TevSpace

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
Thomas A. Edison, Encyclopaedia Britannica

"Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration."
Thomas A. Edison, Harper's Monthly, 1932


"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931

The last one was a rough cut, this is a better version, cut down from over 6 minutes to under 3.

Hastings Cakes recipe (edited) from Tev Kaber on Vimeo.

I shot my first real video with the new camcorder this morning. I did a mini cooking show on how to make Hastings Cakes.

I shot it and edited it this morning before heading out to work, just before leaving I started it uploading.

It came out kind of long, 6 mins 16 seconds, I can probably get it down to 4 minutes by cutting out the washing and waiting to cook parts. But I think it came out OK for a first try.

Hastings Cakes Recipe from Tev Kaber on Vimeo.

I was riding home yesterday, Carl was driving, and we were listening to that iTunes Weekly Rewind podcast, which is just a few people talking about music and playing a variety of clips.

There were a few that sounded interesting, and I wanted to remember what they were.
My first instinct was to reach for my iPhone and write myself a note, however, I decided it would make a good experiment.

So there were 3 phrases that I wanted to remember, either band, album, or song names. The phrase would be enough to find out more with a Google search later.

The first phrase I converted into a visual mnemonic.
The second phrase I converted into a mixture of visual mnemonic and text.
The third phrase I left as text.

I forgot to try to remember them when I got home (metaforgetting?).

So today I remembered the experiment, and was trying to remember the three phrases.

The first was easy to remember. I visualized a clothing iron and a glass of wine. This is for a band called "Iron & Wine".

For the next phrase, I could remember the visual part of the mnemonic, but not the words. I had been visualizing one word, with a line drawn under it, and another word underneath. But I don't remember the words. It was something like "____ under ____" or "_____ below ____" the second blank mighta been a longish word.

The third phrase I didn't remember at all.

Clearly, visuals are extremely easy to remember when compared to words.

When a new programmer was hired to our team at work, I came up with a visual mnemonic for his name, and can now recall it easily. I pictured a guy with lots of keyboards and a camera, "John Tesh" and a "Konica". His name, therefore, is Shantesh Kanekar.

Reminds me of an example Derren Brown gave for how he does a card trick. He said he visualized a room, and in that room are 52 objects, each representing a specific card. When a card had been played, he would visualize putting a bright ribbon tag on that object. In this way, he would be able to remember which cards had been played, and which were still in the deck.

I guess to remember the missing two items from that podcast, I'll have to download it and listen to it again. I checked for show notes, knowing my memory would be jogged if I saw the missing phrases, but oddly they list the songs for every episode except that one.

Started using jQuery yesterday, just starting to get into it, but so far I'm liking it. It's a Javascript library that has a bunch of predefined functions and structures set up to make it quicker to write stuff. There's also a UI component to make it easy to do stuff like dialog boxes and such.

Nice to be able to write something quickly and have it work in all browsers.

Here's my first test, a simple box with a slide animation between 4 boxes of content when you click buttons.

For some reason it has a slight tearing happening during the animation in FireFox on Windows, but looks good on every other browser (even FireFox on Mac). It only does that for the 1/5 of a second during the transition animation, so I guess I can live with it.

I could do the same thing without the animation pretty easily with basic Javascript, but jQuery's animation makes it look that much slicker. I'm also starting to do some drag and drop tests with jQuery UI which I may use in a project at work.

Metaphysical ramblings...don't expect them to make any sense.

I was thinking today about the whole religion and afterlife thing. It started with me not being ready to present at a meeting, and that meeting being fortuitously delayed until tomorrow, giving me time to finish getting ready for it. Which made me think "you know, I am a strong believer in the adage 'It all works out in the end'..." Now of course there are instances where a situation or outcome is undesirable, but in that case, could it be a matter of perspective, that either the attitude was mismatched to the situation, or a misperception of scope.

In the short term, dropping an ice cream sundae on the ground does not seem to have worked out in the end, but expanding the scope, and viewing it holistically as part of a pattern of causality, perhaps it caused your food intake for the day to be healthier, or not eating the sundae put your schedule ahead by 5 minutes, which cause you to get home in time to catch the cat about to knock something off a shelf, thereby averting a disaster. Everything's more fun with causality thought experiments, after all (bringing to mind another fun adage, "This is the best of all possible worlds").

Now, of course, general circumstance may seem so overwhelmingly negative and perhaps lead to death. Which made me think "I can see the appeal of religion, for it lets you artificially expand scope beyond the point of death, and say that things worked out, even when it would be extremely difficult to argue that ordinarily." Now, granted, you can expand scope beyond your life simply by switching focus to a new generation of offspring, or to humanity as a whole, but being a very self-centered sort of person, I'm choosing to focus on the individual here.

Of course, I have no such handy religious views myself, and here is why: I believe that which is termed "an individual" is at best a gestalt organism. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the sake of argument, let's take as a given that each individual has a "soul" which exists beyond the physical plane and persists after death. Yay, you're immortal!

Well, not so fast. Your "soul" may be immortal, but is that "you"? I say no. Take, for instance, brain chemistry. Get whacked on the head wrong or fed the wrong chemicals, and your personality can radically shift, to the point where it can be argued you are no longer the same person. We are saying the soul is beyond the physical plane, so those chemicals aren't affecting your soul. So what you perceive as "you" is a gestalt, then, of the soul and the physical meat that is your body. Separate the soul from the body, and you no longer have the same gestalt as before.

So even if your soul is immortal, without the body, it's no longer "you". At best it is an aspect of "you" but it's no longer the same perspective, same chemical-engine of emotion and thought, or optical- and auditory-based perception. It's not the same person. So even if your soul is immortal, when you die, that's it, "you" are dead. That particular combination of flesh and soul is no longer.

And through all of this, the presupposition granted at the beginning is that there is an invisible immortal soul - but if that's not true, if "you" are in fact just the byproduct of a lot of neurons dancing around in your meat brain, then when that shuts off "you" are also dead.

Now of course there are alternate ways around this - nonlinear time, branching universes, quantum interactions and the interconnectedness of all things - but for all practical purposes, dead is dead.

None of which, strangely, deters me from still believing that Everything Works Out In The End. Which I guess is the nature of belief, getting a fundamental feeling of "rightness" from a concept despite any possible logical arguments against it.

The last couple days I've discovered how to put comics and manga on my ebook reader.

There are not a lot of sources for legal comics and manga (the Sony eBook store has a handful of titles, mostly just a few that came out at the launch of the store and hasn't been updated since). However, there are lots of sources for technically illegal (scans of books) and quasi-legal (fan english translations of scanned japanese books, out-of-print comics whose publishers are no longer in business) sources of comics and manga.

To be honest, I'd be willing to (and have) purchase legal copies, but most publishers are unwilling to provide comics in digital form, or do so in a restrictive form, like limiting viewing to special software on a computer only. So they simply aren't interested in providing digital content.

Thankfully, there are lots of comics fans out there scanning and posting. A few searches on Google should yield you a wealth of golden-age comics and manga titles.

To put manga and comics on the Sony PRS-505:

1. Download .zip of a manga book (or create a zip of sequentially named .jpgs)
2. rename the .zip to .cbz
3. Drag the .cbz file into Calibre (free, cross-platform app: http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download).
4. Click "Convert" in Calibre to convert it to an .lrf file. Leave all the Calibre settings at default except check "Keep Aspect Ratio" otherwise it will be stretched to fill the screen.
4. Copy the .lrf file onto your reader or onto an SD card or memory stick and put that in your reader.
5. enjoy!


Caveat:
In some cases MacOS creates metadata files that may trip up Calibre. To remove metadata files, copy the files in the command line like this:

cp -X /path/to/original/folder/* /path/to/cleanup/folder

The -X switch will prevent extended attributes from being copied.

More detailed info:
Metadata on OSX is stored in hidden files that start with ._ so if you download an image from a webbrowser called "page_01.jpg", an invisible file called "._page_01.jpg" will also be created, which may contain info like the fact the image was downloaded from the internet, and the URL it came from. This is how OSX knows to warn you the first time you try to run an application downloaded from the internet.

A Cheez-it promo for the new Star Trek movie.
Reminds me of a Java applet for doing a 3D animated head - from like 10 years ago.

A promo for the new Terminator movie has a little flash-based photo manipulator. Not bad, but could have been better.
terminateyourself.com/

Still not as cool as the Simpsonizer.
simpsonizeme.com/

I've been playing with making chocolate things recently... I've made chocolate-covered mint oreos, chocolate Lego bricks with a graham cracker and peanut butter center, and most recently, I got a Space Invaders mold and made Space Invaders chocolate:



Each one has an espresso bean in the center.

An examination of ASCII chars

A bit of background: the extended ASCII chars 145-148 were meant as control characters. However, Microsoft instead used them for some custom characters, namely "curly" quotes. Apple stuck with the original charset definitions, meaning that curly quotes from Word sometimes still show up as broken on MacOS. Although oddly, the entities for the same char (like “) work - apparently functioning as aliases to the "correct" upper-ASCII characters (like “).

My question is, why doesn't this same remapping happen with the literal character? Isn't it worth the sacrifice of some unused control characters to allow the user to see quotes as the copy editor intended them? Why punish the user because someone else used char 147 instead of 8220?

Also, if Microsoft hadn't used those slots for their own stuff, and left it alone, then we would have those standard ASCII codes for other uses now - non-character delimiters, anyone? How great would it be if you had characters specifically for string delimiters, so you wouldn't have to always be escaping quotes? I even notice that the original name of char 150 was "Start of guarded area", 151 was "End of Guarded area", 152 was "Start of string" and 156 was "String Terminator". Sigh, for what might have been.

ASCII Num	Entity	Bad Char	JS charCodeAt of Bad	Good Char	JS charCodeAt of Good
145	‘	‘	145	‘	8216
146	’	’	146	’	8217
147	“	“	147	“	8220
148	”	”	148	”	8221

I was thinking about it yesterday, I've had quite a few PDAs over the years.
I'm probably forgetting one or two, but here's the ones that come to mind:



Casio BOSS organizer
I actually had 2 or 3 of these in succession, but I don't remember the brand/model of the first ones. The Casio BOSS was handy - it fit easily in my pocket and stored all my phone numbers and schedules. It didn't have any fancy extras, but it got the job done and had great battery life.


Casio Databank calculator watch
Ah, what nerd hasn't had a calculator watch at some point? I was really fond of this one, though - although the memory was limited, it was still plenty to store all my phone numbers and schedule. And being a watch, the battery lasts for YEARS.


Palm Pilot
The first PDA I got with the ability to install apps. The Palm OS was lightweight and efficient, and there were a lot of people releasing free apps for the Palm. Good times.


Palm III
The Palm III improved on the Palm Pilot's screen and memory and was just better in general.


Palm IIIxe
The PalmIIIxe was the same as the Palm III, but with more memory and I think a faster processor.


Kyocera Smartphone
Combined a Palm with a cellphone in a form factor that was not unlike duct-taping the two devices together. Still, I could check my email when out and about, and even though the web browser was hacky and barely better than Lynx, at least it was something.


Dell Axim X5
A capable PDA with a color screen. Bulky in design, but a nice device. Running Windows Mobile, it was more capable than Palm OS, but also not very optimized. There were also less apps than on Palm OS, and unlike Palm, most Windows Mobile apps weren't free.


Tapwave Zodiac
I really wanted to like the Zodiac, it used the Palm OS and had a pretty color screen. The controls were perfect for games... however, the underpowered processor, small RAM, and terrible camera meant I ended up returning it after a week or two.


Dell Axim X50
A big improvement over the Axim X5, the X50 had a beautiful full VGA screen (even today, many PDAs are lower-res than that), a fast CPU, and WiFi. The mobile IE was pretty bad, but usable. App selection was ok, although one flaw with Windows Mobile is that if an update to the OS was released, each PDA manufacturer was responsible for working with Microsoft to create a custom build of the release for that PDA. Which meant that you were pretty much stuck with the OS on the PDA, and could only gaze wistfully at updates.


Danger Hiptop 2 (aka Sidekick 2)
Sexy design with a swiveling screen. However, a crappy CPU, crappy camera, poor app selection, and bad web browser had me returning it not long after getting it. It did do AIM real well, but that was about it.


iPhone 3G
My current PDA. Sleek and powerful, it comes at the expense of battery life. I didn't get the original iPhone because at that point there were no apps for it. With the 3G iPhone, Apple launched an app store and a flood of applications quickly appeared. Interestingly, the main menu GUI is pretty much the same as the Palm Pilot, from way back when.


One thing I have noticed: over time, CPU and RAM has gotten better, but batteries really haven't improved much. Which means I have over time gone from a PDA that could run for weeks or even months on a charge, to the iPhone, which can go maybe 2 days.

Another great video by The Buddy System, about everyone around you being cheerful while you're in a bad mood.

There's only one thing you can do with Satanic Horses:

Specifically, what is it about stepping on a slug in our bare feet that causes us to recoil?

Physically, we are no danger, aside from the small possibility of slipping and falling. We are not expressing concern over the fate of the slug, indeed it probably barely registers to us. We are concerned with the sensation.

Why do we find it unpleasant?

Is this a learned opinion, or something hard-wired? Would a baby crawling along the ground burst into tears if he crawled over a slug, or would he be curious? Or would he not notice at all and just keep crawling?

If it is an evolved response, why? Why is it beneficial to find a squishy, sticky goo "icky"?

I've been playing around with chocolate recently, making chocolate-covered oreos, graham crackers, etc. I've been using a Lego ice cube tray to make some, which has worked out well.



I wanted some more molds to play with, so I looked around, at a bunch of kitchen supply places, but... no luck. So I tried Amazon, and ordered a whole bunch for like $2-$3 each. They arrived yesterday, now I have all sorts of new shapes to try!

Another MacHeist bundle is out!

$39 for a bunch of Mac apps (which are normally like $20-$40 EACH).
As usual, only a few of the apps are ones I would use, but even then, still a good deal.
If there are 2 apps there that you'd use, it's worth picking up.
25% of the sales go to charity.

http://www.macheist.com/bundle/u/59851/

Important to note:

if you are a developer, if you download the beta of iPhoneOS 3.0, if you install it on your phone, you cannot go back to an earlier version of the OS!

This means you'd be stuck with 3.0 beta on your phone until the final 3.0 release comes out sometime this summer.

Also, if you download the 3.0 SDK, you can't submit anything you develop with it to the app store until after the final 3.0 release this summer.

Important gotchas to keep in mind.

That said, I doubt I'll be able to resist the temptation to try it out.

There's an Apple announcement today, so of course the nerd world is all a-twitter.

Apple just announced the features of iPhoneOS 3.0.

To sum up:

* App paid expansion packs (i.e. Buy City Guide app, then buy a city pack for it)
* Push Notification (apps can get alerts when not running, like IM alerts for example)
* Peer-to-peer Bluetooth connection (for exchanging business cards, 2-player games, etc)
* Accessory communication (create custom accessories, like a glucose meter that talks to the iPhone via Bluetooth or dock connector)
* Turn-by-Turn navigation is no longer banned (expect to see GPS apps soon)
* Google Maps API (put Google maps in your app)
* Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo (copy and paste between apps)
* Landscape mode for standard apps (use bigger keyboard in Mail and Message)
* MMS (send photos and audio clips to other cellphones - no video tho)
* Voice Memos (record audio clips, you could do this before with 3rd party apps, but now built-in)
* New Calendar file format support (support for standards used by google cal and others)
* Stock app features (now with news)
* Spotlight Search (search in standard apps, such as iPod or Notes, plus global search)
* Stereo Bluetooth (for wireless headphones)

Available NOW as a beta for developers, later this summer for release.
Will be a free update for iPhone owners, $10 update for iPod Touch owners.

I'm excited, lots of good stuff in there, and other minor stuff not mentioned.

Betcha the servers will be bogged down when I try and get it tonight. =)

Last night I started playing "Retro Game Challenge" for the DS.
It's sort of a... 1980s childhood gaming simulator.

It does a good job of capturing the essence of gaming in the 80s - flipping through gaming magazines, talking about cheat codes, and playing the latest game while a friend cheers you on (his mom even comments every now and then "are you kids still playing that game?" from the next room).

The way it works is fairly straightforward - your friend gets a new game, and you have 4 successively harder challenges to complete in the game. Once you complete the challenges, the next game is unlocked. Your friend also gets gaming magazines in the mail, which you can flip through for tips and cheat codes for the games.

The games are not actually retro games, but invented games that are representative of the types of NES games of the era. I'm only on the third game, but so far they are enjoyable. The first game is a Galaga-like game with some nice touches to add depth, the second game is an odd elevator-action-eqsue platformer, and the game I'm on now is a racing game similar to RC Pro Am.

The game may seem somewhat restrictive, by only doling out games one at a time and making you unlock them, but that too hearkens back to the childhood days of NES gaming, where getting a new game was a big deal, that might involve weeks of saving (or begging). The challenges can also be... challenging, just like the games of the 80s were.

All in all, a good nostalgia kick. If you had an NES growing up, and have a DS now, give it a look.