Seven ports! I need to make a really short USB cable so that I can hook the chording glove up to it.



Four on the inside, three on the outside. USB-mini in the back, optional power supply.

The wristband is a padded velcro thingy that the company that a guy I know works for ordered by mistake. Normally, a smaller beige plastic holder for a barcode scanner velcros onto it; I took the velcro off the plastic thingy and put it on the hub.

My original plan was to get one of those four-port unpowered jobs, mount it in the original plastic housing, and also add slots for SD cards. I may still do that, since the guy has lots of these wristbands available. This approach means less work to do with a Dremel, but I like the idea of storage on the go. Perhaps one for each wrist, to support keyboard and mouse. (Hey, if I ever don't feel like chording but have the rig set up anyway, I can just plug an ordinary USB keyboard into my wrist!)

If I do make a custom wrist-mount, I might go all out and make a PCB for it using this approach.

ETA: Three hours in, I'm still wearing it comfortably, which is impressive for me, since I usually fidget like crazy with bracelets, watches and things like that. I did flip it to the inside of my wrist, because I realised that the titanium bracers that Chris++ is making for the sleeves of my leather longcoat will go on the outside of my arms, leaving no room for an outward-facing hub, but I think it will fit okay on the inside. Worst-case scenario, the velcro straps are long enough that if I have to, I can wear the hub on my bicep. Time to get one of those retractable USB-A/USB-mini-B cables, the clicky kind.

Snagged from michiexile.

1.Take a picture of yourself right now.
2.Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3.Post that picture with NO editing.
4.Post these instructions with your picture.



Me and my Arduino NG, with the accelerometer I just rigged up to it.

A three-day-long rave. In a field full of windmills. With an absinthe bar. Cool art; music so good that I frequently could not convince myself to leave the dance floor; truly excellent conversations about evolutionary psychology, game theory as applied to intentional communities, chemotaxis and other forms of animal communication (did you know bees' dances have regional dialects? I didn't until Sunday), and emergent network behaviours at the molecular, cellular, and human scales. I spent a good chunk of the time uncertain where my boots were and mostly unconcerned about that fact; I also lost my pants for a day and a half straight, though not the ones I was wearing at the time and not for any particularly exciting reason, but hey, that makes a good line, doesn't it? (Works better for "No shit, there I was" than for "So, there was this girl...", but hey, you can't win 'em all.)

More details later. At the moment I'm going to go soak the grime off of myself, see if a warm bath will unwind these knots in my shoulders, and slather Vitamin E cream all over the ridiculous-looking asymmetric sunburn that is my shoulders and upper back. (Note to self: do not fall asleep in full sun while wearing a tank top ever again.)

Crazy mad heat and humidity -- and small children on the street outside having Super Soaker wars, who are all too happy to hose me down on the way to swap out the laundry. That was refreshing.

I'm heading out in a bit to go to a techno party in the middle of the woods, where it will hopefully be a bit less oppressively hot. Happily, all the good stuff happens at night anyway. Have a great weekend, LiveJournal!

First off, my apologies for the lousy picture quality. We have a really good camera, thanks to foxgrrl, but I am a terrible photographer who cannot hold a camera steady one-handed to save her life. Also, unfortunately there are no macro shots, because either we don't have a suitable lens for it or I don't know how to use our existing lenses properly (the latter is far more likely). But these should get the picture (har!) across.

So, how does this thing work?

( cut to save your flist )

This post brought to you by free software. No, really. Image editing was done on my EeePC running Ubuntu Netbook Remix, using F-Spot and UFRaw for importing and colour correction, and The Gimp for annotation and resizing. And, of course, the SpiffChorder design is itself free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.

It is retardedly hot and humid in the late afternoon/early evening here. I have given up entirely on the notion of pants, and still cannot bring myself to do much of anything except drink water and read. Every window is open, my neighbours probably think I'm a pervert (we have big windows), and still all I can do here is lie here and sweat.

Pics later (of the chording glove, not my pantsless self, get your minds out of the gutter), I promise, but for the moment I'm going to try to keep from melting if that's okay with y'all.

I need to find some milk crates, a hose and a couple of half-amp motors; this is giving me ideas for a stackable modular swamp cooler.

i am typing this post with my prototype chording glove

Since my last update, I've picked up the necessary hardware to build a SpiffChorder, Mikkel Holm Olsen's homebrew AVR-based chording keyboard. The circuit is now mostly breadboarded, and one of my winter gloves has been converted into a prototype that looks scarily like something out of Serial Experiments Lain. ph34r my wire tentacles!

I have also fallen madly in love with the art of wire-wrapping. It's not a technique people use very often anymore, since soldering is so convenient and cheap, and almost nobody prototypes CPUs with discrete components these days -- we have FPGAs for that. However, it's a great way to hook up components that need a flexible connexion, such as glove-mounted switches that need to tie in to a breadboard. Wrap a lead, then wrap a single header pin, and voila -- breadboardable glove-mounted switch. (Also handy for connecting panel-mount components to a breadboard, using the same header trick. This worked great for the USB-B jack.)

joel tells me that I'm not the only one doing my part to keep wire-wrapping alive -- Steve Chamberlin did prototype his own CPU with discrete components, showed it off at Maker Faire, and taught Joel (and presumably many more people) how to wire-wrap. Keep the dream alive, Steve!

Now to figure out what I did with those 82-ohm resistors, finish that breadboarding job, and try loading Mikkel's hex image onto my ATMega8. Cross your fingers for me -- I want to take this to the hackerspace meeting tonight.

ETA: hm, that's strange, the ISP pins are definitely lined up correctly (my multimeter tells me so!), there's a 2.2k pullup on the RESET line, but I still get the blinky red LED of no love from the AVR-ISPmkII. Actually, first it's the solid red LED of no love which isn't mentioned in the manual, then when I try to load up the image via avrdude it's the blinky red LED of no love. Downloading AVR Studio now, we'll see if the official tools give a more useful error.

Just now I heard a repetitive, high-pitched "mew" outside that can be only one thing: a hungry kitten.

I went out to look for it, mewed a few times to see if it would answer, and caught a glimpse of a little tail going under a car. I knelt down to look under the car and spotted it; it appears to be grey (though, in the dark, all cats are grey), and is probably about eight or nine weeks old. I'm pretty sure it's feral, as there are a lot of feral cats around here already, and we're coming up on kitten season.

It wasn't interested in an outstretched hand, but I wanted to do something for it, so I went upstairs and rummaged through the cabinets. enochsmiles and foxgrrl had brought a tin of liver pate (that no one was curious enough to eat, I guess) back from their train trip to Berlin, so I took that outside. The kitten had vanished by then, so I opened the tin and left it between two parked cars, situated so that I can see it from the bedroom window.

If nothing else, I hope the poor guy goes to sleep with a full belly. I also hope cats like pate.

ETA: wtf, half an hour later the entire tin has vanished without a trace. It better have been a cat dragging it off to eat in peace, and not the people I heard outside on the street just now. (It sounded like they were up by the corner, but it's hard to tell.)

Dear everyone,

If you are planning on committing suicide via overdose, for fuck's sake do not do it with anticholinergics. Anticholinergics are otherwise known as "deliriants" for very, very good reason. If you want to die confused and terrified while your blood pressure pingpongs around out of control, anticholinergics are an extremely effective way of accomplishing that. If you're lucky, the rapid swings in blood pressure will trigger a heart attack (which is also not a lot of fun, especially when you can't tell what's real and what isn't); if not, you're likely to end up in a coma with a failing liver.

Seriously, just don't. It will suck for you, it will suck for whoever finds you while you are still alive and it will suck for the medical professionals who end up treating you. Do yourself a favour: call a friend, call a suicide hotline. You can even call me if you can deal with someone talking you out of it with logic and being pretty much entirely unemotional about the situation.

But yeah, fuck anticholinergics in the ear.

ETA: thanks ephermata for just generally being awesome

Dear LJ Genie,

Here is a picture of an audio cable:



I know that I can go to Radio Shack and buy a screw-together or snap-together end for an audio cable, but the friend on whose behalf I am asking doesn't need an audio cable; he needs to provide more mechanical stability for a join, and layered heat-shrink tubing doesn't look nice. Is there a name for the thick plastic part of the cable that one holds onto while inserting the male end into a socket, such that I could search for it on digi-key?

ETA: It's a strain relief boot. Thanks, grepmaster and tikiking!

Why doesn't the core Arduino firmware already support V-USB? 1400 bytes, wow, that ain't bad. I'd shave off some program space for that.

I will, naturally, have to see if I can compile it for Arduino in userland, but this should be a kernel thing. For the microcontroller notion of "kernel", anyway.

(clones? where are you, clones?)

ETA: thanks, internet

...wait, I could do 3D "circuit board" design if I could somehow produce the unholy fusion of gEDA and Blender.

If Blender lets you freehand draw on the texture of a surface, that could actually work. omgwtfbbq.

...and then you somehow convert the Blender data file into a knitting pattern, which would in and of itself be a neat little hack, since you could 3D model a garment and then convert it into a pattern ... oh cloning why are you not here yet

I forgot to take my antidepressants today. Maybe I'm actually back to the point where I don't need them anymore. That would be nice.

ETA: apt-get install blender but I am not allowed to play with it till I get more work done, it is a reward

I'm a huge fan of Instructables, not so much eHow. The former is an amazing treasure trove of projects with a well-implemented search function; the latter has some pretty cool material too, but is plagued by pointless articles such as "How To Be [insert Naruto character here]" which keep coming up as "related articles" when I'm looking for, say, information on making a planter.

Given the, shall we say, tender age of most Narutards, I wondered whether eHow was being used as a sort of covert social channel for the Nickelodeon set -- the kind of people who would think it a major victory if their little eHow bullying page ("How To Be A Total Loser Like Amy Kunkel") or guilt-trip page ("How To Make Your Girlfriend Cry", calling the target out on recent behaviour) picked up a whole thirty hits, because that's like half the school, seriously. Searching on "how to make your girlfriend cry" came up empty, but there is How To Make Your Boyfriend Cry. For the, uh, teenage passive-aggressive gold-diggers in the audience, I guess.

No covert mockery that I can find, either, so I guess it was just a passing fancy. But I share it with you anyway, a flicker of some possible internet future.

I just bought two rolls of sportweight cotton in what can only be described as "printed circuit board green".

It cost me less than 5EUR, so I'm not that bad. But I'm still giggling.

Switch placement worked well (and comfortably!) on the test glove, a winter glove that I'm not using right now. Next step is to get some junk wire and lay out the traces, as it were.

For want of a needle I cannot finish making my pimped-out EeePC carrier (padded sling bag, using webbing from a messenger bag that was coming apart), and thus must hand-copy a list of parts to take with me down to my Local Electronics Shop, where I must stop on the way to my doctor's appointment later today. Or just, you know, use a backpack, but it seems awfully silly to devote an entire backpack to such a tiny piece of equipment. My sling bag will be efficient and modular. If I want to, I can clip other things to it. Neoprene will protect the laptop itself from liquids and impact damage. The weight will ride nicely in the small of my back or at my hip. Only a needle, between me and this!

But no, I will be sensible and take a backpack, because it will be faster, and that way I can make time to go to the sewing store. (Neoprene is kind of a beast.)

Oh, and I should find a good oldskool punk patch to sew to the back of the case...

Okay, knitting people, here's one for you: I want to do some work with conductive yarn. Specifically, I want to make a chording glove -- like a chording keyboard, but knitted into a glove.

After all, keys are just switches, and switches are just two contacts completing a circuit. So, imagine conductive pads leading to outbound "channels" -- insulated from each other by the surrounding nonconductive yarn.

Is this a job for embroidery, or is there a way to actually knit this?

/me watches the ICMP traffic flicker by and notices a pattern in the increase in packet sizes. The derivative is an exponential function (2ⁿ), how delightful!

Bitshifting is of course simplest but the notion of increasing payload size as a function of e^x amuses me for some reason.

My joints have decided to do that exciting grating-together thing again, and it is of course just as comfortable as ever (which is to say, no fun at all). Keeping myself fed and watered is a challenge, so right now my focus is on (1) basic life needs, (2) family stuff, and (3) work, in that order. If I have committed to doing anything in a short timeframe for you, the chances of my flaking are high.

I am loading up on glucosamine/chondroitin and hitting the NSAIDs, but if previous experience is any indicator, this'll be done with me whenever it's ready to be and not a day sooner. :-/

Hey, massage therapists: what's useful for tight muscles plus a heavy dose of O BTW YOUR JOINTS HATE U?

Viewed from human scale to city-block-scale, city streets look well-aligned, on a grid, planned out in meticulous detail. (And they are; city planners and surveyors get paid good money to ensure this.)

Viewed from slightly higher up, they look like slime molds:





A fascinating chapter from a book about our friends the Dictyostelia

Now, what I'd like to know is, what are the self-assembly rules for Dictyostelia? What kind of space do they like to have between them and their neighbors?

Well, thanks to the magic of green fluorescent protein, here's how they come together:



Also, their cell signaling has been caught and immortalized on film:


Thanks, internet!