Dead Bicycle Tire

After a ride to school and back with an annoying rhythmic sound and very minor damage to my bike, I identified a tumor of the sidewall of my real tire (always the rear one, the harder one to get on and off).  I feared the tire was failing and that I was going to have to replace it.

I was right.

This is the interior of the tire after I turned it inside out for inspection. I don't know what caused this but the damage is done and there is no repair that I know of.

New tires are on order but I suspect my riding to school won't resume before the end of the semester.

Save Icon

I recently was able to upgrade my Mac version of Office to 2011, the latest version.  Today I used it for one of the first times and in opening Excel I saw this:

A floppy disk (or disc?) being used for a save icon.  I was alive and computer-aware enough when the transition to those rigid discs took place and it was decades ago.  When was the last time you held one of those discs?  Its been at least five years for me, maybe even close to ten.  There are students in college now who are very computer literal and have never used one of these.  I'm sure they are aware that it means save and might even know that it is a floppy disk.

 I vote that we find a new image for saving. And I'm not the only one who is talking about this.  Always easier said than done.

Secret Project Revealed: The DIY Digital Picture Frame

If you've been following this blog, then you know I've been writing cryptic snippets about a secret project. The secrecy was necessitated by the fact that this project was a gift for my wife and posting your plans for her gift to internet is not a good way to keep a secret.  Her birthday is now passed, she is in possession of said item, and the secrecy can be diffused.

The gift: a DIY digital picture frame.

The project got its' start when my mother-in-law turned over to me a dead laptop, one that had died of a video card failure which was not economical to repair.  This was quite unfortunate for her as the laptop had a 17" screen which I knew to be working perfectly fine.  My response: do nothing with it for six years.

It was during a recent cleaning spree that I disassembled the laptop, scavenging for parts, and was able to completely remove the LCD panel from its' frame.  I held in my hands a perfectly good panel and wondered, what would it take to make this into something useful?

I Googled around, talked to a friend, and thus was born my ambition to make a digital picture frame.

Problem one: I needed a way to plug a VGA, DVI, or HDMI signal into this panel. All I had was a mystery connector running out of the back of the pannel and that wasn't getting me anywhere.  Upon advice from my friend, I found a place in China with an eBay store that sells a kit which plugs into the panel and provides a VGA and DVI port as input.  Update 1 was made as a test of the kit shortly after I received it.  I took the VGA out from my wife's computer and plugged it into the kit now connected to the panel.  It worked; I was happy.

Problem two: I needed something to actually push the images up to the display, something like a really small computer.  You know what? They make those.  They go by the name "Raspberry Pi" (one of many products but this quite popular right now) and for not much money, I could have a computer slightly larger than a deck of cards with an HDMI output I could use to put images up on the display.  The Pi's default OS is a Linux variant and I would need a way to make it display images from a folder of my choice on the screen in a slide-show fashion.  The command-line program fbi fits the bill perfectly. Update 2 was my testing of the Raspberry Pi running fbi on a folder of test images.  The display being used was our TV; the Pi has an HDMI and composite video output but no DVI or VGA.

Which brings us to problem three: putting the pieces together.  The Raspberry Pi runs off of 5V, the display driver kit runs off of 12V. I needed to covert the HDMI output of the Pi to DVI or VGA.  I wanted to add wireless network connectivity to the Pi but that required using a powered USB port as the power available on the Pi was widely documented to be inadequate for such an application.  This is systems integration and the devil is in the details.  How does this signal get there?  What voltage needs to be here?  What type of connector is needed here?  Will this piece communicate with that?  I spent several hours playing with different configurations and wirings and paper and when I physically put the pieces together, I ended up with this: Update 4.

In addition to the wireless network connectivity (which allows my wife to add and remove pictures from the pool the frame will display), I had the ambition to include a motion sensor that would turn the display on and off based on the presence of people.  Again, more design decisions and playing around to try to figure out what would work best.  Update 3 was a test of how low a voltage could be used on the display driver kit; it says it needs 12V but it worked at 9V and I'm pretty sure the voltage I'm using right now is a bit below 8V.

My plan was to write a little bit of code for the Pi that would read the sensor, keep track of how long it was since motion had been detected, and after a pre-programmed time, kill power to the display driver kit and effectively shut the display off.  All of this required a bit of external hardware and Update 5 was the completed circuit I constructed to facilitate this.  (This is the blank brown board in Update 4 now filled-in.)  Oh, and the wonderful frame, I didn't make that.  I took the display into Hobby Lobby and had them make a custom-sized shadow box frame.

There were glitches, set-backs, unexpected complications along with way that I'll fill in when I write about the full technical details in a forthcoming post, but the system is up and working as I write this.  My wife loves it and is duly impressed. She thinks there is a market for something like this and so do I; my ambitions go beyond what I've built here.  Maybe down the road I'll upgrade the system and see if I can make some of these other ideas a reality.  Always more to do than I have time or money to try.

Portal 2 Cooperative: The Greatest Game Ever

I do enjoy me some video games.  The demands of a responsible life means my time playing is limited and often in relatively small chunks.  One of the games that has fit this lifestyle well is  Portal and its' sequel, Portal 2.  The strength of both of these is a truly creative game-play mechanic: the ability to connect two points in space with a portal.  Rather than trying to explain any more than this, I'll let the video below do the talking.

(The humor demonstrated in this video also persists throughout the game, adding to the enjoyment).

Portal 2 added more of the same in all departments as well as expanding on the repertoire of mechanics with fluids that allow your character to run faster and jump higher, bridges made of light, and catapults that throw you across the room.  I loved it all from the humor filled introduction sequence to the difficult (for me) final showdown with the test-obsessed robot overlord.

Except I didn't get to play it all.  There is a whole second half to the game which you must play with a friend, each of you controlling a character with a portal gun to solve puzzles that couldn't be solved otherwise.  Until recently, I had no friends....

.... who had played Portal 2 and could join me on this mission.  That changed a few weeks ago and though our time playing together has been limited, it has been a fantastic experience. I can't highly recommend enough playing the co-operative test chambers with a good friend. I look forward to every minute of it, even though those minutes are often weeks apart.  One of these days we will finish all those test chambers and the satisfaction will be high.

(This will only leave all the community created test chambers, both single-player and cooperative.  I just discovered these when I started playing cooperatively with my friend.  The software developers have provided the tools for game players to become game creators by developing there own test chambers and posting them online for others to play. There are over 200,000 of these, more than I will ever play.)

Secret Project - Update 5

I've had to rework part of the design a few times but what you see below has been tested and is working 100%.  The software to use the board has also been written and tested and the board has been integrated into the system as a whole.

The project is nearly complete and I'm waiting on one more item that should be coming in soon.  Plug it in, make a few more software changes and it will be done.

Daylight Savings Time

This is the effect that the time change had on my home temperature measurement system; look at the green and red traces between 1am and 2am.

Everything's Working (Mostly)

As I wrote a few days ago, this week was off to a sub-par start in the Hardy household: our furnace broke and my computer hard drive crashed.  The good news is that both are up and running again (for the most part).
We had a lucky break regarding the furnace in that the cold snap was only a snap and the weather warmed up enough that we didn't need it much past the weekend.  Our electric and kerosene heaters helped us limp along and by the time the repair people came out Wednesday, we were back into the 70s.

The furnace guys confirmed my suspicion that the gas valve was the problem.  This is the main valve that allows gas to flow from the house's gas line into the burner tray where the heat gets made. Our furnace has a pilot light and as a safety measure, a temperature sensor is installed close to the pilot light to detect its combustion and ignition ability. If the light is out, the gas valve won't allow gas to flow into the burner tray or to the pilot light.  When lighting the pilot light, holding down a switch on the gas valve allows a manual override of this sense and gas can flow just to the pilot light.  Holding the switch down and lighting the pilot light allows the temperature sensor to warm up and once its hot, the switch can be released and the pilot light will stay lit; the temperature sensor has given the thumbs up to the gas valve that the gas being released to the pilot light will get burned. In our case, releasing the switch extinguished the pilot light indicating that the gas valve was under the impression that the pilot light was not heating the temperature sensor.

When replacing the temperature sensor didn't solve my problems I suspected the gas valve would need replacing; it did. The furnace guys spent a bit over an hour cleaning the furnace and replacing that valve. They said our furnace was in good shape and that our particular brand had a reputation for longevity (though not efficiency).  A few hundred dollars to the nice repair men and we had a working furnace.

The computer repair has been more laborious. When your hard drive dies, all the data on it dies as well; hard drives die all the time and to the extent that data is valued, a robust backup strategy is a good idea.  Much to my surprise, I ended up using three of the four backup strategies we have in place during this repair process.  As I write this, I'm still working out a few of the details but I suspect everything will be back to normal shortly.

Strategy 1: Superduper!
Superduper! does one things extremely well: make a complete copy of your hard drive onto an external drive.  The most beautiful, wonderful thing about having a exact copy of your formerly working drive is that you can immediately pick up where you left off when your main drive dies.  This is exactly what I did: when I realized that Apple's oddly prescient email had come true, I booted from my cloned drive, did a few last minute house-keeping items for school on it, and then shut the computer down to take it in for repair.  Having the cloned drive gave me peace of mind that all was well and that I could safely send the computer in. (I clone our drives every night so at most, we should be out a day of data).

When I got my computer back from the shop, Superduper! also made the restore process easy: I simply used my clone as the source for the data and copied it all back onto the internal hard drive.  Six hours later (!) I rebooted my mac using the new internal drive and all was exactly as I left it a week ago.

Except for iTunes.

Though all the data was still on my drive: iTunes had some serious memory problems.  I suspect this had to do with the program being in the middle of downloading podcasts when the drive died.  It had forgotten all of the podcasts I had subscribed to and almost all of the applications and data on our iPad. When I plugged in the iPad yesterday evening (after getting my computer back up), it "backed up" the iPad and removed most of the apps that I no longer had listed in iTunes.

To be clear, we still had all the applications and data for the iPad on my computer; the iPad just didn't know it.  So how to get my iPad looking like it did a week ago?  iTunes only keeps one latest backup and that one was missing all applications and data.  If only there was a way to get iTunes to use an older version of the backup...

Strategy 2: Time Machine
Time Machine specializes in keeping historical records of files.  Superduper! remembers nothing but the most recent state of the entire drive; Time Machine keeps track of previous versions of your files and makes it pretty easy to copy an old version from its' archive back onto the main drive. (The big disadvantage of Time Machine is that you can't start your computer up from it.  Once your computer is running and you have a working hard drive installed, you can use it to restore your data but there is no painless, up-and-running-again like Superduper!).

I found where iTunes keeps its backup of the iPad, activated Time Machine, went back a week to right before my hard drive failed, and restored that larger, complete backup of the iPad. Then using iTunes I restored the iPad from this complete backup and in ten minutes, my iPad was back to its original state.

As far as the podcasts go, I decided to resubscribe to them manually.  I still have the files for any of the historical episodes I like to keep, and the resubscription process took only a few minutes.

Strategy 2: Crashplan
We use Crashplan as our doomsday, online backup. In the event our house burns down or a tornado takes all our computers to Oz, our most valuable data (photographs, legal documents...) are all stored off-site in the "cloud" and can be retrieved once our lives get back in order.   Though I didn't need to use Crashplan to restore any lost data, I did use it to get access to my resume while my computer was being repaired.  Crashplan provides a browser to all of the files it has stored and if you known where to find the file in question, it can be restored to whatever computer you're using at the time.  Though I don't recommend using this as a primary "cloud" file storage solution due to the laborious interface, it allowed me access to my files when and where I needed them and that is very handy.

The Library, Its Full of Books

I have been unsure about my career in higher education since before it began. In fact, I let my ignorant fears and misunderstanding of the typical university professor job description scare me away since finishing my undergrad. Now that I'm on this path I my ignorance is decreasing but the uncertainty is receding much more slowly. I enjoy teaching so much that I have been fearful the other demands of the professorial life will hinder me from this task and turn the work into drudgery.  More specifically put, being a university professor is more than being an excellent teacher, particularly at bigger schools where research is most highly valued.

To better understand what I would be facing, I undertook the reading of "Balancing Acts: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers" by Huber. (Micro review: Outlines four professors who found ways to make teaching a priority despite working at research-oriented schools.  Good read but definitely thickly written in the ways of academics.) As is common in academic works, this book cited many sources including "Advice for New Faculty Members" by Boice.  This title was so highly recommend that I began to hunt for a copy.  Amazon had it and for $40 would let me own my own copy.  Wichita Public Library had not heard of it; no surprise.  I felt I had run out of options until I remembered, Wichita State has a big library, they might just have this title.

They did.

And many, many others, all on this seemingly obscure topic of managing an academic career.  Literal shelves stacked with books covering topics from the failings of universities to finishing a dissertation topic to being a mentor.  More books on the topic of university life than I could read even if that's all I did for the six years of my PhD.

I shouldn't be surprised, though; academics writing books about the academy.  It seems obvious in retrospect.  "Publish or perish" and all that.