Burnt Face Man (by sarah)

I am actually married to Burnt Face Man it would appear!

Though the initially burns after the cooling water treatments didn't look too bad - half way through yesturday Alaric started to look really rough with some sort of ichor type stuff oozing from various places on his face.

So we made a sojourn out to get a cooling cream - mainly it is his hand that's hurting him though and hampering typing.

I am now wondering if I should have called him an ambulance when it happened as perhapse they would have given him more treatment and he'd be looking less rough :/ The other thing is I am alittle concerned about infection getting in but am hoping the cream will help with that.

High power LEDs (by alaric)

I've got a few 3W RGB LEDs that I've been meaning to play with, so over the Christmas break, I decided to hook 'em up to the bench PSU and have a play.

As I have but one variable bench PSU with current limiting, I could only easily light one LED at a time. I didn't have big enough resistors to build individual LED current regulation circuits - I just set the current limit on my PSU to 0.35A and cranked the voltage up until it maxed out, hooked up to one LED in turn.

They are certainly dazzlingly bright:

Since the green and blue LEDs both have the same forward voltage, I figured I might be able to drive them together by using a pair of resistors as a current splitter, and setting the PSU for 700mA, thus ensuring that 350mA went to each LED.

However, my 0.25W resistors started to smoke when I got to about 400mA, so I shut it off - if one of the resistors burnt out then the entire 400mA would go into the surviving LED, overloading it (until its resistor also burnt out), and possibly making the thing explode. I ended up with a nice pair of burnt-out resistors:

Which is a shame, because I'd love to see how bright the thing is at maximum, with all three LEDs going!

My lab partner was most impressed, and asked me lots of questions about current and voltage; I had to resist her demands to keep making things, so I could go inside and write this blog post:

BlackBerry (by alaric)

Many moons ago I did some work writing apps for BlackBerries. I liked the things at the time; they seemed to be well-built, both from the hardware and software angles.

So when my mobile phone contract came up for renewal (meaning I can get a free new phone if I sign up for another two years), with my existing phone falling to bits and rather crashy, I was pleased to find that I was eligible for a free BlackBerry 8520!

The device is a nice evolution of the BlackBerry I was using back in 2004 or so; rather than the thumb-activated scroll wheel we now have a two-dimensional scroll thing that works like a trackball, but seems to really be the innards of an optical mouse, set up so it sees my thumb moving over a small plastic window. This works well, takes up little space, and has no moving parts apart from the click action when it's pressed in to select something. The one downside of the new hardware is that my original Blackberry had a reflective LCD; it had an optional backlight, but spent most of its time with it switched off, simply reflecting the light incident upon it (in colour!). This didn't make for vibrant, saturated, hues in photos, but it did save a lot of power, and meant that the screen was highly readable in the brightest sunshine.

There's a few rough edges in the software; my model lacks a GPS, and the supplied maps application lets me enter my home and work locations by typing in an address, then gives me the option to locate that from the current GPS position (which of course fails) or to look up the address - which also fails, claiming the state/province cannot be found. If I just put the postcode into the address and nothing else, it works - but only matches on the first part of my postcode, getting a location that's some distance away in my rural area. I'd like to have an option to choose the location I've scrolled the map to by hand, geocoding that doesn't suck, and no menu options about GPSes when I have no GPS, please.

The mail system tries to auto-configure itself. Which is a blessing, and a curse. I bet it's a blessing for many users, and their IT departments, that they can just enter their email address and password, and have the rest fetched. However, I have a funny mail setup; I have lots of different IMAP mailboxes on the same server, with usernames like "alaric-work". And there happens to be a POP3 daemon listening on the machine that hosts my employer's web site. So when I put in my work email address, it notices that the domain part of the email address has an A record, and it has a POP3 server, and that POP3 server has a user called alaric (which is the user part of my work email address) which it can log in as with that password - so it goes ahead and makes me a POP3 account... with the wrong username and wrong mail server. Which would be OK apart from the fact that there's no way of changing the protocol or username on an existing mail account.

The trick, it turns out, is to deliberately put the wrong password in on the initial setup screen. This causes the POP3 login attempt to fail, and the subsequent IMAP one (in order to be compatible with Outlook's autodetection, it tries POP3 before IMAP!) too; it then says it can't automatically configure me, and asks me to list username and mail server. It then proceeds to guess IMAP somehow (it still didn't ask me, and the machine has POP3 as well as IMAP on it), and pow, my IMAP account is set up.

The Art of Knowledge Unconference (by sarah)

This weekend 12-13 Dec 2009 in Bristol there is an Unconference part of the uncraftivism weekend and I am going to be reading some of my poems that I think appropriate! Like The Programmer's Lament and A Picture of Words.

Me and Alaric are hoping some of you will join us in Bristol 🙂

It looks like a really interesting event so I'm looking forward to it - lots!

BKU2009 on twitter and I think there's some online jabbery stuff occuring. There is also like a talk/culture cafe thing and a lot of free form stuff hence the Un- bit of conference!

On being oddly dressed (by alaric)

Last Friday, I stood up in front of a hundred or so people and gave a five-minute talk on some software I've spent two years of my life writing. However, I wasn't particularly self-conscious about the fact that I was oddly dressed.

For me, clothes are about:

1. Keeping me warm
2. Carrying my stuff

It's not that their appearance doesn't matter to me - I don't want to be wearing shabby or tatty clothes. I don't want to wear garish bright colours. I like my clothes to more or less match, so I tend to choose solid dark colours when I buy myself clothes, as they're easy to look smart in.

But every now and then I get a comment from somebody that I must be a bit weird to go around wearing a podbelt and an assault vest... and when the weather's bad, I got outside in a full-length heavy cloak. Luckily, saying that sort of thing disqualifies people from me being too interested in their opinions, so it doesn't particularly bother me.

I like carrying lots of stuff with me. I'm equipped for every eventuality. When people get things in their eyes, I'm there with a mirror and tweezers. I have the obligatory geek multi-tool, of course. My first-aid kit has brought comfort to many a cut finger. My little lengths of string have jerry-rigged many a repair. I always have a torch, a compass, a pen, a notepad, a monocular, and a laser pointer to hand; so I can navigate, find things in the dark, read small text on a projector from the back of the room (and then point to the thing I'm asking about with the laser). If a button comes off of something, I sit down, take out my sewing kit, and fix it. In my laptop bag is a pouch full of cables and adapters, which has saved the day on many a late-night data-centre emergency. When it's raining so hard that people are cowering in shop doorways, my cloak keeps me dry; at the conference on Friday, when there were no seats left, it folded up tightly and became a low stool so I could sit comfortably. A week or so ago, when I was driving home from London very late one night and became too tired to continue, I pulled into a dark lay-by and slept underneath it, warm and comfortable even when the temperature plummeted before dawn.

I'm not just hoarding gadgets for the sake of it - I do assess the trade-offs of every extra bit of weight to carry around. Weight in the podbelt isn't an issue as it carries very nicely on my hips, I barely notice the weight of it, but space there is at a premium. Weight in the assault vest is more of an issue, since it pulls at my shoulders. I've tried having just a podbelt, but it's not good to wear while sitting down, so I tended to take it off and sling it over the back of the chair, which makes things harder to get at; and I've tried just having an assault vest, but weight was a problem. The current combination means I can keep lightweight things I often need while sitting down (mobile phone, pens, pads, business cards, laser pointer, etc) on me all the time, while weightier things I tend to need more on the move (keys, wallet, tools, first aid gear) in the podbelt. I have optional extra things I add for specific "missions" that I wouldn't want to carry all the time, too - I have a special tool jacket with loops for screwdrivers and the like which I wear if I'm doing DIY in awkward locations, an extra assault vest with more specialist stuff for when I'm busy being a Cub leader, a black lightweight mesh one with large pockets for hiking (the large pockets accept good quantities of food, GPSes, and the like), a water flask that goes on the podbelt, and a spare podbelt pouch that I'm going to assemble a survival kit in: emergency rations, a survival blanket, that sort of thing.

When I've explained this to people who question the amount of stuff I carry, they say "But what are the odds of all these things happening?". But they happen all the time! So I'm happy being prepared for anything... it makes life a lot less stressful. My clothes and their pockets become an extension of my body; we are, after all, all cyborgs.