While I thought this would be a great gift, I was a little concerned that it wouldn’t work on the university’s wireless network in our on-campus apartment.  Sure enough, when I tried to set it up yesterday I couldn’t get it to work.  Any time a new device tries to connect to the university’s wireless network the DHCP server assigns it a temporary local IP address and redirects it to a registration web page.  Unfortunately, the Eye-Fi isn’t really a network adapter so you can’t use it to browse the web.  Thus, you can’t visit the registration page in order to register it for use on the network.

After the automatic setup procedure didn’t work I jotted down the card’s MAC address (which is easy to determine using the included software) and emailed the IT people on campus to ask if they could manually add the card’s MAC address to the list of MAC addresses the DHCP server will supply with IP addresses.  They were very helpful and responded that they had added the card’s MAC address as I had asked.

So, now it appears that I’m all set. I spent some time this afternoon getting it set up and I’ve successfully uploaded 5 or 6 pictures and one video using the device. All in all, it’s pretty nice. Hopefully, using this card will simplify the process of getting pictures from the camera to the computer but only time will tell if the device lives up to its promise.

If the card I got my wife works out well, I’ll seriously consider buying the Eye-Fi Pro, which permits you to upload RAW files as well as JPGs and videos.  In addition, it enables you to set up an ad-hoc connection with your PC so you can bypass local wireless networks and upload pictures directly from your card to your computer.  This type of functionality typically costs much more than either the Eye-Fi Pro’s street price of $100 or its MSRP of $150.

Anyway, I have wanted a sturdy tripod for a while.  After a lot of looking, I decided that I wanted a ball head since I had grown tired of having to adjust two or three knobs in order to get my composition right.  I settled on the Manfrotto 322RC2. It seemed like it would allow incredibly fast composition changes and would be very comfortable to use.  So, that found its way onto my wish list.

By pooling together money I got for my birthday I was able to get the 322RC2 head with the Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod legs.  I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to use everything yet but so far I really like it.  The ball head is so nice.  It is super easy to change your composition, very quick, and it locks solidly into place.  The legs are big – if I extend the legs fully, the eyepiece of the camera is at eye level without raising the center column at all.  This is great because it maximizes stability and gives me some freedom to play around with shots that might require the camera to be above my eye level.

Shortly after I got my kit and put everything together I took a picture of my wife and me enjoying our nerdy lifestyle:

Of course, this picture isn’t going to win any photo contests – it’s just a fun way of documenting what our evenings sometimes look like.

Earlier this week, I needed to provide someone with a head shot of myself for a poster on my research work.  I couldn’t find anything suitable among the pictures in my collection since I’m normally the one behind the camera.  So, I needed to have one taken.  I decided to try taking one of myself using my tripod.  In addition to the tripod, I also used my Pentax Remote Control F to trigger the shutter.  I wanted the picture to have a background nicer than the curtains in our apartment or something such so I went down to the banks of the Charles River and set up the camera.  I had to experiment with the camera height in order to make sure that the banks of the river in the background didn’t line up with the middle of my head, which would have been distracting.  I also ended up using my circular polarizing filter control the appearance of the clouds.

Below is my favorite from the whole batch, which includes probably 2 good pictures and about 45 bad pictures.  I felt pretty silly standing there smiling at the camera and taking pictures of myself as people drove by on Memorial Dr. and as runners strode by on the running path but I’m pretty happy with the result and I’ll probably never see any of those people again, anyway.

I’m excited about the possibilities the tripod creates for me.  I’m looking forward to trying my hand at some high dynamic range photography.  While a tripod isn’t essential for these, it certainly makes things easier since HDR pictures require at least 2 source images that have to be properly aligned before combining them to create the final product.  Also, I’m looking forward to being able to photograph the city at night.  I have plenty of good pictures looking across the Charles at Boston but none of those I’ve taken at night have been acceptably sharp.  I’m hoping my new tripod will change that.

All in all, I’m very happy with the setup, which also includes a padded carrying bag and a separate strap for carrying the tripod without the bag.  Given how solidly these things are built, I expect to be using them for years to come and probably passing them on to my offspring.

I’d like to thank my parents and my parents-in-law for their generous gifts, which not only got me the tripod but also got me the remote control and circular polarizing filter at Christmas.  Thanks!

Yesterday, my wife went out to Target and came home with a headband for him. You can see a picture of him wearing it by clicking the link below.

In any case, my son is now following in my footsteps.  He has been tripping, falling, and hitting his head on the ground for probably a month.  Today, though, he tripped and evidently hit his head on a small rock lying on the ground.  So, instead of a nice scrape like he’s gotten before, this time, he got a nice cut, which bled profusely down his face.  You can see a picture by following the link at the bottom of this post, but be warned – there is a lot of blood.  Also, here’s my wife’s description of today’s action.

At the beginning of March we were back in Pittsburgh, where we’ll be moving once I graduate, and we started looking at houses in the hopes of ultimately buying one. Thinking about actually owning a house and getting to customize it in whatever ways we see fit really got me thinking about how we should set up all our electronics, including TV, DVD Player, Stereo, DVR, computers, and backup storage. Ideally, it would all work together and make things basically accessible all over the house.

Ok, so how do I start explaining my thoughts on this, since it involves so many different components? First, I guess I’ll start talking about the network. If possible, I’d like to avoid cables. Cables are the fastest and most robust solution but I don’t want to have to drill lots of holes and pull cable through the walls. Cable is also very inflexible – if my wife wants to rearrange our furniture, any jacks I had made for the cable might no longer suit the arrangement. Fortunately, 802.11n provides an alternative. It seems to have enough range and enough bandwidth to meet all of my needs for the foreseeable future. My work laptop supports 802.11a/b/g/n and we plan to replace our main desktop machine at some point in the next year, so we can get it configured to support 802.11n. Plus, practically all new computers either come with 802.11n networking built-in or they offer it as an upgrade. So, it shouldn’t be too hard or too expensive to create a home network based on 802.11n. In my limited research so far, this seems like the best router/access point for the job.

Next on the list is backup storage. Ever since it was announced, I’ve been interested in Windows Home Server (WHS). It’s now pretty mature and supports lots of great features. So, the plan is to have a WHS machine attached to one of the gigabit ethernet ports on the router. It’ll back up all our machines, provide a network print server, and store all our media (like pictures, home movies, and music). Having all our data in one place makes it easy to then do an offsite backup. There’s a JungleDisk client for WHS and I recently read about a new service called CrashPlan, which enables you to do offsite backups to other people’s computers. So, for example, I could backup our WHS machine to a computer at my parents’ house using CrashPlan and I wouldn’t have to pay per-gigabyte bandwidth and storage costs like I would if I backed up to Amazon using JungleDisk. Plus, I could “seed” the offsite backup by doing the first backup locally and then moving the computer to the offsite location. This would dramatically reduce the time necessary for the first backup (probably from weeks to hours). The upfront cost is higher and I would be responsible for any maintenance but it may be worth it, depending on how much stuff I find myself wanting to back up. While I initially thought it would be cool to build my own WHS machine, I’m now thinking that it might be better to get one of the dedicated WHS machines from HP. They are small, quiet, and have room for up to 4 SATA drives. Plus, the cost of the WHS license is included and you get some additional software that seems really useful. I think I’d have a hard time building a computer with a 4-bay hot-pluggable SATA backplane for less than $500 including the $100 WHS license. Those backplanes are like $100 by themselves!

I’ve also had ideas of having a computer in the kitchen. My wife sometimes finds recipes online and prints them out. It would be really convenient for her if she had a small touch-screen computer in the kitchen where she could pull up recipes, bookmark them or save them locally. It would also be cool if she could view videos, listen to music, or have occasional web chats from this machine while she’s busy in the kitchen. The HP TouchSmart series is too big and too expensive. Something like the Asus Eee Top seems to have both a better size and pricepoint. The Eee Top has 802.11n and a screen that could be used for watching 720p video, though I’m not sure if the integrated graphics is up to the challenge. Hopefully, Asus will release a new model based on the NVIDIA Ion platform with a dual core Atom processor. According to a recent Engadget article, there are a bunch of so-called nettops coming out in the next year that will be based on this combination. Hopefully, at least a couple of these new Ion + Atom 330 machines will have the built-in touch-screen, bluetooth (for a wireless keyboard), and a VESA mount. The ultimate would be if I had the computer mounted on one of the cupboard doors and I had a wireless keyboard built into the cabinetry like an under-the-counter pull-out cutting board. Sweet!

In part 2, I’ll look at the TV and DVR. This is an especially complicated issue because the proper solution is not independent of the service provider we choose for TV. I’m just starting to get knowledgeable about issues like CableCards and how they affect DVRs, etc. Hopefully, I’ll post part 2 soon.

After the break, I have some info on the Arduino project and how I got involved.

A couple of months ago, I bought an Arduino Diecimila microcontroller board after getting interested in the Arduino project while working on my exercise bike project.  Basically, these boards have a set of input and output pins that can be used to interface with switches, sensors, and output devices like LEDs.  In addition to the board, the project produces an open-source integrated software development environment that enables you to write code for controlling the microcontroller and upload it to the board via a USB cable.  The programming language involved uses syntax similar to C++, so you don’t need to learn how to program in a controller-specific assembly language.  Plus, since uploading and running your code on the board is quick and easy, the system is straightforward and convenient to debug.

The thing that’s great about the project is how easy it is to get started.  I actually bought an Arduino starter pack, which includes pretty much everything you need to start making cool projects. After I got it, I began by writing a program to light up patterns in a row of LEDs that came in the starter pack.  This was followed by an application to the exercise bike project: I built a little optical tachometer (using an LED and a photocell from the starter pack) and wrote code to send RPM data back to my computer over the USB connection (actually serial over USB).

One night I was up by myself and I thought that my 4-year old daughter might get a kick out of a little device that could sweep through the colors of the rainbow.  I had red, green, and blue LEDs, so it was actually pretty simple to get it working using the Arduino and the protoshield from the starter pack.  With maybe about 2 weeks remaining before Halloween, it occurred to me that I should put this type of device inside my pumpkin.  However, the LEDs I had used in my little prototype seemed a bit anemic for a pumpkin to be displayed outdoors – I needed to find something better.

I ended up settling on a high-power RGB LED array that I bought from SparkFun Electronics (which also carries a full line of Arduino boards and lots of other cool stuff).  The Arduino is connected to a prototyping breadboard which contains the various resistors, potentiometers, and transistors needed to drive the high-power LEDs.  This intermediate set of circuits was necessary because the LEDs I used can take up to 350mA, while the Arduino can only supply about 20mA per pin.  Other than the Arduino board and the LED array, I got all the components used in this project from Radio Shack and You-Do-It Electronics Center.  Thanks to my parents-in-law for the gift card that covered my Radio Shack purchases and thanks to Ricky Hardy for the ride to You-Do-It Electronics.

In the end, the project was a lot of fun.  I learned a lot and I got a lot of positive feedback from friends and neighbors about the pumpkin.  If you have any questions or comments, please leave them for me below.

What I found was the web page of Thomas Fink, who, at the time, was a physicist at the University of Cambridge in England. He and a co-author wrote two scholarly journal articles (here and here) examining the topology of tie knots. In these papers they enumerate all the possible “moves” that go into tying a tie. There are 2 ways to begin a tie knot, 6 ways to continue, and 2 ways to end a knot. By exhaustively examining each possible combination of moves, they enumerated 85 distinct ways to tie a tie (involving as many as 9 total moves not including the termination move, denoted “T”).

In addition to simply enumerating the possible tie knots, they came up with a scheme to rate how aesthetically pleasing a knot is, based on its symmetry and balance. This enabled them to identify the subset of all possible knots that people would probably actually want to use. Not surprisingly, this subset of aesthetically pleasing ties includes all the commonly tied knots, like the four-in-hand and Windsor. However, it also included some very nice knots that weren’t already in wide use. To my eye, the nicest of the bunch is known as the Hanover. It is huge but perfectly symmetrical.

If you are interested in putting this research into use for yourself, I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia page about Fink’s book, The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie. For an exhaustive list of all possible ties, take a look at this page. I have used this page repeatedly over the years because I don’t tie ties often enough to memorize any particular knot, so each time I need to tie a tie, I have to look up the steps. I hope you will find this all as interesting and useful as I have.

At the very least, the URL will need to change. However, I’d like to stop having to do admin work on the computer, like dealing with upgrading to the latest version of the software or troubleshooting hardware problems. So, ideally, I’d like to migrate all my photos to an online photo sharing site. I’ve been looking at the various options but none has really jumped out as a the logical choice. I have a lot of pictures, so I’m resigned to paying for a “pro account”, as they’re called on many sites. Generally, this amounts to $20-25/year, so it’s no big deal. There are a bunch of criteria that I’m judging the sites on but I won’t get into details now – I’ll save that for a later post.

In the meantime, I’ll focus on one criterion: that a tool exists that would allow me to automatically migrate my existing albums to a new location. I was aware of a sourcforge project called gallery2flickr, which will migrate your Gallery v.2 albums to Flickr. However, it’s nice to have choices and I was afraid that I would be locked into Flickr because it was the only service with a migration tool. However, today, I discovered Migratr, which will convert between any of 10 different photo sites, including Gallery v.2, Flickr, Zooomr, and Picasa Web. This gives me a lot more options.

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, all these migration tools work with Gallery v.2 while I run Gallery v.1. So, I’ll need to migrate my Gallery v.1 albums to Gallery v.2 albums. I’m not sure how difficult this will be. I’m pretty sure that it will involve at least two steps, though: 1) upgrade from my current Gallery version to the latest version in the v.1 line and then 2) convert that installation into Gallery 2. This could be complicated by the fact that Gallery 2 uses a MySQL database and I’m not sure if I remember the root password for the MySQL server on the machine, which I’ll need in order to create a new user, which, in turn, I’ll need to give Gallery 2 access to the database and the appropriate tables. If things don’t go smoothly, this could turn into a huge pain since I need my MySQL installation for my blog, which, incidentally, is something further that I will need to migrate before too long…

I was able to draw the tree on her dad’s side with little difficulty, though I couldn’t remember the name of one of her cousins.  Her mom’s side was a little hazier mostly because we have had less interaction with them.  I got her aunts and uncles but I wasn’t able to name all of her cousins (and spouses and their children).  Anyway, I’ll pose this question to my readership: assuming you have a significant other, how well could you draw out your significant other’s family tree (on both sides) starting with his/her grandparents and ending with the youngest generation?

In my family tree, the youngest generation is two generations younger than me: I have a first cousin twice removed (that is, a grandchild of my cousin).  So, while putting together the family tree of your significant other might be an interesting challenge, if you have a complicated (or even large) family tree, it might even be an interesting challenge to write down your own family tree…

If these two projects turn out well, I won’t be sorry that I didn’t get to work on all the others.