Hackszine.com: Life Archives

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December 11, 2008

Swiitboard - homebrew Wiimote jogging game

What do you do if the Wii Fit games aren't intense enough for you? You build your own exercise gaming system, of course:

wondered about a way to get fitter, work out without having to go running outside (although that is very healthy). I didn't think the Wii balance board would do the trick, as the Wii games where reported not to be very intense, and the board itself is to hard for running on it. So what is different about the Swiiboard is that can absorb running effort, measure the effort and perhaps that it can use those measurements to control a virtual environment. It turned out this can be achieved using a Wiimote controller.

The controller is a simple setup: a wooden plank spans two chunks of mattress foam, and a Wiimote is zip-tied to the center. The accelerometer in the Wiimote can be used to measure your jogging pace, as well as the left to right tilt on the board, giving you all the control you need to move an avatar around a 3D world.

The Swiitboard (Footwii/Pedal navigation device)

November 17, 2008

Android hack - a smarter garage door opener

Brad Fitzpatrick created a garage door application for his G1 Android-based Google Phone. This would be noteworthy enough, but the interesting thing about Brad's hack is that it opens the garage door automatically as he approaches his home.

I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service's wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for my house.

When my house is in range, it does the magic HTTP request to my garage door opener's webserver (HMAC-signed timestamped URL, for non-replayability/forgeability if sniffed) and my garage door opens. Complete with a bunch of fun Toast notifications (like Growl) and Android Notifications (both persistent ongoing notifications for background scanning, and one-time notifications for things like the garage door actually opening).

So when Brad comes home, he starts the application which scans the WiFi network and then opens the garage door as soon as his home network is in range. He even describes an automated version where the phone constantly monitors the network for common scenarios. For instance, your if your phone sees your work network disappear, followed an hour later by your home network appearing, it could safely assume you have come home from work, opening the door without any interaction.

This is compelling support for a fully hackable, open source device. With normal iPhone development, you don't this level of deep access to be able to monitor WiFi connectivity or run an application as a background process.

Brad's released the source code for this one. If this app gives you any ideas, his code might be a good place to start. Just make sure to send us a link to your Android hack when you get your G1 to turn lights on and off when you walk around the house.

Android Garage Door Opener
Download the Java Source

November 15, 2008

Myvu Crystal as a wearable head mounted display

Ralf Ackermann sent us a tip on using the Myvu Crystal headset in conjunction with a wearable computer. The Myvu glasses were designed to block out the rest of the world for private iPod video watching, but its VGA resolution and device compatibility makes it pretty suitable for tearing apart.

The consumer myvu crystal HMD (sold as a nice though still somewhat "socially unacceptable" 2 eyepiece video output device for the ipod and other devices generating a PAL/NTSC signal can be modified into a much smaller 1 eyepiece version. This one works very well with a multitude of devices like a Parallax propeller, a Nokia N95 via TV out or a Archos PMA 430. It is thus well suited as the core of "another wearable computer".
For this purpose it might also be combined with the iphone / ipod touch
Xbee IO extension described earlier this week.

Ralf's project is still a work in progress, but it's a reminder that most of the hardware required for a wearable is now commonly available. Considering most of us already carry a sufficient computer (iPhone, N95, G1, etc.) around with us all the time anyway, it's only a matter of time before a HMD design is made cool enough to dodge the social stigma.

Myvu Crystal HMD Modification (Flickr Photo Set)

November 11, 2008

Make cake in a mug

Wired's how-to wiki gives us "Cake in a Mug," perhaps the greatest thing to come to the microwave since peep jousting:

You're working at home and your mind starts to wander to snack possibilities. There are probably some prepackaged, good-until-the-next-millennium baked items in your cabinet, but you're in the mood for something warm from the oven. Something chocolate. However, your compulsion to work is just strong enough to keep you from leaving the computer long enough to make something from scratch. Guess it'll have to be another stale Twinkie after all.

A single-serving portion of cake. Baked in a microwave. In the mug I mixed it in. Just for me. Right now.

Hello future. You can keep the jetpack.

Make Cake in a Mug

November 3, 2008

Top 5 election day mashups

Aside from the politics, opinions, and issues involved in this election, I've been really interested in how the current state of web technology, survey data, online conversation and public information would be merging together into web applications and utilities for the growing digital electorate.

From finding a voting location, to enabling countrywide real-time political conversation (by people, not pundits), to monitoring live election results, and even reporting quality of service measurements at poll stations, below are my favorite examples of the web working hard to improve the democratic process.

Where And How To Vote

Google is providing what is essentially a voting howto map that will help you with directions to your voting location as well as information about your state's election regulations. After you type in your address, you'll be shown the location of your voting precinct, as well as useful links to registration information for your state. Many states allow "day of" voter registration, so if you haven't already registered and you'd like to vote, it's worth checking out.

Map of 2008 Voting Locations and Instructions

Tweet Your Vote

It's simple. We voters are using Twitter and other texting tools to report on how the vote is really going during this election, and we're urging everyone to use the common word (or "hashtag" in Twitter lingo) of #votereport as they do so. If that happens, we'll all be able watch on maps and graphs how the election is going across the country.

To participate, you'll want to Tweet details on your voting experience, including your location, wait time, quality of experience, and any problems that you ran into. Useful hashtags include: #[zip code], #wait:[minutes], #good or #bad, and #machine or $reg (for machine or registration problems). For example:

#votereport things are #good in #55404 with #wait:30

This will let local volunteer monitors know that things are functioning well in the 55404 area code and that the wait time at the polls is only 30 minutes. More information is available at the Twitter Vote Report web site, and in the video above, including ways to report serious issues as well as reporting status by phone.

Twitter Vote Report

Monitor Poll and Survey Data

You can monitor trend estimates for the presidential, senate, and house elections on pollster.com. The map data provides a working estimate of the election outcomes by calculating regression trendlines based on available survey data.

In most cases, the numbers are not an "average" but rather regression based trendlines. The specific methodology depends on the number of polls available.

If we have at least 8 public polls, we fit a trend line to the dots represented by each poll using a "Loess" iterative locally weighted least squares regression.
If we have between 4 and 7 polls, we fit a linear regression trend line (a straight line) to best fit the points.
If we have 3 polls or fewer, we calculate a simple average of the available surveys.

Clicking on a state will give you more information about the poll data, as well as the computed trendline that forms the basis of the predicted outcome.

Pollster 2008 Election Polls

Tweet Your Opinions

Twitter is running a special Election 2008 filter that lets you track opinions and conversations about the presidential election through the lens of users' Tweets. Basically, any time you use the word Obama, McCain, Palin or Biden in a tweet, it will show up in the live monitor. The site uses AJAX requests to pull in successive batches of updates and display the messages in almost real-time. You can filter by a particular candidate, or just watch the whole passionate conversation roll by, assuming you can read fast enough.

Twitter Election 2008 Stream

View Live Election Results

Google is also providing live election results in a map gadget. As precincts begin sending in data, the map above should change to reflect the current reports. You can embed this in your own page by following the link below. The gadget allows you to customize the embed code to track either the presidential, house, or senate election.

2008 Election Results Gadget

Send Us Your Favorite Election Hack

Do you know of any voting mashup hacks or tools that I've missed? Please add them to the comments!

(Keep in mind that we want to hear about your favorite election tech, but please reserve any political discussion for a more appropriate site.)

October 30, 2008

Halloween candy code

Hobos have a code system for communicating warnings and identifying good places to camp. Warchalkers have their own code for marking open access points.

Now kids can have a secret ideogram language for finding the best loot:

Growing up in the Bowling Green neighborhood of Sacramento, I was taught how to read and mark houses with the Halloween Candy Code. For kids with an early curfew these codes were invaluable. Once we tagged a house, our peers could use our marks to reap the best full-size chocolate bars while avoiding Chex mix and dried apricots.

Most marks were left in bright chalk at the bottom of the driveway.

Shown above are the symbols for king size candy bars, fun size bars, open porch bowl, and Reese's Pieces. Though I'm pretty sure it's a joke—and I dare drop my first public ROFL in the middle of this blog entry, as that's what I've been doing for a few minutes—it also strikes me that this is a sound idea and should immediately be taught to kids everywhere.

Halloween Candy Code
Cabel Sasser's inspired tweet on the topic of a kids' hobo code

October 26, 2008

Start Chrome in incognito mode

Maybe you don't want a bunch of cached data hanging around after your browser session exits. Maybe you travel a lot with your laptop and don't want a bunch of private information on a machine that might be stolen. Maybe you do a lot of "birthday shopping."

Whatever the reason, if you prefer to use Chrome in incognito mode for most of your day to day browsing, Michael T. Bee sent us a convenient script that starts up Chrome in incognito mode automatically. Here it is in all it's glory:

//Chrome_Incognito.js - start new chrome incognito(sort of)

var liWait=175; //wait ms (double on older pc)

var oSh=new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
oSh.Run("chrome.exe"); //start chrome
WScript.Sleep(liWait);
oSh.Sendkeys("^+N"); //start new incognito window
WScript.Sleep(liWait);
oSh.Sendkeys("%{Tab}"); //go previous(first) browser window
WScript.Sleep(liWait);
oSh.Sendkeys("%{F4}"); //close first browser window

Just drop this in notepad and save it as chrome_incognito.js on your desktop. When you double click it, it will launch Chrome, make an incognito window, and then close the first window. It does all this by sending artificial keypress events to the application through the Shell ActiveX object, a technique which might come in handy for scripting other standard Windows applications.

If you have an older or slower machine, you might need to adjust the liWait variable to give your machine time to launch Chrome before the application starts sending fake keypresses to it.

Going Incognito At Startup

October 24, 2008

Using web services with Google Docs

Last week I wrote about a couple of cool dynamic data capabilities that are built in to Google Docs, including the GoogleFinance function, which lets you link to external stock ticker data in your spreadsheets.

Hackszine reader Tony Hirst, who previously showed us how to incorporate Wikipedia tables into a spreadsheet document, sent us some examples for accessing different web services from the Spreadsheets application using the importXML function. His examples include a howto for calling Amazon Web Services and another for accessing the New York Times Campaign Data API. Tony mentions, "I've now started thinking that google docs is a good place for people with little coding experience to play with web services."

For non-coders, the importXML feature is great in that it gives your spreadsheets access to a number of existing APIs without you needing to do a lot of work. For the programmers out there, however, this is even more powerful - you now have a mechanism for easily presenting and graphing your application data, assuming you can toss together a quick XML service.

Calling Amazon Associates/Ecommerce Web Services from a Google Spreadsheet
Viewing Campaign Finance Data In a Google Spreadsheet via the New York Times Campaign Data API

Previously
HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets
Scraping Wikipedia tables with Google Spreadsheets

October 23, 2008

Simple stock quote grabbing with Perl

Hackszine reader 3riador wrote in to recommend a quick and easy way to grab stock quotes using Perl and the Finance::Quote CPAN module. The codebase is actively maintained and has been around for some time, having first been distributed as part of GNUCash before becoming its own project.

Paul Fenwick, one of the GNUCash developers, had this to say in an article for The Perl Journal in 2000:

If you have a reason to watch the world's financial markets, and you know a little about perl, then you may find that the Finance::Quote package comes in handy. I personally use it to remind myself that I should never buy shares, as I have a good history of losing money on the stock exchange. However, you can use Finance::Quote to help track those tasty stock options you've been offered, or even to help you build dynamic artwork driven by fluctuations in the world markets.

Near as I can tell, the dynamic artwork that's referred to is the Stock Puppets presentation which was shown at 2000s Burning Man event (can anyone confirm this?). The idea was to have large marionettes controlled directly by stock market data, some servos, Basic Stamp microcontrollers, and IBM Thinkpads pulling market data using the Finance::Quote library.

To use Finance::Quote in your own projects is a simple task. Here's a few lines of code that will print the current price of Google shares:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Finance::Quote;

my $q = Finance::Quote->new();
my %data = $q->fetch('usa', 'GOOG');
print $data{'GOOG', 'price'} . "\n";

The Dabbler Blog has more information on installation and basic usage, and The Perl Journal article is a good resource for those wishing to delve any deeper.

Finance::Quote Perl Library
Dabbler Blog - Fast and Simple Stock Quotes Using Perl
Finance::Quote Article In The Perl Journal
Stock Puppets

October 15, 2008

Scraping Wikipedia tables with Google Spreadsheets

Fitting in nicely with the discussion on pulling financial data into Google Spreadsheets, the OUseful blog recently demonstrated another Spreadsheet data import function, importHTML(), which allows you to easily link an external HTML table to your workbook.

The Google spreadsheet function =importHTML("","table",N) will scrape a table from an HMTL web page into a Google spreadsheet. The URL of the target web page, and the target table element both need to be in double quotes. The number N identifies the N'th table in the page (counting starts at 0) as the target table for data scraping.

The author goes on to show you how to pull a country population table from a Wikipedia entry into a spreadsheet, create a graph from it, publish the spreadsheet as a CSV, consume the CSV in Yahoo Pipes, export the Pipe output to KML, and import the KML into a Google Map. Whew!

The importHTML function will accept either "list" or "table" as the second parameter, which allows you to retrieve records from either UL/OL/DL lists or TABLE contents, respectively. If you want to retrieve something that's not table or list based, the importXML may also come in handy. With importXML, you can pull data from any XML or HTML file using an XPath query to target a specific tag or attribute. For more information on these import functions, consult the official documentation below.

Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
Google Docs Documentation: Functions For External Data

Previously:
HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets

October 13, 2008

HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets

One of the most convenient features in Google Spreadsheets is the ability to pull live external data sources into any worksheet. Instead of copying data into your worksheet, when the linked source changes, the cells in your spreadsheet will automatically update, which can save a lot of work if you pull reports regularly. This external data can be pulled from XML, other spreadsheet documents, and even (assuming you can bear to look) current and historical stock quotes from Google Finance.

Linking a worksheet to Google Finance is as simple as calling the GoogleFinance spreadsheet function. There are two ways to use it: you can pull current information on a ticker symbol, or you can pull historical trade data for a particular date range. Here's how:

Retrieving Current Stock Information

If you call the GoogleFinance function with two attributes, you can link to current market data for a particular ticker symbol. Just open any cell in your worksheet and enter the following:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute")

Replace "symbol" with the ticker id, such as GOOG or AAPL. The attribute parameter determines what information will be retrieved for that symbol. There are a number of supported attributes, including price, volume, tradetime, beta, pe (price to earnings ratio), and changepct. If you omit the attribute parameter, it will default to "price". There are a number of other possible attributes which I haven't listed, including some specific to mutual funds, so check the documentation link below for the full list.

Pulling Historical Stock Data

Another thing that you can do is retrieve historical stock data over a large date range. Once you have this in your spreadsheets, you can use formulas to process, compare, and chart this information over time.

Here's the syntax for pulling historical stock data:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute", "start_date", "end_date", "interval")

As in the previous example, "symbol" needs to be replaced with the desired ticker ID. The "attribute" parameter, however, works a little differently. It's possible values are limited to high, low, open, close, vol, and all. "start_date" and "end_date" define the range of data that will be retrieved, and interval should be set to "DAILY", "WEEKLY", or a number from 1-7, which represents the number of days between measurements.

When the stock data is retrieved, a number of columns and rows will be consumed to capture the linked data, so make sure you have room to accommodate the data you've requested. It's not a bad practice to contain this data in separate sheet. One thing I noticed is that the column names always appear in French for me, despite my language preference settings. If you notice this as well, you'll just have to ignore it until it's fixed.

You can have up to 250 of these Google Finance feeds in a single spreadsheet. It's not an unlimited amount, but it's not exactly lightning fast to pull that much data anyway. If you need more than that , one possible option is to separate your report data into different spreadsheets and then refresh them as needed.

Example Google Finance Spreadsheet
GoogleFinance Documentation and Examples

September 17, 2008

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

Standford's Stanford's School of Engineering has released a number of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering courses online, in their entirety, called Standford Engineering Everywhere. The online program includes all course materials—notes, tests, and complete lecture recordings—free for students or educators to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

SEE users may pick and choose the materials that best meet their needs and interests. Want a refresher course on a particular programming concept? View a video lecture that covers the basics. Are you a programming novice? Spend several weeks viewing lectures, reading course materials and tackling class assignments. Test your knowledge by taking quizzes and exams.

As an example, here's the first lecture in the Machine Learning course, taught by Professor Andrew Ng:

The ten courses that are available cover a healthy range of topics. It's basically 3 or 4 semesters worth of EE and Comp Sci. education that you can brainload for free. Here's the current selection:

Introduction to Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

Linear Systems and Optimization

If you've ever wanted to go to Standford, but didn't have the time, money, or grades, here's your chance.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere [via Creative Commons]

Previously
Lecturefox: free university lectures
Bootstrap Education

July 24, 2008

Farm Fountain - edible eco-sculpture

Equal parts hydroponic garden, aquarium, and interactive art, the Farm Fountain is an experiment in self-contained, indoor ecosystem design created by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. The idea is that you can raise edible fish and cycle their waste nutrients through a hanging garden which filters the water before returning it to the aquarium.

Their 4th generation Farm Fountain is currently on display at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand until January 2009. From the Farm Fountain website:

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans. The work creates an indoor healthy environment that also provides oxygen and light to the humans working and moving through the space. The sound of water trickling through the plant containers creates a peaceful, relaxing waterfall. The Koi and Tilapia fish that are part of this project also provide a focus for relaxed viewing.

The plants we are currently growing include lettuces, cilantro, mint, basil, tomatoes, chives, parsley, mizuna, watercress and tatsoi. The Tilapia fish in this work are also edible and are a variety that have been farmed for thousands of years in the Nile delta.

A Basic Stamp program controls the pump mechanism, allowing the plants to be watered at regular intervals for a set period of time. Depending on available natural light, supplemental lighting can be provided by a combination of fluorescent and grow-spectrum LED lighting, switched from a standard light timer. Ken and Amy worked out a lot of the details during the construction of their 3rd Farm Fountain design (pictured above) and they've assembled a how-to instructional gallery which you can use to design your own Farm Fountain system.

There are a lot of external inputs required to keep the ecosystem healthy for a long period of time including fish food, PH and nitrate monitoring, and general gardening tasks. Once you've gotten accustomed to it, though, it's probably not much more work than maintaining a lawn, and a lawn can't give you tomatoes in the middle of winter.

Farm Fountain - a sculptural ecosystem you can eat

July 22, 2008

PocketMod and Mapufacture: the anti-iPhone

Here's a clever way to fold an 8.5x11 sheet of paper into a small book. The way it's folded, all of the book's 8 outward-facing pages are from the same side of the sheet of paper. This allows you to easily construct a handy little daily planner by printing a single sheet of paper. When you're done folding, the first and third leaf will have a little pouch that you can shove a business card or two inside.

The PocketMod website has a flash application that lets you quickly build a layout for your planner. You can drag calendars, todo-lists, grids, conversion tables, and even RSS feed articles to the page and print it directly from your browser.

I love it. It's the iPhone for the mobile Luddite.

You're probably thinking: this pocketmod thing is awesome and all, but what about maps? Well, PocketMod does maps too. Or rather, a cool Web2.0 mapping service does PocketMods.

At mapufacture.com, you can create and manage custom maps and import data layers from news sources, geo blogging services, and Google My Maps. In addition to all the normal embedding and sharing tools that you'd expect, they also have a PocketMod export, allowing you to convert your map into a handy format that you can put in your back pocket.

You can't make phone calls on your PocketMod and it doesn't hold any songs you can't sing or whistle yourself. On the other hand, it's crazy slim, 3rd party application writing is a cinch, the data plan is affordable, and you won't believe the battery life.

PocketMod
Mapufacture - create custom multilayer maps (with pocketmod output support)

July 6, 2008

KidWash sprinkler toy

Just because it's hot doesn't mean the kids have to stay indoors in the A/C. There are a number of worthwhile summer projects, but the KidWash looks like it has a particularly high fun/effort ratio. A trip to the hardware store for some PVC and mister jets and you can give the Wii a run for its money next weekend.

I headed down to the PVC section of the local home improvement store to pick up supplies. While browsing the adjacent sections for interesting stuff I noticed the micro-irrigation section and inspiration struck: KidWash with mister jets!
The modification worked great. We turned it on and kids from up and down the block started showing up to help with the testing. It's a lot of fun on foot, but my kids also get a blast out of riding their bikes through it.

This would be great to combine with a DIY visqueen slip and slide.

KidWash 2 : PVC Sprinkler Water Toy

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