todbot blog » ramblings

Too Much RFID

todbot — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:11:37 +0000

[This post was part of a CrashSpace mailing list discussion on a "proximity t-shirt": a shirt that would light up or similar when other similar t-shirts were nearby. People were wondering how good RFID was at localized detection of tags.]

Okay so I’m a big RFID nerd, did a lot of consulting work using it. So here’s a quick brain dump.

Regular passive RFID is designed for identification not localization. The RFID tags can be reliably read only to within a few centimeters. But the readers are cheap. You can get 128kHz (LF) and 13.56MHz (HF) RFID [...]

In Memoriam: Jed the cat, ~1992 – 8 Aug 2007

todbot — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:15:13 +0000

Jed, aka “JedJedJed”, “Jedders”, “Jedbutt”, “Little Wacko” died today after living approximately 15 years. He died quietly in his home with me at his side.

He had lymphoma that ate up his back leg joint and alimentary canal. It was so frustrating, for both me and him, to see his body failing when his mind was still so alert and active. Why don’t we have mind uploads yet? Why no restore from backup? The world of atoms sucks sometimes.

I got Jed from the Pasadena Human Society sometime in 1994 (or maybe ’93). He was ~2 [...]

The Ubicomp of Tomorrow, After These Messages

todbot — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:47:37 +0000

In my periodic perusal of Warren Ellis’s blog, I see he’s linked to Nicolas Nova’s post about “The Ubiquitous Computing of Today”. Nicolas discusses a great LIFT07 paper, “Yesterdayâ€™s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computingâ€™s dominant vision” by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2006). He and the paper highlight a persistent problem with ubicomp research: the ever-receding horizon of technology.

It’s a truism that the technology we need is “just around the corner”. This “proximal future” described in the paper is comforting because it means we don’t have to focus on the actual implementation issues. [...]

Sketching in Hardware: USB on Rails

todbot — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 04:58:17 +0000

I gave a talk at the Sketching in Hardware 1 conference. It was a great conference, full of amazing people and hosted at an astounding location. I’ll write more on the conference later.

My talk was “USB on Rails”. The USB HID standard enables the sending and receiving of arbitrary data-structures (“objects”) between a host PC and a device. All without any additional device drivers, since the HID driver is built in to all OSs. Many sketching tools or demos use USB, but introducing them to the unintiated means lots of reboots for driver installs. The [...]

SpiroExplorer, a Spirograph toy

todbot — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 06:31:14 +0000

So I’ve written a tool that can turn any parametric equation into a series of Roomba movement commands. Mostly, anyway. The parametric equations I’m predominately focusing on are the hypotrochoid series of equations used in a Spirograph.

To explore the space of hypotrochoid curves I created SpiroExplorer, a simple Processing applet that lets you to adjust the equation parameters in real-time. You can do the following things while it’s drawing:

- left/right arrows change “r”, the radius of the inner moving circle - up/down arrows change “d”, the pen’s distance from center of the moving circle - ,/. changes “R”, the radius [...]

Epicyclic Processing Triptych

todbot — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 21:57:35 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Processing in order to visualize complex Roomba movements but instead have been having making little graphics programs that amuse me.

Thus the below. Click on each on to start it going.

I guess this is generative art, but mostly it feels like wanking to me. Lots of fun, but still.

ALERT: The robot uprising has begun

todbot — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 19:05:03 +0000

It has started.

(image caption: factory robot wrestles Glock-9 from off-duty officer, shoots him)

They’re not going to take any of our crap anymore.

Scattered reports around the country show a coordinated effort by the machines to displace humanity as rulers of this planet.

If I could make music videos…

todbot — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 19:30:40 +0000

they would all look something like this. (18 MB MOV)

The lighting, the digital compositing, the motion graphics effects… all just perfect. And the hot milfs are nice too.

[from green towel and via the tween blog]

Cache This

todbot — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:47:51 +0000

dumb stream-of-consciousness replacing of ‘cat’ with ‘cache’ for movies

That Darn Cache — You can never have too much Cache on a Hot Tin Roof — A story of casemodding gone horribly, horribly wrong The Cache From Outer Space – Computer technology gets uplifted via Roswell-related research The Cache In The Hash — Turns out you really do know more when stoned Cache Me If You Can — “Why don’t huge porn files load faster!?”

‘Try Again’ button for map routing

todbot — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:34:50 +0000

I wish mapping websites like maps.google.com & maps.yahoo.com had a ‘next’ or ‘try again’ feature after giving you a set of directions.

So many times I can see that there is an alternate route that may be faster, more entertaining, etc. and if I could only say “next”, meaning “perform another route planning, but this time, ignore the connecting streets from the previous route planned”.

Even better (and perhaps more tractable) would be to let one select which street in the current route to delete and route around.

On so many routes I get mapped I’m often saying “yes, yes, that’s all [...]

Tag Links: the Next Stage of Tagging

todbot — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 02:36:26 +0000

(in progress, but published for now so i can think about it)

What if tags had inter-relationships? Labeled inter-relationships?

There’s been lots of noise about “folksonomies” (i.e. bottom-up, emergent, user-generated taxonomies of data) but they all seem to be focused on simple labeling of a particular dataset. The “namespace” of the tags is entirely flat. This is one of the basic strengths of these tagging systems, but also limits it. If current tags are ‘nodes’ of a taxonomy graph, the next stage is to define ‘edges’ between those tags.

These edges describe an inter-relationship between tags and can be tagged [...]

Connectivity Tribes: In the future, we’ll live in Hexagons

todbot — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:26:11 +0000

When I first learned electronics, I thought like most that “wired” was the way to go. Need another DC-to-10 GHz spectrum? Run another coax. Viz. the 80′s/early-90′s with Wired magazine, ethernet, cyberpunk and it’s stereotypical “jacking in”. No one thought wireless was going to be that useful because everyone was stuck in the old model of “transmit as far and as wide as possible” and “we only have one wireless spectrum, we have to conserve and regulate it!”

No longer. We’re discovering how to really use the air spectrum. We’re truly becoming “wireless”. In this [...]

DSL woes, but fixed!

todbot — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 19:58:46 +0000

Rains attack. Tod defends. Communication lines are compromised. Safe mode is engaged and Tod belatedly pounces on the demarc with cutters and splices.

I have Speakeasy as my DSL provider, with a static IP so I can host stuff. They are pretty awesome: their customer service seem to actually have a clue and are fun to talk with, their web site has a decent webmail and useful help ticket system, they don’t block ports, they encourage line sharing, and (as I recently discovered) they’ll send their hardware-level guys called Covad out to your house to check things [...]