Technology Bytes

and here’s the Snuggie for real men!

This Sunday afternoon, come out to Caroline Collective for the “Can-Do Technology Bash”, a celebration of do-it-yourself and hands-on technology. Demonstrations will include a build-your-own water pump, robots, LED projects, a solar cooker, and the Makerbot 3D printer. Or bring along your own project to share with the community. It is a free event, but will be a benefit for a water and power project at a hospital in Kenya. Things go from three to seven this Sunday December 13th at the Caroline Collective, located at 4820 Caroline. More information can be found at www.technology4charity.com. That’s technology, then the number four, then charity.com.

And while the Mac folks have been too busy making tough decisions as to which Apple product will receive their hard earned dollars, the Linux folks are plowing ahead with their monthly meetings as if all their stuff was free. No planning what-so-ever. They just install whatever they want on any old hardware. Seriously, Christmas isn’t about sharing, it’s about buying.

Anyway, if you’re into that whole Free Software thing, the Linux Special Interest Group at HAL-PC is holding thier first monthly meeting this Saturday, December 12th, at two in the afternoon. The HAL-PC headquarters is the place to be, tucked conveniently close to both caffeine and a major computer retailer just off 610 West and San Felipe. The presentation generally runs two hours, and contains an abundance of practical knowledge for both graybeards and noobs alike.

Hit www.hal-pc.org for directions to their headquarters and www.houstonlinux.org to keep tabs on what the Houston Linux folk are up to.

And backing it up an hour, at 1:00 that afternoon, the monthly meeting of the iPods, Smart Phones & Mobile Gadgets SIG takes place. This newly renamed special interest group examines portable media players, mobile phones, GPS receivers, laptops…pretty much whatever digitalia they can affix to their person. Not sure if they’re familiar with that term, though, so be careful… Common issues include setup, connectivity, rate plans, accessories, troubleshooting, importing and exporting data, how to find help, tips and tricks and even how to get vendor discounts. Again, that’s One o’clock this Saturday afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters.

You know, this show is cool because a lot of the issues we deal with are applicable not only to the caller, but to a lot of our listening audience as well. In fact, most of BarretTime is geared towards a fairly wide array of people, otherwise I’d spend two or three minutes each week delving into design patterns, server security, and hardware hacking. So most of my stuff isn’t geared toward any one person in specific.

But I feel like that last event is really geared toward one caller in particlar. Again, that’s this Saturday at one o’clock in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters. These are your people; they can help you.

And backing it up a full day, this Friday is the December “Make-up” Geek Gathering. That doesn’t mean you should go heavy on the rouge, it just means you now have a second chance to geek it up with your peers before the post-holiday tech support calls start rolling in from various family members, immediate and extended, sure that you will be able to help them through whatever troubles they’re having. These calls tend to come in during meals, at critical points in online multi-player games, and right after you’ve gotten all hot and sweaty trying to squeeze into your new Sailor Moon outfit after having a big Christmas dinner. (Dwight knows what I’m talking about…)

The Coffee Groundz offers a light menu, a full bar, and a wide selection of coffee, tea, beer and wine. Free WiFi will warm the air, and electrical outlets abound. And building on our two month tradition, we’ll pack in a bunch of open source hardware to play with. We’re planning to set up a station where people can design their own animated LED snowflakes, then export their design to a stand-alone RGB matrix for the rest of the crowd to check out. And if I can find two Super NES controllers, we’ll be able to put an 8-bit homebrew gaming console up on one of the televisions at the coffee groundz. The console, called the Uzebox, is built on the ATmega644 chip and is capable of running just about everything you would find in an arcade circa 1980, in addition to a ton of community created content.

So that’s 7:00 this Friday at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston. 2503 Bagby @ McGowan. We were snowed out last week, but the weather for this Friday evening looks like it will be in the lower 50s with a 60% chance of showers. An overnight low of 46, with morning clouds on Saturday, followed by afternoon sun. Highs in the mid 60s and lows in the mid 50s.

That’s it for this RTFWM Weather Update and that’s that for BarretTime. Jay, back to you!

Appears the live stream was offline tonight. Fortunately this did not affect the ability to capture the podcast. Here’s is Wednesday night’s show in all its glory.

Technology Bytes Podcast for Dec 9th, 2009 [ 1:59:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lance Ulanoff, editor-in-chief of PCmag.com calls in to talk about the death of the Crunchpad and the future of tablet computing. Good discussion throughout the second half about memories of our first electronic toys.

Technology Bytes Podcast For Dec 2nd, 2009 [ 1:59:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

All right – the weather outside is getting colder, and the holiday season is now fully upon us. Decorations and gift giving definitely seem to highlight this time of the year, but that wasn’t always the case. Gift Giving in the modern sense didn’t really get underway until the 1820s. The first advertisements for Christmas gifts hit the US in 1804, and it wasn’t until the 1840s that it had become an integral part of the American Christmas tradition.

And just like our grandparents and their parents before them walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways, each generation seems to state that gift giving was never that important when they were a kid. Harriet Beacher Stowe wrote in 1850 that, “the very idea of a present was new!” and that “there are worlds of money wasted at this time of year.” Stowe was a member of the last generation to be able to legitimately make that claim. If you’ve heard similar words escape the lips of anyone under 150 years old, they probably didn’t notice all the commercialism as a kid because they distracted by all the presents they were getting.

However, calling grandpa out on Christmas Eve is not what this BarretTime is about. If you want to go that route, you go it alone. I need to check out Snopes for the real deal, but I suspect that Grandma getting run over by that reindeer was directly related to her always correcting grandpa’s snowy, giftless, Christmas recollections on Christmas Eve. But unlike stories past, Grandma won’t be around to refute the reindeer story and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever be able to produce Santa in court.

So rather than implicating grandpa, I’d like to ask the Technology Bytes crew if they remember the first electronic toy, gadget or game that they received for Christmas. We should probably be pretty loose with what constitutes electronic, as some of us in the room may have received gifts before the birth of the integrated circuit. That’s 1956, for those keeping track.

We could probably open that up to our callers the last half of the show as well…

And speaking of free things, If you’ve heard the comparisons between free as in speech and free as in beer when it comes to Open Source wares, you’re probably aware that speech usually trumps beer. Sadly, there isn’t a lot of free beer going around these days, but that could change tomorrow night, depending on how quickly a firkin of Fireman’s Number Four is drained tomorrow evening at the Petrol Station in Garden Oaks.

The Petrol Station is the new Kaveh Kanes of early Geek Gathering fame and a firkin is an old English unit of volume, equal to nine imperial gallons or seventy two pints. If the crowd at the Petrol Station can drain a firkin of Fireman’s in under seven minutes, Real Ale will open up a free as in beer firkin of Coffee House Porter. You’ll want to arrive a little before 8:00, because by 8:07, it could all be over. The Petrol Station is at 985 Wakefield near Golf just north of the 610 loop.

Another Free as in Beer activity is the Geek Gathering this Friday night at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston. Bundle up or plan on spending some time indoors, as things will be chilly regardless of any frozen precipitation. Things get started at seven o’clock at 2503 Bagby at McGowan. And be sure not to park along the street on McGowan, or you may be starting to run after a tow truck by eight.

WiFi, Geeky Comaraderie and side hugs are all free. The beer, spirits and food will cost you.

Hit www.geekradio.com for details and directions.

And one last free as in beer related item, though I’m going to make you come out to the Geek Gathering to collect. Open Source Hardware, like the Arduino platform, is free as in schematics, but often falls under the same category as beer. Not this season. A US based Open Source Hardware vendor is giving away $100 of the gear of your choice to all practicing or aspiring tinkers and hardware hackers. The catch is that it is one day only, they’re capping it at $100,000 in total giveaways, and you’ve got to pay your own shipping. This is a really awesome deal from some good people aimed at the hardware hacking community. Ask me about it at the Geek Gathering and I’ll give you the company name, the date and the link.

Knowing that not everyone can make it out to the Geek Gathering, I’ll give a hint to help track down the company. They were recently mentioned in a Canadian newspaper when one of their bluetooth to serial devices was discovered in a mobile credit card processing machine at a restaurant. The photo, intentionally or otherwise, prominently displays their company logo on the nefarious device. Rather than shy away from the news release or burying it, they’re embracing it. After all, serial to bluetooth converters don’t debit card numbers and PINs, people do.

That’s that for your holiday Free One One and that’s that for BarretTime.

We’ve spent the last three weeks asking you to give a gift of support to KPFT. You can consider that a warm-up for the next few weeks of pleads for your hard earned money. Only they won’t be coming from Jay or Peter, but rather the thousands of advertisers all clamoring for your holiday dollar.

There was a time in America when hand made gifts were the norm. There wasn’t any ‘store bought’ anything. At least that’s how the graybeards in the server room tell it. I tend to agree. Gift giving has gotten too easy. With things like Amazon and eBay, you don’t have to go any farther than your front stoop to send someone something material. And if you have it delivered directly to the intended recipient, you don’t even have to do that. Maybe we as geeks should go back to making our own gifts…

If a macaroni portrait of Steve Jobs or a hand sewn black turtleneck with three sleeves doesn’t embody the message you’re trying to convey, not to worry: we’re here to plant a few gift ideas in your holiday head.

A spin on the classic coupon for hugs, kisses, or housework, you could put together a few Tech Support coupons good for short sessions of help. You definitely want to limit the scope of the coupons. Each coupon could be good for one tech support instance or for one increment of time, say 30 minutes. Seriously, if you’re already doing a ton of tech support for a family member, this is a good way of assigning a little value to it or even making them think twice before they call you. It is especially appropriate gift for anyone who tends to call you throughout the year looking for free tech support, anyway.

“Ok, aunt Edna… It’s Jauary 12th and you’ve already used up half of your coupons… Better slow down…” Of course you’d be joking. Kinda.

O’Reilly’s Maker’s Shed carries both LED menorahs and Christmas trees, both just a couple of solder joints away. Chumby guts and toys from Japan also grace their website. Surf to www.makershed.com to check out the goodies before they’re gone. That’s the downside – as most of their fare comes from individual makers, the cooler items can often run out before December 25th.

The world of Open Source Hardware has opened up all kinds of doors as far as gifts go. Sites like Adafruit Industries at www.adafruit.com carry both kits comprised of all the electronic components you need to build a game, an electricity usage monitoring system, or the infamous TV B-Gone. Think of Adafruit Industries as a clearing house for Open Source projects. Just like RedHat or SuSE may package a Linux Distribution for you, Adafruit packages all of the necessary parts. If you don’t want to go through Adafruit, you can always hit the site for schematics and the parts list necessary to source your own.

Many of the Open Source Hardware kits require some soldering, but even that can be remedied with the gift of soldering skills via the “learn to solder bundle” from the Maker Shed. The ability to control molten metal and the flow of electrons around a circuit board is definitely a gift that can keep on giving.

Another gift option is a vanity URL. Sites like gandi.net let you take actual ownership of a domain, or let you assign that ownership to someone else. This is more a gift for a technically natured friend or family member, otherwise you may want to consider bundling this gift with a limited supply of tech support coupons.

If you have an electronic music lover in your life, Curious Inventor.com carries a line of audio gear titled The Voice of Saturn. Open Hardware components like a sequencer, a modulator, and synthesizer will enable them to create chop up all the music or noise they want. This may not be the best gift for roommates or anyone who lives within a few hundred yards of you.

And if you don’t want to give an entire gift, you can always give someone something to accompany what they already have. There are all kinds of creative hacks out there, from TiVos to phones to Roombas. These gifts are best for people who could actually install and use them, so be careful to avoid any Gift of the Magi situations with like-minded geeky friends.

That would be like phliKtid saying “I eBay’d my Wireless Access Point to buy you this serial cable for you to hax your Roomba.”

Then Groovehouse saying “Oh No! I eBay’d my Roomba to buy you this serial connector so you could hax your Wireless Access Point.”

If you’re not familiar with Gift of the Magi, I believe it’s a remake of the Sesame Street Christmas Special with Ernie and Bert.

That’s that for your geeky gift guide and that’s it for BarretTime.

We interviewed the Nintendo rep about their new game releases. An informative and entertaining interview arranged and primarily conducted by Barrett with some interesting additional questions and comments from the crew.

Technology Bytes Podcast For Nov. 18th, 2009 [ 1:59:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Normally we don’t post podcasts of fundraising episodes, but in this show we met our $1,400 goal in the first 45 minutes which allowed us to take calls as normal.

Standard Podcast [ 1:58:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A slideshow of photos from last night’s episode.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.