Tools Of The Trade

I am progressing slowly with watercolours, thanks to F., the best girlfriend of them all, I now possess a Rembrandt aquarelle travel set, which is quite a step up from the small selfmade set filled with children's watercolours I used before. With a bit of whittling I was able to fit a number 0 chinese brush, a 00 brush and a number 6 and 12 flat brush inside. The colour quality of the Rembrandt is amazing as well, here for example is my most recent work, which took me about two hours in the train from Lausanne to Basel.

Unwanted insight

The Canon 50mm 1.8 is an excellent lens. Cheap, light, fast, very good image quality. But, and this is important, do not drive over it, or else you will get some unwanted insight into the inner workings of said lens:

Filter removal

Shortly after Christmas I fell, while heroically chasing a suspected fox through the icy steppes of Kaltenleutgeben, Austria. Even though I tried to throw myself under my DSLR, the UV-filter I had put on my EFS 18-200 mm full-range-zoom broke:

But it did its job, i.e. protecting the lens. I subsequently removed the broken glass, but was unable to unscrew the filter ring afterwards. Applying pincers deformed the ring a little bit, so I stopped, leery of damaging my lens. The ring did not stop the lens from working, after all, except that I could not affix another filter.

Filter ring with pincer marks

Last week  I finally went to the local photography store, where a very helpful girl told me that they'd only send the lens to Canon, anyway. Since I have recently purchased a circular polarizing filter, I was determined to get the ring off soon, and on my own.

I needed to apply force to the ring without deforming it, so I took it to the drill press and drilled two 2 mm holes in it. Tense moments there, as a slip could mean scratching the lens.

Holes drilled, it was a simple thing to insert a screwdriver through them, twist, and voilà:

Filter ring with screwdriver inserted through hole.

Removed filter ring!

 Now I am off to take some polarising photos ;)

Installing a new car radio

I got fed up with the very bad error-handling of the CD player in my Mitsubishi Colt, and decided to invest in a modern car radio, capable of playing music from USB sticks. I bought a Pioneer DEH-2200UB, and proceeded to install it, which I made more complicated than I had assumed it would be.

While popping of the front panel and uninstalling the old radio was not very hard

the new radio and the old radio did have two totally different connectors. Of course. I could have gotten and adapter, probably, but I wanted to try out my new radio now, dammit. So I had a look at the pin-outs of the two radios, snipped off the wires and connected them individually.

Against all common sense, I did not make any mistakes, and the radio lit up the second I turned the key. Lit up in a good , glowing-led sense, not in the bad, smoke-producing sense.

Who would have thought that automotive electronics would prove so simple?
By the way, those micro-SD stub USB key thingies (in white in the photo below) are perfect for the USB aux port of your car radio, I bought two 4 gb ones for 12 CHF each, more than enough space for music, and they are so small I won't accidentally rip them out of the radio by brushing against them.

Now I wonder how difficult it would be to install a keyless entry-thing on my own?

Nexus S

I have had my Nexus S for more than two months now - I got fed up with the iPhone 3G's slooooowness, and did not want to pay through my nose for the technologically already outdated iPhone 4. After a bit of research I decided to take the plunge and go Android.

Recursion

Now that I have used the thing for a while, here are my impressions. First, the good stuff:

• zippedy-zippedy fast. This has mostly to do with the faster processor, and the fact that Apple doesn't give a shit about your old hardware when they update the OS.
• no iTunes anymore on my PC. This sounds silly, but I swear I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I deleted that particular piece of crap software from my computer. How Apple think they can convince people to switch over to using their software and hardware when such an integral part of their user experience for windows-users is the worst #$%$ piece of crap software ever is beyond me. So long, iTunes, long may it be before I see your slow ass again.
• Every setting accessible. I had jailbroken my iPhone, and was all set up to root the Nexus S, but there is really no need if you don't want to run a custom ROM. You can change nearly anything in the settings, and if you can't, there is an app that does it for you. I am currently using Swype as input method, for example, and got rid of the annoying and unnecessary fake shutter noise of the camera via the app silentSnap.
• Multitasking. Handled excellently, and without burning resources needlessly. 

But all is not flowers and buttercups in Android garden. There are some things that Apple is just better at:

• Systems integration. This is a biggy. Apples iOS is really the smoother operating and eco-system. From the centralised App-settings to the way Apps play nice with each other, iOS just works. For example, in Android you can choose your music player, podcast-player etc. So far so good, but then try and controll your music with the button on your headphones? Disaster. I like to listen to podcasts on my bike, but if I try pausing them, random music from winamp will start up - or nothing will happen. There is, as far as I can see, no real policy for how various apps can hand off control over the headphone button, so it is a matter of luck, or rather the current specific state of the phone, including which apps are suspended/running/still in memory. Urgh.
• The music player. Apples iPhone evolved out of the iPod, and it shows. This thing is made to play music, and simply better at it than anything Android currently has to offer.
• Simplicity of use. Apple's iOS, by virtue of being less capable, is also simpler to use. The difference is not large, but noticeable - Android will use a bit more of your brainpower until you are used to it.

Aaand that's it. All in all, I much prefer my Nexus S to the iPhone 3G, even back when the 3G wasn't running 3.1.3 and slow as hell. Still, I don't have a direct comparison to the iPhone 4, so I can't really recommend dumping that one for an Android in good conscience. I am happy with the Nexus, but maybe I'd be happy with an iPhone 4 too? Yet... No. iTunes. Any. More. Ever. ;)

Concerning UV filters

The UV-filter is an anachronism in the digital age, the chips in modern digital cameras are insensitive to UV-light. Yet the humble UV-filter is still sold - I have one on every one of my lenses. Why? Behold:

The front of my nifty full-range lens, after I slipped on ice shortly after Christmas. What looks like a major catastrophe was just a minor set-back - the cheap filter had given its life to protect the lens. Its noble sacrifice will not be forgotten, and I also ordered a new one immediately...

Kindle

I got my new toy two days ago: Amazons Kindle, a Christmas present from my parents. Do I like it? Let me put it like this: If you are going to read books electronically, do it on an e-ink device. The difference to an LCD screen is amazing - it really looks like (albeit glossy) paper. You quickly get used to the page-refresh, which rapidly blanks the page before displaying a new one - this eliminates 'ghosting', where you can see some remnants of the old page because the electrophoresis in the pixels wasn't complete. The refresh only takes a fraction of a second, anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading real books, but my book-shelf real estate is limited, and has run out some time ago. Plus, there is something neat in having a couple of hundred books stored on a device that weighs only a couple of hundred grams.

Close-up of Kindle display

I do hope e-ink continues to make advances, especially in terms of the refresh-rate, for I would love to see it used as a display for tablet PCs, phones and the like. Yay progress!

Leather and drugs

I am back! Survived a brief bout of the flu - it must have been the Parisian flu, since I first felt ill at the conference in Paris. I didn't want to miss anything of the rather excellent conference, so I showed the flu who is boss, by eating copious amounts of paracetamol, ibuprofen and aspirin. This worked, to a degree, until I came back, laid off the drugs and was struck down by the Revenge of the Flu. Ugh.

But now I am better, and yesterday I spent four hours sewing. A year ago my favourite leather jacket's zipper broke, and yesterday the stars were finally right (Gliese 581 must be in just the right place in Librae for leather work!). I purchased a new zipper, a leather needle and set to work - you can see the result on the right. It works, and turned out less ugly than I had feared - everybody wins! Well except the old zipper. I tossed that bastard faster than you can say Gliese 581g may or may not exist.

Lab safety

I recently noticed that an important safety feature was missing from our lab, so I rushed to supply it:

Note the red tassel. 'Raptors despise red tassels, true fact.

Do you know how many casualties per year there are, due to people getting sucked into space-time warps and having no arms to defend themselves against the lizard-men of dimension X? Or dinosaurs? Do you?

Didn't think so. You'll thank me when all that stands between you and a pack of hungry 'raptors is your trusty lab-spear. Here is a close-up of the safety-sign I made - you are welcome to use it in your own lab. Just don't forget to replace the safety spear if one of your colleagues has been sucked into the warp.

Cooking in your rice cooker

After reading this at lifehacker, I rushed out and bought a rice cooker. Best 25 CHF I've spent in a while.

But Boris, I hear you whine, can't you easily make rice in a pot?

Shaddup, and behold the

Fake Indian Rice and Lentils Dhalish Kind of Dish:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of rice
3/4 cup green lentils
a carrot, diced hacked into pitiful pieces
a clove of garlic, sliced into slices
an onion, likewise
a tomato, hexadecimaled
4 cups of broth

Put some oil into your rice-cooker. Add, in this order, while stirring: onion (stir until glazed), carrots and garlic (stir for a minute or so), rice (toss until coated with oil), the rest. Put in some curry powder, or ginger, salt and pepper, or five spices powder, or garam masala. I don't care, go wild. Heck, put in some diced chicken for all I care.



Close the rice cooker, it will do it's magic. Eat when finished.

Flying Home

On Sunday I had to say good-bye to New York and fly home. Yes, I missed the US' Independence Day, due to forgetting all about it when I booked the flight.





My flight to the US (with United Airlines) was plagued by all kind of problems - the flight back with Swiss Air was a sheer joy in comparison. Of course I can't say anything in general with a sample size of one, but here are some thoughts:




The Airbus A330 is a much nicer and more modern Airplane than the ageing Boeing 767, which I do not remember fondly. No surprises there, since the A330 was first flown in 1992, versus the Boeings 1982. It shows.





Metal cutlery! Apparently the Swiss are not afraid of their passengers hijacking the plane with a metal butter knife. The Swiss are just bad-ass like that.

Babies can, and will cry for two and a half hours straight when provoked, and said crying will cut through earplugs, blankets, glass and any other material known to mankind.




Swiss Air uses Linux for its onboard entertainment system, which didn't prevent it from crashing horribly, twice. The stewardess eventually had to pull the circuit breaker to reset.

A 'thoughts about the US' post will follow soon.

- tales from the road

Location:Avenue du Tir Fédéral,Ecublens,Switzerland

Geta Mk I

I got interested in Geta, and then stumbled over this excellent page. Using it as a rough guide, I produced my first Geta-prototype, the Mark I:

My dainty little feet. Also: geta

A very rough build, the baseboard is not yet finished off (rounding the edges, etc.). But, to my astonishment, they worked right away! Here are some notes, in case you want to build your own, (in which case you have to go to the above-linked geta calculator) and for my Mark II model:

*) Geta are loud. Forget sneaking up on your enemy. Your ninja career is over once you start wearing geta.

*) The straps need to be tight, or else you'll get cramps in your feet because you curl your toes with each step, trying to keep those things stable.

*) Traditional geta don't distinguish between left and right, their toe-hole is right in the middle. This makes them quite broad. I thought slimmer ones would be more elegant which, together with the next point, will eventually kill me.

*) Tapering your ha (the two stilts below the board) may look spiffy, but consider: lateral stability. My geta have less than the usual width, and the tapering reduces the actual footprint (ha!)  to less than five centimetres.

*) Running will kill you. I don't know if you can run in geta. Maybe Japanese people can, having been trained from an early age in the ancient art of geta-do. I lack this training, and even walking faster makes people stop and stare curiously at the coming train-wreck.

*) Nevertheless, when not falling ass over tea-kettle or twisting my ankle, geta are surprisingly comfortable. The set-back of the front-ha (about two-fifths of the board length in my case) means the front of the geta will hit the ground when it is tilted at a twenty degree angle, allowing a naturalish (<- this should be a word) rolling motion. Also, with them I am six centimetres taller. Go me!

iphone: photo

The camera of the iphone is nothing to write home about. Still, they are some that say it is the best camera ever, since it's one you always have with you. Chase Jarvis even published a book with nothing but iPhone photos:

Furthermore, a limited camera can make you a better photographer: Just snapping a photo with the iPhone will result in a crappy picture: small dynamic range, noise, ugh. But you can work with those limitations to  make excellent photos - if your name happens to be Chase Jarvis, I guess. Nevertheless, I tried to use my iPhone camera a bit, and will present two of those pictures per day, seven days in a row. Here are the first two: Snapped with the iPhone, and then edited on the iPhone with the (free!) Format126 app.

Creepy sister.

Cone

Lock and Key

or: Nothing stands before the Swisstool.

 This morning I had occasion to investigate the comparative quality of a very low budget bike-lock and the awesome Swisstool, my favourite multitool.

While riding home yesterday evening, the key belonging to the above-mentioned lock had fallen off my key-chain, and I lost it somewhere on the way. This did not take me by surprise, since the key was partly plastic, and only hanging on to the key-chain by an increasingly thin strip. I was, as they say, monitoring the situation, staying on top of the developments, etc. I also new that I had a replacement key, and not only knew where it was but also found it later that evening.

The cabin of the elevator in my apartment building has no interior doors. While riding it up and down, you can see (and touch) the wall and doors of the various floors rushing by. Consequently, there is a gap between cabin and the walls of the elevator shaft, a gap that yawns about two centimetres wide and leads to the fathomless and inaccessible depths beneath the elevator cabin.

I think you can see where this is going.

Right in one: This morning, while riding down to my bike and trying to attach the new key to my key chain, I inevitably dropped the former, straight into the gap. There wasn't even a "plink" to mark it's passing - it vanished soundlessly into the abyss. Which leads us directly and finally to the following picture:

Snippety-snip

Swisstool versus bike-lock: 1-0, 30 seconds. Which is, I'll maintain, a Good Thing. Consider: A better lock would have meant calling the landlord, who'd have called an elevator technician, who'd have billed me. This way, I'll just buy a new lock (20 CHF or so). Everybody wins!
And if my bike gets stolen because of my inferior lock-technology? No worries, now I know that I can get a new one in about 30 seconds...

Mic repair

Recently my microphone (indispensable for making Skype calls) started to annoy people I phoned with crackling noises, so today I pulled it apart to see why:

Who the fuck wired this up? Godzilla?

Here's your problem! Short-circuits lead to no-good sound quality. So I desoldered  the electret microphone, hunted down a bit of shrink-tubing and then started to resolder it. Word of advice: Think before you start soldering, or else you'll find that you forgot to thread on a crucial piece, and have to start over again. Not that this happened to me, obviously.

Always store some isopropanol right next to hot soldering irons. Makes your life more interesting.

 I used a C-clamp as a temporary third hand, because some #$%@#^! colleague  had stolen mine.

Hot soldering action

If you don't have a hot air blower, use the soldering iron to shrink the shrink-tubing. It'll stink a bit, but it works just fine.

Shrinky-dink

Here is the finished piece. put some shrink-tubing over the lower part of the mic to stabilise the whole thing a bit. That's how it should have been done in the first place, goddamit. That'll teach me to buy cheap microphones...

Good as new

Netbook sleeve

Over the holidays I made a sleeve for my new eeePC, under the (very) close supervision of my mother. It was not easy.

First, I had to hunt down, kill and skin those rarest of baby seals: The ones who get colour-sprayed by PETA or Greenpeace, which makes their fur extra valuable, and a pretty colour to boot.

(Photo from Gettyimages)

Unfortunately the activists tend to spray only small spots or lines, so you need an ungodly number of baby seals. After skinning them, I approached (with great caution) the sewing machine, she of the pierced fingers. Thankfully my mother agreed to supervise me ("No sew. Slowly. No, not in that direction. Slowly, I said! What are you doing?"), so I could stitch the furs together without major injury on my part. Here is the result:

Nice, isn't it? For future reference, be careful not to hit too hard when clubbing baby seals to death, since getting their blood out of the fur is a bitch.

Here is another shot of the sleeve, closed. I decided not to sew on a Velcro strip, since it stays closed well enough when I tuck the flap in:

Disclaimer: No more than 26 baby seals died a horrible death in the making of this project.

New toy: Netbook

I decided to buy myself an early Christmas present: An Asus Eee 1005HA netbook. My old Dell Inspiron still runs fine, but can not really do the portable thing any more: it's hinge is broken, and the battery lasts about twenty minutes or so.

I am quite happy with the Eee. It has an 11.6 inch screen, and a full size keyboard, so typing is ok. The shift-keys are a bit small, but nothing you can't get used to. What is really awesome is the battery-life, which easily surpasses nine hours. Nine! Of course, it is not the fastest machine in the world, but more than powerful enough for browsing or writing, which is all I use it for.

Last but not least, it only weighs one and a half kilos, so it won't break my back when I lug it around.

Here it is, in all its glory, with a dog-skull for scale:

New reactor, part III

(see also part I & II)

The plasma box I designed came back from the workshop, and it looks great! (Also lends itself to beautiful macro-photos, see the post yesterday).

My student will have to test eight electrodes with various patterned surfaces. In the background you can see the box (middle left) that will enclose the plasma, and it's lid with the hole for the RF  (i.e. radio-frequency, which provides the power to drive the plasma) connection (middle right). The white stuff on the sides are two pieces of Teflon insulation, to insulate (what a surprise!) the RF electrode from the electrical ground of the box.

Now all that's left is to build the RF connection with it's vacuum feedthroughs,  and to match the RF generator to the characteristic impedance of the new reactor. If all goes well, I'll do a first test-run by the end of next week!

Ferrofluid

Ferrofluids are awesome, especially when you happen to have some ridiculously strong neodymium magnets lying around.

Ferrofluids are colloids - a suspension of superparamagnetic particles in a carrier fluid. If brought into a strong magnetic field, they will form the above pattern of corrugations, an effect known as normal-field instability to physicists, and as wicked cool to everybody else.

In a completely unrelated note, bringing your fingers between two of the above-mentioned neodymium magnets hurts.

I hate you, Apple

Not that this is any news for the internet (see here, here and here, for example), but the build-quality of the stock iPhone earbuds is not the best. Point in case: mine after not even a year of not-too heavy use (i.e. half an hour twice a day, on my bike-ride to and from the EPFL).

Why, Apple, why? I already shelled out oodles of money for your frankly excellent phone, do you really have to gouge me some more?
What's that? You do?
Sigh.