Hackszine.com: Life Archives

Archive: Life

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March 20, 2008

Visualization API for Google Docs

This looks really useful. Google recently released an API for using Gadgets and visualizations inside of (or pulling from) the Google Docs spreadsheet system. Developers can create useful visualization models, like Gantt charts or geographic heat maps, and Docs users can use these tools inside their own documents.

The Gadgets in Docs framework also allows the visualizations to be plugged into iGoogle, so you can have an up-to-date visualization data on your iGoogle page that pulls from spreadsheet data in real-time. I found the timeline gadget, pictured above, to be particularly useful, but if you don't find the particular visualization you need, you can now go ahead and make it yourself.

Visualization API [via Google Blog]
Example Visualization Gadgets

March 16, 2008

Art Bots 2008

The fifth international ArtBots exhibit is being held on September 19-21 in Dublin Ireland. Whether you're interested in creating a robotic work of art, or a robot capable of producing its own works of art, you have till May 1st to submit an entry.

I've seen the output from this robot talent show / art fair for a few years now, and I'm really excited to see what happens this year. Are any of you folks planning on entering or attending?

Shown above: One of Bruce Shapiro's "Ribbon Dancer" robots. When activated, the robots are able to perform intricate dance routines by moving a ribbon through the air in choreographed patterns. It's the robot equivalent of an Olympic floor routine.

ArtBots 2008 Call for Works
Ribbon Dancer Robots

March 5, 2008

Neighborhood crime fighting robot

Someone in Atlanta created what appears to be a homemade Dalek to help deal with streetcorner criminal activity:

Rufus Terrill has had it with the drug dealers, petty thieves and vandals he says roam the streets outside his downtown Atlanta bar, O'Terrills. Instead of calling the police or hiring private security guards, Terrill built his own security robot.

Watching the video leaves me with a bit of an uncomfortable vigilante aftertaste, which is a little strange since I can sympathize with the difficulties living in an area like this. It's just not realistic to head down the street at night and ask people to leave.

All that aside, it's just an imposing looking tele-operated vehicle with a squirt gun and a speaker. The reality is that it's probably in more danger of being tipped over sideways than hurting anyone.

The real hack here is that (for better or worse) someone's invented a home-brew, tele-operated psychology counter-weapon. By removing the immediate threat of violence, the driver is able to communicate in a hostile environment. If you made the thing look like Ronald McDonald and had it sing the theme song to Barney instead of squirting water, the robot would probably be even more effective.

Robot keeps Midtown block safe - [via] Link, Video

February 25, 2008

Botanicalls Twitter: flora tweets

With Monday finally wrapping up, it's time to start thinking about next weekend. Why not spend it Twitter-enabling your house plants?

Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.

I've managed to make it through the winter with only two plant casualties so far. There isn't a whole lot I can do about the scarcity of light in Minneapolis, but with a little Arduino hacking I could at least remove watering issues from the equation.

Botanicalls Twitter - Link

February 23, 2008

Remote file access through email

Shantanu Goel put a proof-of-concept Outlook macro together that will send you files in response to a specially formatted email. The idea is that you can activate this and leave Outlook running on your computer at work and if you are offsite and need to grab a document it's only an email away.

This project came into being after reading this post at lifehacker (original post and solution here). It listed a method to retrieve mails on your home/office PC by sending a "magic email" to it, but it was only for mac's. Seeing that people wanted it for windows as well, I thought of making something up during lunch time at office.

If you think about it, this is kind of a clever way to get around a corporate firewall. It'd be funny to add some directory listing functionality to it and formalize an email file transfer protocol.

Remote File Access Through E-Mail -Link

February 1, 2008

Meta-model: tools for clarifying communication

Hackszine reader nathaN writes:

i have mind performance hacks here on my lap, and i found hack 56. you included transformational grammar, surface/deep structure, you have to be aware of this other book on my desk, next to my lap. The book describes a method of using transformational grammar to analyze statements and gather incredible amounts of information, the technique is called the Meta Model, i had to write this post after i found #56 in your book. it's out of print, i think, but it's not too hard to find used if you make a few calls. it cost ME $35, but its probably online as well, torrents or whatever =(
its the single most useful "hack" i've ever found, ive been using it for about an year and it gives me more options than i know how to take advantage of.

The Structure of Magic I, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Introduction by Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson.
Science and Behavior Books, Inc
copyright 1975

Unfortunately, the Google Books entry for The Structure of Magic I wasn't a full scanned version. There is, however, a wealth of information about the Meta-model and other Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tools on Wikipedia:

The meta-model in neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a heuristic set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person's model of the world. It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker's language.

In the process of communicating, the mind is forced to translate a person's experiences and their internal understanding of the world into words, making language a highly optimized and compressed representation of a complex internal mental state. This translation occurs a second time, as the listener parses language and interprets that communication based on their own mental world model and past experiences.

The meta-model provides tools for quickly parsing the structure of a communication, determining implied meaning, and locating potential points of misunderstanding. When you can recognize the linguistic translation artifacts that are common patterns in the communication process, you can respond to them. On the receiving end, this helps you better understand the experiences that underlie the speaker's language. On the sending end, it helps you to better communicate without misunderstanding. Internally, it helps you to analyze and debug your own model of the world.

Meta-model (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - Link
Mind Performance Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link

January 3, 2008

GrabFS: the screenshot file system

GrabFS is a clever MacFUSE-based file system created by Amit Singh that creates a live screenshot file system for all of your running applications.

When you run GrabFS, a new drive volume will appear. Inside, you'll find a folder for each running application, and inside each application directory, you'll find a tiff file for each of the application's windows. When you drag, copy or open one of these files, you get a snapshot of the application window at that point in time.

GrabFS requires Leopard and the Leopard build of MacFUSE. I think it's time for me to upgrade.

GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - Link
MacFUSE - Link

December 25, 2007

Lecturefox: free university lectures

I think MIT coined the term Open Courseware, but there are several other universities that are releasing lecture videos for free online. Now, tracking down a particular subject matter is made quite a bit easier because of a project titled Lecturefox. From the about page:

What is Lecturefox?
It's all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category "faculty mix" you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

I really like what they've done in collating these resources into a single index. Tracking the companion blog's RSS feed, you can get updates about new material that's become available. Video, audio and text courseware are included in the index and it appears to be actively maintained and comprehensive, especially for computer science and other math/science related courses.

Forget your other new years resolutions. You couldn't do much better than treating yourself to a free lecture every weekend.

Lecturefox: Free University Lecture Index - Link
Lecturefox Blog - Link
Previously: Bootstrap Education - Link

December 21, 2007

Essential hacker stocking stuffers

Like most of us, you've probably got some last-minute shopping to take care of. Or maybe there's a special someone in your life who keeps asking you for gift ideas and you need to start dropping hints to avoid another button down and a neck tie. Whatever the reason, here's a quick and dirty hacker gift guide with a variety of gift ideas that should put a smile on someone's face.

Make sure to add your own favorites to the list in the comments area and pass it along. I'm focusing primarily on smaller items that are available in local stores, but feel free to toss in whatever you think is important and shouldn't be missed.

Reading Material:

Make: The Best Of - a killer collection of the best 75 projects from our favorite magazine.
The Dangerous Book For Boys - this is a great book for sharing with your kids. Chock-full of essential information like how to tie knots, play poker, use a compass, build a tree house, and relate to girls.
Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition - the swiss army knife for your computer.
Illustrated Guide To Astronomical Wonders - ideal for anyone who's interested in knowing their way around the universe.
Also check out other books from the O'Reilly Hacks Series - Link

Gadgets:

Asus Eee PC - this ultra-tiny Linux laptop is just starting to appear in stores - Hacks
Linksys WRT54GL Router - the L in the GL stands for Linux. It's a $60 router that can be customized to do more than it's thousand dollar big-brothers - Hacks
Western Digital MyBook World Edition External Hard Drive - any extra storage is really nice to have, but this network-available drive contains mirrored RAID storage and a mini Linux computer that can run a web and database server - Hacks
iPhone or iPod Touch - did I really put that here? - Hacks
Broadband Mobile Card from Verizon or Sprint - they are getting super
popular, and heck, they are cheaper than an iPhone.
Nokia N95-3 - the winner of our most hackable mobile phone survey - Hacks

Toys:

Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle - remember the Picco-Zs and their clones from last year? Here's two of them in a single package, enhanced with a trigger that let's you zap your friend's heli down.
E-Sky Lama V4 Helicopter- Yeah, I'm crazy for helicopters right now. The counter-rotating models like this one are about $100, ready (and easy) to fly, and very hackable.
WowWee RoboSapien V2 - fun for the kids. More fun with a soldering iron - Hacks

Gear:

2GB or larger micro SD card, plus various SD and USB adapters - perfect for scooting files around, the size of a finger nail, and you can put a full Linux distro, anti virus software, or a Puppy Linux virtual machine on it - Hacks
Mini Multimeter - always handy.
Bike Multitool - a good one will pack allen and hex wrenches, screw drivers, and a knife into a pretty small package. Perfect for voiding warrantees in a pinch. Oh, and there's a chain tool, too - Link, Link
Soldering Tools - whether it's a new Weller or just a pair of helping hands, it'll be welcome in any stocking - Link, Link

What have we missed here? Add your wishes to the comments. Then find a completely non-tacky way to get this list into the hands of someone who wants you to be a happy hacker.

November 25, 2007

Recovering a dead external hard drive

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

November 15, 2007

HOWTO: using tabbed bookmarks in Safari and Firefox

A friend of mine was commenting today on a common scenario that a lot of us run into. When you're actively working on a project, you often times have several tabs open in your browser solely related to that work: some API documentation, a couple versions of a site you are working on, a google spreadsheet, a project resource/status page, and things of that sort.

When you change gears to work on something else, you might have another entirely different set of pages that you keep open all the time. If you juggle several projects at the same time, it can be a nuisance (not to mention a waste of time) to constantly be closing and opening all those windows throughout the day.

This isn't new news, but Firefox and Safari both have a really convenient--and often overooked--feature built into their tabbed browsing and bookmarking functionality that makes managing groups of commonly viewed documents really simple.

In Safari, just create and fill a folder in your bookmarks menu for each group of sites. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open in Tabs. Clicking that will open the entire folder's bookmarks at once, each in a tab of the active window.

Firefox makes it even easier. Just set up your tabs the way you normally would, then click on Bookmarks->Bookmark All Tabs. Firefox will create a new folder in your bookmarks menu and automatically import all of your current tabs to the folder. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open All in Tabs. This works just as you would expect, conveniently loading all of the documents in the bookmark subfolder.

October 3, 2007

HOWTO - read RSS with a POP email client using FreePOPs

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

Read full story

September 1, 2007

HOWTO - beat carnival games

I decided to brave the manure, mullets and *-on-a-stick this weekend and swung by the state fair. It seems like every time I go there are a couple people walking around all day with enormous stuffed animals, presumably won through some feat of basketball tossing or ring flinging. Enormous. Impossible to win enormous. Paid carnival employees walking around with giant stuffed bears tricking innocent folks into thinking it's actually possible to win enormous. Like, such as, the Iraq.

Anyone who's attempted the balloon dart throw or the coin toss knows how rigged these games are.

What if you knew a few tricks that could increase your odds? For those of you who'd think about climbing back on that Jacob's Ladder and giving it another try, here's a guide to beating a few of the more popular carnival games.

How To Beat Carnival Games - Link

August 5, 2007

Investment Spreadsheet 2.0

Meet Sue. She's straight out of school with 0 investments and a $36,000/year job. She's hardcore in her simple living, and has a roommate so she can save for an early retirement. She manages to live on a tiny $16,320/year take-home budget.

It's hard work, but she'll be a millionaire at 44, even without a major promotion. There's a good chance she could retire at 40, or keep working to drastically increase her retirement quality of life. If she keeps it up for about 30 years, at 50, she'll be making 140k just on investment income and she'll have a couple million in the bank (and growing toward major f.u. money).

Introducing FU Money Calculator 2.0
My trial run of an open-access wikisheet was a huge success. Thanks to the hundreds of you who have collaborated and experimented with the document in the last couple of days, I've put together an update that accounts for your pre-tax 401k contributions as well as a home loan. Special thanks to James G. McIlhargey, who contributed the loan debt model!

In the interest of proving a point, I've put together 3 example scenarios of very normal people becoming wealthy by being excessive in their frugality.

John Q. Hacker

John doesn't care about being rich. He just wants to retire ASAP so he can focus on his software and robot projects. He's a 27 year-old hacker and has been working hard for several years. He makes reasonable money, could make more, but enjoys a fun open source job working for a small company. He reads Hackszine daily, and decides to try taking an aggressive retirement path of 13 years, so that he can spend the rest of his life writing his own software, making robots, and tending to the garden in the house he just bought.

It's not easy and he has to make some sacrifices, but John is able to retire at 40. Any side jobs he decides to take on are just gravy. He's his own man.

Dick and Jane

Finally, meet Dick and Jane. They're college grads and have been out of school for a while. They have some savings, and a combined income of 80k. They have just taken out a loan on a modest home for 170k. After a few years, they have a baby and their income drops 25% due to childcare and one parent working part-time.

Before their kid is in college, they could start thinking about retiring.

Run Your Own Simulation
FU Money Calculator 2.0 is available both as a template that you can copy to your own private spreadsheet, or as a fully collaborative wikisheet for those of you who would like to contribute fixes, improvements or other simulations back to the Hackszine community. Thanks to Hackszine reader jrochelle, who tipped us off on how to make a Google Spreadsheet template.

FU Money 2.0 Template: run your own numbers in your own private copy - Link
FU Money 2.0 Wikisheet: help improve and update FU Money - Link

August 3, 2007

The FU Money Spreadsheet

If you're a Cryptonomicon fan, you might recall uber-hacker Randy Waterouse's business partner, Avi, who had a spreadsheet which tracked a particularly interesting value.

The subject heading of Avi's first message is: ``Guideline 1.''
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for ``fuck-you money.'' It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of ``fuck-you money'' at a glance.
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

There was a post recently at Lifehacker about the "crossover point," another magic number—albeit with a less colorful name—representing the point where your investment income exceeds your living expenses.

For all intents and purposes, the crossover point _is_ the attainment of FU money, as you could essentially quit your job on a whim, check out, and live off of your investments for the rest of your life. What's funny about the crossover point, is that you actually are in control of the major factor determining how long it will take you to acheive it.

In a simple model, you can think of your crossover horizon as being effected by 3 parameters: your income, the percentage of your income you invest, and the rate of return you get on your investments. Only one of these factors is really up to you to control to a large degree. Your percentage of investment is directly tied to your lifestyle, your ability to live frugally, and your willingness to skimp in the short term for a larger long term benefit.

The Hackszine FU Money Spreadsheet
To illustrate the point, I've created our own Hackszine version of Avi's FU spreadsheet with Google Docs.

It would probably mean skipping yearly computer updates, eating out a lot, and the purchase of all the latest doodads and gizmos, but if you can be happy only spending half of what you earn and investing the rest, a hacker earning 50k a year can actually pass the crossover point in about 10 years.

Given 18 years of living like a spartan college student, your investment income will actually have passed your salary, at which point you can start raising your standard of living a bit while watching your investments continue to grow exponentially.

What I find really amusing and counter-intuitive about all of this, is that an increase in salary doesn't necessarily put you any closer to the crossover point. Assuming you invest at the same percentage of your salary, you'll have increased your standard of living, but you'll also have increased the sum you'll need to accumulate before hitting the crossover point. Think about it: if you can be happy living simply, assuming you earn enough to live on 50%, you could actually retire in 10-20 years, no matter what age you are.

Run Your Own Numbers
Keep in mind, I haven't included the nitty gritty details like inflation and taxes, but you get the idea. I've given you all edit access to the spreadsheet (should this be called a wikisheet?), so you can run your own numbers, fix any glaring bugs, or even add your own FU money model to another sheet. Feel free to experiment with different scenarios and discuss this stuff in the comments.

References:
FU Money Calculator 1.0 - Link
Make your investment returns exceed your spending - Link
The "Crossover Point" - Link
Cryptonomicon - Link