While working with my Toyota 747 I decided to try and find a ribber for it, which led me to the Ravelry Knitting Machine Sales group. I did not find a Toyota ribber, but I did find someone in Brooklyn who was selling a White/Superba 1602. He was selling it at a reduced price because the electronic selector box was not functioning.

The Superba knitting machines, which were also sold under the brand names White, Singer, and Phildar, are really interesting machines. Instead of a main bed and an optional removable ribbing bed like most Japanese machines, the Superbas have two permanently fixed identical beds. This makes it much easier to get consistent, even ribbing.

Mechanically, the machine is in good shape. Stockinette stitch, ribbing, and jacquard patterning (done by manually moving the needles into place) all work well.

The selector box, which can be seen in Patrick’s photo stream, works by reading stitch patterns off mylar sheets. A photoresistor detects either a light or dark square and sends a signal to the machine which moves the needles accordingly.
In addition to maintaining a comprehensive site on Superba machines, Patrick also was kind enough to supply me with the users manual, service manual, exploded part diagrams, and logic flow charts for the electronics.

As soon as I opened up the machine and took out the circuit boards, it was clear things weren’t working properly:

I superglued the board itself back together, and then used lumps of solder to repair the broken traces. Jumper wires would have been better, but admittedly I was too lazy to get up and find a spool of wire.

Once the traces were repaired, Phooky helped me test the output voltages. Since it takes in 110V mains power, I was nervous to start poking at it by myself. But we only made the electricity arc between the multimeter probes once. Have I mentioned that mains power is kind of terrifying?

Anyway, of the four pins that connect to the card edge, two are tied together to ground, and the other two provide 24v for the motor drive (which feeds the mylar sheets) as 12v for the COP420 microchip.

Speaking of the COP420, my first instinct was to try to get a firmware dump off the chip and try to reverse engineer the firmware. Not that I have any experience doing that, but luckily Trammell does. Unfortunately, he found out that the COP420 is a mask-programmed device, meaning that the program is put into ROM when the chip is created, in contrast to something like the Atmega chips used in Arduinos. If you’re lucky, the “test mode” on the chip was initially enabled, making it possible (if somewhat of a pain) to read out the firmware.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense just to redesign the selector box from the ground up. Most of the bulk and power of the box is related to the scanning and advancing of the mylar cards, which are adorably archaic but not exactly convenient. A USB interface would be vastly preferable, and would cut down on about 2/3 of the circuit. I need to do some investigating to see if the whole thing could be USB powered, eliminating the need for a separate power cord and bulky transformer.

Yeah, ok, I have a knitting machine problem.

It was delicious, and while I don’t have an exact recipe, I’ll describe the process so you can throw whatever’s in your house in and have something equally delicious. I didn’t take photos because it just looked like shredded meat.

You will need:

• 4 – 6 pound pork butt. Which actually comes from the shoulder. It’s cheap. You should be able to get it for around $1.25 per pound. Less if it’s approaching the sell-by date.
• Crock pot. It needs to be big enough to fit the pork butt.
• An onion
• A clove of garlic or two
• A bottle of BBQ sauce
• Various spices. Whatever you have around is probably fine.

Step 1:

Thaw the pork butt in the microwave, or overnight in the fridge if you’re better at planning than I am.

Step 1.5:

While the pork is thawing, coarsely chop up the onion and garlic. Throw them in the crock pot haphazardly.

In a medium sized bowl, mix together equal parts of the following various spices, making substitutions for anything you have / don’t have / like / don’t like.

• Salt
• Ground black pepper
• Sugar
• Brown sugar
• Cumin
• Tumeric
• Chili Powder
• Garlic Powder
• Paprika

I used 2 tablespoons of each for an 8.5 lb chunk of meat, though I added some extra paprika because it smelled so nice. I also used curry powder instead of chilli powder/tumeric because I didn’t have either of those.

Alternately, you can used a pre-made BBQ rub, but they didn’t sell that at my corner store.

Step 2:

Take your thawed pork butt and rub the spice mix all over it. Place the pork butt in the crock pot on top of the onions/garlic, and go ahead and dump the rest of the rub in there.

Step 3:

Fill the crock pot about 2/3 with water, or stock if that’s how you roll.

Step 4:

Cook 6+ hours on high or 10+ hours on low. If you have a temperature probe, make sure the interior of the meat gets up to at least 145 degrees F. The longer it cooks, the easier the next step will be.

Step 5:

Once you’re tired of waiting, turn off the crock pot. If you’re lucky, the meat will be so tender it will slide off the bone and you can pull the bone out easily, and then use tongs to move the chunks of meat into a bowl. If you’re like me, the meat will hang onto the bone for dear life and you’ll have to figure out how the hell to lift an 8.5 pound roast out of a vat of boiling water and fat.

I ended up using a measuring cup to scoop off some of the liquid, cut some of the bigger chunks off the bone, and then move the whole thing into another bowl where I could hack at it for a little while.

Step 6: After liberating the bone and meat, get rid of all the inedible bits like the skin, bone, and fat. Discard them along with the onions and garlic, who valiantly gave up their lives for your pork. Pour off most of the water/fat broth, leaving about half an inch in the bottom of the crock pot.

Step 7: Return the meat to the crock pot and shred it using two forks. By the time you’re done, it should suck up the remaining broth and be deliciously juicy.

Step 8: Dump the bottle of BBQ sauce in there. Mix it up.

Tada! You now have pulled pork! Eat on a sandwich, or just straight up.

Here’s what you should do:

• Locate a working flashlight and some fresh batteries. Put them somewhere you can find them in the dark.
• Grab a few extra boxes of crackers/jerkey/other foods that don’t require refridgeration. If the power goes out for a few hours, you’ll want to leave your fridge and freezer closed to keep the cold in.
• If it looks like things are getting serious, turn your fridge/freezer down to pre-chill things in case of power outage.
• Charge your phone, laptop, and anything else that can be charged
• Do your laundry
• Locate some pots/pans/buckets you can use if you spring a leak
• Locate some old towels you can use to clean up said leaks
• If your basement tends to flood, move the stuff you care about away from the walls if it starts raning. Prop up your couch with things you don’t care about. I hear webOS devices are cheap now.
• If you require beer, get it now.
• Find a battery operated radio (hint: many iPods fit this bill) and figure out what station weather reports come in on.

Also remember that land-lines generally continue to work without power, but the cordless phones won’t. Go to the thrift store and get an old school phone if you don’t have one. If the hurricane is a no-show, you can use the parts for hacking later.

Other emergency-preparedness tasks, such as the following, can generally wait until later. Say, when there is actually a hurricane within 12-24 hours of you:

• Fill the bathtub with water (to flush the toilet, wash your hands, etc)
• Cancelling any and all plans that don’t involve getting the hell away from a hurricane
• Buying up a month’s worth of toilet paper (why do people do this?)
• Compulsively refreshing The Weather Channel home page

Personally, I prefer NOAA to The Weather Channel. It’s a lot less sensationalist, but considerably lower-fi. Their graphics are bringing you the latest in 1999 technology.

Keep your heads on, folks.

Being a professional video game reviewer sounds like a pretty great job, you get paid to play games and write about them. And I still think it’s a great job. But for every review copy you get of a game like Child of Eden, you get a Bratz: Forever Diamondz. I’m playing through Rabbids Travel in Time now, which is pretty good, but after the Petz Fantasy 3D review I needed a palate cleanser. If you play too many similar games they all start running together. If you play too many bad games, you start to feel your standards slipping. And suddenly you understand why so many horrible, horrible games have so many positive reviews on Amazon: because it can get so much worse.

I’ve been playing a lot more Starcraft II since I started Sparkle Gamer, as well as Box Life on the DS. Because all of the titles I’ve reviewed so far have been DS games, I’ve been able to play them while commuting to/from the office. I judge a title by how much slower or faster it makes my commute go.

You’re supposed to play each game all the way through, which I do when I can tolerate it. The worst thing about most of the girl game titles is that they’re incredibly repetitive; most of them have nothing new to offer after the first hour or so of playing. And I do mean nothing: many of them don’t even bother ratcheting up the difficulty level of the minigames.

So I have a new respect for people who do this for a living.  Sure, it beats a lot of other things, but it’s still hard work.

It's finally nice weather out, so I decided to make use of my cell phone's wifi tethering feature and take my office outside. Being a member of a coworking space is great, but sometimes you just want to get away from everyone and hammer out some code.

I recently picked up a Eagles Nest Outfitters DoubleNest Hammock for camping, and this seemed like a good time to test it out and practice hanging it.

The hardest part was finding two trees close enough together and an appropriate diameter for my straps. The trees in nearby Liberty State Park are all pretty far apart, and tend to be either too small or absolutely huge. But at last, I found two trees about 10' apart and each about 8 inches in diameter. As a bonus, my spot has a nice view of both Ellis Island and the Statue of LIberty.

I did make one critical error: I forgot to bring snacks and now I'm starving. So soon I'll have to abandon my hammock to go search for food, but until then it's a pretty great place to write code.

Google sent out invites to Gilt Groupe*’s early bird sale of Chromebook laptops. I found it difficult to get excited about a $500 laptop boasting nearly the same specs as a netbook I bought for the same price 2 years ago, but I’m also not the target market for a “fashion laptop.”

What is curious though is Gilt Groupe’s decision on how to categorize the laptop, which I only noticed when copy/pasting the URL to a friend:

http://www.gilt.com/sale/men/google-chromebook

Oh, right, it’s a men’s item. Never mind the fact that they have a perfectly serviceable Home category, for items which are presumably neither worn nor gendered.

This is, on the scale of sexist things I’ve witnessed, pretty trivial. Minor. Unimportant. But come on people. Is this really where we are still? Girls like shoes and boys like computers?

Come on folks, we can do better than this.

* Don’t even get me started on the superfluous E

In a country that is so fiercely split along party lines that I sometimes wonder if we’ll make it another 50 years without bursting out into a civil war, there is one thing that seems to be a uniting factor: hatred of the TSA. Friends across the political spectrum all seem to share a thorough resentment of the organization. Some people might say I’m being over dramatic; that while the TSA is a inconvenience, calling it a “terrorist organization” is a bit over the top, yes?

No. Not at all. Terrorism is a means of controlling people via fear, and that is exactly what the TSA is doing. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not an anything-wing nutjob, I by and large stay out of politics. But the TSA has crossed a line, causing rape victims to re-live their trauma, strip-searching 6 year olds, or making cancer survivors detail their medical history to complete strangers… and trying to pass the whole thing off as making us “safer.”

Safer? This is an organization that screens the pilots for crying out loud. News flash: if a pilot wants to hijack an airplane, she doesn’t need any weapons because she’s already the pilot.

Frankly, I’m terrified. I’m trying to figure out how I’ll possibly navigate the choice between trying to make my startup work (a process will undoubtedly require many trips to California) and not wanting to allow a complete stranger to touch my vagina. I feel backed into a corner: comply or fail. I generally prefer to “vote with my feet” and use the power of capitalism to say what my vote often fails to. But in this case, I don’t have that luxury.

We’re all fed up with the TSA’s BS, but no one seems to know what the next step is. What are our options for doing something about it?

Anyway, so, pen. The nickel tour is that it records whatever you write* and can also record voice. I had a microcassette recorder in college. I used it to tape a handful of lectures, and never listened to the tapes ever again. So the voice recording capabilities weren't really a huge selling point.

What's cool about the Livescribe is that it indexes the audio to your writing. So I can tap on a bulleted list, and hear the full conversation from thath point. Which is much more useful than having to search an entire conversation for the 10 second clip I care about.

It syncs with Evertnote, though not particularly elegantly. With a paid evernote account, you can search your notes (using OCR), and since I didn't feel like paying for the Livescribe OCR add-on, that's a win. Evernote's OCR does an OK job of translating my half-cursive-half-print writing.

But, let's get to the most important thing about this pen: it plays Zork.

Zork is a free application for the pen. It's a direct port of the Zork we all know and love, and it uses the pen's LCD window to scroll text (e.g. "You are west of a house"). You write your actions on the page, it reads them in, and then spits out the appropriate snarky Zork response.

The handwriting recognition is generally very good, but I had some odd trouble getting it to read the phrase "open mailbox." If you look at the command list, you can see where I forgot to save and had to start over after turning off the pen. Modern autosave has spoiled me.

Saving/restoring is pretty cool, you draw a little picture (the circled 1 and 2) and tap it twice. Then you tap the one you want to restore when you go to load a game. Neat trick.

Overall the pen is a neat bit of technology. Maybe not a critical one, but definitely neat.

*provided you write it on special paper. You can print your own special paper if you have a nice enough printer, and even design your own special paper if you really want to hack around with their SDK.

Wedding

I am getting married in early April. We went a very DIY route, hand making everything from the invitations to the centerpieces (which are made from approximately 25,000 individual lego bricks). I've been dutifully documenting the processes, but haven't had time to write up blog posts about everything we're doing.

A New Startup!

Technically, it's my old startup. But we're doing it for real this time. For those of you who are following along at home, you'll remember that about this time last year I was starting a startup. And then a few things happened and my personal finances looked a little scary, and long story short: I bailed. 

But I'm back at it! The company is called BitBot Media, and is the new home for all my professional startup projects. The project under the most active development is a health game, which I'll get to in just a second.

I'm working out of General Assembly, a new coworking space in midtown Manhattan. It's a beautiful space with a great collection of people. The space opened in mid December, so there are still a few kinks to work out (I frequently complain about people taking phone calls in the library) but overall it's pretty great.

So about that game…

The working title of the game is ExeRPG, and it's a browser-based RPG meant to encourage consistent workout habits. It might not be the next Grand Theft Auto, but finding the drive to exercise seems to be a comon problem among our friends.

We're in a private email-based alpha right now while we work out some of the major gameplay mechanics. It's a slow process, but has already provided us a lot of valuable feedback. We expect to have a full beta up by May. We're also planning on running a Kickstarter campaign to fund our initial development. If you're interested in the project you can sign up for our mailing list at http://www.exerpg.com

Developing a long-form game has been a huge learning process. I hope to blog as much of it as I can over on the game development blog.

Overall it's a busy time for me, hopefully post-wedding I can sit down and finish up some of the draft blog posts I've got lying around.

Then I saw this cake:

The most amazing cake I have ever seen

Upon seeing the miracles of icing one can produce with a wedding cake, I revised my statement: I would be willing to get married, but ONLY if I could have the most awesome cake in the world. Though since I was single it was hardly a pressing issue.

Fast forward a few years to now, Chris and I are indeed selecting a wedding cake. And oh my are there cakey options. We went to a cake tasting where we were presented an array of cupcakes in different flavors and icings. They were all incredibly delicious but by the time I left I was done with sugar for a week.

Cupcakes by Whipped Bakeshop

We ended up going with Whipped Bakeshop, a cute bakery in Philly which ironically enough got its start on Etsy.

In a rare fit of restraint we decided not to go the super video game route with our wedding decor, and instead opted for a much more mild “pixel” theme.

I realize Mrs Manners does not approve of “themes” at weddings. She believes the “theme” is marriage. And while I do take the teachings of Mrs Manners to heart, I’m letting this one slide. Mrs Manners will not be attending my wedding. Plus, we’re not including any of the tree-killing reply cards she so hates in our invitations. Clearly that’s what the custom wedding reservation CMS I’ve written is for.

Come on now, really, how could you have two web developers get married without one?

Here’s the sketch of our cake, I’m pretty excited to see it in person:

Not only does it look awesome, but it will be made of THREE different flavors (each on a different tier): chocolate, lemon, and carrot ginger.