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Google’s breaking their social contract

I’d say I started noticing a change in the keyword stats reported on my websites about six months or so ago. Instead of seeing all of the keywords and search terms people used to arrive at my websites, most of the search terms were showing up as “Unknown search terms” in my WordPress Jetpack stats plugin and “(not provided)” in Google Analytics.

Apparently this is all due to a number of changes with Google. As Google pushes more people to be logged in or stay logged in to their Google, Gmail, or Google plus accounts, the more their searches will be done over SSL. This has the “side effect” of making their searches opaque to website owners. However, that same data is of course available to Google themselves. I say “side effect” because I’m not so sure this is unintended, rather than one of their actual goals.

Why then do I accuse Google of breaking their social contract? Here I am, an owner of multiple domains who has been running Google Analytics tracking bugs in all of my sites since their various inceptions. The entire point of doing so is that I might be able to better understand the search terms and patterns of people coming to my sites, with an eye towards improving traffic. In exchange literally allowing Google to insert code inside my websites, they were supposed to help with these insights. Insights they are no longer providing.

I’m not so naive as to think Google ever promised or contracted to provide this information to me. I’ve never read their Terms of Service and never plan to. When every piece of software includes click-shrink-wrapped terms of service, it’s impossible read, comprehend, or provide knowing consent to these things. All I can go on here is that I’ve continued to let Google inside my websites – and they’re not giving me the very thing I had been lead to believe would be provided in exchange.

That said, Google Webmaster Tools is still pretty useful.

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Zen and the Art of Cross Stitching

"One screw at a time." - John Grunsfeld — “One screw at a time.” – John Grunsfeld

I love every damn thing about this beautiful post by Rachel aka AverageJaneCrafter.1 2 I love how she drew inspiration from John Grunsfeld (one of her favorite astronauts), a sweet bit of paperclip art, her first cross-stitch design, and how a quote from that astronaut brought it all together into a simple and elegant statement and artwork. Her cross-stitch just looks as if all the elements were specifically engineered to one day come together in this one place, for this one purpose.

If you didn’t click through to Rachel’s post, the quote “One screw at a time” refers to how Grunsfeld would go on space walks to repair the Hubble which involved managing more than 100 screws. To deal with the magnitude of the task, he just focused his mind, not on how many he had finished or had to go, but on “one screw at a time.”

If this man can handle tasks hundreds of miles from the earth while traveling thousands of miles an hour on a mission that probably cost billions, I’m sure as hell going to kick the crap out of today.

Hat tip to Chris Connors for the link [↩]
Photo from Rachel’s blog. Rachel – I hope you don’t mind me recycling your wonderful artwork here! [↩]

A website just about drawing robots

Lately I’ve been working on drawing robots more and more. My latest creation is an itty bitty Tiny CNC drawing robot. I’ve already published the files and Arduino sketch on Thingiverse, but you’ll find all of the instructions over on my PlotterBot blog. While this site is about 3D printing and random nonsense, I’ve tried to only post stuff directly related to drawing robots over on this new website.

If drawing robots are your cup of tea, then please take a minute and check out my other side. :)

Interactive Floor Projection Displays

A little more sophisticated than this... — A little more sophisticated than this…

This weekend we went to the The Tech Museum of Innovation, aka “The Tech,” in San Jose.1 We had a great time and saw a lot of amazing things. (Also, a lot of people greeted me as “Bender!” because I was wearing the Bender hat my wife knit for me.)

One of the coolest things we saw was an interactive floor projection display entitled simply “Social Circles.” A projector in the ceiling created a white rectangle on the floor – with a multicolored border. When you step onto the display, you have to cross through a colored bar along the border. Once inside the display, your feet are surrounded by a small circle of light – the same color as the bar you passed through. As you walk (or run!), the circle follows you around. When someone else is on the display (with their own circle) and is close to you, your circles will join for a moment into a larger circle of a combined color. As you separate, your circle will retain it’s inner color – but will have a border color that is your original color on one side and the color of the person whose circle you combined with on the other side. As you go along and interact with more people, you can gather more and more colors onto your outer ring.

It was awesome and awesome. Kids were running across, crashing into one another, chasing everyone else, collecting colors, and trying to avoid gaining colors.

This gave me SO many ideas on how to turn this kind of a display into an interactive game/project that I want to learn how to build one of my own. After doing some minor internet research I’ve found a few resources – some a lot more user friendly than others. There are some commercial, some semi-commercial, and some open source ways of creating a floor projection display.

One system, created by Proximity Labs, involves a stage with RFID sensors and slippers with embedded RFID tags. Some systems use Kinects or cameras in conjunction with projectors, some only use Kinect cameras, one seems to use the tracking of QR-code like tags, others seem to use proprietary 3D scanners, and some don’t seem to show much of what’s under the hood. Two of the more promising ones are the Open Source Computer Vision ((Or, OCV)) project and the UbiDisplays project.2

The difficulty with OCV project is that it seems to be geared towards vision in robots, which isn’t really what I was interested in. Rather than giving a robot sight, I’d like to create a way to track and interact with multiple people using, ideally a webcam, and a projector. I’m not even that interested in fine grain detection, so much as tracking the location of people across a display area, and integrating their movements into the scene.

Starting from what I have now, which is a lot of interest and enthusiasm for the project but little knowledge of how to make it happen, it looks like the UbiDisplays system might best suit my needs. This system seems like it incorporates a Kinect to take inputs and then manages all of the interactions through the use of web based logic3 or possibly through some Flash animation. I just don’t know if it is capable of handling multiple sources of input (more than one person). The Po-Motion system is a commercial product that seems like it might also be an interesting way to go – as long as the product allowed the purchaser to create their own custom interactions/games.

All other things being equal, I would prefer to go with an open source solution – but as long as I can create what I want without restrictions, I’m happy to pay for the software.

SO, is this something you know anything about? Do you have any suggestions on where I could start?

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Photo courtesy of Carbon Arc [↩]
One interesting possibility is a display which uses edge IR LED’s to detect motion – I just don’t know if it would work at all for this kind of a project. [↩]
HTML + javascript and CSS [↩]

RepRap Wally: Turtles all the way down

RepRap Morgan was recently awarded the Gada prize, which was the first time I had seen a “SCARA arm”1 robot.2 Reading Hackaday lead me to read about RepRap Wally, another SCARA based robot.3 Anyhow, My favorite part about this robot is that it boasts it can print parts for larger versions of itself.

While building more 3D printers is, perhaps, a noble goal – democratizing production and all that – actually working to churn out parts is a dull business. On the other hand, the idea of a robot capable of building increasingly larger iterations of itself is incredibly amusing. As is the idea that a robot could build smaller and smaller versions of itself.4

Of course, this then makes me think of a chain of robots – one set making ever larger and another set making ever smaller robots… robots all the way down.

Yes, I know that’s redundant [↩]
Photo courtesy of Haceme un 14 [↩]
Watching this orange plastic robot in action, it’s easy to imagine they gave it the name “Wally” for looking somewhat similar to Disney’s Wall-E. [↩]
Of course, smaller versions would really only be more useful if they printed with greater precision [↩]

Arduino Adventure Series – The Adventure Begins!

Arduinos, Arduinos, Arduinos... where to start?! — Arduinos, Arduinos, Arduinos… where to start?!

A few weeks ago I started fiddling with an Arduino in earnest.1 I’ve built things using Arduinos before, but each time all I did was slavishly follow a tutorial as it took me step by step through a process.

Just as a child memorizes the Pledge of Allegiance, committing to memory the right sounds in the right order, I had a grasp of the assembly – but not the underlying meaning. Sure, I built a MakerBot Cupcake CNC (“Bender”), a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic (“Flexo”), an Egg-Bot, a Polargraph/PlotterBot, and an IoT Printer. ((FYI, my MakerBot Replicator 1 is named “HedonismBot“)) However, I have only the dimmest understanding of how the things I did actually created the things I ended up building.

However, I want more – there are several ideas I would like to create using electronics. One is a sonic screwdriver flashlight. Another is device for … shall we say…2 interfering with television infrared codes.3

My goal for this series of posts4 is to document my triumphs and failures playing with an Arduino. I think it’s time to get started on that next post now…

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Photo courtesy of Arkadiusz Sikorski [↩]
Mu-ah-ha-ha!!! [↩]
Nope, not a TV-B-Gone [↩]
I know it’s ambitious to call a post the “first” post – but dammit, a man’s got to dream [↩]

Lessons In Printed Plastic Paper Mache Molds

My daughter and I have been working on a project to create paper mache fairies and fairy furniture.1

Photographic Background Stand, ready for shooting!

But first, I can’t help showing off this nifty 3D printable photographic background stand I designed. Inspired by some other designs on Thingiverse, my first draft worked exactly as I was hoping it would. Okay, back to the paper mache.

Printed fairy mold (about 2" long) — Printed fairy mold (about 2″ long)

I designed two tiny human-ish figures in OpenSCAD, subtracted them from a block, and sliced the block in half to create a two-piece mold for what we were hoping would be tiny paper mache fairies. I was pretty sure the tiny figures wouldn’t come out well in the printed plastic mold and that the mold wouldn’t work well with the paper mache. However, my daughter really wanted to try to make fairies of this size (about 2″ tall) – so we gave it a shot.

I squeezed the paper pulp so it wasn’t sopping wet, added a liberal amount of white glue, packed the printed mold with the mixture, and put a rubber band around it to keep it together. I gave it a few days, then pulled the mold apart. I wasn’t able to add much of the mixture into the upper half, so the reverse side didn’t seem to leave much of an impression. Once it was dry, the dried paper mache stuck to the bottom half of the mold so well it tore in several places as I got it out.

In any case, here are the lessons I’ve learned:

The fairy bodies are somewhat angular – which I think made them difficult to remove from the mold. I would have made them more rounded in the first place, but there were already a lot of spheres and cylinders in the design which were causing some pretty long OpenSCAD render times.
Larger molded objects would probably work better.
The mold would probably release the cast object if I made the interior smoother – either with sanding or acetone.
A release agent would probably help. Maybe petroleum jelly on the inside, perhaps plastic wrap?
I should have sanded the tops of the mold halves – so they would mesh better. This might have allowed the paper mache to be pressed better into the top part of the mold.
It may help to add something to the paper mache mixture to make it stronger. My thought is pieces of frayed yarn or pieces of a cotton ball. This may give it more strength and flexibility.
It’s hard to tell if it would matter, but more glue might have helped.
I think it would have helped to create the mold in multiple pieces – similar to this Chris K. Palmer early Thingiverse chocolate mold.

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I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide who chose the subject matter [↩]

DIY Chess Board Bag – 13 years in the making

Very nearly four years ago I had a vision of a totally DIY chess set. In the year 2000 I designed a bag for holding chess pieces – that could be turned inside out and used as a chess board itself. I filled the bag with some cheap1 plastic chess pieces… and then lost it after we moved in 2006.

Fast forward nine years after I made this bag to the year 2009 when I bought my very first 3D printer – my trusty MakerBot Cupcake CNC #465, “Bender.” In preparation for Botacon 0 in the winter of 2010, I was furiously dialing in my printer to create a set of non-black chess pieces so that I could bring a full set of printed chess pieces to New York. I was able to print the pieces – but I still could not find the chess bag.

Today, I found my chess bag – and I’d love to share it with you. I’m not a tailor and I’ve had no formal training with a sewing machine. When I was in college I wanted a very specific kind of carrying bag – so I made it.2 What I know about sewing I learned from my dad when he showed me the basics of the machine operation and turned me loose on my mom’s sewing machine. In any case, I no longer have the designs for this chess bag, but I’m quite sure a clever person, such as yourself gentle reader, would be able to figure out how to put one together from the pictures you shall find within.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If this is the sort of thing you feel like embarking on building yourself, I have some suggestions:3

Find the fabric first. I’d recommend canvas for the outside, obviously a simple black and white checkered square for the board itself, and a nice pleasant deep color for the border around the checkered board.
Get a cool cord. The bag as designed incorporates a pretty nifty looking shiny cord.
Consider how you’ll put it together carefully. As best as I can recall and piece together from its appearance, this is the rough process I used:
- Prepare the checkered fabric. I remember that I had to find a good piece of the checkered pattern that was more square than other parts. I then ironed it so it would hold it’s shape. Then, cut to size, leaving about 1/2″ all the way around the checkered board.
- Prepare the cool border. The next step I recall is ironing the cool border, then sewing the checkered square to it. I think my border is about an inch thick – maybe an inch and a half.
- Create the bag. I am pretty sure the next thing I did was sewed the border fabric to some of the canvas (but I’m not certain). Once that was done, it looks like I folded the pieces of canvas so that it was trapping the cool red cord, and then I sewed that together. Once I had the two sides individually assembled, I then sewed them with the board-side-out. This had the effect of putting all the seams on the outside edges of the bag, making them visible when the bag was laid out for play. The reason I sewed the bag in this fashion, rather than leaving it so the seams were on the inside of the bag when it was laid out for play, is that it would have caused too much fabric to be inside the bag making it uneven during play.

I simply cannot tell you how happy I am to have united these pieces I printed in 2010 with the bag I made them to be contained within in 2000.

If you and I happen to see one another, and I hope this is soon, please remind me to bring this bag with me and maybe we’ll share a cup of coffee or a beer over a friendly game and a bit of conversation.

Injection molded [↩]
I’ve been increasingly tempted to make a new bag – but that’s an entirely different post for an entirely different day [↩]
Alas, all the drawings and plans I made for this bag have been lost in the mists of time, otherwise I would share these with you too [↩]

Tentative Shredded Paper Mache Results

This is, by far, the most interesting photograph that came up when I searched for "fairy furniture" on Flickr — This is, by far, the most interesting photograph that came up when I searched for “fairy furniture” on Flickr

This last weekend my daughter and I tried making some small objects using paper mache from shredded paper.1 Here’s what we did:

Soaked 3 gallons of shredded paper in 1 gallon of water in a 5 gallon bucket for a week in a warm garage
Each day I stirred the mixture a little – to see if the paper was absorbing the water and disintegrating
We scooped the paper pulp out of the bucket, squeezed the water out, put the pulp into another bucket and added a liberal amount of glue – and then kneaded the glue into the pulp
We then formed the gluey pulp into simple shapes – and left them to dry

After four days, the sculptures (a fairy sized bed, bathtub, table, two chairs, and a footstool) are mostly dried. They all have a grayish brown look with a rough texture – as if they were carved badly from hard rock. It was difficult to mold the gluey paper pulp into shapes – and it didn’t want to keep complex forms. Nonetheless, for their intended purpose – fairy sized furniture and fixtures – I think they look really nice. Once they’re fully dry, we’ll sand and paint them with some acrylic paints (which will also help seal them up).

If they come out well or if there is enough interest, I’ll put together a tutorial on how to do this all yourself. But, in case you’re interested already, the process is pretty simple and there’s not much more than what I’ve described above and in the prior post.

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Photo courtesy of Esther Simpson [↩]

Shredded Paper Mache

A few days ago I realized that I might have an actual use for all of the shredded paper I’ve accumulated at home and at work.1 Basically, my thought is that I may be able to create a paper mache “clay” by soaking shredded paper in a bucket of water, draining it somewhat, mixing in some white glue (or flour), molding into some interesting form, and letting it dry into a hardened cardboard like form.

Today my daughter and I went out to the hardware store to pick up a bucket2 , masking tape, and a lot of glue. We dumped about three gallons of shredded paper into the bucket, added about a gallon of water, and mixed it up. I plan to let it sit out to let the paper disintegrate a little before we drain it and add some glue.

Just to see if it would work, we packed one of my daughter’s sand toys (a large fish mold) with some of the wet shredded paper and set it out to dry. I have no idea if it will hold together since we didn’t wait for the paper to disintegrate and didn’t add any glue. If it works, great. If not, I figure we can just toss it in the bucket again and let it disintegrate for good.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning some really great paper mache techniques, I can’t recommend enough Dan Reeder‘s books on paper and cloth mache. Here are the three Dan Reeder books I own:

Of the three, I think the second (Make Something Ugly) is probably the most comprehensive and interesting. However, the techniques in the others are also really great.

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Photo courtesy of Sha Sha Chu [↩]
Pink!!! Pink!!! [↩]