http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/goodbye-wheelchair-hello-exoskeleton

Initially we toyed with the idea of switching back to Direct TV or even to cable, but what we found was that all of them play serious games with their pricing structure.  They all talk up their low, low pricing specials, but those only last for the first year … of a two year contract!  For that second year, we’d be paying what amounted to the same high fees we’d been paying to Dish.  I also found that during our discussions with each outfit, they projected every confidence that we’d eventually cave in and sign up, that there really wasn’t any choice.

They were wrong.  We canceled our satellite service and I hooked up the aerial antenna again. 

For the first couple of days, it felt like they might have been right.  We live in Phoenix, and although there are several tens of DTV stations available, we are apparently in the broadcast shadow of a nearby mountain.  So we only have 7 channels to choose from, half of which are PBS — although I have to admit that with DTV, they do come in crystal clear.

Fortunately, there are other alternatives for watching our favorite shows.  Most everything we want to watch is available on Hulu.com, so we can watch them from our computers.  New shows aren’t always immediately available when they broadcast, but it’s usually only a matter of a few hours, or at worst, the next day before the latest episode is available.

For the TV in the family room I dusted off an old PC I had laying around that just happened to have an S-Video port.  I installed Ubuntu and Boxee on it, connected it to the TV, and picked up an inexpensive pc-remote control from Amazon.

Boxee is an application — available for Windows, Mac, and Linux — that allows you to select and watch TV shows and clips that are freely available across the web.  The servers at boxee.tv continuously check the broadcast network websites, such as CBS and Syfy Network, as well as other websites, like Hulu, to compile an organzied list of television shows, movies, and clips into the Boxee application that can be easily navigated with a remote control.  All for free.

The hard part is connecting up a computer to the TV so these programs can be watched there, instead of from your PC or laptop screen.  Fortunately, D-Link has been working with Boxee to create Boxee Box, a TV appliance that runs Boxee.  The Boxee Box has all the normal TV hook ups built in so it will be as easy to connect to the TV as a DVD or Blu-ray player is.  The Boxee Box is not quite available yet — D-Link is expecting to release it in November, just in time for the Christmas season — but it can pre-ordered from Amazon for about $200.

So we’ve been living this way for several weeks.  We still watch all the shows we’ve become addicted to.  The only thing we do miss is being able to sit in front of the TV and just flip through channels.  On the plus side, we now tend to watch TV with a purpose, and when the show is over, it gets turned off.

I haven’t missed the Satellite service at all.

But when you decide that you want to read them in the order they were posted, it gets rather cumbersome:  You have to locate the first entry, which can be an interesting prospect if they don’t have archives enabled, then you have to read from the bottom of each page towards the top — so you’re constantly reading down the posting, then moving up, past it, to the next one, reading down the posting, moving up, past it, to the next one … and so on.  Then when you get to the top, you usually have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page again to find the link that takes you to the next page, chronologically.  When that page loads you’re looking at the top of the page again, so you have to scroll back to the bottom of the new page to the last entry, then start the whole process over again.  What a pain!

It’s not so bad when each posting, when viewed by itself, has links to the next/previous posts, because then you can simply read the post, then click to the next one and so on.  A lot more page loads, but easier to navigate.  Unfortunately, many blog themes, or layouts, don’t seem to have these links either — mine included, again.  I think most people just don’t think about it:

What if someone wanted to read my blog in book style, from the earliest posting, until now?  Will it be easy to do?

It’s a part of the user experience, or usability, that seems to get lost when developing the blog or when web-designers develop themes and templates.  But it’s also something that could easily be fixed, either by adding the next/previous links to the page that displays individual posts, or by creating an optional “index” page that sorts the posts chronologically, instead.  Relatively small changes that could dramatically improve the usability of your blog — especially if the contents or subject matter lends itself to being read in date-order.

Although I can’t see why anyone would possibly want to read AlienSplicer this way, I’m going to have to modify it’s layout just in case they do.

What do you think?

This final roll was processed at Dwayne’s Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas.  Dwayne’s is the last lab in the world that still handles Kodachrome processing.  Since Kodachrome is no longer manufactured, there are not many rolls still in circulation and Dwayne’s is expected to stop processing it this December.

National Geographic has been following and documenting this last roll of Kodachrome film and is expected to publish both the story and some of the pictures in the Spring of 2011.

References:
kansas.com: Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons

The article discusses an example of someone receiving one of these scam calls, that its’ a growing trend, and that the scammers will sometimes ask for payment for their “service.”

Then she wraps it up with:

People can add themselves to the Federal Trade Commission Do Not Call registry to prevent phone solicitation by calling 888-382-1222.

I’m sorry, but that seems a bit detached from reality.  If someone is going to call you and try to scam you out of something, be it money or the security of your computer, they are NOT going to be concerned, one iota, whether or not your phone number is listed at the FTC’s Do Not Call registry.
 

I really detest spammers! Most of us give it little thought, but when we receive spam messages, the “sender” is usually a spoofed address. Not spoofed in that it was made up — that’s too easy to test for in many cases — but spoofed in that they use someone else’s email address as the spam message’s sender. … right arrow, center-button … When we receive the spam, that little fact doesn’t mean much to us. But when they use your email address as the spoofed sender, you know it.

… right-arrow, center-button …

Over the weekend, I’ve received several thousand — yes, that was thousand — bounce messages where a spammer had attempted to send their spam to invalid email addresses, to mailboxes that were already full, to servers that correctly identified the messages as spam, to systems that needed some sort of anti-spam confirmation actions, and more for a number of other reasons. … right-arrow, center-button … What these bounce messages had in common was that (1) the original message claimed it came from one of my email addresses, and (2) it had actually originated from Brazil (many of the bounce messages were kind enough to include message headers from the original).

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Having to constantly delete messages from my inbox all weekend long was very annoying and I had to be very careful, as it would have been very easy to accidentally delete a real, valid, message from someone that I knew. There’s nothing much that could be done about it, except, perhaps, to create a couple of temporary mail filters to assist with the deleting.

… right-arrow, center-button, right-arrow, center-button …

To make matters worse, the particular email address that had been victimized was one that not only delivered mail to my inbox, but also delivered copy to my PDA phone. … right-arrow, center-button … a small detail I missed until late last night. Although the wave of bounce messages finally trickled off to almost nothing shortly past midnight, I’m still deleting them from the phone, where each one has to be individually acted upon with a two button sequence. It’ll take some time to get them all deleted.

… right-arrow, center-button …

Did I mention how much I loath spammers?

… right-arrow, center-button, right-arrow, center-button, right-arrow, center-button …

NetBSD-smallest.jpg Over the last several days, I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be handy to have NetBSD on a laptop. So this morning, I downloaded the installation CD image, burned it to a disk, and installed it on an old HP Omnibook 6000.

This was very smooth and I was happy to find that the network device was recognized as well as both the LCD screen and touch-pad mouse. X, the graphical windowing system, just seemed to work out of the box. A much better experience than when I last installed v1.3.2 on an IBM 755CD many years ago — getting everything working back then was a major struggle.

With the base system installed, I downloaded and installed pkgsrc (package source), the application installation subsystem. I could have installed quite a few pre-compiled packages from CD, but I’m rather old school and like to compile everything myself. This, of course, takes time on a 700MHz system — XFCE, my favorite windowing system, required nearly 9 hours to build along with all it’s prerequisite applications. Not that I had to sit in front of the laptop for that long, I just changed to the xfce4 directory in pkgsrc, and issued a “make install clean” command. Then I could go out to do something else.

Now that I have the graphical environment and a few tools such as Firefox and Open Office installed, the laptop is all set for working on unix development projects or just about anything else while on the go and without having to worry about viruses or other such nasties that are so prevalent on Windows based systems.

Here’s a short video of van Geest’s concept in action:

Just before writting this, I showed the video to Son#2, who immediately broke out into laughter. He said he could see walking through the library, activating every chair can find, then running from one end of the library to the other, screaming and waving his arms, while a stampede of chairs came rumbling along after him. That’s my boy!

I searched the Interweb for more information, but it’s still unclear whether this video was filmed of real “Take-A-Seat†chairs in use, or if it’s simply the equivalent of stop-motion photography in order to visualize his concept.

While researching, I found a robotic chair created by Max Dean as a performance art sculpture — currently on display at Kitchener-Waterloo Children’s Museum (Sept 20, 2007 – Jan 6, 2008). Dean’s chair — definitely not for sitting upon — will fall over into pieces, then carefully rebuild itself before doing it all over again:

Not only is this chair entertaining, it displays some rather sophisticated robotics. It can find all of it’s missing pieces and attach them where they’re supposed to be connected before pulling itself back together again.

But even more interesting, I also found a short article in The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) indicating that the Macquarie University and the University of Technology, Sydney, were planning to begin phasing in robotic drones as shelvers. Due to the size of university collections, quite a few books are stored in non-public areas of the libraries. The drones would be used to search for and retrieve them as needed. They expect robotic drones to be in use by 2011.

Using robotic shelvers is not a new idea. Roboticists at the University Jaume I in Spain developed a prototype robot shelver in 2004. The robot could navigate itself to a shelf, read book titles, then withdraw a specific book and deliver it to the person waiting. At the time, they figured it would take about another 5 years before robots could realistically perform searching and fetching tasks.

I’d say they were right on target.

Resources
Link: Jelte van Geest (Dutch)
Link: Robotic Chair
Link: Waterloo Regional Children’s Museum
Link: Library drones would put shelvers in a bind
Link: Robots in Libraries

Khine and her team now create their design in AutoCAD, prints it on Shrinky Dinks with a laser printer, and shrinks it in a toaster oven.  The Shrinky Dinks apparently shrink faster than the ink, causing it to bulge outwards — making the whole thing a perfect mold for creating thin, rounded channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber.

As a demonstration of the usefulness of microfluidic devices created in this manner, they’ve created a functional gradient generator — a simple device that mixes two colors of food-color, creating a rainbow-like color pattern — and that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can easily flow through them — microfluidic devices are sometimes used in biological research as well.

Atlhough this wasn’t originally her intention, Professor Khine says “This is certainly becoming a major thrust of my research.”

Link: Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: rapid generation of deep and rounded patterns