Category: Random Nonsense

Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save

Guilty Pleasure #293

I found a container of canned air at work.  I practically emptied it into my laptop and desktop keyboard.  I held the desktop keyboard vertically and ran the air can up and down.

In doing so, I accidentally zapped my hand.  Cold!  I know the directions say not to do it, but then I did it again because it was kinda fun.  The directions are pretty clear – no shaking, no zapping skin, immediate and thorough washing of the afflicted area, and no (under any circumstances) huffing.  I didn’t inhale.

 

You know there’s something wrong when…

My office is about two blocks from a grocery store and many days I’ll just walk out there and grab a sandwich from the deli.  As I was walking back I thought of something I might want to blog…  but none of my current blogs1 was particularly appropriate for this notion.  For a full minute I actually toyed with the idea of starting a fourth.

Which, of course, is just pure madness.  There’s no damn reason for one man to blog in four places across the internet. 234

Thankfully that moment of madness has passed and I have no recollection of the thought which prompted me to taste insanity just before my turkey wrap.5

  1. I post two places regularly and on a third site very infrequently. [↩]
  2. Unless, of course, schizophrenia counts as “reason.”  And, I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite. [↩]
  3. Or close enough to the opposite of reason when one considers the appropriate number of blogs per capita. [↩]
  4. One man, one vote, and one blog seems about right. [↩]
  5. Except for the lingering knowledge that I had some thought/idea that was so compelling I might actually decide to spin up a fourth blog. [↩]

Roboapocalypse averted

Yesterday I got to hang out with Chris of DIYDrones.  We discussed this video and he assured me that SkyNet is still a little ways off.

What I didn’t realize about those videos is that they are, in Chris’ words, one step up from a simulation.  The rooms in which those copters are flying have no turbulence, are surrounded by sensors, all obstacles are clearly marked so that they can be picked out by the myriad of cameras surrounding the room, and all of the sensing and computing is being done by a computer – rather than the drones themselves.

Even if you had an army of robo-drones that could only fly indoors, how cool would that be?  Some of those videos show the little ‘bots lifting and assembling structures.  I would love to have a swarm of these things that did nothing but structures out of legos.

Now, I suppose, I only have to concern myself with the zombie apocalypse.

I kept thinking… SkyNet

@johnbaichtal had this to say:

Dude, quadrotors are scary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4

Watching an army of nano quadrotors fly in formation, swarm, and return to formation was almost surreal.  It really did feel like I was watching a clip out of Terminator.  If you get a chance, watch the other videos by this same uploader, “TheDemel” as they feature these quadrotors flying/diving through hoops, flying/diving through thrown hoops, and perching on vertically mounted landing pads.

On Partially Closed Systems (or why businesses should share more)

Sometimes it is just silly not to share.  Take for instance mouser and digikey’s refusal to make a cost API available1 or Polulu’s refusal to share their 3D image files for their products.

I say these are partially closed systems because, for whatever reason, the system controllers refuse to facilitate sharing.  But, such websites and products as those mentioned above are only partially closed systems.  The problem with partially closed systems is that those portions of their systems that are public facing (a website or the physical dimensions of their commercial products) are not only available for public consumption, but they’re public facing because their business model requires it. 2

Now, I’m not advocating the need for open sourcing or sharing absolutely everything. 3  I’m just suggesting that facilitating the publicly available aspects of your system makes sense when it means you’re enabling your customers and clients and allowing them to better consume your products.

I suppose it is possible that a company’s competitors might misuse such knowledge, but it is almost trivial for those same companies to accomplish what one dedicated person can do by themselves.  While Amazon and Buy.com used to use a system that only allowed you to view special promotional prices when you added that item to your cart, it doesn’t appear as if Amazon does this any more.  I haven’t visited Buy.com in a while, but I would be a little surprised to see if they did.

The problem with any partially closed system is that it only takes one person to defeat the system.  Worse, no matter how much money, time, and resources you throw at the problem, it will never be enough.  Somewhere in the vastness of cyberspace there is one hacker4 who will work around the clock fueled by unlimited amounts of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and hot pockets.  And they will do it for free.

Ultimately trying to prevent access to a partially closed system is useless (those measures will be circumvented) and counter-productive (since that information was already made public).  The only people who are truly deprived of that information are those could do the most for the company holding the partially closed public information.

  1. No longer there.  Bummer. [↩]
  2. An e-commerce website without prices?!  A physical product that has no physical dimensions?? [↩]
  3. In fact, I like the idea that creators of intellectual property can reap financial rewards for their work.  Perhaps it is because I some of my own income is derived from my own intellectual property.  However, I think rewarding content creators for their efforts is probably a good thing even outside of my own selfish desires.  I believe that incentivizing work and the creation of content is a good thing and critical to a well-functioning capitalist society.  That said, I love open source hardware and software projects and actively devote my time and efforts to both. [↩]
  4. I say hacker to mean a person in the strictly technical, non-perjorative sense, of one who makes use of things in ways they were not originally intended. [↩]

Can you tell I’m trying not to work?

I’ve been sick the last few days.  Yesterday I thought I was feeling pretty good and ran a bunch of errands.  By the time I got back home and took care of a few small projects around the house…  I was totally wiped.  It felt like someone had just pulled the plug on me.  Obviously, although I’ve been as weak as a kitten, I’ve been posting all kinds of nonsense. 1

  1. Amazingly, as much as I’ve been posting this month…  this has only been my third most prolific month ever. [↩]

TARDIS’s are more practical than you might think…

You could use a prop TARDIS for a tool shed, chicken coop, garden shed, file cabinet, etc.1

But, as I was watching that video of Sillysparrowness build her TARDIS, I couldn’t help thinking…  This is a time and relative dimensions in space device – why does it need to be enclosed?  As long as you are going to use it as a prop, rather than as a storage device of some sort, you would really only need the front, the left or right panel, and the top.  Admittedly, then you could only take front or 3/4 perspective view shots.  If it were modular, the left and right sides could be swapped back and forth so you could take a left or right-sided 3/4 view picture.

If constructed in such a fashion it wouldn’t take up much room if you were to put it facing into a corner.2

  1. A place to change clothes very quickly before you go off to save the world? [↩]
  2. NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER! [↩]

I had a dream last night

One of my favorite songs has this line in it, so I just like saying and writing it.  So much so that I’ve used that same exact title for three posts, including this one.

Okay, so, in this dream a huge package arrived from MakerBot.  It contained a bunch of spools different colored plastics, a brand-spanking new Replicator, and a galvanized steel industrial strength sewing machine as big as a saw horse.  I’ve never seen a sewing machine that big, so it was entirely an invention of my mind.  And, now that I think about it, I don’t even know how it would even work.  I recall thinking, in my dream, that the thing was strong enough to sew a stack of denim jeans together.

Um, there’s not much else to this post.  I suppose the dream was probably about my excitement over a new delivery from MakerBot so I can finish my DrawBot and the prospect of getting a Replicator one day. 1

  1. I think now that we have two 3D printing robots, Bender the Cupcake CNC and Flexo the Thing-O-Matic, an Egg-Bot, and I’m in the process of building a drawing robot my wife has caved to the sense of inevitability that whatever new robot MakerBot produces I will buy. [↩]
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