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After I introduced the HeadSprout back in April, several people asked me how I came up with the idea of a bike- and head-mounted digital television system. The best answer I could give was that a TV antenna and a bike helmet found themselves both in my field of vision at the same time.

The other day, I read a BBC Magazine article asking a teenager to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Feeling nostalgic as I always do, I went rummaging through a drawer at home and found my old Sony Watchman. Slightly before my time, portable TV gadgets were all the rage. At some point, my family purchased an FD-250 model, probably at Sears, and it became my favorite toy growing up.

The Watchman FD-250 has the size and weight of a small book, but the antenna extends well over a foot.

The Watchman was my poor-man’s introduction to DXing. Whenever my family took a summer road trip, I’d bring the device along with me and tune in to various stations along the way, collecting their call letters as we entered large metropolitan areas. On the way to New Orleans, I would pick up numerous Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Birmingham stations this way.

It still works, after you pop in a fresh battery or two. The first thing you notice is how much consumer electronics have changed within just twenty-odd years. Get it? Watchman, Walkman? You know, Walkman, predecessor to the CD player? Like large MP3 players? Um, before iPods?

The Watchman’s screen is angled downward and pincushioned inward. Shown here is some old movie on channel 38. Even if you watched it on a state-of-the-art digital TV, it’d still be in black-and-white, so no loss here.

This particular Watchman model had a black-and-white CRT display. Actually, to give the device a less awkward form factor, the screen is just a mirror, angled to reflect the image produced by the CRT tube (below the screen in the photos). The fact that the screen is black-and-white shouldn’t be that surprising: in the early 1990s, you could still find plenty of full-size, black-and-white TV sets at family-run electronics stores (another relic of that decade).

Since nearly all Cincinnati-area stations stopped broadcasting in analog sometime last month, the Watchman can only receive three stations: WLWT 5, the Cincinnati NBC affiliate; WKEF 22, the Dayton ABC affiliate; and WBQC 38, an independent station in Cincinnati that airs kung-fu movies and similar fare. As a low-power station, WBQC isn’t required to give up their analog signal yet, while the other two are airing nothing but DTV infomercials in a federally-mandated loop. The reception isn’t spectacular in any case – unidirectional VHF antennae never work well this far out from the city – but the Watchman was built for mobility, not kung-fu movies.

If I had the right cables, I could restore the Watchman to full working condition by hooking a converter box up to its A/V In jack. Then I could watch digital TV in glorious black-and-white, and it would be plenty more convenient than HeadSprout. But that’s a project for another day.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2191 under Television | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]

For the past three months, I along with five partners have toiled in stealth mode to build a disruptive product that will revolutionize media consumption as we know it, by synergizing television watching with bicycle riding. Leveraging unparalleled loyalties to both recreational activities, it is our intent to forge a new market based on mobile multimedia and capitalize upon emerging opportunities.

In short: we have developed the HeadSprout, the world’s first fully-integrated bike- and head-mounted digital television system.

( Read more... )
[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2079 under Humor | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]

This morning, Mozilla officially renamed “add-ons” to “change-arounds”. Apparently the move is intended to capitalize on Barack Obama’s campaign for President, which centered around the word “change”.

Add-ons never added to my hard drive’s available space, and the extensions I’ve authored never added to my bottom line. So, though I find the new name a bit awkward, I’m thrilled that Mozilla is finally listening to the more pedantic parts of their user base for once. I just Twittered a Mozilla official, who wished to either remain anonymous or place me under an NDA. He assured me – off the record – that the Internet Explorer team plans to make the same change to their browser interface, possibly as soon as the next Patch Tuesday come-arounds.

Mozilla had planned to rename the feature “Take-outs” – reflecting the subtractive nature of many extensions and themes – and had already commissioned a series of cute Chinese take-out box icons. However, the nearby Lucky Wok restaurant stepped in at the last minute, threatening legal action. “Developers need Chinese take-out for late-night coding sessions,” explained the official, again off the record. “You wouldn’t believe how many bugs we’ve traced back to the presence of pizza or TV dinners in the building. You just don’t get that with moo goo gai pan.”

I’ve just updated AVIM’s website and its listing at Firefox Change-arounds to reflect the change. The Mozilla official fully expects other change-around developers to follow suit. But you didn’t hear it from him.

[Update] After much outcry from such Facebook groups as “I miss OLD Firefox Add-ons!!!11!!”, Mozilla has changed the name back. The fact that it’s now April 2^nd must’ve factored into the decision, too.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2077 under Humor | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]

I keep a folder of bookmarks filled with pages I intend to mention at some point on this blog, because they’re just so funny or otherwise worthwhile to read. But the last time I ever drew from the “Blog About…” folder was over a year ago; since then, its growth has closely paralleled that of the National Debt. The 182 bookmarks stand as a rustic testament to my penchant for procrastination, and that’s just the ones I didn’t lose when switching to the Mac. Though many of those links are now dead, no longer interesting, or covered copiously elsewhere, I’m still going to post the interesting ones.

Well, maybe later. Instead, I thought it’d be fun to share a few of my oldest “good read” bookmarks. Here are some of the webpages I added to the “Humor” folder back in high school, sorted by date bookmarked. Seriously: it’s not every year you find this kind of brilliance on Digg or Reddit:

• Steve, Don't Eat It! – 1991 Urkel-Os (bookmarked June 23^rd, 2005)
• Under Construction (June 22^nd, 2005) – guilty
• The Onion 2056 (June 22^nd, 2005)
• Big Fat Institute for Advanced Interactive Experiences (April 11^th, 2005) – based in Cincinnati
• The Credit Card Prank (April 1^st, 2005)
• PodBrix (February 27^th, 2005) – Legos, except not
• Taste for the Web (February 8^th, 2005) – a parody of Paul Graham
• Postal Experiments (January 21^st, 2005)
• “Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head.” (September 22^nd, 2004) – in 112 languages
• BlueScreen Screen Saver (August 28^th, 2004) – free from Microsoft
• win98.c (February 14^th, 2004)
• Case Western Reserve University, circa 2000 1900 (September 2^nd, 2003 1903) – background
• Laws of Japanese Animation (September 27^th, 2002)

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2071 under Summary | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]

First things first: if you use version 20080728.280 of my AVIM extension, upgrade to version 20080728.306 now.

Last Friday, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant refuted five typical excuses for calling the eval() function in JavaScript. I remembered that function well: take any string, pass it into eval(), and the string gets executed as though it were ordinary code. When I took Stanford’s hacking class last spring, we developed an exploit that targeted a fictitious website’s generous use of the function. eval() is the most easily abused function available to JavaScripters, because it’s such a tantalizing shortcut. Why bother learning DOM Level 3 when you can call one function and move on?

Were you to conduct a comprehensive survey of computer programmers, I’d suspect that nearly all of us would rate ourselves “above average” programmers who keep particularly good best practices in mind at all times. Like, to avoid eval() at all costs. But I called that function – once – and Wladimir caught me.

( Read more... )
[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2062 under AVIM | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]