Snowmageddon 2010

Hello all from the frozen tundra of Minnesota! Quite an adventure today as close to 24" of snow is scheduled to fall and our town has announced a state of emergency. Of course, I only found this out after I tried to go out. Normally the rule of thumb is if you can escape your driveway and onto a main road, you're good to go. Not the case today because they decided it was a losing battle to try and clean it up now, so they are waiting. I got about 3 miles from my house before I finally called it quits and went back home. Why was out I out do you ask? Well, it just so happened that I got one row of my driveway snowblowed out, when it decided to sputter and die. After careful inspection, we suspect that it has a clogged fuel filter. So I figured I'd either be staying and shoveling or going and snowblowing. So I made a run for it. Immediately when I hit the snow in my driveway I knew I was in trouble for I could feel it start to slow me down instantly. The Explorer fought against it with all it had but it gave up the ghost just at the end the driveway when it hit the hard pack from the initial plowing that occurred before the announcement. After an hour of getting all the snow out from around, under, and behind the truck I finally was able to manuever and made the decision to try and punch it into town. At this point, I should have known that there was going to be a problem when a couple goes walking past my driveway in the middle of the road on snowshoes, we said hello like it was a sunny summer's eve and I was washing my car, I love Minnesota. But on the other hand, the roads had less snow, and all I needed to do was keep forward momentum going, right? Easy peasy...until after 20 minutes of fighting heavy drifts and almost stopping to help somebody who was stuck in the middle of an intersection in a 4x4....I decided that my snowblower wasn't the most important thing and I should probably hightail it home.

Out my driver door when I arrived back home...all the way up to the door.

Another picture after I punched it into the driveway on the way home.

So yeah...I pushed about 2"-3" just to open the drivers door.

All in all, this is part of the reason I love living in MN, the high highs, the low lows, and the fact that I just saw another couple outside out walking their dog. This is definitely a strange place to live...

Project: Wii Golf Simulator

Project Name: Wii Golf Simulator (WGS)
Project Type: C# Program
Project Reason: I just got a Wii Balance Board, already had Wii Motion Plus, and with Winter starting I began playing the Wii more, plus a new diet had me trying out Wii Fit Plus. So Wii Fit Plus comes with a great Golf Driving Range, which looks at your weight shift to determine ball flight/power. Pretty good, but not great because it doesn't take into effect your arms. Slide in Tiger Woods 2K11...this is awesome because it picks up every single bit of movement with the Motion Plus and is very accurate with swing action. However, no balance board so nothing in the weight shift taken into account. The question is...how hard would it be to create something that takes both into account?

Project Plan: To create a C# program that interfaces with the Wiimote, Motion+, and the Balance Board to do data collection about a golf swing and report back information about it. Possibly even present a 3D model with movements tied to the movements being logged by the hardware.

Project Cost: $0
Project Timeline: ~1000hrs (plus or minus 2hrs) - span will be over my lifetime
Project Starting: Evening of 11/25/2010
Project Phases:
1) Datalogger for hardware
2) Data Interpreter to interpret data into body motions
3) Display Model to show motions
4) Collect data and video from real golf swings
5) Data Interpreter to interpret data into ball flights
6) Display Models to show ball flight
7) Create Gameplay/Instruction Modes

Initial Resources: http://www.brianpeek.com/blog/pages/wiimotelib.aspx
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wiimote/Extension_Controllers


Obviously, not exactly an overnight project (even with Mr. Peek doing 75% of my work by creating his fantastic Wii Library), but I haven't done any real programming in a long time and I was inspired. This is not my first golf-style simulator either, for my Senior Thesis project at Kettering University I used a Cognex Machine Vision Camera to track a real golf putt and determine how good of a shot it was. As it turns out, just because the ball went in the cup there are still a number of ways to determine just how good the putt was.

Eventually once I have something that somebody can see, I'll be creating a Sourceforge Project page.

Removing the Blog Cobwebs

Summer has bit me in the butt this summer when it comes to projects...apparently I like just hanging out doing nothing...or I traveled a lot for work and have gone through 3 reformats on my computers and 3 reformats on my Blackberries. It was crazy, I didn't travel on an airplane for work a single time in 2009...now 2010 has seen me going to Germany, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Ohio, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And the majority of those all came in the month of June.

Along with that I had my laptop blow a screen, so I got a brand new Lenovo T510. I don't have a lot of love for IBM now Lenovo laptops, but so far this is a pretty nice one. I received it the day before leaving on a trip, and I was pretty excited because it was supposed to come with Windows 7 on it, and I was ready to move on from XP to see what all the hype was about...of course as I pushed to get the laptop as soon as I could because my other one was broken and I didn't want to be in an old intermediate laptop for too long, it ended up coming with XP. No time to reformat now, I'll have to travel with it. Gotta say...it sucked. It was almost jittery...which a Quad Core Processor with 4GB of ram should never ever ever be jittery....it was. Finally when I arrived back in the office, I was able to reformat it to Windows 7. Much better. I think it was actually too much machine for XP, which lead to XP having to try to decide what to do with all the excess processing power and caused jitters. I liken the situation to XP wanting to bounce a ball against a wall, but my computer had so many resources instead of hitting a wall and bouncing back, it was like throwing a ball into a field and having to run after it. However, Windows 7 did give me a problem...I was getting BSODs after installing certain programs. Programs that I've seen installed on other machines and programs that should have no problem (one was Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007...Microsoft!!) The BSOD pointed to the antivirus that my company runs which is F-Secure (an aside? This program sucks) however uninstalling that made no difference in the installation process except instead of a BSOD my computer just locked up instead. Then came Safe Mode and System Restore to the rescue. Of course, I was about to go back on the road so no time for another reformat, this led to installation of Windows XP Mode. What is this you ask? Why, this is a program that acts like Windows XP so you can run programs in an XP environment. In other words...it's a repackaged Windows Virtual PC. I was a little disappointed to learn this, because I've never seen virtualization work really well and really seamless. Thankfully, I was completely wrong. Virtual PC works so flawlessly within Windows 7 and when you're working inside of it, you swear you're using a standard Windows XP machine. The second thing that is really nice is that it's very easy to share files between the harddrive and the Virtual Harddrive. Loaded up with virtualization I continued on for a few more weeks, then just last week I was able to get a new reformat finished. Thankfully, no BSODs any more, so now I'm back in rebuilding mode.

Along with the computer stuff, I was also very very glad to see the launch of the new iPhone4. Of course, this was not because I was able to get one..I don't want one. However, it meant that the manager of my department was able to get one and I was able to slide myself into a Bold 9700. Fantastic device, smooth as silk, optical trackpad, 3G...just great. Of course, that means I had to reset up the phone as well while I'm messing around with resetting my computer, all while I'm traveling around and starting to pack up the house for the big move.

Soon I'll have some follow-up posts to talk about the new Blackberry and some new apps I've discovered, along with possibly some Windows 7 widgets and goodness.

Ford Explorer: Project Vents - Post 1

Well, my first project with the blog up and running so it'll be a learning experience for all of us. Feel free to comment with ways you'd like to see this presented. Here's my hope for a first try format:

Step 1: Pre-Project Post - Give reason for project, goals, expected timeline, and any up-front research materials and costs.

Step 2: In-Project Posts - Posts within the project that will include progress, pictures, costs, and issues. Not sure how often these will come, probably once a day maybe...we'll see. If you're interested in mid-project information, follow me on Twitter.

Step 3: Wrap up - This post will be written so that somebody with the same problem can follow this single post from start to finish and hopefully do the same thing with minimal problems.

So there we go, this is the first post on the first project...so be gentle.


Project Name: Vents
Project Type: Ford Explorer
Project Reason: The vents in the Explorer will not change from blowing out of the defrost and the floor to the panel vents. Very not cool for the A/C season!
Project Cost: $0
Project Timeline: 5-10hrs over 1-2days
Project Starting: Evening of 5/30/2010

Initial Resources: http://www.justanswer.com/questions/3814k-2003-ford-explorer-only-blows-air-from-the-dash-vents-switch

Potpourri

Hello All!

Sorry I've not posted for a while, part of it was because I didn't have much to write about, part of it was because this blog was created to document projects which I haven't done many of recently, but most of all I've just been lazy and forgetful. However, I'm about to embark on a project which I hope it to be the first one which I fully document...we'll see how it goes.

So I will post a short introduction to the project next, which is going to be trying to fix my vent system on the Explorer, as right now it's stuck on defrost and floor and it's getting hot and the A/C is not very useful on that setting.

Also, here is a quick follow-up to my previous post about Integrated technology...it may not be a phone, but it at least runs on a phone OS...it's a start.




That's right, when docked it's a fully functional netbook with Windows 7, and if you remove the screen you get an Android powered tablet...how cool!

Let's see, what else to mention of things I've found in the recent findings...

- Worldmate Travel App on the Blackberry is pretty cool, for free you can forward your confirmation emails of your flights, cars, and hotels and it scours the emails and displays all your travel details in an app complete with confirmation numbers, phone numbers, and maps to the hotel...very handy.

- I'm currently downloading BitBop, which claims to offer free TV streaming to mobile devices and acts like a little DVR for the phone so you can set which shows to show up.

- The wife's android phone got upgraded finally to Android 2.1, days of course to when Android 2.2 was announced (Froyo). Lots of cool features added, a few interesting bugs added, all and all good update. Google Navigation is a very amazing beta...can't wait til they put more time into it.

- Just started working with Trapster a little bit, it adds a new layer to your google maps basically alerting you of all the speed traps, cameras, and regulated speed zones in your upcoming path. It's all driven by other users, so it works best in well populated areas. I still haven't found a good mounting solution for either phone yet so I have yet to use it to it's full potential...we'll get there.

- OurGroceries is a great app that keeps lists...kinda like the Maratick that I talked about before. However, this one allows you to connect your lists with another persons, which means when you open it you get anything the other person has added! How fantastic for families who want to keep an updated grocery list for everybody who's grocery shopping. We've linked my Blackberry App with the wife's Android app...everything working as promised. Just make sure to close the app down fully otherwise it'll chew up battery and bandwidth as it's always checking...Push functionality anyone?

At the risk of this becoming a Blackberry Blog, I'll stop here by mentioning that it looks like I weasled my way into a Blackberry upgrade to go along with a laptop upgrade, so soon I might have a few more apps to play with and report on along with some Windows 7 pros/cons.

Beyond that, look forward to a project post here soon and I'll try to post some daily updates.

Installed Apps on my Blackberry

So I'm about to embark on a new OS for my Blackberry Curve 8900, and I always do a full wipe when I do this. I say always, but really I've only done this once before. Things worked out really well for me last time so I don't have many worries. This time I'm going to take it a step farther and install a hybrid OS. This is where a really smart dude takes the binary files for all the Blackberry OS files he can get his hands on and take bits and pieces creating a masterpiece of wonder for your phone. Supposed to help battery life, general issues, and memory optimization. Of course, due to the full wipe, it's time to document which apps will get re-installed afterward. So I thought I might write up a post to highlight my list. Hope it helps somebody someday.

Social Media
Facebook
LinkedIn
Foursquare
Twitter

Mapping / GPS
Google Maps
Blackstar - Geocaching and GPS waypoint logger
BBGPSGolf - Golfing GPS application which allows you to map out a golf course before hitting the links using Google Maps satellite view. Pretty awesome app for golfers.

Utilities
BBWeather - Free weather app, icon changes with conditions, and auto-updates location based on GPS signal
YouMail - Free Visual Voicemail service!!
XE Curreny - Keep track of currency exchange around the world...gotta keep an eye on that Euro!
Pandora
TwinsBaseball.com - Gotta keep track of my World Series bound team
MaraTick - Simple checklist app
Navita Translator - Handy when in Europe in case you forgot how to say something
FileScout - File Explorer App
Google Talk
Microsoft Live
Blackberry App World

Games
Baby Go! - Simple game that locks out your phone and says the letters to your child.

On the Bubble
Not sure if I'll be putting these back on or not, but I figured just in case I need the names I'll throw them down.

Scanlife - 1D Barcode Reader
Beetagg - 2D Barcode Reader
Viigo - News/RSS Feeds

Well that's about it, here's hoping it goes well again, nothing like getting IT ticked off at me on a Friday. :)

Huh? What? Did I forget something? OH!! RIGHT!! THEMES!

Well I only use one, but it would have been rough had I lost it and had to go refind it again. The best thing I can find for the name is com_plazmic_theme_Blackberry_Prov3...interesting. Basically it's a dark theme, it has quick shortcuts for Messages, Calendar, Browser, Options, and Profiles built into the bottom row. I can preview items like Messages and Calendar, and then on top of that I have 5 more configurable icons I can place on the main page. Along with a Weather icon that will show up in the top corner. It's pretty sweet....

The Future of Integrated Technology

So I was talking with my father over the phone the other day, and if you wonder where you came from just look at your parents and you'll probably see yourself. Anybody who knows me knows that this is definately the case when it comes to me. My father and I have spent a number of nights thinking up 30 different ways to solve problems, and this past evening was no exception aside from one critical detail. This time my father came to me with an idea that was rooted in state-of-the-art technology. Before I reveal to you his idea, you must understand my father. He has a computer which connects to the internet via dial-up, the majority of the phones in his house are rotary, and in order for him to get a cell phone I had to thrust it into his hand and say it was paid for. I think you get the idea, so now you're prepared to understand the importance of him having this idea.

He's been watching my wife and I playing with our new smartphones, and he thought about how powerful just the phones were getting nowadays. He thought it would be a pretty good idea if you came home, you plugged your cell phone into the home docking station and then immediately all the already installed home phones routed through the cell phone. Then you could have an external monitor and keyboard, and the phone could basically be your computer. This would especially be useful for those of us that just use the computer to surf the web, read email, perhaps writing some letters. I thought this was a fantastic idea, and figured there might be such a beast already. As it turns out, my assumption was half correct. First, to make the home phones route through your cell phone, it seems the best option in this market is the Dock-N-Talk from PhoneLabs. It connects to your phone through bluetooth, and basically makes all the landline phones just like a bluetooth headset.

The second half of his idea has not seemed to come into existence yet, however there is no lack of people that would love to have this ability. Like I've already written about, my wife has the Samsung Moment with an 800mhz processor...I think it'd be fantastic to have a monitor + keyboard for this platform. The closest thing to this is the netbooks that have started to get popular. There are even a few out there running Android on a netbook. However, a netbook still doesn't fix the problem of the need to eventually have to walk out the door and you need something to fit in your pocket. So far I haven't seen much in the way of a product that fits into this product realm.

So if you know of something like this on the horizon please let me know, this sounds like a great combination of technology and accessories.

Oh, and Dad? Just to let you know last night when we talked about you not owning a dedicated CD player? You have 2, both of them are my old stereos you have setup in the garage. :)