Keith's Complete Waste of Time » Having fun

Logical Conclusions

keith — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:05:40 +0000

So, if Republicans are correct and lowering tax rates always leads (in the long term) to the government taking in more revenues than it would have at the higher tax rate, isn’t the logical conclusion that the tax rate should be 0 and that would lead to the government taking in the most possible tax revenue.

Although I wonder who would be paying those taxes if the tax rate actually was 0%.

My Woot Bag of Crap!

keith — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:02:06 +0000

So, after a couple years of trying really hard to get a mythical Woot Bag of Crap, and cursing every time the stupid server of theirs would go down the instant the bag of crap came up for purchase, I’d given up hope. But, a few weeks back there was a Woot off, and I was sitting in my office, and I saw that the current item ( a wireless mouse ) was sold out, so I hit refresh to see what the next item was, and HOLY SHIT IT’S THE BAG OF CRAP. ORDER! ORDER! ORDER!

Except I was pretty sure I’d missed it again, since I did manage to enter in my CVC code for my credit card, and hit the confirmation button, but then the page timed out, so I was dejected.

Except about 15 minutes later I saw that a bag of crap had appeared in my “Order summary”. Woo!

Here, without further ado, is the unboxing. Starting with the box…

Since it was only 5 lbs, and about 12″ along the largest side, I was pretty sure that it didn’t have a 60″ plasma display inside.

As expected, none of those items are large plasma televisions. Instead, they’re

1. A 10 function remote with a display. Apparently I need a Windows machine to set it up.2.

2. A Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” phone / game holder, with a carabiner on the back side.

3. A wired “Netbook” mouse, with a cord in a little retractable holder.

4. A wireless mouse, in some kind of OEM packaging, so it might be Bluetooth or something else.

Overall, not a bad haul for $8.

My Peggy 2 clock idea

keith — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:31:07 +0000

I’m a bit of a clock guy, and I’ve got a bunch in my house and in my office. I’ve got bunches of regular analog clocks. I’ve got my grandparent’s mantle clock that they were given for their wedding in the early 1930s, which we wind with a key and which chimes on the hour in my living room. In my office I have one of those “rolling ball” clocks as well as a ping-pong clock from Adafruit.

One thing that some clocks show better than others is the passage of time — and sometimes it’s the passage of time that is most interesting to display instead of the exact digital instant that is now.

Here’s the idea: The front of the peggy is treated like a “pie”, except it’s square. It shows the fraction of the last and next 12 hours which are day versus night ( calculated from the wall clock time and the longitude and latitude which are configured by the user ) In essence, the “light” and “dark” parts of the current day rotate clockwise, and at a glance you can see how much of the day

As time passes, this display will “rotate” in a clockwise direction, with the current “time” being at what would be 12 o-clock on a conventional clock. So, this is a small version of the peggy, with white being “lit” LEDs and black being unlit, and a blue border around the 25×25 pixel field.

would indicate roughly noon, on a day near the summer solstice, and this

would be shortly after sunset, again on a day near the solstice.

Here’s a time around noon on a day in late fall, when the day is about 10 hours long.

Here’s dawn on March 21st, the spring equinox ( when the day and night are each 12 hours long )

During the year, as the seasons change, the amount of light and dark will change and along with it the fraction of the clock which is lit up. Near the winter solstice, only about 1/4 of the leds will ever be on, while in the summer 3/4 of them may be lit.

Other ideas that might be possible ( depending on how much memory code to do the above took to implement )

- The actual time could probably be drawn, either near the top or bottom of the display, using digits roughly 5 x 5 in size.

- the brightness of the leds could vary, so that near the time the sun was most directly overhead the leds were full brightness, and the dimmed as the time got closer to sunset, then slowly brightened again the next day

- perhaps other astronomical stuff — phase of the moon, or the tides — could also be included, although anything terribly complicated probably won’t fit in the memory available

-Keith

I rode 25 miles and didn’t die!

keith — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:48:56 +0000

As some of you know, because I emailed you and asked you to donate to the American Diabetes Association for my ride in the Napa Tour de Cure. My friend, Mark, had organized a team, and because I had the same kind of bike as he has he asked me if I’d like to join in. He promised the ride would be pretty and flat.

My friends totally came thru and donate a bunch more money than I even expected, and I’m both proud and extremely humbled by the generosity of people I know.

The bike ride itself was up in Yountville, CA, just north of Napa, on the morning of May 5th. Loretta’s sister Maureen went up with me and also did the ride. We went up the night before because we needed to be at the start between 9am and 10am, and actually got onto the road about 9:45am, and rolled back over the finish line about 2 hours later, just before noon. I was a bit tired, and my feet were a bit tingly, but nowhere near as worn out as I’d expected. It was, as promised, mostly flat and quite pretty. Much of the ride was on nearly deserted roads, with only a few mile segment on a pretty busy highway.

I taped a short movie at the start of the ride, so you can see me in all my glory, and I also taped about the last 15 minutes of the ride because I wanted to show what it was like. Sadly, the camera does jerk around a fair amount because of the bumpiness of the road.

So, we went and saw Jonathan Coulton last weekend…

keith — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:56:12 +0000

up in San Francisco, at the Great American Music Hall. It’s probably been a number of years since I last went to a concert — heck, maybe the last real one was Voice Farm, which would have been in the mid 1990s. Jonathan was great ( and, the two opening acts were also good — a music/comedy team called Paul and Storm and a dude named Kid Beyond, who was musical in a way that I can’t describe. ) I taped a couple bits of the concert on my Flip Video HD camera, because apparently it’s cool to do so with Jonathan and the openers. This is the first song of his that I can recall hearing, and I rather like it since (at times) it seems to pretty adequately describe my life. I suspect you can vaguely hear me singing along.