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Labor days are here again

Now that it’s Wednesday, it’s time to recap the weekend. I’m a slacker.

Saturday night I had the pleasure of seeing Derek Trucks Band (again) with Angeline up at the Recher. DTB was in good form with a mostly new set (not even Joyful Noise made an appearance) featuring some good gospel-y numbers and a straight-ahead jazz rendition of Greensleeves. Good stuff, listen for yourself.

A pleasant surprise was Baltimore-based opener Jayakar, who turned out a set full of nicely arranged, funky, memorable jam tunes. Apart from some weakness in the vocals department, the band has got it together and I look forward to seeing them on their own soon.

On top of that, we discovered a nearby billiards and table tennis Mecca, as well as a nice place for a five mile hike. Thus I suggest a new slogan for the Maryland tourism board: “Baltimore: why not?”

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Kitchen update

Since the last update, I’ve had my new appliances delivered, painted the ceiling, put together and hung a few of the cabinets, and redid the plumbing on my hot water sink line to accomodate my dishwasher (this last involved me getting soaked with warm water four times before I figured out how to attach a compression valve). So, things are coming along. The cabinets, as pictured, show the interior; once finished they will be the darker wood color on the outside.

Now I just need to finish the cabinets, buy a countertop, and I’m good to go.

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Good Karma

Just to follow up the earlier post, I officially announce my Karma driver web page, including the kernel patch such as it is. I’ve worked out some more details about the disk so I expect to be able to mount it shortly. Peter from empeg declares it “could be useful.”

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$20 digicam


CVS camera
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

Everyone’s done it by now so it’s not cool anymore, but I now have my very own hacked CVS digital camera. For those living under a rock, CVS sells one-time-use digital cameras for $20, and video cameras for $30. The idea is you are supposed to return the camera, pay them to develop it, and they keep the camera. The only advantages of the still camera over a disposable film camera are that you can preview and delete photos after you take them and presumably you get a digital copy of the prints. So, the only thing to do is hack the cam so you can get the pictures off yourself and keep it for good.

Of course, it didn’t take long for every hacker with a logic analyzer to reverse engineer these things, so I didn’t have to do any trailblazing for the hack. I just built a cable using a USB cable (from an old digicam) and my old Palm III cradle. Then I loaded a patched firmware, a rather involved process that requires opening the camera and shorting a couple of pins on its PCB as it boots up.

Does it take good pictures? It is decent, but nothing to write home about. It has just over a megapixel CCD and a really bright flash. It is focused like your usual point & shoot, so anything closer than a couple of feet will be blurry. Still, it may make a worthy camera for some aerial photography experiments later on, and a good camera to carry places where the normal digicam might get broken or stolen. Here’s a picture of the cable taken with the camera.

(This entry tests the flickr “Blog This” button. If you read this, it worked.)

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Karma

My poor MP3 player is destined to be relegated to the trash heap with all of the other Not-An-iPods. For good reason, really, since I have broken it in several different ways since I’ve had it: first the hard drive failed, then after replacing the unit, I dropped the new one and the scroll wheel broke off, and the battery leads came off the mainboard. I’ve soldered the battery back on and glued the scroll wheel back, so it continues to hobble along. Other than build quality, it is a fine MP3 player: it does OGG and FLAC, gapless, has a decent UI, fits nicely in one’s pocket.

What is most annoying about this device is that you have to use Rio’s software to transfer stuff to it over USB, and this only works in Windows. Otherwise, you are stuck using a Java app over ethernet in Linux which is sloooooooow. It would be nice if you could just use it like any old hard drive. Imagine being able to use a hard drive like a hard drive!

So, armed with the recent purchase of the book Linux Device Drivers, I have set out to reverse engineer this bad boy. It isn’t a straight up mass storage device, but if you poke around on it you can make it enter mass storage mode (also, you can make it reboot). From there, it should be a “simple” matter of using dd and figuring out the file system to make this thing a bit more user-friendly.

It took me a couple weeks of looking at hex dumps, but I’ve got phase one completed. Life is good.

Aug 17 08:09:10 dust kernel: usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using address 2
Aug 17 08:09:10 dust kernel: usb 1-2: Product: Rio Karma
Aug 17 08:09:10 dust kernel: usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Rio
Aug 17 08:09:10 dust kernel: usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 00000000000000000
Aug 17 08:09:15 dust kernel: scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Aug 17 08:09:15 dust kernel: Vendor: Rio Model: Rio Karma Rev: 0101
Aug 17 08:09:15 dust kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Aug 17 08:09:15 dust kernel: SCSI device sda: 39070080 512-byte hdwr sectors (20004 MB)

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Hike

I am usually rather obsessive about checking that my keys and wallet are on my person when leaving a building, room, chair, or any given two-square-foot area. This fact makes it all the more annoying that all my faculties broke down yesterday, such that I found myself in Reston, with my keys in Crystal City, wondering how to get home without being able to start or even enter my car.

Great ideas usually come to me when faced with such adversities. Yesterday I had only lousy ones, so I decided to walk home from the Park & Ride. It is only 4.5 miles or so, but I was in work shoes, long pants, had my backpack, and it was 124.3 degrees outside. The W&OD bike path is probably as close to a straight shot as one can wish for, so I set out on a journey, not unlike the Incredible Journey, though maybe a lower budget version without pets and Michael J. Fox. Here is how it broke down by the mile markers:

  • 17 – A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
  • 17.5 – Clearly, the mile markers need to be recalibrated, for I’ve certainly
    walked several miles by this point. Worked out a strategy for getting to work the next day without a cab ride or 4.5 mile walk.
  • 18 – Visited first 7-11. No salad dressing to be found. Bought blue Gatorade.
  • 19 – Rabbit.
  • 19.5 – Visited second 7-11. Bought salad dressing.
  • 20.5 – Local band plays “American Band” and “Pride and Joy” as I walk by, as part of a Thursday night concert series. Herndon has a Thursday night concert series?
  • 21 – Walked into a tree.


Then I broke into my house and collapsed.

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Forms

I think it would be nice to get a contract law degree on the side, because I hate signing forms whose sole purpose is to screw me over legally. And the most dreadful of these: the waiver. I understand that these are even questionable legally, and yet I still get anxious when putting my Johnny H on the bottom of some form that says Company X has the right to do anything they would like including harvesting my organs and using my house for parties while I recuperate, whilst I am legally bound to sit there and take it. Screw that!

Recently, I had to fill out a waiver for an upcoming softball tournament. They helpfully sent it to us as a Word document for us to print out and sign. I can’t pass up such an inviting opportunity to take back some rights. Where I supposedly declared my absolution of all guilt on behalf of the organizer, I slipped in a few words that make the whole waiver rather useless to them (“unless the undersigned agrees…”). Then, just to make sure no one was reading it, I made the following additional edits:

I further understand that consumption of alcoholic beverages will be monitored and if necessary, police officers may assist in escorting any overly intoxicated individual off the premises
became:
I further understand that consumption of alcoholic beverages will be monitored and if necessary, police officers may assist in intoxicating any overly escorted individual off the premises.

And:

[the risks] include those foreseen and unforseen, known and unknown
became:
[the risks] include those foreseen and unforseen, in universes known and unknown.

Minor edits that I doubt anyone will read anyway, but it will be nice if I can compel the local police to help me get drunk.

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Weekend

So, the weekend was a smash. It began on Saturday (as many weekends do), with the fun that is removing kitchen cabinets. Armed with a crowbar, an electric screwdriver, and a healthy disregard for safety, Angeline and I tore into the melamine boxes, liberating screws and nails from twenty years of servitude. In the space of a couple of hours, we pulled out all of the base cabinets, the countertop, and the range hood. We then took a break and screened Jerome’s new favorite movie, Wedding Crashers. I concur with his review.

The next morning I unwired all of the appliances in preparation for the arrival of hired hands Scott and Jerome. I didn’t even electrocute myself. After help arrived, we drew on Scott’s extensive mechanical engineering background and J’s immense skill in belt-tightening to move the big stuff in about half an hour. Then we chatted a bit over a beer and an orange (it’s a breakfast drink). I’d blog more about this but it really deserves a podcast.

Sunday evening I went to go see the Dragonflys [sic]. I went solo but had a great time anyway. The State was sparsely populated, so I was one of only maybe half a dozen people in the dance floor area — most other patrons had taken a table. Barraco joked, “what is this, dinner theater?” I situated myself just to the left of Jimmy Herring’s monitor, directly in front of the stage (a convenient place, by the way, to rest one’s Sam Adams). This ensured the mix that I heard was about 95% Jimmy’s Super Reverb and 5% everyone else. They played a lot of the tunes from the CD which I am completely unfamiliar with (note, Jimmy does not appear on the recording), but there were also a few blues and jam tunes on which the band wailed. In fact the only song I recognized was a perfect cover of Steely Dan’s Kid Charlemagne. Larry Carlton’s solo on that song is widely considered one of the best rock solos of all time, and Jimmy resisted the urge to go crazy, playing the solos note for note. On other tunes, Herring played firey jazz lines, always with a wry smile peeking out under his beard, and at times full on laughter when he and another band member would quote each other’s phrases. I couldn’t hear Barraco that well, but he is a fine keyboard player with a good voice. The bandmates connected for tight vocal harmonies and plenty of rhythmic and melodic interest. In all, the show was well worth the $13 and if Jimmy ever blows up, I’m going to miss being able to watch from ten feet away.