August 6th, 2010
Screenshot: Airplane Flying Handbook cover
I have completed converting the Airplane Flying Handbook into EPUB format, a type of digital book. The Airplane Flying Handbook is an FAA publication designed to teach basic piloting skills. I used the Airplane Flying Handbook in ground school when I was studying for my private pilot certificate. You can purchase the EPUB version of the Airplane Flying Handbook in my store.
The digital version contains all of the content from the paper version. But since it is digital you can easily search for terms using your reader. (It still has the index from the paper version too.) I found it to be very convenient to read on my Droid phone, an Android based device, using a program called Aldiko. Having the book on my phone allowed me to make use of my idle time: it was very convenient to open the book on my phone and read a couple pages as time allowed. I have provided a little screen tour of the EPUB Airplane Flying Handbook rendered by Aldiko, captured from my Droid phone. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: aviation, epub
Posted in aviation | 2 Comments »
January 25th, 2012
Screen shot of webLightSwitch running in the Android browser
I have developed a new project called webLightSwitch. You can find details about the project on the webLightSwitch project page. The project is a simple but useful program to allow me to control some of the lights in my home via a web interface. This allows me to use my mobile phone to turn on and off the lamp or the outdoor lights at my house. The control software is written in JavaScript and runs on a BeagleBone using node.js. The user interface, as seen in the screen shot, is implemented with jQuery Mobile to make the interface touch friendly. The lights are controlled by Smarthome INSTEON controllers. The BeagleBone communicates with the lighting controllers via a Smarthome PowerLinc Modem.
I have been running the software for over a week now. With it being winter right now in Iowa, it gets dark well before I arrive home from work around 6PM. Using my mobile phone to be able to turn on the outdoor lights is very convenient. The experience is similar to my automatic garage door opener: drive up to drive way, press button to open garage door, and press button to turn on outside lights.
I plan to develop a more advanced home automation system, but this simple system has proven itself to be useful. In addition to the webLightSwitch project page, you can find the source code on GitHub and a video demonstration on YouTube.
Tags: beaglebone, home automation, insteon, JavaScript, node.js
Posted in webLightSwitch | No Comments »
September 15th, 2011
My employer, Pearson, provided the opportunity for its employees to participate in the 2011 Global Corporate Challenge. The GCC consisted of teams of 7 who tracked their daily steps counted with a pedometer for 16 weeks. The idea is to motivate people to become more active. The event started on May 19, 2011 and ended September 6, 2011. Being an engineering type of person, I liked the idea of gathering the daily step count as a metric for activity. The event suggested a goal of achieving 10,000 steps a day. I was pretty active recording my pedometer activity every morning via the SMS text message data entry technique: the GCC has an SMS short code and you entered the date and number of steps. Submitted text messages were recorded in your step log on the GCC web site. Being able to enter the data via my phone was very handy as it let me enter data while I was on vacation without missing a day. But, now that the event is over, I still wanted to keep track of my step counts. Here is the technique that I worked out using Google Docs to record my step counts.
I created a Google Docs Form to collect my daily step count. The collected data is stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The form can be viewed in a web browser or in Google Docs for Android. Since I have an Android phone, the form lets me use my phone to still collect my daily step counts each morning. And since the data is stored in a spreadsheet, I can perform calculations on the data to get my total and average step counts and even graph my daily totals. Here is the process that I use.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: android, docs, log, pedometer
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
September 15th, 2011
Separator Screen Shot
Lifehacker had a pretty neat post yesterday which added “a Handy Separator Between Commands in Your Terminal on Mac OS X and Linux.” I use a Cygwin terminal on my Windows machine, and the Linux script almost worked: the dashes didn’t print. I tracked down my particular problem to the COLUMNS variable used to calculate how many dashes to print in the separator. In my Cygwin terminal prompt, running “export $COLUMNS” showed the variable was blank; meaning that no dashes were used for the separator. Looking at the Mac modification, I noticed that it used the command “shopt -s checkwinsize” to check the window size and if necessary update the LINES and COLUMNS variables. So after adding these two lines to the beginning of the Linux “.bash_ps1″ script, here https://github.com/emilis/emilis-config/blob/master/.bash_ps1, the separator worked for my Cygwin terminal.
shopt -s checkwinsize
export COLUMNS
Tags: cygwin, linux, terminal
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August 13th, 2011
I finished the book Sandman Slim
by Richard Kadrey last Saturday — I think it took me a week to catch my breath. This story was basically non-stop action. It a story about a man, Stark, who is seeking revenge on the people who killed his girlfriend after these same people sent Stark to Hell. Yep, Stark was a live human living in Hell. He had to escape Hell and return to Earth to track down the magicians who sent him Downtown. The story follows Stark’s investigation into where the responsible parties can now be found after living in Hell for 11 years.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I could not put it down because it moves so quickly from one scene to the next. One reason may be because the book is not arranged in chapters; it is just one continuous story. It is full of magic mixed together with Hellions and Angels, God and the Devil, and Stark’s vendetta against his old “friends”. The language used in the book is quite colorful. The descriptions of other worldly locations provide depth to the story. I could almost see one of the Whedon brothers turning this book into a movie.
Tags: Book, review
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February 3rd, 2011
At my place of employment, The Icealert System™ (trademark of Icealert, Inc.) was installed this fall at all of the doorways and the entrance driveway. The Icealert System™ display turns from white to blue when the potential for ice occurs. Now, I live and work in Iowa. We expect it to get cold. (It was a high of 13 degrees Fahrenheit today–which is below freezing, and a bit below the average of 31 [which is still below freezing]). So I was interested to see how The Icealert System™ would be helpful in such a climate where there are extended days, perhaps weeks, where it doesn’t get above freezing. I have been waiting for a day like today and was prepared with my camera phone to take this picture.
Snow covered Icealert indicator
The Icealert System™ indicator is showing “blue” because there is a potential for ice. Well, I guess there is more than potential, as half of the indicator is obscured by snow! This “obscured by snow” indication is not listed as a feature of the indicator on the The Icealert System™ web page. (In fact, in the pictures of the indicator on the companies web site, none of the picture show the indicator in snow.) This snow indication may be a hidden feature of the indicator–sweet.
This kind of reminds me of The Weather Rope. It is typically a board with one end of a small length of rope tied to the board and the other end of the rope is left dangling. There is some variation of this legend included on the board:
| Rope |
Weather |
| Still |
Calm |
| Moving |
Windy |
| Wet |
Rain |
| Shaking |
Earthquake |
| Gone |
Tornado |
Tags: humor
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
My Droid received the Android 2.2 (Froyo) release last night. Last night I was here, at Folly Beach, SC.
Posted in Current Events | No Comments »
April 14th, 2010
xkcd recently posted the perfect comic showing how every GA (or sim) pilot who has to fly commercial, I think, wishes the system worked: http://xkcd.com/726/
Seat Selection
Tags: aviation, comic
Posted in Comics, aviation | No Comments »
February 4th, 2010
From “Authentication is Secondary” by Bob Cringely:
“Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.”
Tags: authentication
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February 3rd, 2010
This post was created on Droid phone using WordPress for Android. You can find more details about the app at http://android.wordpress.org/.
Tags: android, application, blog, wordpress
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