Staticfree Blog

A while ago at Grendels, I happened to discover an odd characteristic about US currency in infrared: it has special markings! So I decided to do a proper photo shoot using as many interesting sources of light that I had around my home.

These are only a few bits of the spectrum. I wonder what surprises await in other, less accessible parts!

After disabling bitmap fonts in Debian, the default alternative to Helvetica is Nimbus Sans. As you can see below, its on-screen rendering is ugly. Thankfully, Debian makes it pretty easy to disable Nimbus Sans and make fonts look nicer.

I went to Japan last week with my brother Cole, my dad, his significant other, Marie and her daughter, Minna where we met with my youngest brother, David. We traveled to Tokyo and stayed to explore for a couple days. Then took the bullet train to Kyoto where we stayed in a machiya-like hotel and ate bowls upon plates upon bowls of odd things that once lived in the ocean.

After we explored all variety of pagodas and temples over the course of a couple days, we headed over to Okinawa to stay on a military base.

The contrast between a ritzy traditional Japanese hotel and an American military hotel is astounding. The most notable differences were:

1. a poorly-designed ventilation system that was so noisy one had to talk loudly over it
2. general aesthetics and pleasantness; one place encouraged rest whereas the other seemed to find resting in one's hotel to be an afterthought
3. the toilet (of course)

Okinawa is famous for a few native fruits, notably: the Goya - a green, bitter melon that looks somewhat like a pickle, the pineapple, and the Shiisa which isn't a fruit. Shiisa are guardian lions that come in pairs: one with its mouth open to let out bad spirits and one with its mouth closed to hold the good ones in.

We just so happened to plan this trip around the same time that David was getting his promotion, so we got to see him become promoted to Corporal - the first big promotion in the Marines.

We snorkeled in the coral reefs on the north-western side of the island. As I wasn't able to put my glasses on under the goggles, I got to see coral, water and swimming schools of blurs. The water was warm in our wetsuits and the waves weren't too obnoxious. We later went to the aquarium and saw many of the things that lived in said coral. Okinawa is largely made of coral, so many things that are usually rock are instead coral, such as castles.

There are a few notable quirks about Japanese streets:

1. There are numerous vending machines. I only encountered a few of the wide variety of vending machines available.
2. Overly-friendly construction notice signs, complete with inspirational pictures.
3. The crosswalk man has a hat

I made it! I've finally gotten off the North American continent. My lack of Italian skills isn't as scary I thought, due to a common language of money, food and occasional English. I already knew how to read the wine bottles and many of the names of food. With a bit of French, Spanish and metric knowledge, I'm able to get by reading general signage.

I love the metric system: it makes so much sense compared to the highly deprecated and confusing English system. I've been using metric measurements everywhere I go for the past few years and have one place that I still need to convert: the kitchen. Metric measuring in the kitchen is done more by weight than by volume. It's looking like I need to get a nice digital scale.

The only thing I am not down with here is the exchanging of "." and "," in numbers. To me, "." is more important than "," and is something more important to leave in a thing. Dropping a "," in a sentence is less critical than dropping a ".". So when I see that "." is used for thousands separators (which can be left out) and "," for decimal separators, that does not make me happy.

I have some photos online and will be adding more. Check out my ongoing collection of photos from my trip to Firenze.

This is my first Threadless submission and my first attempt at design of this sort. It's a cheerful reminder that we don't have to use solar cells to be powered by the sun. If you like it, you should go vote on my design so it can become a shirt!

I haven't been updating this blog all too often, but I have been updating my website! Perhaps I should unify the two at some point, but for now, here's a list of some new stuff:

• Dots! - a graphical way of representing large numbers, in order to better visualize and compare them. How big is 45986 anyhow?
• n770 hacks - I finally got my n770 back from repairs and will be posting various hacks that I do there.
• Infrared Photography - some more IR photos, such as the one above from my recent hike in the White Mountains.

I've been playing with my infrared-modified Canon Powershot A40 some more. I've managed to work around the blurriness due to the confused auto-focus and have done some post-processing work to make the images cleaner. At least for starters, I think I've managed to come up with some images worthy of the time it took to hack it :-)

Below are a few of my favorites so far. Check out my infrared gallery for more or go visit my flickr page to leave a comment.

Having left France Telecom R&D in search of different waters, I arrived at the shores of the Media Lab, where I'm now employeed at NeCSys.

My first day was on Monday and I've already been overwhelmed with new names and faces. I am determined to fix that as soon as possible; there are some amazing people and projects here and I plan to meet them all. If you are at MIT and reading this, stop by E15-463F and say hi.

Tina and I went for a walk around town, enjoying the 10°C weather. We took my recently-modded Canon that now only sees near-infrared. I'm still working out the kinks with the mod, so some pictures are slightly blurry.

I finally did the Bluetooth handset mod using a vintage Series-500-ish handset. It can connect to my phone and using the button on it, pick up the phone and do voice dialing. Click the above image for more details.

I finally made a real version of my 24h analog clock. You can play along at home, as I put up some notes and pictures about the build process. I think it looks quite nice in our kitchen.

I have been working on a design for a noon-at-the-top 24h analog clock. It is going to become a real clock for our kitchen, as soon as I buy the hardware for it and get the face printed.

For fun, I decided to animate the SVG source so that it displays the current time in your browser. You can see the smaller, live version of the clock that should work in quality browsers such as Firefox.

Of course, this is all released under an open-ish license (non-commercial), so feel free to hack away! See the project page for more details.

Update: I've updated the design to version 2.1 so that it works better across platforms. Apparently the text-on-path feature isn't reliable for spacing things out. This new version seems a bit more readable from a distance, too.

I just completed my first IR webcam mod, loosely following the simple directions found on this forum: open it up, scrape off the infrared filter from the lens with a screwdriver, add a visible light filter (in my case, a Wratten 87), and finally close again. This particular webcam (Intel CS-330) is nice for experimentation in that it has an adjustable lens for focusing close up on things.

I modified the directions slightly, so I could preserve as much image quality as I could manage. Instead of scraping off the old filter with a screwdriver, I opted for 600 grit sandpaper (use higher if you can find it) and a little veggie oil (I think you're supposed to use mineral oil, but this is all I had).

So far, it works! So far, I haven't had much to look at yet as almost all our apartment's lighting is compact fluorescent and emits little IR. The above photo was taken in my bathroom with the only remaining incandescent light bulbs. Of course, my shirt and hat are both black, despite them showing up as bright white and grey (respectively) in the photo.

Once I get some daylight, I'll be posting many more photos to this gallery. As I have a lot of the Wratten 87 filter left, I may mod a more portable camera as well for experimentation in the wild. I was able to see quite a bit with just the Wratten 87 filter held in front of my Nokia 6103's camera (that photo was taken during the day).

This has been said many times, however I repeat these things here because they have made a difference in my life. They are not easy to do, but neither is changing one's life.

Fundamentally, these tips are about changing from a passive participant in the world (and in your life) to becoming an active participant. It is about getting on the other side of the screen and becoming a producer instead of simply a consumer.

See more ...

So, I finally got my Tux beret made. In fact, I got four of them made (one for a spare and two to sell).

But you've had a penguin beret before! True, but it was the Penguin Books penguin. Now I've got the right penguin and all is well.

If you would like to buy one of the two extras that I had made, contact me. Due to the small run, the costs were higher, so each one will be sold for $30 + shipping. They're all gone at the moment. I gave my last extra away recently.. If I get enough interest in them, I'll do a larger batch and can probably sell them for $20/ea.