Tomicles' Blog » Electronics

Cross Country Trip 2009

tomicles — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:34:15 +0000

I am writing this as I sit waiting for my delayed flight to Boston from San Francisco. My younger sister decided to move from Boston to Portland and I am helping her move her car across the country. I’ve brought some toys to keep me connected and report my position along the way. Tomorrow there will be more photos of my setup as I get it installed in her car. My tracking site is located at the following URL: http://whereami.tomicles.com/ and if everything goes as planned it will update my position every 10 seconds or so while on the trip.

Highway 17 takes SI Crew’s Boats, Trailer, and Pickup

Tomicles — Mon, 08 May 2006 08:46:46 +0000

Today started just like any other Sunday, I woke up and decided to ride my bike. Jess wanted me to come say hi to her and her family up at the regatta at Lexington so that’s what I went to go do. I rode up the creek trail to the lake, and just as I went up the first little hill, before crossing over the spillway, there was a group of people gathered pointing up the hill. As I approached, I looked up and my stomach sank. There was a pickup truck, with a rowing trailer with five 8-person rowing shells on it, half way slid down the hill, facing backwards. The truck was in very bad condition; it looked like the truck bed was bent at about a 30-degree angle to the cab. The driver and the passenger were OK and climbed out the passenger side window and up to highway 17. This all just happened about five minutes before I arrived at the scene. I immediately called Jess who was at the boathouse and told her what had happened, and I think she was the first to tell anyone who was still there. Most of the people had left the regatta by then, but the few that were still around went to go help out. I rode over to the boathouse to show them some pictures, and then headed home. On my way home I decided to go up St. Joseph’s hill to see if I could see the accident from above, and sure enough, I could. I whipped out my camcorder again and proceeded to film for an hour, or until the tape ran out, while they removed boats from the trailer and pulled the truck and trailer back onto the freeway. The story I’ve heard thus far is that the brakes on the pickup gave out, and the trailer wanted to go faster than the, causing it to jack knife and fall off the freeway. At $20,000 – $30,000 each, this was no cheap accident. I dont even know if they will be able to repair the one boat they removed by hand before pulling the rest up the hill, as it was missing its entire bow. (see video)

Video Footage: SI-Crew_Boat_Accident.mp4

Except for the first 15 seconds or so, I took this footage from half way up St. Joseph’s hill in Los Gatos. To the very left of the main shot, is Lexington Dam, and to the right, is downtown Los Gatos. The camera shot is from at least a mile away, zoomed in all the way on my little Panasonic 3ccd minidv camcorder. I didn’t use any digital zoom. I took interest in this accident as I rowed for LGRC for 4 years and know the kind of dedication those rowers have put into their sport. Hopefully they have more boats at their boathouse so they can continue their season.

If you have more info about this incident, or if I didn’t quite get something right, let me know. If you’ve come to this site, and are a member of SI Crew, I’m very sorry for your loss and am very happy to hear that both people in the truck are doing well. I can provide a DVD copy of this video to those directly related to this incident.

Selling Cell Phones on Craigslist…

Tomicles — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:49:36 +0000

…is WAY easier than I thought. We’ll see how my 2nd transaction goes.

So last night I had my first experience selling something on Craigslist. I think everyone knows that Ive posted personal ads there before, but never really anything else. After I was sitting at starbucks bitching with Matt about my lockline phone problems seen in the previous post, he told me to get off my ass and just sell the Treo. Thats exactly what I did. While we were still at starbucks, I wrote up a quick little post for the Sprint Treo 650 and posted it online. It didnt have any pictures, but its price made it stand out I think. 20 minutes after posting it I had half a dozen requests for it, one of which I called, and she wanted to pick it up asap and had cash ready. I told her I had to run home to grab the phone so I did, and she showed up a bit later to buy it. This was a total no-headache transaction for me, other than it happened much quicker than I anticipated. Within 90 minutes of posting the Ad on Craigslist, I had $250 cash in my hand, and no more Treo 650 depreciating on my shelf. Even though I probably could have gotten a bit more for that phone, I wanted it to move quickly and thats exactly what it did.

Today I got my LG VX 8100 and just posted it on Craigslist for $260. I dont think this one will move quite so quick since the retail cost for this phone is $319.99 directly from verizon. The Treo at $250 was a much better deal, but hopefully someone needs one and doesnt want to pay full retail. We’ll see how this one goes.

Lockline and OUT OF STOCK phones

Tomicles — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:06:11 +0000

So after SHDH this last weekend, where I didnt give a rats ass about my phone since it was being replaced, I called LockLine to get my phone replaced. They told me it would arrive tuesday and it would be $50 non-refundable deductable for the claim. Today I called to figure out why I had not recieved my phone yet, and they said it was on its way and gave me a tracking number. They then went on to say that there was a delay because the no longer have any MOTOROLA E815s and they were sending me a LG VX 8100 instead. Not only will the 8100 NOT connect to my system via bluetooth the way I want it to, i.e. BluePhoneElite, but it also has a completely different interface. I explicitly decided to go with the CHEAPER E815 instead of the LG 8100 when I purchased my phone, and still feel the same way. So now the question is, what phone do I get? I can go pick up a new E815 from Verizon for the Retail cost, and sell the LG VX 8100, or I can pick up something a little cooler, say a PDA phone or blackberry. I dont know what to do. Either way, I have a broke ass phone that goes straigt to voicemail usually, and a brand new VX 8100 that I dont think I want to open, as well as an unused Treo650 for Sprint that I can sell.

What PDA Phone do I buy?

Laser Mineral Detector

Tomicles — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:37:44 +0000

Just read an interesting interview with this guy who invented a laser based detection device. It can identify the 3 parts of tylenol through the plastic bottle and tell you what type of plastic the bottle is made out of. NASA is planning on using it for a 2009 based Nuclear mars rover mission to be able to identify anything on the surface of mars very quickly. The device can identify the makeup spectrum of anything, but has to have seen it before to identify what it is. They are currently making a database of everything known on earth, to be able to identify it. They even said you could point it at a leaf from a tree, and it would tell you what kind of tree it came from. But you can read it yourself linked below. Its this sort of stuff that makes me want to get a degree in Astronomy or some other non engineering field that will in someway be linked to the space industry.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1581469.htm

slut-o-meter

Tomicles — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:26:33 +0000

The slut-o-meter has finally been moved to its new home, just a few ip addresses away and 2 computers higher in the rack at he.net, provided by Community Colo. Its not got a lot more ram, a much faster processor and it is actually a Dell PowerEdge server, instead of the ghetto piece of crap that it was running on before.

Specs:
2.8ghz HT P4
2gb DDR2 RAM
6gb SWAP <– site died on old server when swap ran out
250gb of sata disk space
10mbps

Digg.com –>Slut-o-meter.com –> Server==Dead

Tomicles — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:13:15 +0000

Today slut-o-meter.com got posted on Digg.com. It took a couple of hours to get upgraded to the front page, but once it did, mysql on my server couldn’t handle it. Adam Smith quickly jumped in and limited the type of statistics that were being reported and offloaded a few static parts of the site to another server but it was not enough. Eventually all of the system’s RAM as well as its SWAP were completely full and after traveling to HE.net to check it out, I found the server’s console with the image seen at the bottom of this post. It was not possible to login via SSH or from the console itself so my server lost its 319 days of uptime. Because I had to reboot the server to fix these memory issues, I also upgraded to the current legacy kernel once it rebooted to take care of any potential security flaws. It now appears to be working just fine, but the load has also gone down quite a bit. In the morning when I get up, I’ll be installing some Linux OS on my Dell SC420 to place at the colo as a backup system. I’ll also configure this box to do secondary DNS, and be a box usable for offloading sites in the event of a flash flood like today.

EVDO Speed

Tomicles — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 22:45:02 +0000

Im working on my homework and studying at Coffee Society at the pruneyard right now, and I’m using my EVDO wireless because the wireless here is free, but its quite slow. I decided to do a speed test of the EVDO and got the best results I’ve seen thus far.

I saw it go as high as 1745 on the down and then it settled out to 1627/124

my previous fastest test was just about 1000/118

I love my Mac

Tomicles — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 06:19:05 +0000

So today I backed up all my crap on my laptop so I can reinstall the OS. Its just gotten a little cluttered since I got it and its just that time again. I booted off the DVD to start the format/reinstall, and had an “oh crap” moment. Luckily, from the installer it lets you load up the terminal app. I plugged in my iPod, and copied the files i forgot to backup to my ipod from the installer. <3

Week of 8/15/2005

tomicles — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 06:47:28 +0000

This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.