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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]

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]

Sixth grade was not a good year for me on the school bus. Every year, Loveland City Schools shuffled its bus routes around, with the intent of keeping us students on our feet. That year, my stop wound up first on the route. The long ride each morning – usually half an hour to school – exacerbated my motion sickness, keeping me under the menacing eye of the bus driver.

One day, a classic winter storm passes through Cincinnati. You know: snow, sleet, slush, ice, slice. I can’t remember quite how much snow accumulated that day, but it can’t’ve been more than five inches. Regardless, the weather forecasters went hysterical about the sheer severity of the storm. Loveland, on the other hand, kept their cool. At the time, the district was hard core about staying open despite inclement weather. (I believe these days we call it “flinty Chicago toughness”.) Nothing like those Northern Kentucky schools that’d shut down whenever it felt chilly outside.

Still hoping for a chance snow day, I monitor all the TV stations’ scrolling tickers that morning. There’s an art to channel surfing on snow days: you switch to each channel as its ticker nears “L”. Little Miami, Live Oaks, Lockland – wait for it – Lynchburg. Fooey.

My bus meanders along its usual route, but at normal walking speed. Due to the thick layer of ice on the roads, the driver never makes stops; instead, she coasts a bit, swings open the doors, and waves us in. One by one, we jump aboard the oversized toboggan. While the driver carefully manages the slick hills, time is ticking on my motion sickness. We’re already plenty late for school. A few more minutes, or a couple more speed bumps, and I’ll have to pull out the Kroger bag the driver required me to carry, just in case.

Just as we slide past the final stop and start across town to school, the dispatcher comes across the radio, unusually loud and clear:

Base to all drivers, pull over. Repeat: pull over. We are determining whether to cancel school for today.

The freezing, exhausted passengers on the bus erupt in celebration, followed by arguments about who gets dropped off first once school is called off. Surely following the route in reverse would be unjust: some of us had been riding almost an hour already!

During the next ten minutes, we search for ways to stay warm as the district deliberates (in their cozy office, no doubt). Finally, a relieved-sounding dispatcher gives the all-clear over the radio. There will be school after all. Defeated silence. The eighth-graders at the back of the bus resume their daily routine of furiously scribbling down homework answers just before arriving at school. The kids across the aisle kick themselves for not flushing at 7:00 the night before. And I just want some fresh air.

Although St. Columban School is located within the Loveland school district boundaries, students come from several surrounding districts as well. That morning, the school appeared conspicuously empty. Of course, with Little Miami, Milford, and Goshen all closed, everyone but us Lovelanders had an excuse to stay home.

Readers from the West Coast will probably want to know what a Kroger bag is. They’re your ordinary plastic grocery bags, but tan-colored, so they make for good barf bags and great dresses (apparently).

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2061 under Elementary School | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks | PLANET_GO_AWAY]