Waiting is good for you

Dear future self,  Please don't melt down if your Nexus S phone freaks out with a dead battery and refuses to charge. If this happens, please remove the battery, wait 5 minutes, and put the battery back in.  It will then decide all on its own to recharge just like to uber cool phone that you've enjoyed so much. kthxbai, me. 

I recently went a while without charging my Nexus S (a week as a juror on a really disturbing jury case, but i'll save that for another time). My phone's battery was very low. When I turned it on, it let me unlock it, then it threw all of its toys out of the pram, and pitched a fit. The screen went completely black, and no combination of plugging it in to the USB port or to its wall charger would convince it to charge. I even popped the battery out and put it back in. Nuthin. Finally in an act of desperation, I removed the battery, and let it sit, sans battery, for 5 minutes. I put the battery back in, and Shazam! It happily started charging.

So sometimes waiting does help. Now if I could just spin that into procrastinating being good, i'd be set!

UPDATE: Another phone that I have started refusing to charge, so I plugged it into the wall charger, and also read that you have to wait for it to reach 10% charge b4 it will boot. See? Another indication that waiting is good.

WebGL hits prime time

Congrats to the Google Maps team on deploying your WebGL enabled version of desktop Google Maps. This is a pretty cool use of WebGL. WebGL lets you have hardware accelerated 3D in your browser without requiring installation of an additional browser plugin. Pretty cool, huh?  WebGL is basically a javascript interface to OpenGL ES, which lets your javascript have direct access to your graphics hardware.  It's still javascript, so you have the expected performance hit of running javascript, but it can work well for some applications (like Google Maps!).

If you aren't familiar with OpenGL ES, it's the open 3D standard done by the Khronos Standards group, and it's also the 3D api of choice for iOS and Android. Sweetness.

This is also a great milestone for the WebGL community to see their standard being used by Google Maps.

I played with it in Chrome, and it functions fairly well. I like being able to rotate around things, and zooming down to street level. Given the power of WebGL, the Google Maps team has a fun time ahead of them as they code in new features.

I'm keeping an eye on the WebGL middleware communities. Javascript programmers aren't going to want to code directly in WebGL, so there are lots of middleware sprouting up everywhere.

Fun!

Yearly religious experience

Today was my yearly religious experience: Beethoven's Choral Fantasy at the Marlboro Music Festival. For the last performance every year, the school does the same piece. It's really nice because it is done in such a small venue (most performances are a few musicians ), and the performance hall at Marlboro college is really built for music, just about every interior surface is done in nice thick wood. This makes for a really great setting. Because the piece requires such a large number of people, some of the local musicians participate alongside the students, and the chorus is mostly local amateurs. Since the piece also requires a solo pianist, they have to wedge a grand piano in the middle of the stage. It gets pretty crowded up there.

I think one of the other things I like at Marlboro is the casual atmosphere. The students are focused on their music, and plenty of folks in the audience are wearing jeans. Great classical live music that I don't have to get dressed up for is a total win...

Google Maps 5.0 when traveling off the grid

So we recently completed an amazing trip to Greece and Turkey. Hopefully I'll find the time to blog on that sometime.

One thing that made things less stressful on this trip was the use of the new caching feature of Google Maps 5.0. As I reported earlier, it isn't perfect yet. The biggest issue is it doesn't cache points of interest like expected.


But it was surprising useful even in it's current state of only caching map tiles. Seeing your location as a dot on a nicely annotated google map when in a foreign country while trying to use public transportation was really really nice. We'd be on a bus, and I could whip it out and it would help us figure out which stop to jump off on.

Holding a mobile device up is also much less conspicuous than flapping around with a guide book always out, or god forbid, a big paper map.

And I was able to do it all without having a working 3G connection. Nice.

Shrinkage

Yesterday I got a new USB external hard drive from newegg. I was struck by how much this technology has improved in the last few years. I dug out my very first external drive that I think I got in 2006. It had a noisy cooling fan and required a big external power supply.

So I put them side by side.

They cost roughly the same, the new one holds 1T and if I recall the old one is around 100GB. The old one is the size of a large book, the new one is the size of my passport, except it's thicker.

Pulling the plug on Japan

This week we made the painful decision to cancel our trip to Japan next month. I've spent months working out a really nice trip, but the nuclear thing, even though I know it is being overly dramatized by the western media, is stressing us out. I feel bad about bailing out, but we realized that we were so worried about things in Japan, we weren't even looking forward to the trip.

Since we are planning on doing this trip some day, I thought I'd record the original plan I had put together.

3 nights in Tokyo
7 nights townhouse rental in old area of Kyoto : day trips to Nara, pottery town of Bizen.
2 nights stay in buddhist Temple in Mt Koyasan area
4 nights Takayama
1 night ryokan in Takayama
2 nights Tokyo

Google MyMaps... So close, and yet so far.

We're taking a trip overseas this year, and I'm in full planning nerd mode. I won't have cell phone or 3G service where we'll be going, so I'm trying to look at ways to utilize a mobile device for helping with directions and routes when we will only have occassional wifi access.

I've been tinkering with Maps 5.0 on Android, especially its caching functionality. The caching seems to work pretty well. I think if I spend some time roaming around in google maps on the device with wifi access, it will work well when I dont have wifi.

The problem is in geotagging and routing. While I'm offline wandering around a city, I won't be able to look up the place we're headed to, or get routing information to guide me to the location. So I need some system of locally stored/cached items that have longitude/latitude data with them, and it would be sweet loveliness if I could also have a locally stored/cached routes for our plan for the day.

I was so close with built in Google Maps features of MyMaps for routes and "starred places" for individual locations.

I am able to 'star' something on a map, and Google Maps will sometimes sort of cache my list of starred places (but not reliably caching)... But... While I search for the item by the English name, in my "Starred places" list, they tend to be listed in kanji (we're going to Japan). I can't find a way to rename a spot I have starred. That's going to really limit my ability to use this feature.

MyMaps would be perfect for planning siteseeing, except it doesn't cache at all.

i'm almost tempted to build a PhoneGap app that pulls POIs from locally stored stuff, and then invokes Maps with it. Mmmm... would I still be able to have fully functional Maps 5.0 caching? Is there a way to plop a route on it? Before I launch off on that, I'll probably poke around and see if anyone else has already coded up something.

Finally!

I haven't been doing much in the way of electronics recently because I've been spending all my time researching/planning our upcoming vacation in Japan. ( it also doesn't help that my workshop is out in the chilly garage. )

I finally have our route and hotels planned out. Here it is: Tokyo - Kyoto - Mt. Koya - Takayama - Tokyo. In Kyoto we are renting a traditional wood machiya (townhouse), and plan day trips to Bizen City and Nara. In Koyasan we are staying with monks in a Buddhist temple, and we have one night in Takayama in a traditional ryokan with a smazzy dinner.

We still have lots of planning to do, but somehow there is a certain comfort in knowing where you will rest your head each night.

The power of creation.....errr.... Programming

I recently took phonegap for a spin around the block. I've found that I learn best by flinging myself at something and doing/creating/making something. Phonegap is pretty cool. It creates platform independent hybrid apps for mobile devices. It basically uses JavaScript as its programming language, and provides APIs for using all the sensors on your device. That means you can use whatever JavaScript libraries you want, and you can compile your app for android, iphone, and blackberry.

One of my pain points in developing augmented reality apps has been that getting camera access meant developing a native app, which in turn meant porting waz painful. Granted, I think for vision based AR, a true native app is still the way to go because you usually need to do some crunching on images that you grab from the camera. But once video support is added to phonegap, things get really interesting for location based AR.

Anyway, I created a simple phonegap app that grabbed a picture from my camera, displayed it in the app, and then used jquery to push it to my waiting php script on my server. I learned a lot from it, and was struck by one thing. I realized that in the space of an afternoon that I had sort of implemented a rough cut version of what my Eyefi setup does. My Eyefi pushes images from my camera to my NAS, and the phonegap app does a similar thing, using all open source. Open source is so cool that way. It's like no matter what I need, there is always a waiting set of open source power tools for the task.

Finally testing the ups

Power went out this morning, and now I can test the ups. This is cool. I sitting in a dark house, but still have connectivity with AT&T uverse. My router and my NAS are hooked up to a ups. I'll probably get one for Vermont, since the cabin tends to have more frequent power blips.

Unfortunately, the coffee maker isn't hooked up to it, so my next cup will be luke warm. Connectivity is more important than hot coffee. I wouldn't have said that 10 years ago. If the power stays out much longer, I'll get to find out if connectivity is more important than heat. It's 30 degrees out.