Mike Kuznoff

Wendell is admittedly a little unhinged, and he’s been arrested a few times for harassing tourists who take his photo without paying. But I’ve got a real soft spot for him.

He’s one of the most photogenic people in the city, but also one of the most difficult to photograph. I’ve probably taken 100 shots of him, but none of them are particularly well composed. He doesn’t sit still and he doesn’t take suggestions. You can only take a portrait of Wendell on his terms, because he always has a very strong artistic vision. In this photo— he chose to pose with a van in the middle of the street. He kept rapping his cane on the word “homeless.” I’m sure the driver was terrified.

Continue reading Warren Spector dials back the panic in DICE speech

Warren Spector dials back the panic in DICE speech originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

By Leo Babauta

You know that you should exercise, and eat lots of veggies and less fried, salty and sweet foods.

But knowing something and actually doing it are two very different things.

You know you should stop procrastinating. You know you should watch less TV or go to social sites (or news sites, or your email program) less often. You know you should be writing, or learning that language you’ve always wanted to learn, or practicing guitar, or decluttering your house.

Knowing isn’t the problem. It’s the doing that gets us every time.

In business, there’s a concept called The Knowing-Doing Gap, where companies study all kinds of ways to improve, hire consultants and hold endless seminars, start a new Big Program every year … but don’t actually change anything. They know what to improve, but don’t actually implement it.

Why is implementing so hard? How do we put knowledge into action? What’s stopping us, and how do we overcome it?

The answers are both simple, and difficult. Let’s take a look.

Doing vs. Not Doing

It’s not knowledge of what to do that’s stopping us. That’s usually fairly simple:

• If you want to lose weight, eat fewer calories and move more.
• If you want to be healthier, eat more veggies, beans, nuts, seeds, fruits and whole grains.
• If you want to be in better shape, exercise.
• If you want to write a book, fucking write it.
• If you want to learn a language or an instrument, practice.

But that’s not what we do. Here’s what we do instead:

• We read about various programs.
• We talk about it a lot.
• We put off doing it and go do something else.
• We feel guilty about it, and then push it to the back of our minds.
• We finally decide to take action, so we read and talk about it some more.

Reading isn’t doing (unless what you want to do is read more books). Talking isn’t doing (unless you’re learning to communicate better or become a public speaker).

Doing is doing.

So what’s stopping us from doing the doing? It’s fairly simple.

The Little Thing That Stops Us

There’s something going on here that stops us from doing what we know. It’s hidden, it’s a mystery. We all have it, but rarely know what to do about it, and worse, rarely acknowledge it.

It’s fear.

Why don’t you write the chapter of your book, or write your blog post, but instead go and check Facebook, Twitter and email? Because you’re afraid you’ll fail. You’re afraid you’re not good enough. You’re afraid of the task because you don’t know where to start.

Why do you eat fried foods instead of veggies? You’re afraid of change. You’re afraid of things that aren’t comfortable. You’re afraid of looking like an idiot when you go to dinner with friends and they’re all eating fried cheese and bacon and you’re eating carrot sticks and kale.

Why do you not talk to your girlfriend when things are difficult between you? You’re afraid of rejection, of looking stupid, of injuring your pride.

Why do you not leave someone who treats you badly? You’re afraid of being alone, of being unloved, of failing on your own, of looking stupid when your family and friends know you’ve failed in another relationship.

We’re afraid, and so we do some rather brilliant things to avoid the thing we’re afraid of.

If we’re afraid of failing as a writer, teacher, language learner, runner, weight lifter, guitar player, manager, leader, mom … we create all kinds of unconscious strategies to avoid that failure. We aren’t “sabotaging” ourselves … we’re trying to help ourselves not do something we’re afraid will hurt us!

We are very good at finding ways to avoid this pain. We go to great lengths to avoid it, and then we wonder why we can’t do what we “know” we should do. No, we don’t really know we should do it — in the backs of our minds, we know we shouldn’t.

And so, to get to doing, we have to beat the fear.

The Do Plan

We’re going to beat the fear by doing. The only way to learn to do is to do.

Here’s the plan … don’t just read it, but do it!

1. Learn by doing. Don’t learn by reading. Of course, a little reading is helpful, but if you read, just read a little, then do. Don’t learn by talking. We talk too much already. Start doing, and if you’re going to talk, talk while doing. In the doing, you learn what gaps you have that are stopping you, you learn how there are steps you don’t know or haven’t figured out. Then you take action to fill in those gaps, figure out the steps, and keep moving.
2. Write down your fears. If you’re having trouble doing, fear is stopping you. What are you afraid of? What do you think you’re not good enough for? What belief do you have that’s keeping you from doing something? Write these down. The writing is an action.
3. Now do away your fears. We’re going to beat the fears by doing. Afraid of writing? Just do 2 minutes of it. That’s such a small amount, such a small commitment, it’s not that scary. Afraid of not doing well at language? Listen to 2 minutes of Spanish music, 2 minutes of a Spanish movie, 2 minutes of a Spanish podcast. How badly can you suck at listening to something for 2 minutes? By doing something in such small steps, we learn that the fears aren’t true — that we can do it and not completely fail.
4. See failure as a learning tool. We’re deathly afraid of failing, because we see this as a statement that we suck. But it’s not. Failure is an indication of something we can learn. Failure is a necessary step in learning — if you can already do something perfectly, you’re not learning anything. You have to fail, re-iterate the process in a new way, and then succeed. Sometimes you have to fail at something 10 times before you learn it, but if you look at it as a step in the learning process, rather than an “I suck so bad” statement, then failing 10 times isn’t bad, it’s great! Failure is an opportunity.
5. Adjust, and do some more. The process is act, fail, learn, adjust, then act again. Once you’ve failed at something, figure out how you can adjust, then try again. This new attempt might be better, or maybe not. If it’s not, adjust again, try again. Keep adjusting until you’ve figure it out, and then move on to the next step. There’s no plan that can tell you exactly how to do something without failure. No map is exactly right. You have to take action and adjust as you go. This is the key skill that you’ll learn with this process — how to get good at adjusting.

Fear is not the determining factor in our lives. It doesn’t tell us how our lives will go. It is only a little child’s voice in the back of our minds, trying to get its way, trying to avoid discomfort. But we can learn that discomfort isn’t horrible: it is the feeling of exploring new territory, climbing a new peak, pushing to new levels.

We can beat fear. Let’s start right now.

National Science Foundation and NASA

Via The New York Times:

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.

A planet, as depicted in this rendering, orbits the habitable zone of a star 20 light years from Earth, meaning it could have water on its surface.

Astrophyisical Journal
Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable.

“It’s been a long haul,” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who, along with R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, led the team that made the discovery. “This is the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.”

In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.

Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.

Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.

“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.

But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years.

The discovery was announced at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, and the findings have been posted on the National Science Foundation’s Web site and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Read more.

Nandroids backups are invaluable for any rooted Android user. Perhaps the most common use is to keep a fully working install on the device at all times, so that troubleshooting common issues is just a little easier. There are other uses for Nandroid backups as well, but most require a little more creativity. There is now an app to make things a little easier.

XDA Forum Member H3R3T1C released an application called Nandroid Manager. It does exactly what it says it does. This gives whole new versatility to Nandroid backups. Granted, many of these are things most users already know how to do, but with this app, it’s now available to more people. The feature list includes:

* Support for TWRP and Clockworkmod (v5) backups. (Clockworkmod v6 will be supported in the future.)
* Delete and rename backups.
* Verify MD5 of backups.
* Compress backups to zip.
* Extract files from backup files.
* Restore apps+data from nandroid backup. (** Experimental)
* Explore contents of backup files with support for the following backup file types:
- yaffs2.img
- tar
- ext4.win
- ext3.win
- ext2.win

In addition, there are some planned features including conversion from ClockworkMod to TWRP backups, along with restoring data from Nandroid backups. However, there is some danger to be aware of. If users keep their Nandroids on their SD cards, as is required for the app, then any app with SD card permission can access your Nandroid backups. There is a lot of sensitive data stored in any full system and, thus, it can pose a security risk. This app isn’t one of those risks, but if you decide to leave Nandroids on your SD card, be weary of other applications and perhaps only backup partitions other than /data.

For more details, check out the original thread.

Feature

1UP COVER STORY

If the minutiae of people's lives crowd your feeds and drives you to frustration, you really won't be wanting this Samsung patent application to be approved. The USPTO filing outlines a process for creating a "life diary" by collecting all manner of information about your daily routine from your smartphone. Data such as where you've been, what the weather was like, what you've been listening to, et cetera, would be spun out in computer-generated sentences and compiled into a story of your day. Although it would lack the romanticism of a traditional, hand-written diary, we could see it having some use as a mundane log -- as long as you're happy for all that info to be recorded, that is. However, if this ever comes to fruition with sharing options, to boot, all the pictures of food, coffee house check-ins and FarmVille updates would seem insignificant in comparison. Some things, like the last time we sang along with the Bieb, are better left unshared.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Samsung

Samsung files patent for auto-generating life diary, Mayans didn't see it coming originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/7/658149474

When essentially the same device is released on both GSM and CDMA carriers, development on one can be stronger than development on the other despite the fact that they are otherwise identical. This is the case on several devices such as the HTC EVO 3D and the Motorola Droid RAZR. However, this is no longer an issue as there is now a patch for the Droid RAZR to allow CDMA ROMs to work on the GSM version of the device.

Developed by XDA Senior Member dtrail1 with the help of a few other members and devs, the patch can be applied to only a few CDMA ROMs at the moment. They do happen to be pretty popular ROMs, though, and include Black Widow CM9, Eclipse ICS, and Black Widow AOKP M6. There are a few problems, though. For instance, Black Widow CM9 users who use the patch will lose their camera functionality, and it’s been reported that the bug will take some time to fix. Otherwise, the process is pretty simple. For the AOSP-based ROMs, simply flash the ROM like normal, flash a bootmenu patch, and then flash the GSM patch. For Eclipse ICS, it’s the same sans the bootmenu patch. Thus far, aside from the known issues, users have reported that it works quite well.

For more info, check out the original thread.

“Actualities”, photos by Thomas Albdorf.

Taking over a single street in Tokyo, IKEA aim to prove how their products can fit into even the tiniest of living spaces...

IKEA Sukima Gallery was unveiled this week and essentially takes place in the gaps between (and even underneath) several of the buildings on the city's Harajuku Street. A dedicated website at ikea-sukima.com reveals the location of each installation.

In Tokyo, living space is famously at a premium, so presenting IKEA furniture and products like this is certainly one way to get residents thinking about how to make use of limited room.

But at fashionsnap.com, some images of the installations were posted which, unlike the website's glossier, art directed take on the project, show just how cramped some of these set-ups are. For some that might be one reminder too far.

From fashionsnap.com

From fashionsnap.com

Upgrade the four year old Metal Gear game with Trophy and data install support.

I've received an email this morning from a credible source informing me that our good friend Giuseppe Severino passed away over the night. I've yet to confirm it 100 percent but everything so far points to it being true. Giuseppe and I have exchanged emails several times. He was very friendly, enthusiastic about concept art and seemed like a really nice guy. May he be remembered with all of the fantastic artwork he has left behind. He was only 33 years old.

Please visit his blog and take in some of the wonderful work he has produced over the years. We will miss him greatly.






















Keywords: personal concept spaceship and robot art by our good friend giuseppe severino spaceship concept art from endless space cartoon box blogspot

CD Projekt Red's 'Cyberpunk' inspired by Shellshock, Blade Runner originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 01 Aug 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

via http://www.woodlandcreekfurniture.com/publishsite/index.cfm?pagename=mainpage_template&client_id=woodlandcreek&tablename=news&link_id=22425094&linkname=Natural%20Wood%20Furniture

Fascinated by a story of how a magnetic implant imparted a "sixth sense" in its host, engineer and enthusiastic geek Marek Majkowski was eager to test this supplemental sense without the invasive surgery. With the help of cheap hardware like the Arduino and a little open-sourced code, he did just that.

Some time ago I've read about a guy that had a magnet implanted in the pinky finger.

The author seems to have made the implant mostly for fun only later he discovered that it sometimes "ticks" in and gives a "sixth sense":

Photo by Dann Berg.

When people discuss magnet implants giving a "sixth sense," this is what they're talking about. I was working retail at the time, and I believe the first thing I noticed was the vibrations from the fan inside the cash register.

Later he discoverers more things about the environment:

The best part of having the magnet implant was discovering invisible magnetic fields when I wasn't actually looking. The first experience I had with this was walking through the intersection of Broadway and Bleecker in Manhattan. I passed through this intersection a few times before realizing that my finger would tingle at a certain spot. After paying a bit more attention, I realized that I was feeling something underground. At first, I assumed it was a subway car, but later came to the conclusion that it was most likely the subway power generator, or the giant fan that was cooling these generator.

Having a sixth sense sounds exciting, but implanting a piece of metal in your body is quite invasive. Even ignoring such details like finding a surgeon willing to perform the operation, the prospects of a possible magnet corrosion and not being able to get an MRI scan are major downsides.

Deciding that an implant may not be for me I started to wonder: why not to try "emulate" the thing? Of course, any kind of "emulation" is inferior to real sensation in your finger, but at least I will be able to figure out if the whole idea is worthwhile without cutting myself.

Tinkering mode: ON

Devices that are used to detect magnetic fields are called magnetometers. They are quite common spread—detecting magnetic field direction is exactly what compasses do. And most likely you have one in your phone.

Having previously played with Arduino I thought about building a very simple device that could be worn and would notify the user about magnetic field fluctuations.

From Dann's post I understand that he can only sense field fluctuations, but having a computer I'm able to detect more sophisticated changes in the field.

Hardware setup

So I decided to start simple - Arduino, with a magnetometer connected to it and a simple buzzer. I decided to re-use my iPod armband and wear the device on my left arm. The device will count the absolute strength of the magnetic field and if it is stronger than threshold inform me with the buzzer. I guess that's called wearable computing nowadays.

Magnetometer

I'm not an electrical engineer, even simple tasks like getting data from the magnetometer might be problematic in an Arduino world. Luckily I found a blog post describing an Arduino talking to a simple magnetometer. The magnetometer unit in use is HMC6352. For $35 it's expensive—but at least it's very simple.

The chip is simple, works with Arduino out of the box and accepts input voltage in a scale perfect for this project 2.7V - 5.2V. But unfortunately it was not good enough for my usage—readings from only two axis were inconsistent and I often missed interesting facts due to the lack of the third axis.

My next choice was HMC5883L for $15. The decent alternative might be MAG3110 for the same price but a bit more sensitive. I chose HMC due to a better documentation, namely this blog post.

The big problem with those chips is voltage—both operate in around 2V - 3.6V range (not the usual 5V as in USB).

Arduino

Wearing a normal Arduino Uno Board is not practical, fortunately there are many alternatives. I chose Arduino LilyPad Simple. On hindsight, Arduino Fio or Pro Mini might have been better options.

LilyPad can be powered with either from a Li-Po battery or from an USB (FTDI) interface. The latter is mostly useful for development. Most importantly, LilyPad does not provide a 3.3V power output like Uno Board does.

Our precious magnetometer HMC5883L will blow up when powered with 5V. In order to comprehend that I used a voltage regulator from LM1117 family. I got 3.3V one, as that was the only thing available in shop at a time.

With a regulator used to power magnetometer I could connect it to LilyPad and power it either from Li-Po battery and from USB.

Oh, it's worth noting that the regulator is useful even when using Li-Po battery as a power source—although the battery is rated as 3.7V, according to Wikipedia you should expect voltage ranging from 2.7V when discharged to 4.23V when charged.

Buzzer

Sorting out the buzzer was simple; SparkFun provide ready-to-use buzzers crafted for LilyPad.

Soldering time

To be frank, the electronics here aren't very sophisticated, here's a schema (with power supply omitted):

Unfortunately this setup didn't work very well. Once the buzzer was turned on, the magnetometer stopped working. This happened only when powered from battery (not from USB).

I suspected there might be a voltage drop when the motor in the buzzer is started, and the magnetometer is a sensitive beast. To compensate that I added a capacitor between the VCC and GND pins on the HMC5883. This seems to solve the problem, but frankly I don't know if that's correct. I don't know if it's legal to put a capacitor behind LM1117 regulator. Maybe the capacitor should be plugged in near the battery. (Dear lazyweb: help!)

Updated schema:

The final result (including the battery):

Software

The program for Arduino is available on my github (but don't expect high quality software).

One of the more interesting parts is setting up the magnetometer, the hardcoded values are taken from the HMC5883L datasheet:

void setupHMC5883L(){
        compass.SetScale(8.1);
        compass.SetRegisterA(0, 5, 0);
        compass.SetMeasurementMode(Measurement_Continuous);
}

I'm not really interested in the direction of Earth's magnetic north, only in the absolute strength of the magnetic field. To get that I'm using the Euclidean distance function:

        return sqrt(scaled.XAxis * scaled.XAxis +
                    scaled.YAxis * scaled.YAxis +
                    scaled.ZAxis * scaled.ZAxis);

And that's basically it. In fact the program doesn't do much: continuously reads data from the magnetometer and if the strength of the magnetic field goes above the threshold it turns on the buzzer with proportional power.

The threshold must be set quite carefully to cut off Earth's magnetic field, which is between 0.25 - 0.65 Gauss. I used the threshold of 0.7 Gauss.

Results

I wore the device for some time and it actually works. I quickly found out that the buzzer needs to be directly touching the skin to be felt.

(Side note: wearing naked electronics may freak out people on the streets, I don't recommend that).

When wearing the device I could feel "stuff", mostly electrical devices. Friends were laughing at me when during a walk I was stopping suddenly and doing few steps back to identify the source of the magnetic field (it was usually a utility box). There were also places where I couldn't identify the source of the field.

After all that, I agree that being able to feel the magnetic field is a great fun.

Am I a cyborg now? | Marek's totally not insane idea of the day

After fruitful encounters with topics as programming industrial robots or exploiting every hidden feature of TCP/IP options for tracing networking traffic, Marek settled for 'scalability' as his main field of interest, one that he attacks with a magic sword labeled 'asynchrony'. He likes to keep asking 'Does it scale?' Marek enjoys London, though he had to trade riding motorbike in Warsaw for daily commuting by tube.

Title image remixed from Makushin Alexey / Shutterstock.