Shapeways (Not a Women's Gym)

As you may have read about, I've been on something of an Arduino kick lately.  I've slowed down a lot on my trivia system, partially because for a while I considered a change to how I make each of the handheld buzzers.  I've been using PVC pipe and having to file out a rectangular hole in the endcap for the network keystone jack, but that leads to kind of an ugly, irregular cut out that doesn't perfectly fit the keystone jack.

This led me to Shapeways, which as the title of this post suggests, is indeed NOT a women's gym.  Instead it's a 3D printing service that will let you print your designs using a HUGE variety of materials for relatively cheap (they charge by the volume of your printed object).  I've been experimenting using Blender on Ubuntu to try to make my own endcap that will act like a wallplate and allow the keystone jack to simply snap in.  I haven't done any 3D modeling in over a decade, and I've never tried to do something that had to be a precise size for a real-world application.  Still, it's been fun.  My current prototype, which I haven't printed yet, is shown below:

My first attempt at an endcap.  It's shorter and has thinner walls than the ones I've bought from Home Depot, but it would still cost $3.21 +shipping to print at Shapeways.  This one just has a more precise cutout.  It doesn't have the full geometry to act like a wallplate for the keystone jack to simply snap into place.

Unfortunately, even with some of the changes I've made it would still cost $3.21 per part to print at Shapeways, which isn't quite worth it considering the ones at Home Depot cost less than $0.50 each.  Still, it was a worthwhile experiment and I've learned a lot about how to use Blender in the process.  I'm far from being an expert, but I'm definitely going to be on the lookout for cool ways to use Shapeways in the future.  I purchased the material samples kit from their website for $30 so I could see what the different materials looked and felt like before blowing a bunch of money on some actual prints.  It came with a $25 credit for 3D printing though, so now I have that credit on my account just waiting for me!

Seeing as I have all the materials for the trivia system already, I'll probably stick to filing and drilling the endcaps rather than printing them.  The cost just isn't worth it for the larger parts when I need so many of them -- at least not until I get my Replicator 2.  Please feel free to donate to the cause!  ;-)

Thievery Caught by Geekery

So I live in a less-than-stellar part of town.  When me and my roommates talked to people about the area, they said they felt relatively safe, but if you have an aftermarket stereo, don't park on the street because someone will definitely smash in your window to get it.  I have a factory stereo and never leave anything in my car, so I wasn't too worried (my apartment back in undergrad wasn't much better).

Things were fine for the first year we lived here, no incidents at all.  But several months ago, at the end of July, something was stolen from our front porch.  My roommate ordered a used iPhone online, and it arrived in a plain cardboard box, nothing on the box or label to hint that it was anything valuable.  His wife came home to see that the box was not on our porch, but instead was sitting by the sidewalk, EMPTY!  It appeared that someone had walked right up to our porch, ninja'd said package, stolen the iPhone, and tossed the empty box on the ground.  The craziest part is that this happened in the middle of the day!

But unbeknownst to this thief is that they messed with what is arguably the most wired house in the neighborhood.  For shits and giggles, I set up a $60 wireless IP camera to watch our porch when we first moved in. It's mounted on the inside of the house, looking at the front porch through the small window above the front door.  I set up my media server to perform motion capture using Zoneminder, which would save a picture whenever it detected movement in the image.  My friends gave me crap every time they would come visit, asking "why the hell do you have a camera sitting above your door?"    Well, it turns out that being a nerd comes in very handy in situations like this.

The camera caught our thief: a young girl probably no more than 8 years old.  As the timestamp shows, this happened on July 31st, 2012 at 4:36 PM -- right in the middle of broad daylight!

Google Being Less Open with Honeycomb (Android 3.0)

I heard about this a few days ago, and I'm trying not to jump to conclusions too hastily.  Google recently announced that they will delay the release of the source code for Honeycomb, the latest version of Android made specifically for tablets.  How long will they delay it?  No one knows for sure, and Google hasn't been very clear about it.  Open source developers are understandably pissed off -- the author of that Ars article, Ryan Paul (Segphault), started an awesome open source microblogging application for Ubuntu called Gwibber that I use all the time.  The reason for the delay has some merit, however, because in an attempt to get Honeycomb finished, Google stopped worrying about making sure that it would work on phones.

Google's worried that if they release the source right now, Honeycomb will be slapped onto phones or crappy tablets it wasn't meant to run on, and the user experience will suffer for it.  They have an argument here, in that some of the cheap ass Android tablets out there really give Android and Google a bad reputation.  If I buy a $100 Android tablet and find that it's complete junk, I might think that all Android tablets will be like that, which is not the case.  Motorola may also have wanted Google to delay the release of the source code in order to boost Xoom sales rather than having people just update their current Android 2.2 or 2.3 tablets to run Honeycomb.

On the other hand, some tablets such as the dual-core Tegra 2 G-Tablet come with garbage software pre-installed, but because of Android's open source nature, enthusiasts have made custom ROMs that make the G-Tablet an excellent, cheap Android tablet.  I was VERY tempted to pick one up off of Woot the other day for $285 shipped, but Google's delay in releasing the Honeycomb source convinced me otherwise.  The G-Tablet's specs are pretty close to that of the Xoom, but at less than half the cost!  The screen isn't quite as nice, and it has half the RAM, but it would have made an excellent, cheaper alternative to the Xoom once some XDA developers got Honeycomb running on it.  Unfortunately, there's no telling when that will happen now.  In the meantime, I've decided to give Apple's iPad 2 a shot.

I'm very disappointed with Google right now.  I run CyanogenMod 7 (an open source, community-based ROM) on my HTC Evo, and it runs WAY better than the much slower, clunkier HTC Sense interface that came with my phone.  Custom ROMs like CM7 aren't possible without the Android source being openly available.  I understand Google wanting to have more control over the Android source so that the market isn't flooded with crappy products that claim to be the newest Android devices.  To be honest, you can't be as confident that every Android-based device is going to be as solid or consistent an experience as it is on nicer devices like the Evo.  Unfortunately, delaying or withholding the release of the source code like this also cripples the possibilities that an open platform like Android is supposed to be able to offer.  The custom kernels and ROMs that are possible with Android are among the main reasons I switched to Android in the first place!

I hope this really is just a delay in releasing the source code and that it gets released sooner rather than later.  If not, Honeycomb development is going to be severely hindered, and the Android tablet software scene needs as much help as possible to catch up to Apple's 1 year head-start.  Until then, we have no choice but to just wait and see what the hell Google decides to do.

Initial Thoughts: iPad 2 vs. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)

I'm a big proponent of open source software.  I absolutely love my HTC Evo 4G (running CyanogenMod 7), and I've been using Ubuntu on my home computers pretty much exclusively for ~5 years now.  I use MythTV on my media server so I can record OTA HDTV broadcasts via my antenna for free; it even automatically detects commercial breaks so I can skip them with a simple press of a button when I'm watching recorded TV shows.  It's pretty sweet.

So, simply put, Apple products aren't really designed with me in mind.  I like to have full control over my software and hardware so I can tinker with it to get it to run just the way I want.  That's the beauty of open source software, but it's not for everyone.  Apple makes excellent hardware, and their software works beautifully together.  My issue with Apple isn't their products, but rather with how their software is managed.  Apple's iPhone, iPod, and iPad products are also meant to be managed with iTunes, which I can't use because I run Ubuntu.  I prefer my mobile device to act like a USB flash drive so I can transfer music and other documents to it myself and have it detected by the device's software without issue.  This lets me use my Evo as a USB storage device to transfer files between pretty much any computer I want without them needing to have iTunes installed.

iPad: A step backward

If you watched the most recent episode of Modern Family, you might have come away thinking, "Well, I didn't really want one at first, but maybe the iPad isn't so bad after all."  I did.  But then I went to the Apple store to try it out, and I was thoroughly underwhelmed.  I love the idea of a portable tablet, but it seems that Apple is only interested in giving people one more way to buy apps, music, and now books from their store.  Moreover, the iPad offers you very little freedom with regard to how you use it.  I can't help but agree with Corey Doctorow as far as why you shouldn't buy an iPad.

I'm a very proud user of Ubuntu -- a free, popular, easy-to-use Linux distribution.  What I love about Ubuntu, and the Linux motto in general, is that I have so much freedom in how I use my computer.  For 95% of what I might want to do with my PC, some enthusiast out there has already put out software to do it, and FOR FREE!  I can run a DVR/media center, web/file server, virtualization server, or whatever else for free.  Over the last 4 years, I've saved $500+ by running my own DVR on my old computer instead of shelling out $15+/month to a cable company.  It took some extra hardware and some time to set everything up, but it was well worth it and my DVR can do way more than anything I could have gotten from the cable company!  Linux isn't for everyone, but using it for the past 4 years has helped me tremendously in understanding the computers and networks that power the Internet and help us every day.