Author: alex

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Blog News

Running 5 km

Start 2 Run is working for me.

Yesterday I went for a run again, after a few days of rest. The run went smoothly, legs pumping away rythmically under me like they didn’t belong to me !  I had some spectacular views as the clouds were releasing their rain in veils south of me, while I was running under a blueish sky and north of me some thunderheads were going way up in the sky. One was so high it got illuminated by the sun.

The last 4 runs or so have all been over 5 km, with less and less rest inbetween the running periods. I’ve already run 3 times 10 minutes, and yesterday I ran 2 times 15 minutes.

What surprises me the most is that my breathing is under control – I recuperate fairly easily now from running, and my speed seems to be the correct one – sometimes it seems as if I can continue to run forever (only for a little while, but still, a nice feeling).

I just hope I don’t damage or sprain anything in knees or legs so that I can continue these lessons. Dolores has started the program as well, we run on alternate days of course.

Still not lost any weight though…

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Blog News

Sam goes Potty

Sam is 2 years old and counting, and since the last 2 weeks or so we are training him to go to the potty to do pipi and all that.

Until saturday it wasn’t working out to well – he just didn’t feel ‘it’ starting. He would look down with a surprised face when there is suddenly water pooling around his feet.  He even managed to do poo while not noticing it until afterward, and then being scared of it – which is logical, since wearing diapers he never saw it before…

That’s until we figured out a way to keep him on the potty – candy ! Every time he uses the potty, he gets a (small) candy. And that saterday he went two times, one time with us putting him on it, and once more all by himself in the afternoon !

I am SOooo proud of my little guy !!

Categories
Apple Blog News Links TechScience Future

Amazing.

You can find more videos of people helped by AssistiveWare here.

Categories
Links TechScience Future

Cooking with sound : a combo stove-generator-fridge

ArsTechnica has a cool new post about a tool to help developing nations use their energy more efficiently.

It’s a combination stove/fridge/generator that is ingeniously crafted. Yet, according to Ars, the building and maintenance of the thing itself (that is based on a stirling engine) is not difficult. What it means is that the design was difficult to make, but that the creation, application and maintenance of this new device does not (hopefully) need a highly trained technician.

Let’s hope this goes into production, it’s a neat and very practical idea.

Categories
Apple Programming

Nike+ Ipod : what do you do when you forget it ?

It’s great to take your personal trainer and motivator along, but it’s less great if something happens.

What do you do when you forget to take along your nike+ iPod on your run, or heaven forbid, what happened to me, your latest and greatest run of almost 5 kilometers doesn’t get saved because you mucked around with your music after finishing your run ?

You yell. You shout damnation. And then you google around and hack the darn thing of course !

DISCLAIMER. You muck around with YOUR iPod at YOUR OWN RISK. Nothing is guaranteed to work, this is a hack so I could get my run up there. I am not doing this cheat, I want to keep a log of my runs.

With googling, I found my first reference to hacking the iPod sport kit – it’s simple really. You first need to configure your iPod in diskmode, otherwise you won’t be able to access it. Then you can find the files you need. They are in xml, so you can open them in textmate or smultron or textedit. Go to the following directory (I used midnight commander, a port installed unix utility, you could use XFolders) :

/Volumes/<name of your ipod nano>/iPod_Control/Device/Trainer/Workouts/Empeds/<hexfilename of your linkmodule>

You’ll find, beside a bunch of other files that you don’t need to touch, two directories : ‘latest‘ and ‘synched‘. Any files that are in the ‘latest’ directory are not yet synced with the nikeplus website.

So what I did was to browse the xml files in the’synched’ directory, find one where the distance and time where close to what I needed, and copied that file to my desktop.

I then edited it in textmate, and changed the time and distance to reflect my most recent run, to the best of my recollection. I roughly calculated the duration by multiplying the minutes and seconds in the duration string by 60 000. My guess is that the durationString and distanceString are the voice items that your iPod speaks to you, with the more correct variables in the duration and distance properties.

<time>2007-05-29T20:10:38+02:00</time>
<duration>1947280</duration>
<durationString>32:12</durationString>
<distance unit="km">4.8906</distance>
<distanceString>4.89 km</distanceString>

I also modified the start time lower down and deleted everything between the snapShotList property (this is when you press the center button to hear your status, it saves this as well) :

<startTime>2007-05-29T20:10:38+02:00</startTime>
<snapShotList snapShotType="userClick"></snapShotList>

I also renamed the file correctly to the current date and start time to run, and then copied the modified file back to ‘latest‘ directory. Then I ‘trashed’ the iPod to remove it, restarted iTunes and waited with my fingers crossed to see if the sync would happen. It did, and it uploaded it just fine to nikeplus !

My guess is that somebody with a bit more time and more inclination could easily whip up a website or program that would allow you to fill in a form and construct for you the correct xml file to import… It would be really handy for when you forget your iPod or lose oh so precious run data from your last run.

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Blog News

Updated WordPress to 2.2 and YANT (yet another new theme)

I updated my WP installation to 2.2 and finally downloaded some more themes. We’ll see how long I suffer them, although this Cordobo Green Park theme seems very nice…

Still in beta of course.

Update 29/05 : the limegreen colour is really green though. Ugh. I’m already wanting to change the color scheme…

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Blog News

Started running again (using Nike+iPod)

Last month April I started running again – this time using the start2run podcast series published by een.be, our governement sponsored radio. You can either download them as mp3s to play on your mp3 player, or you can subscribe to the podcast using iTunes.

Start 2 Run is a training programme for beginners that varies the number of minutes you run, each time you run increasing slightly the time you run versus the time you walk.

I’m using my iPod Nano, together with the Nike+iPod connectors to monitor my progress. A sensor attached to one of my running shoes transmits my paces to the iPod, which has a bluetooth connector. Once back home, when I sync the iPod nano with iTunes, it transmits the information to the Nike+ website were it is all shown in gorgeous Flash. Honestly, being the geek that I am, this pushes me to keep on running.

So far, I’m progressing nicely ! Basically the time I’m running is about the same always, between 22 and 25 minutes, but I am running further and faster the more I train and the further the lessons progress.

The podcast series assumes you run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but I can only manage Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Sundays either doing the garden work or swimming. So I’m going a bit slower than normal, but I don’t think this is a bad thing.

I started running April 10, and this is the result :

nike runs

May 3 was my absolute top run, but I felt great then and on top of the world (I had an absolutely smashing surprise Birthday feast arranged by my wife) !

On the actual website if you mouse over the bars you see the date, the time and distance and even a calculation on how much calories you burned. And if you want, you can draw your run using a mashup of Google Maps.

Hopefully, I’ll have the discipline and stamina to keep on running the whole series and then some more. One thing I mourn is since I started running I’m no longer losing weight; I’m not gaining either, but boy am I hungry ! 🙂

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Blog News

First Life

If you have Second Life, then get a First Life!

Categories
Hardware Links TechScience Future

RFID firewalls are here !

Today I read an Ars Technica article about a new protection for your RFID tags (you know, those tags that are now used for taking stock of inventory, theft protection, and are now showing up in passports).

What great about this new protection is that you can configure which tags you want to allow to be queried – you can even select trusted readers, for example if you have an RFID chip in your card that allows you access to your work building, you can allow that reader to query that tag, but no others.

So far it’s still in development, but if and/or when RFIDs become more and more pervasive, this will come in useful.

Categories
Pictures Programming

Bash script to convert pictures using ImageMagick

If you have ImageMagick installed, here’s a simple bash script that allows you to convert a whole lotta pictures in a folder to a different size. Just modify the folder names to reflect where your photos are stored :

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This program converts all the pictures that are stored in the folder To-Process to half their size
# and names the resulting photos the same but with -r added to it.
# For this, it uses the ImageMagick programs, so these need to be installed ! Either download a binary version or
# compile them yourself (but you need libjpg at a minimum compiled/installed as well.)
# The resulting photos can be imported in iPhoto.

username = <your username here>

# This processes all JPG pics that are in the folder
for photo in /Users/$username/Pictures/To-Process/*.JPG
do
echo “Converting $photo”
# Using the IM convert program
convert -resize 50% $photo ${photo%%.*}-r.jpg
done

mv /Users/$username/Pictures/To-Process/*-r.jpg /Users/$username/Pictures/Processed

Took me a hour or two to go back reading the bash manuals and tutorials and get it working right. As for ImageMagick, you can either download binaries for OS X (of for windows for that matter) or compile your own. Remember though that you also need to have libjpeg installed as IM depends on this on compile time.

Yes, of course you can do this with other programs, but this is all part of my plan for getting a workflow up and running to process and store my photos. More on this later.