Reza’s Rants

• now on hold for 10 minutes waiting for #sonicnet — they should make it up by giving me a free year of service. #
• @alderete brewing beer in the backyard — stop by if your bored. #

Personal

• likes Blade Runner on Boxee. check it out at http://bit.ly/tYFoN #

Personal

Anyone want to guess what I’m building now?

Electronics, Personal heatsink, peltier, steampunk, tubes

I was in an art supply store with Sarah and came across some supplies for screen printing so I thought I would give it a go. Turned out that the instructions weren’t so great. As they say, third time is the charm – the first two attempts I had overexposed the screen. The instructions said 1.5 hours with a 150W bulb. Turns out that 20 minutes with a 75W flood light is all that is required. The paint also requires an iron to set, which is a technology I do not believe in. So I used my 1375W hot air gun, which seemed to work fine (I applied for 30 seconds vs. 3-5 minutes with the iron). I went with an homage to Team America.

Personal art, silkscreen, team america, tshirt

Many hours ago I got sidetracked and decided to build a “quick” Carbon Monoxide (CO) sensor interface. The CO sensor is a Figaro TGS 2442 Carbon Monoxide sensor. It ended up taking much loner than expected to build – though most all projects take longer than expected. I am using the module in the bottom of the picture to power the device via a USB connector. The number of LEDs illuminated increase as the CO2 conentration increases. The measured values from the sensor are pretty meaningless as the device must first be calibrated using controlled CO concentrations which I can’t produce at home. As a result, I defined the CO level in my room as 1 LED. The goal is to migrate this circuit into my car and use it to gather geotagged CO data on the road using the car gadget that I recently mentioned.

Electronics, Personal avr, co2, sensor

Personal competition, kitesurf, sf

I recently ordered 3 cups from a company. They were packaged well, but one of them still broke. I called UPS and they said they were going to send out an inspector to look at the $6 broken cup to file a report. I wonder how much money it costs UPS to send somone out to do an inspection? I can’t imagine it being less than $6.

I also contacted the company I bought it from, and they said that they were going to ship me a replacement. I’m not sure if their reply was a joke, or if they were taking the broken glass situation a bit too seriously — but I just received the package..

Yes, all that packaging for just a single cup. *sigh*

Personal cup, packaging, shipping, ups

• Checking out the new Postbox email application – now supports add-ons like Lightning for calendaring. http://postbox-inc.com #

Personal

I upgraded my network connection to Gigabit Ethernet and ran some tests which revealed that I had NO speed increase going from 100-mbit ethernet to 1000-mbit ethernet – both came in at 8MB/s. My tests involved timing the download of a large file from a linux server sitting next to the switch. I plugged in my Mac laptop, and the file flew across at 50MB/s. I asked one of my networking friends, and he pointed me to this article. It turns out that Vista purposely caps network traffic because there is a chance that the network traffic might make your audio playback skip if you have a really slow computer. I thought it was too stupid to be the culprit, but I tried it out. Sure enough…

Red – before registry tweaks to turn off audio throttlling service

Green – After following instructions in the link

Yellow – Theoretical Maximum

Personal, Software bandwidth, gige, networking, vista

I was playing around with the Tamper Data plugin for firefox which lets you monitor traffic while loading webpages. I was playing around on gmail and quickly noticed somthing which I thought was a bit disturbing. It seems that gmail monitors where your mouse is and if the gmail window is in focus or not — and constantly is sending state changes back to google. I suppose that by using google, you agree to some level of monitoring for targeted advertising — but monitoring where I mover the mouse and how often I have gmail in the foreground seems a bit totally creapy. All a bit too big brother if you ask me.

POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=i&req0_time=293131&req0_evtype=mousemove

POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=1

POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=0

Personal evil, gmail, mouse tracking