My fourth descent into ADD

I’m going to the desert for a week and wanted a way to recharge my iPhone. I bought a zap rx4-c, which works with most of my other devices, only to learn that it’s not compatible with the iPhone. Zap’s customer service was friendly but they should change their description in two ways: One, you can use regular AA batteries with it for living out in the field for a long time (yay!), and two, it’s not compatible with the iPhone or iPod Touch (boo.). The iPhone requires a 2.4V and 2.8V reference signal on the data pins for it to charge…Crafty Apple! Zap is coming out with a cheap adapter for the Rx4 but I needed something right away.

There are circuits out there for converting the 5V to the proper data pins and voltage, but I already had a 12V car adapter that would supply them. So instead, the goal was to supply 12V to my car adapter with batteries.

The solution:

2 6V lantern batteries
Alligator Clips
Female Car Adapter
iPhone Car Adapter
Cardboard Box

If you wire the batteries in series you get 12V. It works fine, though the adapter whines pretty loudly which worries me a little. Also, I am aware that batteries encased in paper and cardboard are a slight fire hazard. I’m only going to charge this outside while I’m watching it. (Any advice is appreciated, this isn’t much different than how the iPhone charges in a car is it?)

Thanks to Fred for his help conceptualizing this.

I saw this on Winona st. the other day.

I saw a great slogan on a box of cereal that my roommate bought today: “Eating a breakfast of Kellogg’s® Frosted Mini-Wheats® cereal is clinically shown to improve kid’s attentiveness by nearly 20%!¹”

The best part was the footer on the bottom of the back of the box:

“¹Based upon independent clinical research, kids who ate Kellogg’s® Frosted Mini-Wheats® cereal for breakfast had up to 18% better attentiveness three hours after breakfast than kids who ate no breakfast.”

No breakfast?? Lol. 18% is not a staggering statistic for starving children trying to focus. In a related study, 15% of the children could focus better when they weren’t being stabbed in the face.

Come on people. We’re still ok with stuff like this?

Uh, so I knew that Word would save copies of my open files, and firefox would reopen my session and tabs on a crash, but when did textedit start doing that?
I have a bad habit of keeping notes in textedit (stickies started losing data on me) and not saving them. I just had a kernel panic, and when I rebooted and reopened textedit, all 5 unsaved files I’d had open popped back.

This thread’s great.
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1400919&page=1&pp=15
So far I’ve learned:
• You can take a screenshot on the iphone by holding down the hold menu button and hitting the sleep button. It gets saved to your photo roll.
• You can insert punctuation by simply clicking on the .?123 button, holding, and dragging to a character, and when you let go it brings you back to your keyboard! This is the best tip to speed up typing I’ve learned yet.
• You can do the same with shift: drag from shift to a character to quickly capitalize.
• You can hold down a character for a few seconds to get other accent equivalents (such as å, é, ü).
• You can drag before letting go on a letter in general to improve accuracy.
• You can hold down the .com button to get .org and .edu, and sometimes you can hold down the . button to get .com.
• You can tap the very top edge of an app to jump to the top of the page (Safari, SMS, etc.). This wasn’t working for me until I really put half my thumb off the screen on top.
• You can rotate the iPhone sideways in Safari BEFORE activating the keyboard to get a landscape keyboard. So far Safari is the only app to use this.
• You can double click the menu button when the iPod is playing to get a quick iPod transport control popup.
• You can pause and resume songs with the headset button by squeezing once, and skip songs by squeezing twice.
• You can tap the album art in the iPod to get a draggable bar for faster seeking.
• You can make your own ringtones by saving .30 second or less AAC files as .m4v and renaming them to .m4r. When you sync them or drag them to your phone they show up as custom ringtones.

Oh my god, this guy is hilarious.

Today I figured out how to easily turn the rock band drum set for Wii into a MIDI drum controller:

I did this with Junxion, a program that allows you to transform USB and wireless game controller input into MIDI data. I’ve seen demos of other MIDI rock band instruments online, but with the Wii instruments already in USB form this has to be the easiest setup yet. This also seems to have the lowest latency. Junxion is not free but a demo can be downloaded here:

http://www.steim.org/steim/junxion_v3.html

I’ve also used Junxion to turn other game controllers such as DDR dance pads into instruments. I’m using the old PowerPC version 1.4, but version 3 should work fine. Junxion 3 also now works with Wii remotes.

I just used the Studio Tight Kit preset in Ultrabeat in Logic for the drum sounds. Junxion automatically makes an input port which Logic recognizes and listens to.

My setup for this demo was this:

The steps are basically this:

• Plug in the drum controller.
• Launch Junxion.
• Turn off the other devices (USB Optical Mouse, Apple Keyboard, and Apple IR default to enabled at startup)
• Start hitting the pads and watch which sensor status is triggered. Your MIDI app should be sounding or at least receiving input. If not, select Junxion Port 1 as a MIDI input.
• Drag the value of the sensor’s “Dat1″ up or down to change it to the note value you want; for example I set the bass drum to 36 (C2) which triggers the bass drum in Ultrabeat.
• I muted sensor 8 because it was always sounding on any hit.

That’s it! Details may have changed in the new versions. If you have the full version you can save your configuration.

The Rock Band guitar works with Junxion as well! Just plug the USB receiver into the computer, turn on the guitar and follow the same steps. Now I’m even happier that I bought Rock Band!

I’ve been using this site I found about about, GCM Travel Stats, for predicting and analyzing Chicago traffic a lot lately. It works pretty well unless you get an unprecedented freak traffic spike like I did today:

It took me almost two hours to get from Midway to Uptown. I think it was the cubs game combined with the taste of chicago.

Oh well. My new hobby is to take pictures of the sky when I’m stuck in traffic. I’ve been watching them build this skyscraper from Columbia, and it’s really coming together. I figured out it’s the One Museum Park building. Click for larger version:

I started admiring this tree off of I-55 about a year and a half ago on my many trips to and from St. Louis from Chicago. I noticed it for its odd asymmetry and for its placement (all alone in a beautiful field on a farm).

It reminded me of that Shawshank Redemption quote–

I was even more struck to find in the summer that although it has been disfigured presumably by some large weather event, it is still alive and well. I resolved to take pictures of it some day, but drive by photos never worked well and the field was fenced off by the farm along the highway.

Well, today I decided to take the nearest exit and try and find a back road that would lead me to it. I found one and was looking left towards the highway for it until I almost ran into it on my right. It was on someone’s property, but close enough to the road that I could shoot it up close. The day had a magical quality to it (threatening to storm, humid and breezy, but perfectly warm and sunny) and being in the tree’s presence set my heart racing for some reason. It has a wonderful nook at its root (that I was tempted to climb inside but feared being chased off by angry armed farmers) and a beautiful stream nearby.

I wanted to spend all day with it or search for hidden lunchboxes, but this slashdot article came to mind.

Here is a slideshow of the photos I took of it:

http://flickr.com/photos/jordan314/tags/crazytree/show/

I also have a tag set of other cloud and chicago shots I took that day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordan314/tags/i55/

I’ve had two realizations about reality and the way the mind works. Sorry if this post is too random or metaphysical; they’ve been rattling around in my brain and I’d rather have them written down.

The first is that we typically think of knowledge as a tree: We are born as a root, and as we gain new information and memories, those become limbs and branches. This is true, but we are not the entire tree; our consciousness has to propagate through the limbs and branches in order to reach a memory or idea. This is not a new idea - we forget things all the time when those paths become broken or muddled. But nor are we the entire path of consciousness from the root to the leaf; think of the last time you’ve lost your train of thought. What happened when you said, “What were we talking about?” This wouldn’t happen if our consciousness was the entire length from root to leaf. In other words, it’s just as hard to get back to the root from the leaf as it is to get to the leaf from the root. Our consciousness has to be a tiny spark then in our brain, that in this case found its way from root to leaf but then lost its way back. I think “we” are a tiny spark, a pointer in this vast grey matter network of our brain.

The second thing is, I think our brain has refresh rates. It’s well known that our eyes have refresh rates; we can’t see the flicker of film or TV screens or alternating current light bulbs because our eyes’ refresh rates are too slow. Well, I think our brain does too. I think of it a lot like computers; computer memory has to take in information and write it down, take in memory and write it down; these cycles are calculated in kilohertz and are a measure of memory speed. Well our brain has to do this too; we are constantly processing and storing new information. I think it does this one at a time like computers do. I have experienced times where I think my brain’s refresh rate has gone out of whack; I heard audio stopping and echoing like a computer CPU processing too much audio information and having an audio dropout. This insight into my brain’s limited ability to perceive makes me wonder how much of the world we cannot perceive just by trusting our senses. Also, when I’m not feeling well, feeling very nervous, or am falling asleep, often my ‘pointer’ mentioned above goes in loops and gets stuck and I can only focus on a word or idea looping around. I’m not sure what all of this means but I think the idea of the loop and the spark are keys to understanding consciousness and reality.