David Gessel
Exploding Seed Pods
Up in the East Bay Hills there are these shrubberies that about this time of year grow furry seed pods. Last time I was up there running I heard a series of loud pops and snaps that I thought were some kind of insect feeding in the bushes.
I looked for whatever enthusiastic bugs were having a good time in the bushes and found none… and just by luck brushed a seed pod and set it off. It exploded with a loud snap and sprayed my hand with small black seeds.
I noted the trail was peppered (sort of literally) with tiny black seeds and pods were exploding all around.
Rental Mustang
The Canadian version is pretty much the same as the US version.
Great Customer Service
I got a pair of Seth Thomas WBL-714-FS-SETH clocks out of a factory salvage; no instructions of course. They seemed simple enough, but I couldn’t get them to sync. There are the typical (for a radio sync clock) time zone buttons which make the hands move to the appropriate relative position by time zone. There is a big button that makes the hands move and a small button that seems to do nothing. They were not synced. I let them sit for a few days and they still were not synced.
I looked up the company’s web site and wrote a little note on their form, expecting nothing:
"I have two WBL-714-FS-SETH clocks. They do not seem to set themselves to the time signal. After a couple of days, they are not synchronized. Any hints?"
A day later I got this from Donna at the company:
"Dear David: It sounds like they are not receiving the signal. Have you tried moving them to a different location and see if they receive the signal? If not, try that. If you have tried different locations, then try taking the battery out for about 5 min, then put it back in, hit your time zone and if should advance to 4, 8 or 12. It will stay there till it receives the signal. You may just have to move them. Let me know how you make out."
It worked perfectly and now both clocks are synced. It was such a pleasant, prompt, and above all accurate response that it made me wonder if I’d ever received such good service before and as far as I can remember only McMaster Carr compares.
Fixing ImageMagick resize in Postie
I noticed that postie was doing a terrible job at resizing images.
It turns out that the default GD library isn’t super good at resizing – it does a simple subsample and the result is quite jaggy (see the GD version of this image in this post)
I think the version above looks a lot better. It should have been as easy as just turning on the “use ImageMagick” function in the postie config, but it wasn’t that simple. Two files were not where they were expected to be. The easy one is “convert” which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/convert, but under BSD is actually at /usr/local/bin/convert. This isn’t a big deal as there’s a config option to point postie in the right direction. A bit harder is ImageMagick identify which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/identify, but for which there is no config entry.
The fix for BSD is to edit around line 1768 of postie-functions.php and change /usr/bin/identify to /usr/local/bin/identify before the first run or by resetting postie to defaults. If you’ve already installed postie and don’t want to reset the defaults you may need to edit the postie config database (I did) using, for example, PHPMyAdmin and set the value of IMAGEMAGICK_IDENTIFY to /usr/local/bin/identify.
And thus one gets nice, pretty postie thumbnails.
volvo v50
Volvo v50 rental car review
Panoramic Photography
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a panoramic photography product under development. The sample picture they showed was from burning man and the sight reminded me of a company I started way back in 1997 or 1998 with Steve Schaffran, my brother Dan Gessel, and Ken Peters. Steve did most of the business work, Ken built the circuit, and my brother wrote a stitcher application and a fast viewer in openGL.
We made a couple of panoramic tripod heads together: an automatic one and a manual one. They were designed around the old Kodak DCS 120, a camera with a full MegaPixel of resolution.
The manual version was an indexing head that held the camera fairly rigidly and had a kinematic indexing table so that index points were, in theory, subpixel accurate. Of course that depends on the stability of one’s tripod (something we did not, alas, address).
The automatic version had a similar indexing head, but was driven by a small gear motor. The system ran on 8 AA batteries and communicated with the camera via the serial cable. There were two modes: high and low resolution.
In high resolution mode the circuit would tell the camera to zoom all the way in and then start indexing and taking pictures at each point.
In low resolution mode the circuit would zoom the camera all the way out and take a picture every other index point. We had considered doing 3 modes (with a 3x zoom lens) but the camera did not (primitive device that it was) report the actual zoom so there was no way to seek a point other than the ends.
Like the gigapan project, I found burning man an interesting subject… but that was a decade earlier and the crowds were a lot smaller.
Our camp (dis.org) was, that year, exiled some distance from the main camp, but that is a whole different story.
Chevy Uplander
Rental car review: Chevy Uplander
- Quiet – Not too bad but some noise from the huge cabin.
- Comfortable – fairly comfortable.
- Engine – a moderate engine, fairly responsive for the size of the vehicle.
- Suspension – ugh. Wobbles side to side.
- Basic amenities – everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo – acceptable but nothing great.
- Security – not very – everything inside is visible.
Ford Mustang
Rental car review: Ford Mustang
I got this car with plastic on the steering wheel, the back seat belts buckled, and 5 miles on the odometer. I very much enjoy mustangs: they’re fast and throaty and fun to drive and equipped with loud and amusing stereos.
They are small in the trunk and the back seats are pretty useless – definitely not where you want to stuff an large, elderly coworker. But the car is fun. Fast and fun.
The engine has more show than go – the sound of the engine is one of big power and extreme performance. While the car handles much better than most rental cars, it does not live up to the sound of the exhaust. A nice Audi or Volvo, for example, will accelerate faster, harder, and longer and take turns better, but never call attention to themselves while doing it.
On the other hand, actually going really fast is not always relevant: having fun is more to the point and the mustang is fun. It feels spry and agile and powerful and serves well to take years off the driver’s age. It’s the prefect car to cruise suburban malls, especially if one dye’s one’s hair or wears a toupee. If chicks aren’t the goal, then it certainly makes getting to work an exercise in regression therapy.
Aside from the throaty roar and sporty performance, road noise is poorly isolated but well compensated for by a loud, bass-heavy stereo typically equipped with a CD-MP3 changer that can hold 6 CDs (or maybe 60 albums) which means on older cars one can often find heavy metal compilations forgotten in the changer. Not so much classical.
- Quiet – Not very quiet.
- Comfortable – fairly comfortable.
- Engine – a great engine for a rental car, a lot of fun.
- Suspension – very good for a rental car.
- Basic amenities – everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo – killer stereo: loud and plays MP3s off a 6 CD changer.
- Security – small but secure trunk.
windows sucks
Why do people use windows for embeded applications? It sucks and costs money! How stupid can you be?
