adventure real soon now. In the mean time, at least I’m posting more frequently.

The domain name finally propagated and I tried to install Drupal. Now, it complains that one of the PHP configuration variables is set to an unsafe setting and refuses to let me install until I fix it. This is infuriating. I spent about an hour researching the issue and discovered that there may be a way that I can resolve the issue on this server but it entails another round of emails with tech support. I have hit my head on this problem enough times that I’m tempted to buy a 256M slice from slicehost and move everything, my domains, this blog, etc., over there. Don’t get me wrong. I like my web hosting provider. I think I’ve just moved beyond the services that they provide. I suppose I could ask if they provide a similar service to slicehost before I just jump ship. Food for thought.

I’ve been producing videos on You Tube since September of 2006. I have yet to follow through with my original plan and produce a short fictional video to post. Maybe some day I will make my video short story as I call it. In the mean time I have been very busy.

I have posted a documentary of my father-in-law’s 79th birthday party (my first video on You Tube). I’ve posted the obligatory cute animal video. I’ve posted a number of videos responding to questions or challenges or entering contests. I’ve posted a how-to video. The how-to video got me featured on the front page of Live Video.

I’ve also produced several vlog videos. Vlogs are the video equivalent of blogs. But you knew that, didn’t you? I sometimes think that I only have two kinds of visitors here, those that randomly stumble across my site, never to return and those that just want to post comment spam.

That’s a big difference that I’ve noticed between this blog and my You Tube videos. My videos are actually seen by other people, a good many of whom I had never met before they saw my videos and started interacting with me. Vlogging is two way communication. Blogging, not as much so. It could be, but it never has been for me with this site.

I’ve noticed a pattern in my posting of videos. I seem to make a flurry of posts approximately once a month. I’m hoping to use this observation to change this behavior. I guess time will tell.

I also realized that I am really engaged with the individual vloggers that I subscribe to. I care about what is going on in their lives and I miss them when they don’t post for several days. This has motivated me to try to post more frequently than once a month.

One of the vloggers that I subscribe to goes by the screenname of UpDownMostly. Tim is a good guy. I’m pretty sure he lives in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. He is incredibly active in the You Tube community. He is a role model for me. He watches more videos than I can imagine being able to watch and makes at least half a dozen videos a day, primarily video responses.

I guess the essence of this engagement that I’m talking about is interaction, both through text comments and video responses. When it comes right down to it, I’m addicted to the You Tube community. But is it an addiction to want to participate in a community like this. I may joke about it being an addiction but I really don’t think it is. I think it is just a normal human desire to interact with and belong to a community.

When I got home last night, I discovered that the webcams that Pam and I had ordered for our computers had arrived. Initially, I was really excited. Pam was already a little frustrated. She couldn’t find the Mac drivers on the disk that came with the webcam. I reminded her that the eBay listing had mentioned the fact that you had to download Mac drivers for the camera.

I poked around and found the seller’s web site and found the links for the Mac drivers for our computers. There was one version for Mac 0S 10.3 and another version for Mac OS 10.4. Since we both have older Macs, we have never upgraded to 10.4. I tried installing the 10.3 drivers repeatedly on both our machines. It always failed near the end of the installation. I installed the Windows version of the drivers on a PC laptop that I have and the camera worked fine. This convinced me that the problem was with the Mac driver software.
Finally, I got Pam to write the seller and ask for the drivers. They replied with an email that had both drivers attached. They were identical to the ones I had downloaded from the web. She wrote back telling them the problems we were having and we haven’t heard back from them yet.

Needless to say, we were both very disappointed. I hope the vendor comes through with fixed drivers soon. I’m going to see if I can find any other source for drivers for the camera. The camera is a Frisby model 106 webcam. The image quality is really very good.

Well, Santa came. My video camera and my daughter’s still camera arrived Monday afternoon. The still camera was dead on arrival and I had to get a return authorization and send it back for exchange on Tuesday. The video camera however is awesome. I spent much of Tuesday reading the manual and I taped and edited a couple of videos. I’m beginning to get the hang of iMovie.

Pam ordered us two web cams for our computers. We will be on stickam before you know it. I’ll probably also use the web camera for vlogging at least some of the time. I’ve got a list of videos I plan to make as long as your arm. Check out javajini and mslollipop on YouTube and javajini and MsLollipop on LiveVideo.

I was following a link to a band’s page on MySpace last night when I remembered that I have a MySpace page so I logged in and checked it out. I had forgotten that I had entered my High School in my profile so I decided to check out who else had a MySpace account that graduated when I did. The amazing thing was I found a friend that I hadn’t seen or talked to since High School. I sent him a message but I haven’t heard back from him yet.

After that, I spent several hours filling in details on my MySpace account and looking for other people I knew. I found the pages of two of my current friends and sent them friend requests. I also found both of Pam’s pages and sent her friend requests. Of all these friend requests, the only one that has responded so far has been Pam. I thought I had found Erin’s account so I sent her a friend request. When she got home from work she told me that she didn’t have a MySpace account. Oops!

While I was updating my MySpace profile I posted a blog post pointing anybody that was viewing my account there to this blog. Maybe this will generate some traffic here. I hope so. I’d love to get some readers. I suppose if I were to write more interesting posts, I might get more readers. Naw, what am I thinking? People love to read boring drivel like this.