RobotSkirts

I left for Vienna on Monday Nov 19th. I had packed electronics gear in a Pelican 1620 hardcase, my clothes in a duffle, and had my Timbuk2 as a carry on. Despite my creative redistribution between the bags the case still ended up being 9lbs too heavy. The previous two days I had cleaned the house pretty thoroughly in preparation for my exodus. I showed up at the airport early since they’ve got free wifi, but this practice has become more annoying since they changed the departure gate at least 4 times before we left. The flight to SFO wasn’t bad, but we arrived so late that I was only standing in the terminal 5 minutes before I was getting on the next plane. I lucked out on the flight to Frankfurt; I think I was sitting next to the only empty seat on the plane. The night before, I had checked in online and picked a seat in the only row that was completely empty. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick video before I head out (sorry about the awful lighting). I still need to decide on an video service to start uploading to. I want something that will come close to the original resolution and let you download the original file. Topics: TRS-80, Pelican 1620, Nokia N95, ComVu, GrandCentral, Gizmo.

hotcaptcha is a funny idea to begin with; instead of deciphering text designed to prevent spammers you just click on the “hot” people to prove you’re a human. I think my modification pictured above will help capture even more robots than the original. Schneier pointed out today that spammers have even developed a game to have people break captchas for them.

I’m leaving for Vienna on November 19th. Once there, I’ll be meeting up with Bre who will be coming to the end of his artist in residency with monochrom. That week is DeepSec, a security conference, and Roboexotica, a festival for cocktail robotics. I’ll be covering both for Hack-A-Day. From there we’re going to travel to Berlin (via Prague?). We’ll be living in Berlin (fbz adjacent?) for a month and attending the 24th Chaos Communication Congress December 27th-30th. We’re headed home January 2nd. At least I hope we are; the picture above illustrates the last time I tried to leave Berlin and tangled with the S-Bahn system. I’ll be getting home in time for CES January 7th-10th.

I’m back in Vegas after spending last weekend in San Diego for TooCon 9. ToorCon has been my favorite yearly hacker conference. It’s never too crowded and the people you meet are great. I’m finally feeling like I fit in. You can see the talks I covered over at Hack-A-Day. I still need to write up the whole experience. I also need to cover bunnie and Christopher Tarnovsky’s silicon hacking workshop. I’m using the portrait Matt Westervelt shot as my new bio pic. Read the rest of this entry »

Ted (neck pictured above) left a comment earlier today that Vimeo now has a scaling toggle. It’s visible when you go fullscreen. Now you can watch their High Def channel at its original 1280×720 resolution.

Update: It’s apparently Casey’s neck. I admit it; I was wrong.

Update: Vimeo adds a scaling toggle.

Vimeo launched an “HD” channel today, but you’ll find it very difficult to watch any actual high definition content. High-definition means either 720p format or 1080i. We’re just going to be talking about meeting the bare minimum requirements to be considered HD so we’ll just cover 720p, which is 1280×720 pixels (also 1080i is interlaced so you might as well be watching VHS). Read the rest of this entry »

I drove down to LA this weekend to tour Mr. Jalopy’s Hoopty Rides headquarters. It was an interesting time and you can read about my experience on Hack-A-Day. A bonus was meeting Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing. I met Coop as well. He is heading to Mexico on Wed. to codrive a WRX in the La Carrera Panamericana rally. I think this will be at least his third year. Later this week I’m flying to San Diego for ToorCon. This will be my third one; it’s my favorite event of the year.

Hack-A-Day is looking for people to contribute how-tos and other original content to the site. It is a paid position. Let me know if you are interested. To get an idea of the type of content we’re looking for, visit Engadget’s how-to authors pages since most of them were Hack-A-Day contributors:

• Benjamin Heckendorn
• Eliot Phillips
• Fabienne Serriere
• Will O’Brien

Don’t let the title scare you, I won’t be preaching… I might do some lamenting though. That’sFit pointed out that today is World Vegetarian Day, the kick off to Vegetarian Awareness Month (Wikipedia tells me it’s also Filipino American History Month, but that one doesn’t apply to me as much). I moved to Las Vegas a year ago last week (should probably post about that) and became a vegetarian soon after. It wasn’t a moral decision, I just wanted to eat ‘better’. Before moving, my semi regular lunch had been a polish dog with some spicy mustard rolled up in a tortilla or a lunchmeat sandwich. I’m sure many a New Year’s resolution about ‘eating better’ has been broken so I decided I’d give myself a set of rules: I wouldn’t eat meat. Read the rest of this entry »