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Thu, 15 May 2008Whats funnier than recycling by mail? Well, how about earning airline mileage for buying carbon offsets!
May 13, 2008, Austin, Texas - BeGreen, the carbon offsets division of Green Mountain Energy Company, announced their participation in the American Airlines AAdvantage® program. The exclusive offer provides eco-conscious AAdvantage members with the opportunity to earn miles while also reducing their impact on global warming through the purchase of carbon offset products and "green" gifts from BeGreen's online store. Check out how you can have your cake and eat it too! Greenwash yourself today, take unessassary free flights later! And for the record, I think buying carbon offsets are stupid. Mon, 05 May 2008Whats better than a series of tubes under your floor keeping it warm? WiFi? Maybe...but...how about normal, electrically heated floors? (Girl not included).
I recently completed the installation of a SunTouch heated floor mat and programmable thermostat into the "master" bath. Its recommended application is under tile.
Installation was probably the easiest part of the entire tiling job. So much that it was the only part i finished (I had a contractor finish the rest of the tile cutting and placement). The idea is to take the mat, lay it on top of the cement backerboard, put your thinset over it, and put your tiles on top. Oh, and there is a little sensor you put into the thinset that measures the temperature. Wire up the GFCI themrostat, and you are good to go. An installation video (VHS) comes with the mat. The website touts specialized contractors for this type of installation. I do not think its required. All you need is A) a tile flooring guy who isn't afraid to smear thinset on a flat, plastic woven mat -- that ain't hard B) someone willing to hook up the magic thermostat box to electricity.
Out of morbid curiosity, I cranked this thing to 104F (maximum setting), but it becomes plenty toasty by 80F. 80F only took it 15-20 minutes. I am sure it will take a while to get to 104F though. Total current draw is about 2A with my mat, or about 200ish watts. As with any radiant heat technology, that heat generated will just reduce the time my furnace runs. Electric is great for small, directed applications (ie: walk areas, bathrooms, kitchens, etc) where you want heat, but I think a hydronic system is better suited for whole-house applications. Another benefit to electric is how cheaply it can be done. Just remember, if you decide to lay down this mat in your next flooring project, The cut-off between the mat and non-mat under the tile is a considerable drop off! Its down right chilling! I have another bathroom remodel coming up. You can bet I will be putting in some more of this. Mon, 28 Jan 2008
I don't pretend like I have a big blog, and I don't want to lead anyone to believe I even get any mail. But recently I got a few pieces of mail. I get so few that I will just use every single one of them for the mail bag. I stole the image of this mail bag from google images, it was on the first page, and it kind of looks like a bag of mail because it says "Hong Kong Post" on it. China really doesn't follow any intellectual property laws, so I think i am on safe legal ground. You can send me an email if you object. First, comes an email from HJ C.:
http://seattlewireless.net/~casey/2006/02/27#feb272006 At first, I thought he was complaining about one of my blog posts, and that I was the intern. But I really should have read my blog post which pokes fun at question marks. Now we can all laugh at Sprint or the software company that made "America's Best Pix" for using non-readable characters! Stupid interns using Microsoft Word.
Another email, which I am quite certain is a flame, came in from Joe S in regards to my creative writing piece / travel blog post about a 416 mile dirt road to nowhere in Alaska. Joe S. writes:
From: Joe S. I'm sorry I made fun of your bridge. I am sure it took a lot of effort to make. I will quote my own blog with the alledged defamatory content in question:
After hours of driving, we approched the Yukon River. The river was pretty large and spectacular. The bridge was made out of, you guessed it, rotten wood. I really could have wrote:
Its a concrete and steel bridge, with a wood deck. Chained up trucks caused all the damage you see in the pictures, and the bridge is not rotten. But now my 4 readers are bored to death. Who really wants to read a story about a safe, steel bridge i crossed? I think ill keep it as is. Better to tell an exciting lie and than a boring truth when you write a blog. But do you really want to know why I lied? I have a confession to make. I was paid money to post that blog. $7800 to be exact. It all started when I received this letter in the mail from the Bush Trucker Assocation of Alaska:
How could I pass that up? Free trip to Alaska to visit family AND $7800 for a lousy road trip? I am really quite embarrassed over the situation. But, yes, its true. This blogger was paid off to write that article. I still don't reget it much. Fri, 28 Dec 2007I decided to do some more shopping for my game system, and went to the store to buy a (non existant) HDMI-Wii cable.
"I see the component cables, but where do you keep the Wii HDMI cables?", I ask. After a quick iPhone googling in the store -- there really was no such thing. No need to argue, it just does not have any digital out. Lots of forum posts with this exact same HDMI question, and plenty more Fred Meyer electronics section employee-esk responses. Ugh. Time for video school forum posters and store clerks alike:
I don't care about the "jaggies" or blocky video game graphics. All I want is there to be one mario, not one mario and three of his ghosts, because nintendo has a slight impedance mismatch on the component jacks. Wed, 26 Dec 2007Its great to finally see some higher resolutions in the plasma market at affordable prices. It also appears that all of my complaints about plasma dot pitch (aka, the gap between the pixels) have gone away with some of these new sets. It no longer looks like peering through a screen door! Now if only they weighed less and did not buzz so much. :p Price drops are also getting silly in the LCD market. If you look around, and do not care much about the nameplate on the front, you can pick up a high quality 1080p 42" set for under $1000. Most of these are OEM from well known brands. How great do things look on a 1080p set? Couldn't tell you. I'll wait for this Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing to finish and let you know later. I am not putting my money on either format just yet. Sun, 23 Dec 2007Matt got me to impulsively buy the second generation ZipIt, which features a color screen and loads of new features. Some of the highlights:
and then one of the most interesting features:
There is a port inside the battery compartment, a larger ipod-isk connector on the back, and a small 4 pin jack next to the headphone jack. I am not really certain what any of these do. The battery on the unit is unusually large for the capacity of the battery. I can get the same capacity with half the size, and nearly double capacity (2000mAh) in that exact form factor. Sounds like the first hack for this nifty device, as it could really use a lot more run time. Second, a lot of the configuration (backdrop, themes, and radio stations) are pushed to the device from the company's website control panel. I am certain that these can be intercepted by faking the DNS on a local network. It could also serve as a way of uploading new code to the device, as it frequently checks for firmware updates from ZipIt. No word on whether the device will be "opened up" or perhaps an SDK offered. Hopefully the GUI menu is expandable with new applications, as its not a bad launcher, so someone will not have to re-invent the wheel. Anyway, I have no time to do anything productive with this device, so i will wait until someone gives me a serial port with "terminal", an IRC client, an SSH client, and all that jazz.
Thu, 13 Dec 2007
One Thousand Monkeys on One Thousand Typewriters
Can one thousand monkeys on one thousand typewriters eventually write a novel? For fun, I decided to put this to the test. No--I did not fill a warehouse full of monkeys. I used the next best thing: /dev/random. This unix device, or file, can generate a limitless stream of random text and binary for your enjoyment. We are also making /dev/random do something it was not designed to do: produce non-random data. Conclusion: They probably can't write a novel. But they can write a few words. If you ever get bored in a shell, and have a lot of computational power at hand, you could try something like this:
cat /dev/random | strings | grep -i wtf\? Wow! now that was kinda creepy. Lets gather some statistics... Use the 'tee' command and try to count just how much useless noise there was before our monkeys typed something of interest:
$ cat /dev/random | tee junk | strings | grep -i wtf\? So there you have it. In 330 megabytes of sheer randomness, our monkeys finally asked "wtf?". You can also try using base64 or uuencode to make /dev/random generate alphabetical characters to increase the odds.. Sun, 25 Nov 2007Alright, so I really do not have a good name for it yet. I'll just call it that for now...until someone can suggest something better. This game was fruited from a late night conversation at the first Mind Camp last year. I have goofed around with the concept on and off throughout this year, and finally found some spare time last weekend to at least complete a demo. Of course, the "production" version of this game would be much more complex. Hopefully this demo will get the creative juices flowing. The game server engine is fully automated, modular, scriptable, and can handle multiple players. Think of it as the mother of all state machines. For simplicity, the demo is only going to accept one player at a time. So far, only two people have been daring enough to play it. Both people really enjoyed it. The demo can usually be completed in under a half hour and is very low key.. Several people, suprisingly, declined due to lack of details. Are you daring enough? I promise it won't hurt, nobody will bother you, and will not have to do anything illegal :) There are no real requirements for this game and its free for you. If you are interested, contact me, and i'll put you in the system. Tue, 02 Oct 2007
Unlock your iPhone, use it on another carrier, and lose visual voicemail, right?. Well, not so fast. Primer So, first, lets look at how visual voicemail works on at&t: The iPhone makes use of 2 GPRS PDP contexts for IP data: a connection to the "wap.cingular" APN for general internet access, and a special connection to the APN called "acds.voicemail". The phone likes to keep wap.cingular on interface IP1, and the voicemail on interface IP2. For the most part, the phone will remain on wap.cingular for general internet access. On reception of a special SMS with voice indication value specified, the phone knows that it has received a voicemail. Within a few seconds, it switches over to the acds.voicemail context, obtains an IP address, and connects to the visual voicemail server on port TCP 5400 (probably a VIP). The phone will do a simple HTTP 1.1 POST, accepting audio/amr format. The server responds with quite a few details in the header regarding the message, including source number, etc. Eventually, you will get the AMR binary data for playback. This all occurs in the background. You may have noticed that sometimes, your visual voicemail will not play immedately if you quickly go in and try to listen to it. This is because it is still in the process of fetching the data files. After the transaction is complete, the phone quickly jumps off and eventually releases its IP address on the acds.voicemail PDP context. I am not certain if it is using a CMUX interface so both acds.voicemail and wap.cingular can be accessed at the same time. I am also not certain how it knows to connect to one particular voicemail server. The IP address is either hardcoded, resolved via DNS, or passed in the messaging. So what does that mean? This means that for users with unlocked iPhones on different carriers, there is a chance of getting visual voicemail working on your phone too with a combination of VoIP, asterisk, and a simple web server -- if you got creative. This also could open the door to a couple third party apps to entirely replace the phone application. This post should get someone started. Frankly, I am not very motivated to work on this (or even test it), as I am on at&t. Thu, 30 Aug 2007There is an unusual, but thriving population of palm trees in Barrow, Alaska! Okay, well, only three. For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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