Tomorrow morning I’m on my way to the desert for a week of craziness. Be back next Tuesday.
I’ve been working a lot on SWARM.
In the last few weeks I:
complied the audio tracks for the sound system (a mix of editing, creating, and working with a novel sound playback system)
fixed up the 6 sound modules… swapped out a bad amp, adjusted volumes on all of them, installed new firmware drivers for the mp3 players
made 2 new chargey plugs (some were lost)
tested batteries
installed IMUs (inertial measurement units) in 6 orbs: cut stainless steel pieces to be mounts, tapped holes (a PITA, I couldn’t finish, grr), welded in place, sprayed IMUs with clear paint, mounted, made ribbon cables, cut holes for cables
made gussets to reinforce the arms of the canopy on the mothership
helped manage arrangements with Virgin Festival (though they bagged at the last minute, jerks) (Niladri ran point and did a lot!)
managed getting insurance for Virgin Festival (that we didn’t need because they bagged at the last minute, jerks)
had lots of meetings and discussions to figure out exactly how to get our art to the Virgin Festival in Canada. (Dawn did a LOT of work. She’s become an international shipping expert overnight)
Got 1/2 way though (fimed, partially edited) creating a video piece for Make TV
Kept up with our finances. We continue to be in the black.
Went to a lawyer with Dawn to talk about licensing & patenting SWARM
A million little tasks like keeping our shop space livable with a cadre of messy mechatrons running around in it, finding new boxes for Virgin took 1hr+, paint for the IMUs 1hr+, ordering TIG supplies 1hr, finding a good deal on rechargable batteries and chargers for the remotes 1hr, …
As of Q1 2008, YouTube is not profitable, with its revenues being noted as “immaterial” by Google in a regulatory filing.[4] Its bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.[4]
So umm, where’s the money coming from? Google might have billions but $1 million/day could suck that dry pretty quick.
Though I suppose starting a new kind of television is going to be expensive…
If you will be traveling and need offline access to your Mediawiki wiki, what should you do?
If you need to grab pages from a wiki that you aren’t the administrator of, you can try running a web crawler on it or try this Google Gears hack.
But if you are the administrator of the wiki (or you know the admin) you can make a Mediawiki2HTML dump. There is a Mediawiki extension that does it for you. Here’s how to run it:
cd /whatever/mediawiki/extensions
svn checkout http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/DumpHTML
run a shell command something like this as a cron job (create the appropriate folders first)
#!/bin/sh
# Generate a new html dump of wiki.orbswarm.com LCS 8-17-08
echo “deleting contents of /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html”
rm -rf /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html
# DumpHTML.php expects to be run from the maintenance directory. The skin won’t get HTMLified if you run it from another directory
cd /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com/extensions/DumpHTML
/home/swarm/php5/bin/php dumpHTML.php -d /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html -k monobook –image-snapshot –force-copy
“You could buy every single person who will regularly use this boondoggle their own personal Prius, and you’d not only use less energy, you’d spend a hell of a lot less money doing it.” (via) (and)
Hallie’s Baby Shower
Celebrant: Hallie McConlogue
Baby: Pumpkin unit 1
Event Date: 2008-08-16Trailer Trash /punk/hippy themed baby shower at the encounter Studio. Come as you are or in theme.
Time:2pm - 6pm
Where:The Encounter Studio
555 De Haro St Suite 120
San Francisco, CA 94107
Look for the 2 stone griffins around the ivy hidden outter door in the back of the parking lot.
Call hallie for directions if you need em:
408 956-xxxx
Item
Description
Wants
Has
Needs
An evening of babysitting.
We can take as many of these as people want to give … warning we will hold you to it and Train folks as necessary. So add a couple of hours for learning if you have no baby experience. YOU ROCK! by the way… :D
Mostly we need unskilled labor that can take wierd direction and not freak out about Hallie’s weird labor consuming ideas about how to sound proof stuff and decorate.
This would be something I can sleep in comfortably while I’m feeding pumpkin. That means I want to build it custom for my neck problem. And add a motor to keep it going. It will be half rocking chair half hammock… with a motor and a perfect place for pumpkin at the boob.
There there I was, waxing up the wife, like a surfboard, with gallons of vitamin E oil, making her belly shine like a pink bowling ball. Every once in a while, our baby would kick. It felt like he was rubbing back (more likely, he was fighting for space because I was caving in his roof, but I digress.) The more I rubbed, the more I started to recognize shapes. We know where the head is, it’s the BIG round thingy… but I swear, this long thing, just below and to the left of Hallie’s belly button, felt like an arm. And over where Hallie’s belly was churning like a pot of pasta, over near Hallie’s right kidney, that must be his feet! And with vision granted by the tears in my eyes, I caught my first glimpse of my baby. There he was, all curled up in the fetal position (imagine that!) as clear as day!
And this salt crusted face that was already beaming is now lit with a florescent glow I write you this invite.
Hey all, it’s me, Mr. Last minute. Sorry for the lag, but I’ve always been a busy bee, and now I’m a busy bee for three.
We’re having a baby! As you all know. So we’re having a baby shower, and it’s next weekend, and yer all invited. And we have a registry! And it’s, as always, optional, since, as usual, its too late to get anything in time.
But come, if you can.
The theme is “Robo-Trash”… Think white trash…think engineers…think Burningman during construction of AWESOME kinetic art (that can kill you) under the hot desert sun! Think Robogames with less nuts and bolts and more duct tape.. (key work, MORE!)
Meanwhile, all you robots nerds, wanna help me build my new Push Powered Robo Stroller? :-D And you expecting or unexpecting (those who are no longer expecting?) robot nerds, if you help me build mine, I’ll help you build YOOOOOOOOOOURS! (PS, there’s more of you than you think, we should start a club!)
I got this today. San Francisco is so [insert modifier here]
Subject: Zombie Migration Alert: This Saturday, August 16th
Zombie Alert: This Saturday
Friends and countrymen, it is with a heavy heart that I report on the state of Zombie Activity in our fair city of San Francisco. The time has come to once again activate the radio-attraktor towers to funnel hundreds of zombies through downtown to a secure location. This is a risky maneuver, as evidenced by carnage enshrouding last year’s event. Rest assured, we have made improvements to the technology.
We will turn on the radio-attraktor towers at 2:05pm on Saturday, August 16th. All zombies in the area will be telepathically compelled to march down a route which we will disclose in a future email. The radio waves will also cause undead to crave duct tape instead of human flesh. If you are unfortunate enough to be standing along the route with a duct tape “X” on your torso, you will be attacked and consumed by the horde, after which you will be one of them. Don’t wear your favorite shirt.
Please, please tell your friends and family not to be anywhere near the route at 2:05pm this Saturday! Have them sign up for updates ( http://eatbrains.com/announcements) or follow the movement live on Twitter with up-to-the-minute zombie migration forecast, Beijing Olympic protest style ( http://twitter.com/SFZombieMob). If we loose radio control of the mob, the result will be catastrophically gruesome!
I finally finally was able to install my own PHP and eAccelerator on Dreamhost. After all the pain and teeth pulling and agony and frustration and hoop-jumping, it was really easy.
I helped ship a house of boxes from San Francisco to Boston. They used Fix Price Move.
Here’s what my friend said who was taking delivery:
Fixed Price arrived today. After several maddening delays and an additional $600.00 (plus the $923 already due) they delivered. They have been a pain in the ass from the get go. Interestingly, the truck broke down in TX and the truck it was transferred to broke down after unloading in front of my house. Every thing seems to have survived the journey…
When Fixed Price arrived they had 3 boxes from somebody else’s load mixed into ours. The boxes were filled with old canned food and ugly flower pots and before I could tell that they were not ours I had some colorful words for you about sending us … out of date canned food. So far all’s well though.
$1.30lb delivered coast to coast. A bit of a PITA. At least everything didn’t disappear and get sold on eBay.
And all things being even, that’s about as good a moving experience as I’ve seen at a very good price.
TEN feet short of the finish line, Barbie Airplane was stranded.
The cheerful contraption — a Craftsman belt sander crowned with a powder-blue toy plane — had been careening down the 75-foot racetrack moments earlier. Then the sander’s rotating belt came undone, stopping it dead.
In the neighboring lane, Heavy Metal Waste, a circular saw souped up with skateboard wheels and flaming antennas, had already rocketed past. Cheers of victory rang from the bleachers.
“Time waits for no one!” heckled the announcer. So Randy Lisbona, a 47-year-old air-conditioning engineer from Dallas, hauled his broken-down belt sander off the track to make way for the next heat.
That’s how it goes at power tool drag races. The premise is simple: Take a hand-held power tool. Rebuild it into a racing machine.
…
Charlie Gadeken, who started the haphazard sport with a co-conspirator, Jim Mason, saw the races as a way to get more people involved in creating — and not just watching — mechanical art.
To make search results on my blog prettier and more useful, I have installed 2 plugins and added a search.php to my theme. The two plugins are Search Excerpt and Search Reloaded.
All this was at the (very good) suggestion of this post.
When I was a kid, this was one of the most “oo ahh”-able things in the world. They cost like $600. Now they have them at Weird Stuff for… essentially… free. It was a hoot holding one.
Then, when signing up, there will be a box where you can type in a promotion code. “AUGUST” gets you 10% off an annual or biannual subscription to Mozy!
The technology is available to inexpensively produce a small device that records audio and video all day on it’s own battery power. This would be a boon to holding people accountable for what they say and do.
The device would have just 1 button on it. The user would push this button and speak to make a voice-note of a notable event that just happened. Once a day, the user plugs it in to charge and upload the last 24 hours of audio & video recording.
