Just watch, and wonder at the magnificence of nature.
Matchy matchy
A couple I spotted on campus today. Not sure how they got so solarized.
Metric Century
Less talk, more action! Just signed up to do a 65-mile (metric century) bike tour of Chico’s wildflower wilderness this April, with +Chris Tweney and whoever else wants to join. Could be up to 4,000 riders on the run.
http://www.chicovelo.org/main/century-series/26-wildflower
Though I bicycle commute daily, have never done a ride this long before. Time to start training, but my commuter bike is too heavy, and wrong riding position. Hit up a friend for advice, scoured the craigslist boards, and ended up with a 2005 LeMond Tourmalet – tightly tuned and ready to go! Got what I consider a very good deal.
Next weekend will probably see what I can do on a 20-miler.
Arduino Local Ethernet Connections via Shared WiFi
There are a ton of great ideas out there for intertube-connected Arduino projects, but you may find yourself in this situation:
- Router has no more unused ports
- You prefer not to be chained to your router, which may be inconveniently located
- Your Arduino network shield is not WiFi enabled
I prefer to work on a Mac laptop with a WiFi connection, but wanted to do network experiments with an ethernet Arduino shield. Here’s the solution:
- Go to System Preferences | Sharing
- Enable Internet Sharing
- Share the connection from WiFi to Ethernet
Now you can connect an Ethernet cable from your Mac to your Ethernet shield. Because the Mac takes care of crossovers automatically, this will “just work.”
Next you need to find out what IP address to use in your Arduino sketches. Open  a Terminal and type:
ifconfig en0
A few lines down, you’ll see something like:
inet 192.168.2.1
Change that “.1” at the end to any number under 255 and you should have an address that’s shared through your WiFi network, through your Mac, and usable in any Arduino ethernet sketches (I’m using 192.168.2.10). Â Now you can work without worrying about being tethered to a physical router, or being out of free ports.
Arduino experiments
Got the Ethernet shield today, and was able to put together a simple circuit and hack up / modify a couple of existing sketches. I can now contact Twitter through the API, examine a tweet, and light the green LED if a certain word exists in that tweet, light up red if it doesn’t. Baby steps, but it’s starting to click.
Circuit hacking is fun!
Ok divers, figure it out :)
So wonderful, makes me want to jump in the water right now.
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Hydration, Crockett hike
Hydration, Crockett hike.
Photo365 2011
On January 1 2011, I made a commitment to take at least one photograph every day of that year. Now, 365 days later, I can proudly say that I’ve actually accomplished a New Year’s resolution for once. And despite my trepidation at the start of the year, it wasn’t a chore at all, Â never grew tiresome. In fact, the process became an obsession. As the year progressed, I found my habits changing. Rather than photographs “leaping out at me,” realized I was learning to scan the environment subconsciously, always on the lookout for “that moment.” And I developed a Pavlovian response to that little time window after getting the kid into bed – time to study the day’s images, delete the duds, and upload the pick.
Yeah, there were days when the busy-ness or the same-ness of everyday life made it hard, and yes, some shots are weaker than others. But seldom felt like I had to cop out and just shoot for the sake of the project – there’s always something out there waiting to be found. Other days, had the opposite problem, where selecting just one out of many possibles was the real challenge. Definitely feel like the first 100 images are so are weaker than the later ones – felt my eye improving as the year progressed.
Only regret is that I was using Instragram heavily in the first few months, and Instagram leaves you with low-rez originals (or at least it used to). Over time realized  I was almost always better off shooting with the phone’s native camera app, and filtering/processing later with Analog, FX Studio, or Photoshop if I thought the image needed a little goose.
Check out the Flickr set to see the images with captions, or click the grid below for the slideshow (go full-screen!).
Many thanks to Richard Koci-Hernandez for the inspiration – I wouldn’t have gone for it if not for him and his bottomless inspiration. Enjoyed the process so much that I’m planning to do it again in 2012.
Screencast/tour of ~300 digitized LPs
Took most of 2011 to tackle the stack of 500 LPs I’ve been wanting to digitize forever. Turned out that a lot of them I had re-purchased as CD or MP3 in the meantime, and those didn’t need encoding. And some were just too far gone to be worth copying. As for the rest, I used the workflow I outlined at the beginning of the year. Got really anal about having good cover art for everything; what I couldn’t find online I photographed myself. Here’s a quick (silent) tour of the covers.
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Ideal World
We have the 1972 edition of The Ungame, which is like the board game equivalent of a conversation pit. No winners or losers, no set time. Just cards that get you to talk – cheap group therapy for families. A few of Miles’ cherry answers from tonight’s “session”:
Q: What is beauty?
A: When all the species go extinct from global warming, the world will still be full of beautiful plants.
Q: If you had to move and could only take three things?
A: Lego supply, cookie supply, and my nice cushy bed.
Q: What makes you feel lonely?
A: I feel lonely when everyone else in my class knows what to do and I don’t.
Q: What’s an ideal world?
A: In an ideal world I’d be surrounded by aliens and flying cars.
Q: What really turns you off?
A: Nothing. Can I take another card?