Sugru is one of the things that you don’t know you need before it surfaces in your world. It’s a tinkerer’s dream, an adhesive that cures into a soft silicone material at room temperature. It’s probably best explained in the little video that you can find on their homepage:
There are many reasons for me to love sugru, but here are a few:
It’s cheap. So cheap in fact that it’s in the impulse shopping zone.
It works and you’ll probably already have a thing in mind that you can fix with it: Shoes, handles, toys, stuff.
I love how they stress the “hacking” aspect. Their claim is “Hack things better” and they define a hack as “a clever solution to a problem”, which is awesome. As a hacker who has grown tired of hearing stuff about computer crimes when hacking is mentioned, I approve this message. :)
The name comes from the Irish word for “play”. More awesome names from lesser-known languages, please!
Like Lego bricks, sugru tickles a certain spot: It’s like kindergarten again with your beloved Play-Doh, but it’s also serious business and a way for “real grown-ups” (whatever that is) to fix things and do projects. Serious play-time! Hackish neoteny!
I improved the MintyBoost I blogged about with sugru. I smeared some of it over the sharp edges of the tin, I secured the USB cable which is now rock-solid, and I put a little sugru underneath the PCB so it won’t touch the metal surface of the tin. I believe the result looks gorgeous. See for yourself:
Can there be a question much simpler than this? And yet, when I had to answer this question in a little piece of code some days ago, little did I know what i was getting into.
Of course, time and dates are confusing and although they were about the first thing to be measured with contraptions and automata, their units are simply too human (read: insane) for machines:
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. (…)
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.
— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living (1982)
And to add insult to injury, there are timezones. Don’t get me wrong: I fully understand the concept of different times in different places. On the Internet, however, we should stick to Greenwich Mean Time. They don’t call it “Coordinated Universal Time” for no reason — and to keep with the theme of making things unnecessarily confusing, Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as UTC. When I read that the reason for that was that the name is given in English and the abbreviation is given in French, I gave up trying to understand it. I already had more than my share of craziness at that point.
The tricky thing about timezones is that they pop up when you wouldn’t expect them. In my case it was in the FireEagle API. When calculating when a position in FireEagle was last changed, I thought that I could get the delta by just substracting the timestamp of the last FireEagle entry from the current time (GMT/UTC). How naive of me! OF COURSE, FireEagle logs its data in Californian time, being a Yahoo! company effort… This means I first have to find out what time it is in California right now and then convert that to GMT:
Pacific Standard Time (PST), the timezone California is located in, is 8 hours behind of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). But then again, that would be too easy. To make life more interesting, man has invented Daylight Saving Time. And to make that even more interesting, some really arcane rules were attached to that. Here’s an excerpt:
It probably goes without saying that these rules when DST begins are entirely different in other timezones, say in Europe — just to make things even more interesting. A question as simple as “What time it is?”, a question you could ask a first-grader, suddenly becomes really, really complicated, once you have to tackle it with a computer…
Did Google Buzz catch you by surprise? Maybe you noticed that you have a Google profile for the first time ever because of Buzz. I’ve been using this apparently little-known profile thing for some time now, (partly) generating my homepage at http://www.johl.io/ from it. johl.io runs on Google AppEngine — the way I see it, Google gives me a server for free through AppEngine and with the profile I get an el cheapo CMS for free to keep a description of myself and a collection of links where I keep stuff (Flickr, del.icio.us etc.). Does it get any cheaper? It’s probably the nerdiest substitute for Geocities ever.
Here’s a (slightly edited) snippet of the core of the code I use to generate my homepage. I didn’t include the template, but then again, it’s pretty straight forward once you have extracted the right template values:
I bought this thing at 26C3 from Mitch Altman, soldered it together and since yesterday, it even works: My friend Sebastian at C4 spotted the mistake I made — I put in the boost converter chip the wrong way (there were even notches on both the chip and the socket and still I managed to fail at this simple task).
What does the MintyBoost do when it’s done? Easy. According to LadyAda, inventor of the MintyBoost:
This project details a small & simple, but very powerful USB charger for your mp3 player, camera, cell phone, and just about any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge! (…)
The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an Altoids gum tin, and will run your iPod for hours! 2.5x more than you’d get from a 9V USB charger! (See Process for math/calculations) You can use rechargable batteries too.
Some numbers…
iPod video (tested, using alkaline batteries): 3hrs more video (1 full recharge)
iPod shuffle (not tested): 60 hours more (5 full recharges)
iPod mini (tested w/rechargables): 26 hours more (1.5 full recharges)
The MintyBoost lives in an Altoids can. This is how mine looks like when closed:
And this is how it looks like when it’s charging my Android G1 phone:
One of my goals for 2009 is to knit more. The possibilities for crafting are endless, but alas, so are the excuses I can make up for not doing it: I don’t have time for it, I would have to leave the computer, I don’t feel like knitting in hot weather, it’s boring to knit alone… these are just some of my favorite reasons.
When a friend and vintage hardware geek asked me to join his knitting group called “Kneipenstricken”, I knew I just had to do it. The idea is to meet in a bar and knit. Nothing more, nothing less. The bar is a punk/hardcore music venue in Köln-Mülheim and the looks we get from the usual crowd of vegan punkrockers there are special, but it’s a lot of fun. I picked up a project I started in December which is knitted Sushi. At the speed I’m working there it’s pretty possible that I’ll have something to show off very soon.
Hacking and crafting have a lot in common. Making and breaking things and the wonderful stuff you can build in your basement or garage is one of the most noticable trends among traditional hackers and coders. There are quite a few reasons for that, but one reason, which is certainly not the worst, is that it’s fun to both learn some new skill and create something, even if it requires neither code in an editor nor a soldering iron. Since the workshop was over Easter, our task was to knit a bunny.
Originally I had planned to finish the piece during that weekend, a goal so ambitious that I completely failed. My first attempts looked ugly and several stitches were just wrong. While knitting is no IQ test, it does require some skill that comes with experience. After starting over at least 5 or 6 times and leaving the poor bunny in a corner for months, I decided to finally finish it. This blog post is part of my attempt to motivate myself to get it done.
The pattern couldn’t be any simpler: It is nothing but a square done with a stockinette stitch, just one row of knitting and one row of purling. Once it’s finished, it will be sewn together in a very clever way to make a bunny. I’m also thinking about giving the bunny blinking red eyes with LEDs, but let’s see how things will turn out. It certainly helps that I’m currently commuting by train and carry the wool and needles with me all the time. I’ve have got much faster and more skilled in a matter of days, so I’m confident that the project is finished soon.
When I visited NYCResistor in July, i brought gummy bears and Kinder eggs with me which were apparently very much appreciated. Zach Hoeken handed me a little anti-static bag and mumbled something about “electronics in exchange for candy”. It was a prototype for the Sanguino board which he had developed. Last week I finally had time to play with it.
The Sanguino is basically a better, faster, more-of-everything version of the open source electronics platform Arduino. Maybe it would be best to let the people at NYCResistor explain it themselves:
On Thursday I assembled the board and soldered a TTL to USB interface to it. It should be noted that I would have been lost more than once without the incredible help of Alex “fd0” Neumann at C4, since this particular beta version board had some problems that have since been resolved (i.e. there was nothing preloaded on the Atmel and the software available online needed a patch). The weekend after that was FrOSCon, a wonderful Free/Open Software conference in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, which some members of Netzladen organized. I spent some of my time there writing an embarrassingly simple “Hello World” program for the Sanguino. On Sunday at FrOScon, I did a 5 minute presentation on it, since some people asked me if i was building a bomb and I believe that the Arduino platform should be better known among Open Source people.
The “Hello World” of electronics is a blinking LED. The Arduino sketch I wrote isn’t much more, really, and it’s overkill to use a platform like the Sanguino for it. The setup consists of an LED on the breadboard with a resistor as a voltage divider. There’s also a push button. When you push the button, the LED is turned on. When you push it again, it’s turned off. Pretty primitive, but I wanted to use it for a useful retro-gaming interface.
I happen to like text adventures, especially those from Infocom that used to be popular in the 1980s. These are worlds created in text form, where you wandered around, solving riddles and quests using short English sentences like “GET LAMP” or “GO NORTH”. Some people prefer the term “Interactive Fiction”.
When playing a text adventure, you may be ending up in a room without a light source. Pitch dark, without a way out. I wanted to solve this problem with the Sanguino. Pushing the button should turn on the light in the text adventure.
I added a line to the Arduino sketch to communicate the current state of the LED over the serial line to the computer. Next, I wrote a tiny wrapper around Frotz to read input from the serial interface. Frotz is both a popular interpreter for Interactive Fiction and a magic spell in some text adventures to make light, so it seemed fitting.
All in all it took me about 2 hours to have everything set up so I could have a device to switch on the lights in a textadventure. Have a look:
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