Technology Bytes

All right!

We’ve been talking about Arduino for quite some time, now. If you’ve been to a Geek Gathering at some point during the last two years, you’ve probably glimpsed one without knowing. The Arduino is a micro-controller, or a tiny computer that is capable of reacting to the real world in physical ways. Using a micro-controller, you can take various inputs (things like light, heat, motion or distance), make a decision as to how to react to them, then actually cause something in the real world to happen. A motor turns, a sound plays, or, most likely, a light blinks.

In the past, you had to visit a few specific sites on the Internet to get things like these to play with, but all that is changing. MicroCenter, an early adopter and then abandoner of Linux software, is now carrying Arduinos, Arduino clones, and a ton of stuff to hook them up to. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of information accompanying the items, and your average patron is going to cruise right by them like they were an old pile of DB-9 to DB-25 serial adapters. MicroCenter is hoping to change all this by offering an Arduino Workshop this Saturday at their Houston store at 610 near San Felipe.

Things get started at two PM this Saturday, April 28th at two PM. Pre-registration in the store is required, as seating is limited, and participants must bring the following:

An Arduino starter kit or Arduino module with the components needed in class *and* a notebook computer with OS X or Windows.

The following will be provided:

Informational handouts and project details, A CD containing the Arduino IDE for Mac and Windows, Arduino sketch files used in the workshop, Code samples from “SparkFun Inventors Guide”, Code samples from O’Reilly “Getting Started with Arduino” as well as the “Arduino Cookbook.”

Not to be left out, the Houston Area Apple Users Group, aka HAAUG, is putting on their own micro-controller presentation the morning after the Geek Gathering.

They’ve also picked Saturday the 28th to give their talk on Microcontrollers. And while not a hands-on workshop, I’m sure that there is information to be gleaned there. Since the Special Interest Group meetings start at nine AM with the main micro-controller presentation happening at eleven, you could conceivably take in both events, transforming you into a micro-programming machine.

Hit www.microcenter.com and www.haaug.org for details and directions. I’ll also have both links on the Geek Radio website before the show wraps.

And if you can’t make either one of these, we’ll be sure to bring some Arduino out to the Geek Gathering in May.

That’s it for your MicroController MicroRevolution and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right. Since Jay Lee is *Jay* Leaving us after next week, we’re going to be on our own when it comes to keeping this show running. We’ve jokingly referred to ourselves as a number of other shows, often following the “I was driving through Houston” lead-in. I’m thinking that maybe we go in a different direction for more than the regular short-drive duration, just while Jay is out, just to see how it works. So, rather than try to hash out a new format at the start of next week’s show, I figured we could take a look at it now. It also allows Jay to have a bit of a say in things. Not that we’re going to take his advice…

So… What if we changed it up a little and instead of talking about computers, we talked about old cars, pickup trucks, mustangs and vintage Vespas. We could call it Truck Talk. All of our answers could be, “paint it black”.

Ok. What if we did the whole show using nothing but barking dogs, doorbells, ringing phones and chatty teenagers? We could still take calls, but only from Skype users who are still on dial-up.

What if we went with a more topical slash temporal approach? Like a weekly review of what happened in the world of technology? We could sit on inflatable exercise balls to strengthen our cores and maybe call it something like That Week in Technology. Oh! And we could have Dwight Silverman on the show as a guest!

What if I play the part of a fiery redhead in a relationship with someone who photographs bands. Unless Groove wants to forgo photography and take up Big Band direction… We could get into silly situations with our next door neighbors, Dwight and phliKtid Mertz.

No?

What if we all ditch the knickers next week and mod our website to allow for sponsors as well as a ton of ads? We could call it the All Commando Show. No one in the studio is running a dress rehearsal right now, are they? Ok. Good.

OK – last pitch. what if we got all of our prison mail together, read it on air again, and then followed up with talk about cops, courts, jails, prisons, probation, parole, and just life in general? Can we go to prison for stealing Ray Hill’s show?

I’m all for queueing up two hours of Nyan Cat and calling it a night.

I guess it really comes down trying to do a normal show and making a decision now as to who gets to say, “And he’s…” before Groovehouse says Groovehouse.

Also, who’s going to be responsible in case the show tanks. I call “Not It!”

We’ll miss you Jay, but for now:

That’s it for I Love This Commando In TruckTech and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right.

After the sheer amount of stout I’ve quaffed the last two weeks, I feel it only appropriate to lead off with something Guinness related.

Is everyone ready? I didn’t mean for this to be some sort of Irish Inquisition, but we’re doing trivia.

What was Alec Guinness’ salary for playing the part of Obi Wan Kenobi in the 1978 movie, Star Wars?

OK… Hang on. Wrong Guinness. Here we go…

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, what was the greatest selling single computer model of all time?

The venerable Commodore 64. And…Alec Guinness earned 150k plus 2% of profits. Which would arguably buy quite a bit of the other Guinness. It was also more than two and a third times more K than the C-64 had, of which, depending upon where you source your information, between 12.5 million and 22 million units were sold.

Dwight, the next question is yours: How many bytes is that worldwide? Please state the median, mode and standard deviation in terms of bits. Expressed in Octal notation. Backwards. Now go.

Ok… How about: When was production stopped on the Commodore 64?

Introduced in January of 1982, the production run of the C-64 and the C-64C lasted twelve years and three months. Making that… April of 1994.

If Alec had held onto his money for a few years, he could have bought 250 C64s and still had money left over for a couple copies of Tetris.

So, does anyone know what the retail price of the C64 was in 1982?

$595.00.

On a side note, Alec Guinness was not a fan of the Obi Wan character, going so far as to help convince George Lucas that the character should be killed off in order to limit the amount of work he would have to do in subsequent films. And so the first Jedi Knight was cut down, leaving an indelible mark on so many young lives. Alec Guinness passed in 2000, having never had the chance to talk Lucas out of keeping Jar Jar Binks around for subsequent episodes.

Sadly, we lost another noble Knight this week in the form of Jack Trameil, founder of Commodore International.

What was Jack Tramiel’s original nationality?

He was born in Poland in 1928 to a Jewish family. When the Germans invaded eight years later, he spent time working in a garment factory in one of the ghettos before being sent to Auschwitz concentration camp with his mother and father. After being inspected by Dr. Mengele, he was transported to a labor camp near Hanover, where he managed to survive until the camp was liberated by the 84th Infantry Division in 1945. Tramiel was a co-founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was opened in 1993.

I’m not going to try to pronounce his birth name, but what does his last name, spelled Trzmeil, mean in Polish?

Bumblebee. Pretty cool, as Flight of the Bumblebee was probably one of the first data sets I ever spent a weekend typing into a Vic-20, only to lose it all at the next power cycle.

In November of 1947, Tramiel took flight and immigrated to the United States and soon volunteered for the US Army where he learned what skill?

He learned how to repair office equipment, namely typewriters.

Commodore was not Jack’s first choice for the name of his new company. What was one of the other contenders?

Having just come out of the army, he was looking for something strong. Both Admiral and General were already taken. When he saw an Opel Commodore from the back seat of a cab, he had his name.

Maybe our next trivia question should be What is an Opel Commodore?

It’s a trap! No, wait… It’s a car. Sorry. Had to get one more Star Wars reference in there.

That’s it for the end of an era and an Irish Inqusition and that’s that for BarretTime.

New from Hauppage, the Broadway. This device advertises itself as means to watch TV on your computer, smart phone or tablet device. We received a unit to review and would like to share our impressions.

Initially, the idea seemed sound. Connect this device to your home network and provide a video source and then watch your cable, sattelite or antenna based TV on just about any wi-fi enabled device.

Out of the box I have to say, the documentation is pretty minimal. Even as a geek I had to struggle with getting the Broadway up and running and the documentation was of little help with some of the more complex challenges such as enabling port forwarding on the router. And there is little to no troubleshooting advice to be found. Even the FAQ link on the website takes you to a page that says “Coming Soon” with no additional information,

I followed the instructions regarding configuring the device to connect to my wi-fi and that went pretty smoothly. I then followed the instructions to connect the device to my cable TV which proved more challenging. The device includes infrared cabled to be placed in front of the IR receiver on the set top box, but I couldn’t quite get that to work and ended up connecting the device to an available co-ax outlet in the spare bedroom.

Once that was done I was able to scan for available channels and the device seemed to detect several hundred, which was encouraging.

Now the interesting part. In order to use your iPad or other device to watch TV you simply browse to http://distan.tv to connect. No application install, no plugins or anything. The device registers with the Hauppage site and then you make the association with the portable device you will be using. Once that is done you can reach your home television signal from anywhere you have wi-fi connectivity because the Broadway transmits your external IP address to a site that associates it with a PIN you create when you first set the device up. I would imagine this gets updated when your IP address ultimately gets renewed by your Internet provider.

Of course it didn’t work right until I enabled port forwarding, and even then I had to make some tweaks to my iPad settings to get it to finally connect. But once I did, I had a list of TV channels available and was able to watch live TV right on my iPad.

I even tried this from a nearby coffee shop and it worked rather well.

On the downside, you can’t watch shows you’ve recorded on your DVR and there is no HD video. But there’s also no additional software to buy and it appears this will work on any platform, including iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android and even Palm/HP WebOS devices.

Overall, not a bad device once you get past the initial setup. I have certainly enjoyed using it to watch local broadcast on the iPad which is not something I could do in the past.

In the second half of the show phliKtid introduces the hosts of Technology Bytes to My Little Pony: The Magic of Friendship and Bronies

Technology Bytes Podcast for March 21, 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download