Warning: What follows is a rant triggered by having to log into yet another site in order to carry out some simple task I do 50 times a day on a dozen different sites. It’s not me at my most thoughtful, and it may only make sense to people who care about Web site authentication.
Category Archives: Technology
in which i join you in the 21st century
[from my GeekDad post]
I have a confession to make. Compared to most GeekDads, I’m kind of a Luddite. I don’t have a video game console, or a TV to plug it into. I play games with cards and boards, not on the computer. My pets are biological, not robotic. Heck, I don’t even have a microwave. It’s not that I’m opposed to technology, of course, it just tends to get in the way of my life and family.
So I felt odd having a “2001″ technology moment this month.
You know the scene, that videophone call Heywood Floyd makes to his daughter back on Earth. It never made sense to me: he steps off a frickin’ spaceplane onto a frickin’ space station on his way to the frickin’ Moon, and the first thing he does is hop into a phone booth to have a chat with a nearly-incoherent five-year-old who doesn’t care about what he’s doing as long as he brings back a present. (“Way to move the plot along,” I always thought, followed by, “What’s a bush baby?”)
And now I get it, because I’ve done the same thing. Well, substitute a city bus for the spaceplane and my kitchen for the orbiting Hilton, but the rest is spot on. See, the Geeklet and Mrs. Geek are visiting friends for the entire month of August, and due to a bit of bad planning I won’t be joining them until the very end of their trip. I call every day, but to the Geeklet phones are just instruments for saying “Hello” and “Goodbye” to disembodied voices with familiar names. After a few days, he refused to talk to me at all. So I reluctantly did what any GeekDad probably would have started with: I set up a video chat.
Electric Buzz
Yep, that’s me looking all farmer-like last winter sitting on Barefoot’s electric ATV prototype named “Alice.” My crew and I have had the luck of being able to test this Barefoot Motors prototype; which basically means driving it all over our vineyards and trying to break it. And we did — except all it needed was a quick cable reconnect and a replacement 12V battery and we were up and zipping around again.
You can see Alice in action on this Mythbusters clip: Barefoot ATV on Mythbusters!
I don’t know if you’re familiar with regular gas ATVs, but if you’ve spent anytime in that saddle, then you know how loud and stinky they are. Oh yeah, still fun, but loud and stinky — and HOT. Hot right where your legs are supposed to go since you are basically sitting on a combustion engine and gas tank with four wheels. Not something that is enjoyable to ride for the hours we put in on them while working on the farm vineyard. Plus all that exhaust and noise are not so good for the environment. So, when I first heard about what Barefoot Motors was trying to do, I was pretty excited.
Recently, Barefoot had a release party at our winery (read more here: Electric ATV Easy on Environment and Budget) — and I got to test drive their new prototype named “Betty.” Where Alice was a gutted and retro-fitted Polaris, Betty is a complete redesign from the ground up (by the well known electric vehicle designer Ely Schless, no less!) — the only thing she had in common with Alice was a Polaris skin. I took her for a spin (sorry no pictures, but I can show you the bugs that got caught in my teeth) around our ranch and, like the Bionic Woman, she is better, faster, stronger. And so quiet the rabbits didn’t even know I was coming.
Barefoot is still working on options such as cruise control as well as better torque control, but we’ve got our deposit down and are looking forward to getting our hands on our own vehicle once they build it for us. In the meantime, we are very happy beta-testers.
on iPhoneDevCamp and a lack of writing
Things have been quiet at Global Spin lately, but not because I have nothing to talk about. I’ve just been doing my writing elsewhere, like these two stories about my recent trip to iPhoneDevCamp. From GeekDad:
I had a great time at iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco last weekend. Lots of geekdads and their kids were in attendance. Joe Michels got an iPhone so he could show off photos of his kids, but now he’s writing apps. Carlos McEvilly (pictured) wrote code while his daughter Annika playtested games for other developers. Ray Valdes and his kids worked together on a mermaid game, while Camp organizer Dom Sagolla’s infant son Leo offered to judge the Tastiest App award.
And the apps? I’m biased, but Fwerps is so awesome! A fwerp is a virtual pet–think tamagotchi tribble without the trademark infringement. The idea came from LC Boros, who also served as art director and “fwerp herder”. We wanted to make something that was unique to the Touch platform, so we concentrated on the accelerometer (rocking it to sleep), touch gestures (petting), sound/vibration (purring), and network (reproducing). Our “code gopher” Matt Paul hunted down utility code, and I put the pieces together in Xcode. It took round-the-clock coding and a lot of help from other developers, but we got something that worked well and didn’t crash during the demo! (Video of the demo is already online.) [Read more...]
…and from Webmonkey, another Wired blog:
Wow. If there was any doubt that the iPhone is a hot platform, iPhoneDevCamp 2 just squashed it like a tank tread over a pile of Zunes.
Hundreds of attendees got together for a weekend of iPhone application hacking, discussion and beer. Buckets of beer and piles of pizza, all supplied by sponsors eager to find out who might have the next killer app. And apps there were aplenty; 44 teams submitted them for the hackathon, including 3 top apps from satellite camps.
I didn’t mention sleep, because there was none. This was my very first time developing for the iPhone (or in Objective-C at all), so I coded into the wee hours of the morning just to get things to compile. My team got a lot of help from Objective-C gurus on site, too. [Read more...]
I also started a project page for Fwerps, because you know I need more projects to work on.
Showing off the awesome baby that is Luke
And showing off the friendship star quilt that Karen made for Luke, too!