Sub Ubi

“To find things and play on it.”

Via robogeek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RyodnisVvU

Awesome. A funky little rhythm bot.

I ordered a new computer today.

The fit-PC is a 500MHz computer with 256MB of RAM and 60GB of disk. It has two ethernet ports, a VGA port, audio in/out, and a serial port. It costs $325 (shipped), has Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed (or optional Windows XP), and draws a maximum of 5W under load.

The fit-PC draws 5W under load.

To put that in perspective, my MacBook has a 65W power adapter. A typical desktop has a 200W power supply. The fit-PC draws less juice from the wall than an energy saving light bulb. It is fanless, so the computer is no louder than the hard drive… (which, in an aluminum case, is going to be very, very quiet). That, and it’s small. A CD jewel case is 142 mm × 125 mm × 10 mm. The fit-PC is 116mm x 120mm x 40mm. That means it is as tall as four CD cases, and has a footprint that is smaller than those CD cases.

This computer is slated to become the backup server for Untyped. I’ll plug in a USB hard drive (possibly two) and just let it back our dedicated host up. Once we get settled in our new home, I may find a use for another as either a firewall or as a media server. We’ll see… mostly, I’m just amazed to have found a fully-featured Linux computer that is so incredibly power efficient.

Links:

• Wikipedia
• Linux Devices
• ExtremeTech
• fit-PC website

Last Saturday, I ran with the Olin track team in the Jim Sheehan Memorial Track and Field Invitational at Fitsburg State College. I ran a 6:47, which was about 30 seconds faster than my time trial the Wednesday before the meet. I was surprised at the time, and all of us wondered if they had forgotten one of my laps.

Today, we ran in in the Northeastern Solomon Husky Invitational which was just down the road from Olin. The week before I went out fast, and finished weak. Today, my primary goal was to pace myself better in the first two laps and finish the race strong. As it turned out, I did just that: I was able to stride out and finish hard in the last lap, which is what I wanted. As a result, I managed a 6:38. Yes, I was almost two full minutes slower than all of the other runners… I even ran part of my race in the second lane just so they could blow by me.

(Apparently, I now have an overview page that tracks my performance as an athlete at meets or something… however, I don’t think we have any more meets this year…)

Overall, I’m incredibly pleased. I bought a pair of good running shoes back in October, and didn’t really do that much running during the autumn. In January, I committed to running with the track team a few times a week, and managed that pretty consistently. As a result, I’ve gotten myself into good enough shape that I could go out and compete in a 1500m race! Well, compete might be a bit too strong a word… but I went out on a track, took off running with the gun, and did pretty well for a guy who never really was much of a runner.

Interestingly, the loop I depicted in that blog post from October is the loop I ran this Wednesday. I ran it at near competition pace, and other than a 20 second break, I ran the whole thing at pace. Considering that, in October, I could barely shuffle that 2 mile distance… I’m pretty damn impressed.

BUT! Not as impressed as I am with Phillip “CRaZyMan!” Chung, who is a first-year student at Olin College. He ran (get this) the 10,000m, the 3,000m steeplechase, and the 5000m today… all in the same meet. The first event of the day was the 10K, which was immediately followed by the 3K steeplechase. I’m not kidding here: he finished the 10K, jogged over to the start of the steeplechase, stretched for a minute, and they started the race. It was the first time he had run the steeplechase. Later in the meet, he asked for permission to run the 5K (he hadn’t been registered in advance), and the meet official decided that anyone who ran the 10K and steeplechase should be allowed to run the 5K if they wanted to.

Absolutely crazy.

I may write a followup post about the meet; I will say it was certainly a lot of fun, and I had an excellent time just being outside, enjoying the weather, and cheering teammates on. It… well, it felt right. I think I always enjoyed track and field, and it was great to be part of a team again. Perhaps that’s just one more tick mark in the column labeled “Why Olin College is special.”

I don’t usually impulse buy. In fact, I just plain don’t buy many things, full stop. Generally, I want less stuff laying around. But there have been two recent acquisitions around the house that may help reduce the general stress level by introducing a bit more—vegetation and play, perhaps.

After months of being back in the US, we finally got a TV. The entertainment center was $30 from a guy down the street (hooray Craigslist), and the TV from someone across town for $40. So, $70 picked up a reasonable piece of furniture and a 27″ TV so we can watch movies. I think that was a good deal, all told.

This next one, though, I’m quite pleased with. I will admit that it was an impulse buy. I just finished finding a CC-licensed photo of some LEGO that I needed for a document I’m writing. (I’m working on a tutorial for the Robotics class, which is based on the LEGO Mindstorms.) After finding that picture, I was inspired to do some poking around on eBay, because I wanted a brief break from writing… and look at this!

That’s a 400+ piece DUPLO collection! Yes, that is awesum!

Check out all of those DUPLO minifigs!

And look at those two hip cats takin’ a ride in the DUPLO choo-choo! That thing freaking rocks my socks.

And yes, I have the DUPLO MAN. The LEGO police can go around putting the hurt on anyone they need to.

I have a lot of LEGO; I am still wandering around with approximately 12 LEGO Mindstorms RCXs, plus a lot of other bits. Basically, I have many, many LEGO pieces in my collection. Oddly, I have no DUPLO. So, when I saw this eBay auction, I snagged it for $50, which I think is a very good deal. A box of 100 DUPLO pieces from LEGO costs $45, so I think this was a steal.

It’s a frivolous impulse buy, but I was brought up to love LEGO. And I’ll end up using it with students in the classroom, so this was a good buy all around. And, most importantly, I NOW HAVE 400 DUPLO PIECES! MINE! ALL MINE! BWAHAHAHAH!

OK. I’ll calm down. Back to writing.

PS. Ron, if you’re reading this, don’t tell the kids. They’ll be jealous, and I’m not sure I’m ready to share yet. Or, for that matter, cart 400 DUPLO pieces down south so William can get his build on…

Amazing.

Carrie found a note about a Roomba. She sent it to me via IM. I sent the seller an email saying I was interested, and included my phone number. He called me within 45 seconds of hitting “send”. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Hopefully it was a $50 well spent. My hope is it does OK around the house, or serves well in student projects. Perhaps I can find a way to work it into Software Design this semester… I’ll have to look into getting a Bluetooth serial module or something so that students can play with it from their laptops.

So, it’s that time.

Next Thursday, we move to Boston. We have nowhere to live, which is exciting. Exciting in a “may you live in interesting times” kind of exciting. I suppose that’s a vaguely evil, sarcastic kind of exciting.

What I just discovered was that Google Maps has a “Real Estate Search.” I had no idea such a thing existed. I can type in what I’m looking for (rental), a price range, and keywords (eg. “furnished”), and it shows me places in my current view that match my criteria.

Wacky. Even though I know how they did it, it still seems like magic.

My MSP430-4619LCD development board arrived today from Spark Fun. Indeed, I got the last one they had in stock. Ha!

Top:

Bottom:

This board has a Texas Instruments MSP430 (bottom), 128×128 color LCD (top), joystick (top), two buttons (top), 3-axis accelerometer (top), and SD card slot (bottom) for storage. This is a very cool little development platform, and you can bet that I’ll be running the Transterpreter on it shortly.

Awesome.

I received this comment to my last post:

Jungrire, qhqr. V’z n uhzna naq V unir penml znq rapelcgvba fxvyym

This cyphertext does not look like it went through a particularly hard algorithm. In fact, the remenant of punctuation, and the fact that some of the letters show up with what appears to be a “normal” frequency is a big clue that this is, most likely, a Caesar cypher—or a shift of 13 letters. The question is, did the enterprising individual do it themselves, or find a webpage to encrypt their message to me.

I used a webpage to decrypt it.

The cleartext is:

WHATEVER, DUDE. I’M A HUMAN AND I HAVE CRAZY MAD ENCRYPTION SKILLZ

The use of non-standard spelling of “SKILLZ” could have thrown most people in decrypting this cyphertext, but my on-line decrypter munched right through it. So, yes, some humans are amazingly adept at carrying out secure cryptographic functions; I have no idea what I was thinking in that last post. My bad.

Woot! iTerm now supports a full-screen mode!

Awesome! And, it auto-updates now, which is very, very swish.

Sadly, my Roomba arrived dead-on-arrival. I’m waiting for a UPS label to mail it back (along with the bits that fell out of its innards upon opening). Given our timeframe, I don’t think I’ll order another before going back to England.

And it looked like such a good toy, too. I had visions of plugging my Gumstix into it, and writing my own vacuuming algorithms on the Transterpreter.