This isn’t dissimilar to the work I do with computers – it’s just a different (and more difficult, sometimes) angle on things.  Programs are just tools to move information around, and in some cases, create it.  Machines are just things to move energy around, and I find that my brain sees the design and implementation of each sphere – machines and information – as being fairly similar.

This push to work with metal started at a young age (not coincidentally at the same point as my interest in computers) with my habit of taking apart computers and equipment that my father would bring home.  When I hit 16, I dove into cars headfirst, and spent many hours (days, weeks, months) customizing my Jeeps and other vehicles – V8 conversions, roll cages, urban theftproofing, painting, repair – everything.  I never had enough tools to do everything I needed to, but I made a significant effort to buy good tools when I could afford them – I dislike having to stop my work to go out and borrow resources (though I did plenty of that) or worse, not complete a job or have to re-engineer something because I am unable to do what I need with the tools at hand.  So the steady but certain trickle of buying has left me with a fairly large tool collection  that I’ve amassed over the years, and for nearly any problem that presents itself I am able to find the appropriate drawer in which an implement resides to build or disassemble to reach a solution.

This all changed a number of years ago.  I purchased a CNC 3-in-1 mill/drill/lathe.  Suddenly, I had nothing that worked.  The specialized bits and pieces for working with metal or plastic in a very controlled, precise environment are very fussy, expensive, and often difficult to find.  You can’t just “fake it” with machine tools – there is no bending and fudging.  And there is no “machinist’s beginner pack” that you can buy at Sears.  I will admit that I’m not looking to become a master machinist – it’s a means to an end.  I need holes cut, edges milled, slots made, notches created, burrs removed, parts cut off.  I am not building spacecraft, race engines, or surgical tools – I’m just trying to turn ideas into reality, and the machining process is usually just a small (but vital) part of a larger plan on which I’m working.  So my frustration has been building as I have seen the potential of this great mill/drill/lathe that I own, but it has gone generally unused since even looking at it makes me realize how few accessories I have to get meaningful and accurate results using the machine.

Over the last few years, I’ve purchased parts as I’ve needed them – end mills, lathe bits, clamps, measurement tools… but it’s been very slow going, and every single project seemed to require some new tool that I would have to wait days to receive from McMaster-Carr, or that I would have to go to the local machinist supply shop and bore the guys behind the counter with my newbie questions.  (Machinists are not exactly “open source” or enthusiastic people in general, so getting information consists of asking very exact questions and getting very exact and often unhelpful answers.)  I had acquired enough stuff for specific results, but the specialized nature of the tooling meant that getting a “full” collection was going to either a) cost a HUGE chunk of money, or b) take the rest of my life in a tedious, one-by-one bang-my-head-against-the-wall fashion.

Every once in a while, I would look at eBay or Craigslist for collections of machinist tools, so that at one shot I could buy a whole block of useful stuff that would for the most part enable me to just “walk into” a useful collection.  Yesterday was my lucky day.  I saw an ad, fairly vaguely worded, for “Machinist retiring”.  No picture.  No list of tools.  Just a comment that “there are lots of tools here, come by and take a look.”  OK, I’ll bite.  The most vague ads often are the best ones to pursue, since everyone else just doesn’t look at it or dismisses it when there are more detailed photographs and catchy phrases to see just a click away.  But I called anyway, and arranged a look day before yesterday.  I drove over to the house, and had a very good chat with a recently retired machinist who is trying to get rid of the tools that he’ll no longer need.  The collection consisted of a big Kennedy tool chest (upper and lower and middle) which was FULL of tools.

600 pounds of metallic capability

I knew after opening the first drawer that this was the cache I’d been looking for.  The chest was completely full of tooling – it happens that the first drawer that I opened was one of the “thin” drawers at  the top of the cabinet, which happens to be the heaviest – it’s almost solid tool steel, with hundreds of pieces of lathe and mill tooling neatly tucked into the rectangle of the drawer, making it in essence a solid sheet of steel about 1 inch thick.

Jackpot! Machine tool treasure drawer.

Every bit I picked up was in good condition – no chips, most without any surface rust, edges looked sharp and clean.  I quickly made the decision to buy it after a little price negotiation- not often is there a whole lifetime’s worth of tooling and instruments and “tricks” available in one, compact cabinet.  So I happily packed it all up (which was quite a chore getting it in the truck – I’m guessing all told it’s about 600 pounds) and I’ve installed it in its new home next to my mill/lathe.  My partner heard about it (“I thought we were trying to REDUCE the number of things in the basement!”) and called it “Coot-in-a-box” as a kind of strange twist on products that claim to be all-in-one solutions by putting the name “-in-a-box” at the end of the product.  If I’m headed in the direction of coot-ness, then I suppose this is one of those warning signs.  Next up: coveralls and a ZZ-Top beard.  (Uh… no.)

I’m still going through it all, but here is what I can remember after doing a few more once-overs – I’m sure I’ll find much more as I dig through layers:

• end mills (60? 100?)
• boring bars (20? 30?)
• micrometers (10 or more, varying styles)
• pin gauge sets (3, 1 small, two huge, up to .25)
• drills (50? 100?)
• taps (40? 50?)
• reamers (40?)
• v-blocks
• clamps
• parallels
• center finders
• flap grinders
• collets
• chucks
• surface plates
• measurement tools of all types (mostly Starrett)
• files, punches, drifts, hammers, pliers, allen wrenches,…

 

..and more...

More tools

The list is actually much longer than this – huge. There are something like 20 drawers full.  I can’t even start to count all the things in there, and I probably never will.  I’ll clean everything up, get things organized a bit, and just start using it.  I don’t think I’m going to obsess over organizing it too much other than trying to put all the similar tools in with each other.  This is like the magic grab-bag of resources – either the right tool or a set of tools which can be used is in this box for nearly any metal-related task I have at hand.

One of the first instruments I took out of the box was a three-piece Starrett square, which is basically a very precise ruler which can also measure angles.  Forged steel, a very nice implement.  A quick search of McMaster-Carr – $202 current price.  Woo-hoo!  The price for the whole kit was… well, I won’t say, but suffice that to say I’ve paid way more (double?) for disk drives in the past that are now worth around a dollar.  If I sold just a few things out of the box (even at eBay prices) I’d make up the cost, so I’m going to see if there are any huge numbers of duplicates and maybe this will be a wash.  But otherwise I plan to keep everything.

The tool box came with the factory wheels on it ,which were soft.  During it’s previous life on the shop floor, they had rolled over countless little bits of metal spirals, embedding them into the soft plastic.  I didn’t want to roll a 600 pound cabinet onto the basement tile with metal cleats on, so I replaced the wheels with some that I had laying around with the same bolt pattern.  But the wheels are really interesting-looking – like some sort of accidental art.

Soft wheels + machine room floor = masterpiece

My Mac is running 10.6.5.  I downloaded the TiVO Desktop tool, which allows sharing of photos and music from the Mac to TiVO devices.  But there’s a secret option – video sharing, as well!  If you hold the “Apple” key (aka: option key) down while opening up the Systems Preferences pane for TiVO Desktop, you’ll get an extra tab which says “Videos”.  It’s probably a good idea to use the default directory it puts there (~/Documents/TiVO Recordings)

I then downloaded ffmpegX for Mac to convert the .avi files I obtained into MPEG2 files that the TiVO can understand.

Drag the .avi (or whatever you have) file to the ffmpeg window, or select “Open…”

Settings:

1) The “Save As…” filename MUST end in “.mpg” otherwise the TiVO desktop won’t see it.  There is apparently a cron job or something that the TiVO Desktop runs that scans the video folder you specify, and then the file is added to the video list.  A file called “filename.properties” is created at the same time, which contains some meta-information about the file.  This sometimes takes 5-10 minutes to happen, so be patient before you run out to the TiVO to see if the file has appeared in your video directory.

2) Video window:  I set the codec to “MPEG2 [.MPG] (ffmpeg)” and then manually set the bitrate to 2500.  The maximum video size for the TiVO is 352×480 (found in this post that had some good information) so that is the maximum you can work with.  I set Autosize to 4:3, and framerate to NTSC FILM  for my experiments, and haven’t shifted them.  Now, here is where it gets tricky – many films you’ll get are in a different aspect ratio, and when you squash them into a TiVO non-HD screen size of 352×480, they’ll look weird and horizontally crushed.  Everything will be distorted.  So what I did is set a letterbox (see step 4) which was 60 on the top, and 60 on the bottom.  This means that I had 120 vertical lines of letterbox added to the frame.  ffmpegX doesn’t subtract letterbox from the frame size specified in this window – it adds it.  So I had to subtract the 120 lines from my vertical height, meaning that I specified the frame size as 352×360.  If you do NOT want to use a letterbox specify 352×480 here to get maximum frame size.  I found that 4:3 worked fine without letterboxing on some other videos I had which were not quite so wide.

3) Audio window: I set the codec to “.AC3 (Dolby Digital)”, at 128kbps, 48000 Hz, Stereo, CBR.  Audio track I left at 0.  I tried leaving this as “Passthrough” but that didn’t work.

4) Since Buckaroo Banzai is in wide aspect (a strange ratio – 2.14:1 at 720:336 – is this HD?) I chose to set a letterbox.  Now, the top and bottom letterbox black areas that I chose are not the “right” size to get this down to 2.14:1, but if I had made the boxes big enough to do that I think the viewable area would have been too small, horizontally, so I just chose 60 and that got rid of enough of the “crushing” effect for me to watch the movie without the video appearing overly scrunched on my non-HD TV.  (Sorry, I watch too little TV to buy a wide-screen or even a digital TV – I’m using a 1991 Trinitron, and it’s just fine.)

5) I specified “High Quality” on the Filters tab.  I have no idea what that does, but sure, why not!  High Quality.  Caviar and golden dishes for all my videos!

I didn’t mess with anything at all in the “Tools “tab.  I then pressed “Encode” and about 10 minutes later… voila!  I went to the “Now Showing” option on the TiVO, and at the bottom of the list of recorded programs there is now a new item with the name of my computer. Entering that menu, I find “Buckaroo Banzai” now in the list – I start the download, and I’m on my way!

Errors/Troubleshooting: I found that if the frame size was off, I would be able to view the video and see what was being displayed, but the video would be shifted off the screen, or would have horizontal lines through it or otherwise be mangled.  It seems that getting the frame size correct and within that 352×480 box is important.  I also noticed that when the TiVO is actively downloading, the video stutters a bit while you’re watching anything in playback mode – not terribly bad, but noticable.

Hint: you can modify the “filename.properties” file  - it’s just a text file which will be fairly obvious.  It’s useful to put in the methods by which you encoded the files, so you can recall how you tweaked a certain recording in the future for experimentation.  Others have tried adding more data, but it doesn’t look possible easily.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Have fun with your antique TiVO!  I probably won’t be able to answer any questions for you, since I’m just guessing on all this stuff, myself.

JT

gocraigsy app logo

I’ve got an iPhone app to sell, since it’s just sitting around collecting dust and I know it can be a kick-ass, profitable app with a cult-like following with only a little work.  Read on…

I’ve been a big fan of the craigslist.org site for quite some time for buying and selling things.  The interface is lightweight, it’s fast, and it’s not overburdened with all the mud that sites like eBay insist on covering themselves.  A few years back, I had to post a bunch of items on craigslist, and became frustrated at the terrible interface that they have for posting – it’s burdensome, slow, and impossible to use on a smartphone.  The iPhone had just come out, so I started the slow process of developing the specs for an application that posted craigslist “for sale” items right from the phone, using the built in camera and having some intelligent template designs for ease of use.

In late 2008, I finally got a good functional specification together and started working with a group of Eastern European (Ukraine) developers with whom I’d had good experiences in the past.  I gave them the spec, and they seemed to think it was a decent app.  They were super-flexible, and agreed to do the work for cash plus a percentage of the “profit” on the proceeds from the Apple iTunes store sales on the software.  To make a long story short, this was their first iPhone app and development took a bit longer than anticipated, but it did eventually come together.  I called it “GoCraigsy” to include the concept that it was a craigslist app, and also that somehow perhaps it was for craigslist fanatics.  I couldn’t come up with anything better, so… that’s what it’s called.

In February of 2009, I launched the app with a selling price of $3.00.  I figured: if people were going to be selling things with the app, they were recognizing real, actual money from the use of the app.  Not too many other applications can be directly linked with cash finding its way into your pocket… so this was a sure-fire winner, right?  So it turns out that people are cheaper than I had considered.  The $3 starting price was a flop – probably only 20 copies sold in two week.  OK, I said, let’s try a quick giveaway for a day or two – wow, that was an eye-opener.  I think I was shipping five copies a minute for almost a day and gave me great feedback and use on the app for 24 hours and so I figured “Well, maybe I’ll price at $1 to see what happens.”  Again, the downloads slowed to a trickle as soon as I gave the app a price.  Interestingly, the people who did download it used the HELL out of it – one person posted something like 200 ads in a one month span.  I could track this because there is a keyphrase the user could opt to put in the ads, and I would just search on that to see how many ads were posted with it.  I also added up the dollar amounts for a while of the items listed for sale, and lost track after it hit the $250,000 mark.  The free users were just as active as the paid users, and even today a year or so after I turned the app off and took it off the store, at least one person launches roughly every other day.

What happened next?  Well, I got tremendously busy with my day job, which sucked a lot of wind out of my sails for doing side projects.   The income was pretty low – maybe 3-4 people per day purchased it.  The app worked great for about two months, and then craigslist changed one of their form values.  This is a pain, because many of the parts of the code look at the page format on craigslist and parse those into various places to make it appear that the app is a person (this allows me to create the fast and “nicer” UI that is iPhone-friendly.)  So the app broke, and I had to contact the developers to get tiny tweaks done, and then had to re-sign the app and get it sent back to Apple for an update.  But the iPhone development kit isn’t simple, and I really really hate it.  This time around, it gave me huge problems signing the app and getting it uploaded, so I threw up my hands in disgust and haven’t touched it since.

I’ve not even looked at it much since then, and honestly I suspect I’ve lost my taste for iPhone development, at least where I’m supposed to be the guy out there astroturfing about what a great app it is and putting up ads on websites and shilling on MyFavoriteiPhoneAppBloggyBlog.com.  I’m a great promoter of other people’s software, but when it come to my own I suppose I’m just not as enthusiastic for some reason.  So I’ve decided that this needs to be sold, not simply for the money that I could get from it, but really because I want to see it live again – I want to USE this software, and someone needs to become the maintainer of the code and hopefully the reaper of the profit.  I’ve got too many irons in the fire right now, and I’m trying to trim down the number of projects I have on my mind.  This one has been lingering, so it’s time to do something with it.

Since I left it last, two significant things have happened that could make this app more interesting and profitable with a little work: Apple has introduced the concept of “micro-payments” on the iPhone platform via their in-app payment system, and just as importantly, the iPad has come out.  The combination of these two elements I think can make this a winner application.  But much more importantly in the recipe for making this a great application is the ability for the app to be shepherded by someone who is a fantastic promoter of iPhone apps.  I’m famously terrible at self-promoting, so this app probably failed not because it wasn’t awesome, but because I can’t advertise appropriately.

I have a few ideas (well, three) that I think would turn this software around.  Micro-payments is obviously one, though the details and the other idea I’ll hold onto until someone wants to have long conversations about this application.

There have been a number of craigslist-oriented applications that I’ve purchased or tried on the iPhone.  Many of them are wonderful for browsing ads.  A few of them even allow ad posting.  But they’re all terrible.  Universally.  Don’t believe me?  Try them yourself – I won’t name names.  They’re awful, if they work at all (most don’t – they crash or error out.)  The UIs are terrible, they don’t support templates, they default back to the browser interface (sometimes in a window) and they’re just plain garbage, and I’ve verified this even as of  last night.  The methods I used were complex and in some ways a bit fragile due to craigslist’s lack of an API, but it WORKED and the experience was light-years better than the apps that currently exist on the marketplace.  More importantly, it was faster – LOTS faster – than any of the existing apps for craigslist posting, and this really appealed to me (and quite a few people who wrote to me about it.)   Posting an ad took around 35 seconds, including pictures (but excluding the time it took to type the description, which is a “fixed cost”) and that’s pretty snappy.  For someone like myself who wants to wander around the basement and take pictures and sell a whole lot of stuff, that’s exactly what was needed in a craigslist app.  As a sidenote: I’m inclined to think that the people that run craigslist are not so friendly towards their users, otherwise they would have developed an API by now to allow all this stuff to work without the gymnastics.  Every message I’ve sent them has gone into a black hole, and other developers have experienced outright hostility or legal threats.  They don’t seem to realize that real, actual humans want to do things for the right reasons, with the right controls, and not everyone is a spammer.  This is despite their existing system failing to manage the spam problem via the web interface that is the weak link in their process.  Apps like this, if done the right way, could solve a significant problem they have today.  It’s a mystery, folks… but that’s neither here nor there.

So what are the details on what I’m selling?  There’s a server side and a client side, though the server is just a dumb web server that feeds out templates for day-to-day changes.  That’s on the www.gocraigsy.com server, which is a VM ($20 a month?) somewhere.  You can go to that page and even watch a video of the way the app works.  I’d be interested in selling the server, the domain name, the source code, the specifications, and all the code on the server (which isn’t much – just a few support scripts.)  You’d need to get an SSL certificate to make it work (it only talks HTTPS to the template server) and you’d need to have an existing relationship with Apple – I’m not selling my company, which is the entity that can transact business with the Apple iTunes store.  You’ll probably need to have prior experience developing iPhone apps, otherwise this is probably too much of a hassle for you to learn on.  You’ll need to have the ability to convince me that you’ll be able to send me money.  I’m open to a combination of cash and/or percentage of income from the iTunes store (sorry, can’t work on “profit” – too complicated.)  I’d like to make sure my Eastern European developers eventually see some money out of this, as well.  However, don’t let this frighten you – I’m not greedy.  Your next question is “Well, how much are you charging for this?” and the answer to that is actually quite open.  If you were paying just cash, it would be quite a bit – there are hundreds of hours of development and effort in this app, and I do have my stupid sense of honor.  If you’re thinking about purely percentage, then that might actually work better, since I’d like to see this app running again and it puts my money where my mouth is – if I didn’t think this was an amazing tool that other people eventually will find useful and worth paying for, then I’d be shy of a percentage deal.  However, a cash + percentage deal would work as well, since that will reduce my percentage requirement.  Up to you, but assume I’m not going to give it away.

You will almost certainly need to do some tweaking to get it running, but it would be minor.  I’m sure craigslist has changed some style elements on their pages which will  have to be managed.  But that is about 1% of the work of this app – there’s a lot of stuff going on in the background that is pretty fancy, and would take quite a bit of time to reproduce.  This is nearly a ready-to-wear application, but it’s not a game or another @#%(@#%@#% flashlight app – it’s a useful, network-based tool that interacts with a very complicated commercial platform.   It’s amazingly useful, has a significant value to the user base, and is almost universally interesting to anyone who has something sitting in their garage that they want to sell.  Sounds like a winner to me… why don’t you take it over and make some money?

There is a pleasure in being able to do things myself, and I am finding it more and more rare that I have the time to put into practice some of the capabilities and skills that I’ve been stockpiling.  In recent years, I have found myself pressed for time, unable to accomplish even the most trivial of tasks without deferring to someone else’s expertise – I don’t even change my own oil these days, since disposal is a pain and frankly I don’t have the time.  I used to think that concept was absurd – how could I not have the time to change my own oil?  But it’s true – I find myself doing too much, with too few hours in the day, and I’m substituting dollars for minutes.  I look for phone numbers instead of part numbers.

But every once in a while, it does feel good to get back to the way I once was (and someday will be again) where I’m able to handle almost any repair, fabrication task, or creative solution.  Often this is due not to my desire to spend hours on a project, but by the fact that there is no expert or pre-made solution to my problem, which forces me to downshift from thinking about conservation of time and start thinking about steps to completion that I must take myself.  Today was one of those days, and it made me happy to have to plan and then accomplish what seems like a small but otherwise impossible task with a few of the capabilities that have long sat dusty on the shelves.

In an extremely long chain of interlocking requirements, I needed to shift some stuff around in my basement.   Think of one of those little finger puzzles with the numbers that slide around, with one block that’s empty – remember those from your childhood?  My life is like that, it seems.  But heavier.  So the empty slot this evening was the double-door safe I have in the basement (pre-WWII safe labelled “US Army Department of the Air Force”) which is destined to be the locker for all of the dead weight paperwork in the house that I would want to have preserved in a fire-proof box.  The lock on the safe was getting very touchy, and was close to failing.  After some number of years, I finally found a replacement lock for it (that’s a whole story in itself) and then spent the hours getting the old lock off (another story, a minor success due to having the right tools.)   But I had to saw some old bolts off, and as it happened, they were custom screw/bolts which were made exclusively for these safe lock mechanisms.  Foiled again.  Nobody makes screws like this, so I was again floating in the land of  ”can’t-complete-the-task”.  A tiny thing like a single screw was preventing the lock from working, which held up a large number of other dominoes that I was trying to push over.

But… wait!  I have a lathe.  And a mill.  Two items that most people don’t possess, but I determined were part of my “capabilities” toolkit some years ago.  I purchased some bolts that had the same thread, and after about 20 minutes of work on the lathe and mill… presto!  Replacement screw.  It’s so rare these days that I am able to recognize an immediate accomplishment or success – everything seems so long-term, so ethereal.  Having a result that is tangible is a nice change of pace.

This would have cost me at least $100 or more at a machine shop, and that would be after quite a bit of drawing and explaining and driving and phone calls.  Compared to 20 minutes of eyeballing it on the lathe and mill at 10:00 at night.   Everyone should have a decent array of capabilities at their fingertips – even if it’s not quite as dense as mine.  Being able to master or at least battle the problems of the physical world oneself is just as important as knowing the right phone number.

New bolt/old bolt

Long story: A few years back, for reasons I won’t go into at the moment (let’s just say “my eccentrism”) I found myself searching for the oldest possible terrestrial thing I could put my hands on for some experimentation and also as a touchpiece for discussion on long-term thinking.  I was looking not for something merely ancient like dinosaurs, but something fantastically old, back as far as I could reach, to the days when the planet was first cooling and solid rocks were forming.

After quite a bit of research I found that the oldest rocks in the world that were single masses were from a shield formation of rock in upper Canada called the “Acasta complex” (or “Slave craton” depending on what book  you’re looking at) and the rocks themselves were a gneiss called “Acasta gneiss”.  The rock is 4.03 billion years old.  The Earth is around 4.54 billion years, so this is some pretty old stuff.

Can you comprehend a hundred years?  It’s hard; it’s more than most people’s lifetimes.  A thousand years is even tougher.  Ten thousand years is far past the dawn of written history.  A hundred thousand is as inconceivable as a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion… four billion.  It truly is difficult to contemplate – probably impossible.  But that’s how old these rocks are.  Dinosaurs are 300 million years old, at the most – this is more than ten times older.  Diamonds are typically 1 to 3.3 billion years old.  Acasta gneiss is probably the oldest thing you will ever touch that has remained as a consistent “thing”, measurable even against the age of the universe (~13 billion years.)

This rock field is found north of the Slave Lake in Canada, far past the reaches of roads, and is about as remote as you could possibly hope to be – perfect for such an unbelievably old and undisturbed layer of material.  There were older zircons that had been found in Australia, but they were small flecks in younger rock layers.  The Acasta gneiss rock formation was the oldest rock that had been found which could be said to be a consistent age throughout.

So, now that I’d found out what the oldest rock WAS, how do I get some?  This proved to be more difficult than I had first imagined.  I found that there were samples at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC and that several scientists had done experiments on fairly small pieces.  I found someone selling a few grams for close to $100 for research purposes, but a few grams was not what I was looking for.  If anything, I am persistent, and after a few weeks of rummaging around various articles and journals, I finally found the owner of the property from which most of the samples had been taken, and via a very circuitous route finally managed to contact him.  After some discussion (“Oh, I can’t get any new rock until the lake is thawed since I have to fly up in the spring – why do you want this, again?”) and quite a bit of delay, I received my chunk of rock in a beat-up brown box in the mail from Canada.

The rock then saw quite a few miles as a conversation item, something to make myself and others think.  I enjoy unusual items that cause people to pause, especially myself – the firebrick-sized block of titanium on my desk, the ferrofluid, the altimeter, the ship’s telescope – odd objects, each with a story.  The Acasta gneiss was a favorite, though – nothing else could touch the impossibly deep concept that it embodied – “All of history.”

One year I was in dire straits for a Christmas gift.  What can I give?  I was drawing a blank on typical ideas, until I saw the rock sitting on my shelf.  Hmm… maybe I’ll just cut a slice off of that, and make some jewelry out of it.  I contacted a local lapidary here in Portland whose work with semi-precious stones I had seen and liked, and gave him the rock to take some cuts.  His skilled work turned out well – the rock took a great polish, and his wife is a superbly skilled silver-wrap specialist who fitted the pieces into pendant and earring settings.  Anyway, needless to say, the jewelry was well-received and is a conversation piece no matter where it’s worn.

The lapidary had a few pieces left over from the cutting, and asked if I wanted them back.  I told him to see if he could make a few simple “dangle” earrings out of the shards that I could give out as presents to others who might find the story interesting.  As it so happened, at the office I told the story about what the rock was, and how I had the jewelry made, and there was such an interest in the pieces that the earrings I had in my bag as rainy-day emergency gifts ended up being sold on the spot.   The desire to contemplate such age is apparently more wide-spread than I thought, and I had the lapidary make some additional pieces from the leftover stone.  But I have a fairly limited supply, since this was a year or so ago and both my schedule and the jeweler’s schedule work on (pun intended) geologic timescales as far as sideline projects like this.  However, I just received the last batch of silver-wrapped pendants and earrings, and I still have some “dangle” earrings as well.

This is truly a unique gift.  There are no others like this in the world, and the community of ownership I suspect will remain as a tiny group of people who contact me directly.  Getting this rock is difficult; damn near impossible.  The stone is hard (gneiss is a 7 on the Rockwell scale, roughly equivalent to quartz) and takes a polish well but takes time to get shining.  The settings are elegant and professional.  This is a stone far more rarely owned than gold, diamonds, or opals, but even the rarity is not what makes it interesting – the appeal is the age.  This is a piece that women love to own and talk about  - nobody else at the table will have a piece of the Earth from the beginning of time.

What I’m selling

The silver-wrapped pendants (will not match the pictures, but will be roughly the same size but may be differently shaped) or silver-wrapped earrings are $400 for either item, or $700 for a set of earrings and pendant.  If you buy a set, the pendant shape will match the earring shape and the grain will be the same on all the pieces.  The dangle earrings are $150.  Prices include shipping to the US and Canada, though overnight is extra for you last minute buyers.  Pendant includes 16″ or 18″ silver chain – please specify.  PayPal is preferred – contact me for details at jtodd@loligo.com.

Sorry for the crummy photos – I’m not a pro with macro yet.  You can see some of the quartz and red flecks in some of the shots – the stone is actually quite pretty and “deep” looking when seen in a good light.  The silver settings are quite interesting in and of themselves – they’re tension-based, and typically made of just one or two pieces of wrap.

Acasta gneiss pendant/earrings

Acasta gneiss pendant - close up

Acasta gneiss wrapped silver earrings

Acasta gneiss dangle earrings

I just got back from a very successful network rollout (100mbps in 4 business days, to a government building no less) that ultimately failed because of the limitations of TCP and latency – the servers to which the data was being sent were too far away to have reasonable throughput.  After some thought, it seems that my problems could have been resolved if I was just streaming dumb packets (UDP) instead of TCP streams that required the ~150ms ACK round trip.  I know I can’t be the first to encounter this, and it would seem that in these edge cases some TCP-over-UDP method of packet delivery would be suitable despite the hackiness of the solution.

My goal: move large packet streams over mildly (max 5%) lossy network elements with long latency (max 600ms) but high bandwidth.  A 100mbps pipe is worthless if you’re trying to move a 10gig file across a trans-continental (or further) link with any realistic latency or even the slightest packet loss.  But if you’re prepared to re-send some data and hold things for a few seconds in buffer, it seems like a vast speed improvement could be obtained.

It seems that UDP would be an ideal way to transmit large blocks of data, with a very large buffer at each end and a non-sequential retransmission strategy for lost packets. This would not be simply re-writing TCP over UDP, with the inherent ACK path for each datagram.  It would be a larger re-write, with large blocks of datagrams collected and ACK’ed in reply packets, with re-transmits possible within the buffer pool and not just at the very end of the buffer pool.  This seems do-able, given that most modern machines have VERY large memory capabilities and the network is typically the weak link.  This might lead to “bursty” output while waiting for blocks to complete during retransmits, but I’d think that the output would be much larger in size over the same time period as that of a comparative TCP stream.

The goal here is not requiring kernel access, and no demand for any control over network elements in the path.  This should be 100% user-land accessible for installation on generic UNIX style hosts without root permissions.

Yes, I have done a bit of Googling on this, but there’s a flood of responses.  Iproxy seems to be for multicast.  bbftp is interesting with the multi-stream method, but is limited to file transfer and not generic TCP connections.  atou seems to require heavy kernel modifications on each side.  I found some ssh-over-UDP sites that are blurry in their details, and they seem to not be sophisticated at all – still blocking at the point where ACKs are requested back on a packet-by-packet basis, and not blasting out huge piles of data and then selectively backfilling if there are drops reported by the receiver.

It would seem to me that SSH would be a great place to shim this in.  The number of services that can run over SSH is growing, and the tunnel capability (both UDP and TCP) and port re-direction seem to be an already versatile set of methods that would benefit from such a shim component to increase bandwidth.  It also has the advantage of having native file transfer (scp) that is well-supported.

Anyone have any ideas on research on this that has already been done, or shim layers that already exist to take advantage of UDP’s fill-the-pipe methodology?  Looks like some people have done experiments, but the data is obscured (paywall) and/or it is unclear that what I’m looking for has actually been attempted.

JT

notes:
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/net100/bulk.html
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/net100/atou.html
http://doc.in2p3.fr/bbftp/
http://horms.net/projects/iproxy/
http://code.google.com/p/udptunnel/
http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/cpl/record/index.xsql?pubid=123799

update: Several people replied to me privately, with these for-pay options which seem to do pretty much what I’m talking about.  A free (open source) variation of this embedded in SSH might be a game-changer.  This seems well within the range of a graduate CS project.

This type of selling comes naturally to me, as I’ve always wheeled and dealed through my whole life – buying, and selling comes naturally.  However, the scale of the project in front of me is now somewhat daunting.  I’ve always dealt with either: a large number of items, exactly alike, or a very small number of objects (often “1″) of particularly unique nature.

The things I find myself selling are the accumulation of the last 20 years of my own life (mostly computer and technology equipment, though there is a significant portion of “weird” items) and the contents of my parents life over the past ~65 years as I distribute and liquidate the portions of their estate that I don’t wish to transfer into my possession.  There are a LOT of items – hundreds, if not thousands, and I haven’t even looked at the collection that I need to sell of items that I’ve managed to accumulate myself.  My childhood bike (Schwinn Sting-Ray) lovingly painted flame red by hand and with seat covered in duct tape; an English wood and glass greenhouse, stored and moved several times between houses upon my mother’s insistence though never assembled; a huge variety of antique furniture pieces collected by my father – these are items that I can’t bring myself to throw into the digestive tract of an estate broker at a price based on per-pound, but neither do I wish to strap these various albatrosses around my own neck.

How to sell these items individually, but quickly, is a challenge.  Being a native user of Internet services, upon presentation of the problem I immediately started on a track of using the tools that were familiar to me: Craigslist and eBay, along with research on various art wholesale websites.  My results have been decent, but the process is long and the tools are miserable.  There are eBay selling tools, yes – but they’re not exactly designed for rapid creation of sales – they’re more for people who have “stores” where they’re selling a large number of identical items, not a large number of different items.  And I hate shipping things (furniture and big items are nearly impossible to ship at prices people are willing to pay) so eBay is not looking like a particularly good sales method since almost all the buyers are remote.  Craigslist is great for finding local buyers, and is fairly low friction, but is needlessly repetitive and no tools exist to manage posting items repeatedly after expiration (CL says that they do this, but the deletion of the pictures makes their function useless.)  I even went so far as to build a Craigslist posting tool for the iPhone two years ago (goCraigsy) but CL is actively antagonistic to their customer base and to any tools that might make life easier for users, so I gave up trying to keep my interface aligned with their shifting whims.  Don’t get me started on how antagonistic Craigslist is – they’re almost fanatically opposed to their user base finding things.  Plus, there is no connection between Craigslist items – each item stands alone, unless you put some crazy keyword into each posting and note in each sale “Hey, search for keyword myxlplyx to find my other Craigslist sales” – a strategy that doesn’t work well, if at all.

What I really need is just a tool that will allow me to take a LOT of pictures, and then create a web page for each item with a text description, pictures, and maybe videos embedded into the page.  Then, an index and a way for me to price and manage each object.  I’ve looked at various “shopping cart” tools but they’re preposterously heavyweight and complex for the simple task at hand, which is basically an annotated index and detail page for items, with ease of entry being the #1 concern.  I’ll then put short notices up on CL for individual items and link back to the site, but I would expect that most people will browse around and end up buying something that they didn’t come to the site for in the first place.

So I’ll post the question: does anyone know of any tools that exist which have the following criteria:

• Painfully simple to install (PHP?)
• Allow generation of a “main” inventory page with thumbnails and titles
• Allow drill-down into each item, with high-res pictures of the item, or video, and text
• Allow quick changes of price, description, and availability
• Allow easy uploading of media via Web interface
• Free or inexpensive

I don’t actually have any particular agreement or position waiting for me at Digium, and Bryan Johns has stepped into my role as Community Manager with my wholehearted support.  I think that he’ll do great – there are lots of things that I didn’t get around to doing (though lots I did get to do) and I see already that Bryan is leaping into the role with the energy and enthusiasm that is needed.   I suspect you’ll see me continuing with Digium in any way that I can as a proponent and advocate of the company and of the projects to which they so generously contribute.  I remain a devotee of Asterisk, and I’m really interested in where the newly announced Asterisk SCF project is going to go in the near future as work continues.

My Digium email address will continue to work for a while, but I’d suggest that anyone who has non-Digium related issues that you contact me at my non-Digium email address (jtodd@loligo.com) as I try to keep work and personal items separated by inbound email address.

To those of you I never met as Community Director: I’m sorry I never made your acquaintance but perhaps we’ll meet at various conferences or gatherings in the future.  To those I did meet: it’s been a pleasure working with you to this point, and it will continue to be a pleasure as I continue in the VoIP/Asterisk world.  I’m continuing my involvement in everything I’ve been working on in the past, but perhaps now I can work on it at night instead of during the business day.  :-)  Maybe now I’ll get around (finally!) to re-writing those sample configuration files – every time I’d try to take on that task, I’d feel guilty about doing that instead of some vital community project, so maybe my departure will cause more Asterisk-related code to fall out of me since I won’t have anything else to do in my “off hours”.   See?  It all works out.

JT

It's blue, it's crude, it runs on steam.

So I’ve finally received my steam engine, after… let me think… 3 months.  I ordered it on August 3, and I finally took possession late this afternoon and uncrated it before dark.  The customs process for pickup was surprisingly painless – get the bill of lading from the transfer/holding company, take it to the customs desk, pay $9, get the stamp, take papers back to the transfer/holding company, pay storage and loading fee ($111, higher than normal since it’s been waiting for me for a while), load box in truck.  That is not to say the process of getting here has been painless or cheap – it’s been nickel-dime the whole way here – $35 x-ray fee, $200 trans-shipment fee, wrong bill of lading numbers, three conflicting tracking sets of data (Singapore… no, New York… No, Los Angeles… No, Seattle.  No, Snake River.  What?)  No simple process.

It’s from a firm in India that makes small steam engines, along with a number of other small-scale industrial tools for self-sufficiency or village-sufficiency.  They were the only makers of new steam engines that I could find that were meant for production grunt work, versus steam engines made for antique boat propulsion or Mike Brown’s very nice engines which were priced outside of my range and seem a bit too… precision-crafted for what I had in mind.

I know most of you are familiar with me being more at home with high-tech gear, and this perhaps will come as some surprise that I’m dealing with technology from 150 years ago.  However, I have a soft spot in my heart for things I can actually fix or even build by myself.  Computers do not fall into that category.  So you’ll see quite a bit of metal here on these pages in the future that doesn’t look like it belongs in the space program, or even in a server room.  I still love all that is digital, but I also am very aware of the fact that it’s easy to get a 100 year old engine started but nearly impossible to get a 20 year old computer started, and that is an important factor to consider when contemplating how engineering effects the world.

Anyway, my goal is to get a steam engine with reasonable horsepower that can run a DC generator for charging batteries.  I’ll ignore the issue of the boiler for now; that’s a whole different story.  The initial investigation was to import these for resale on a small scale, but I’m thinking that this is really a lost cause using this engine.  I’d have to deconstruct the whole engine and base, sandblast, measure, re-machine, re-paint, and re-assemble before they’d even be close to acceptable for the North American market.  And I haven’t even run it yet – I’m anticipating some catastrophic failure in alloy strength or in the bearings or something, given my first impressions after opening the crate.  Maybe I’ll be more pleased when I start running it.

The good news:

1. The crate was intended to stay solid during a fall off a 25-floor building.  It took me an hour to pry, smash, bend, and kick it apart.  Three cheers for the titanium crowbar and sledgehammer!
2. It’s not unreasonably heavy.  Not exactly lightweight, but I can see how I’d move it around by myself if I needed to.
3. Complexity is LOW.  There are no mysteries here, and I suspect anything that goes wrong with this engine I would be able to repair myself with a lathe and some basic hand tools.  That’s exactly what I wanted.
4. Comes complete with high-pressure water pump.  This seems to be made by some other firm, since it looks marginally well-built and isn’t coated with finger paint.  This is what takes a cold water supply and replenishes the boiler (under pressure) as water turns to steam and is used by the engine.
5. Comes with hand-pump for steam oil.  Every few minutes, a little shot of oil needs to be added to the incoming steam to keep the cylinder lubricated.  Steam engine operation is a very manual kind of thing – no walking away from the rig once it’s started, which is typical of steam operations.  (Boilers can’t be left to their own devices, otherwise they get angry and tend to explode in spectacular style.)
6. It seems to spin smoothly, and with little friction.

The bad news:

1. Paint was done by someone using their fingers. Paint is everywhere; on the belt, on the bearings, over the grease fittings, on the threads… It’s as if a person was told “Make this look like a 3-year old was given the task to paint this engine.”  I’m astonished at how bad the paint job is; a rational person would assume it was intentionally botched.
2. The engine was tested before shipment (yay!) but then the water was not drained out.  WHAT?! That’s right – there was water in the outlet pipe, enough to fill perhaps a shot glass.  The engine thankfully turned over – it had not seized up, but I’m sure when I open the cylinder I’ll find lots of rusty nasties.  In the meantime, I’ll pour some oil in it and keep rotating it until things dry out.  I pity the person who buys one of these and puts it in storage before opening it up – that engine will be solid as a rock when they finally get around to opening it.
3. No markings or instructions on the engine other than things written by markers (visible in photos.)  Seriously?  Written on the paint?
4. No “Made In India” markings.  This is actually a legal requirement for importation into the United States, but nobody was going to open that crate to inspect it.  Glad they didn’t.  No markings of any kind, actually.
5. Engine was shipped on its side, not upright.  No big deal, since the crate was pretty well made. Nothing appears to be bent.  No “This Side Up” stickers or indications on the box lets the shipping company treat it poorly.

Now, before anyone says it – yes, I know, I get what I paid for.  I’m not really complaining that much (other than the water in the engine, which could have been “fatal” to the device) because it was cheaply made and cheaply purchased.  But after owning several Indian-made Lister-type (aka: Listeroid) diesel engines and now looking at this, I am starting to get an idea of why India has never become the world power that it had the potential to become.  The Chinese have a huge leadership position in the manufacture of durable goods; I doubt India will ever be able to catch up with quality this poor.

Steam engine front view

Steam engine detail

And a video of the first run:

UPDATE 2011-03-16:
I’ve got a huge number of projects going, way more than I should.  I’ve decided that I’m not going to keep this engine, or at least I’ll put it up for sale and if the right person sees it they can buy it before I get the time to dig back into this endeavor.  If you are interested and can give me $1900 for it, it’s yours.  It’s still in great running shape, never had steam through it.  It can go right into production if you have a boiler.  Contact me at jtodd@loligo.com for details – I will help you load it onto a truck here in Portland OR, but anything more complex than that will require you to pay for a crater to come out and pack it up for shipment.

The device (Shenzhen V-SUN Electronics Co., Ltd. model TLT-2H):

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22968

The manual:

http://www.v-sun.cc/asp_bin/downfile/201061917138726.pdf

And another link to the same device:

http://www.power-grand.com/product_vie.asp?PID=1140