Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas Hope Santa brought you whatever you wanted. If not, I hope you find it at a 70%-off after Christmas sale.
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December 25, 2001
December 13, 2001
Megway
Megway Did you like the Segway Human Transporter? Check out their web site, but then head over to see the Megway Transporting Human, an even more versatile, environmentally sound alternative. (In particular, you may want to check out the videos on both sites.)
December 12, 2001
In case you're interested, I'm
In case you're interested, I'm capturing the video from my Canon 100MC using an ATI DV Wonder Card (at $40 it was the cheapest "brand-name" option for 1394 input) via a 4-pin to 6-pin 1394/Firewire cable. Editing is done in Premiere 6.0, which I'm just starting to learn -- it's a little quirky feeling compared to the Mac Avid editors and the mechanical decks I've used in the past. Output is done using the built-in export features of Premiere. I use Windows Media instead of Quicktime simply because more people seem to have it (apologies to the Mac users.)
I still need to edit together Thanksgiving dinner -- compress 2 hours of material into 5-10 minutes of final material. It sounds harsh but really, would you want to spend more than 5 minutes watching stuff that happened at Thanksgiving? Probably not.
December 8, 2001
Unwired
Unwired I'm sending this from my laptop via the new 802.11b (WiFi) network at my parent's house. Very nice stuff. My only regret is that I chose the Lucent Orinoco Silver instead of the Gold. The Silver has bit Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) protection, while the Gold (for $20 more) offers 128-bit encryption on the network. Neither is great, but the 64-bit protection is apparently something of a joke. Because my card doesn't support it, I have to run the whole network at 64-bit level, despite the fact that my parent's "cheaper" Linksys equipment all supports 128-bit WEP.
A major source of fustration while setting this all up: I couldn't get the Lucent card to login to the Linksys WAP-11 Access Point, as long as I had WEP turned on. Apparently, the engineers at Linksys choose to index their keys from 1, while the Lucent folks like typical comp sci folks started at 0. So if you go to both machines, enter a key, and tell that it's key index 1, they don't agree. To get the to work, you have to set the Linksys gear to 1 and the Lucent stuff to 0. Nice standard, everyone.
Ran Wirelless Netstumbler all the way from Boston. Detected 60+ access points on the train ride, despiite the fact htat much of the trip is rural and away from more affluent housing developments. Got into the cab in Manhattan and watched the software light up like a Christmas tree - often 2-3 networks detected per block. Out of the 120 or so network access points I detected, maybe 15 of them had encryption activated. There's a lot of loose data floating around out there, if you're really interested.
Off to see if I can now print via wireless. This stuff is nice. I'm using it to substitute for a hardline network in my parent's house, but the ability to use my laptop with no wires and be surfing is a cool bonus.
December 7, 2001
I've started playing around
I've started playing around with importing video shot on my Canon 100MC digital camcorder into my computer. This is a short clip I did last night while refamiliarizing myself with Adobe Premiere's controls... please forgive its errors, I was really tired and the system was still a bit cranky. Ehem, I mean it "had character" or something similarly kind. Regardless, the actual quality of the final edited video dumped back to tape was incredible. Amazing for consumer grade stuff. (Clip requires 100kbps connection.)
December 6, 2001
Searching
Searching Talk about odd, little-known hobbies. Apparently there is a fairly popular pastime referred to as GeoCaching where people hide small waterproof boxes in outdoor locations, record the location via GPS, then post the information on a web site for others to hunt for it. Kind of like a global Easter Egg Hunt. I guess the Handhelp GPS manufacturers see it as a great way to sell more product. Sounds arcane, but there are caches hidden all over the United States, as well as in 82 other countries. There's even one less than half a mile from my apartment, in the middle of metro Boston.
Roaming
Roaming My Lucent Orinoco Silver wireless ethernet card arrived today, so I can now access wireless networks from my computer. Sure, we don't have one in my house or where I work (although my parents will soon have one, if you can believe that) but with some free software from NetStumbling.com I'm on my way try out a little wireless hitchhiking down the info superhighway.
I don't think anyone ever visits this site since I took down my commercial efforts (Weather24, Pixelfoundry, etc.) Amazing how just year after we shut down the sites, there's so little record of a place that millions of people visited over the years. And so little record of all the work we put in, too. Sometimes you wish building software was more like bridge engineering; at least they know their creations will outlive them (or the quarter, for that matter.)