Thanks to rich APIs from both GitHub and Pivotal there are many third party integrations written between the two. So many that picking one to use became a task by itself.

After reviewing 5 or so I went with Pivothub, on account of the fact that it was a) recently updated and b) would run in an environment I could set up easily (heroku). I also really like that when a Github-linked story is accepted in Pivotal it’s link on GitHub is closed too.

Since Heroku is a read-only filesystem and I didn’t want to commit my config file to the repository, I forked Pivothub and changed it around to use Heroku’s environmental config variables.

It works pretty well, though some tighter integration wouldn’t be amiss. Right now if a closed issue is repoened via github, it doesn’t come back into Pivotal. The original author isn’t really using Pivotal much these days so any additional features are ones I’ll have to add myself.

This year’s game was Super Mario Brothers 2 (SMB2), which came out for the NES in 1988. We played it on the Wii’s virtual console as we sadly don’t have the original cartridge.

Our rules are pretty simple: we hotseat lives / levels, and if we get a game over we’re allowed to warp back to the world we were on, but no warping past that.

This game is probably one of the most challenging. It is also one of the weirdest Mario games, because it wasn’t actually written as a mario game. It’s actually a reskin of the Japanese game Doki Doki Panic, as the Japanese Mario 2¹ was deemed too challenging for American audiences.

Aside from the somewhat punishing levels, SMB2 is challenging because 1-ups are few and far between. You get two continues before you are unceremoniously booted to the start screen, losing all your progress. Your only real chance to rack up some lives is to voraciously collect coins² and then participate in the bonus round slot game at the end of the level. With some practice I was able to consistently get extra lives, but even then our maximum life count was a measly 25.

The other factor that made it a challenge was the layout of the warp zones. You can warp from world 1 to world 4, 3 to 5,  4 to 6, and 5 to 7. So when we died in the last stage of world 3 we had to start all over from the beginning. It took a while, and there was a lot of cursing.

We did finally vanquish the game – on our last life with only one heart remaining. If this was an XBOX game, I would have demanded an Achievement for that.

1. Later released in the US as Super Mario: The Lost Levels
2. Coins are counted and displayed in hexadecimal. You can collect up to B coins per level, which is 11 in decimal

There are a number of PAX packing lists, including an “official” one on the forums but they’re really just the same “so you’re going on a trip” list you find everywhere. And there are some very specific items I wouldn’t attend PAX without.

So here’s my list:

• Clothes for 3 days. I have gone on enough trips I no longer feel the need to break this out.
• Toiletries for 3 days. See above.
• A swimsuit I will not actually use but bring every year “just in case.”
• Exercise clothes. If I’m going to eat conference garbage for 3 days I ought to at least keep up with my workout routine.
• Exercise shoes. The exercise clothes are less useful without them. Ask me how I know this.
• A niceish outfit in case we want to go to a niceish restaurant. This really just means an outfit that does not include a nerdy t-shirt.
• Shoes to go with that niceish outfit if it is a dress.
• A Nintendo 3DS. Mario Kart and Tetris are the universal language of PAX.
• A 3DS charger. Mercifully there are a bunch of these you can usually borrow from folks, but it’s a lot handier to have your own.
• My cell phone.
• My cell phone charger. This is the #1 item I purchase at out of town Best Buy stores.
• My laptop (mostly just in case something comes up with work)
• My laptop charger. This is the #2 item I purchase at Best Buy stores.
• A deck of Magic: the Gathering cards. The little starter packs they give out always makes me long for my own deck, which incidentally I only ever play during the month after I attend PAX.
• An empty tote bag, useful for anything you might buy or pick up on the expo floor. I hate walking around all day with a backpack, tote bags fold nice and small

Most of the lenses sat in the closet when I finally moved to a digital SLR, until a couple years ago when I got an adapter ring that lets you used the Nikon F-mount lenses on a Canon EOS body. Obviously none of the computerized features work, but the through-lens metering on my T4i does a pretty good job at exposing the shot. This weekend I pulled it out to use with my dad’s Nikkor 500m f/8 lens. It’s a short (for a 500) fat lens which we affectionately call “the Hubble  because it’s really best suited for taking pictures of the moon and other distant, slow-moving objects.

The church down the street (about 5 blocks away) fit that description well so I stuck the camera on a tripod and tested things out. I used the 2 second self-timer function on my camera so I wouldn’t jiggle the camera when pressing the shutter release. Because at 500mm even a tiny bit of jitter looks like a lot.

It turns out the church is actually much too close to be able to do much shot composition. I had to back up about 15 feet from the window just to fit that much of it in the frame. What’s incredible to me is that you can see the individual bricks that make up the church. This church is far enough away that I can’t read the clock from my bedroom window. Turns out it’s wrong anyway.

Focusing the lens was a challenge. My camera has a “live preview” feature which lets you zoom in on sections of the frame, so I used the edge of the clock face to get things as sharp as I could (which isn’t very sharp with this lens).

The next day I took it to the zoo and got up close and personal with some of the animals.

It’s not the most practical lens but it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad to be able to use the older lenses in my dad’s collection. The flexible and super high ISOs of modern SLRs make the lens more useful now than it ever could have been with film.

Non overlapping circles generated in a tree-like hierarchy

A random number of smaller child circles are spawned from the parent circle, at random angles from the parent. The spawning function is run recursively until the circles are 20 pixels or less in diameter.

Colorful clusters of circles

Each circle cluster or bunch is randomly assigned a color. The colorspace is in HSV and the hues are limited to greens, blues, and purples. The value (brightness) of the color is dimmed 10% each for generation of circles.

Each time a circle is generated, it’s spawned somewhere on the lower half of it’s parent, and then rotated around the circle until it no longer overlaps with any other circles. If it makes it all the way around without founding a valid place to be, it’s deleted.

Sketchy clusters of circles

A Processing library called HandyRenderer gives everything a more sketchy look. But the clusters weren’t droopy enough. So I modified the script to send the circle rotating back the other way if it rises above the center point of its parent. If it reaches the other side without finding a spot, it’s deleted.

Now more droopy!

Now to start working on the “tree” that supports them.

I put together a slimmed down version (no sketchy rendering) for the web. You can play with it here if you’re so inclined.

We get our TV signal over cable. Although we don’t have a cable TV subscription the broadcast channels are sent unencrypted over the cable line. This works great on our newer Sony TV. It turns out it doesn’t work at all on our older Pioneer TV. After much research I discovered that the Pioneer has an NTSC and ATSC tuner (analog and digital over the air), but not a QAM tuner (cable without a cable box).

The simple solution would be to plug a set of rabbit ears into the Pioneer and call it a day. We probably even have some in the basement. Those of you who know me know that the simple solution is never, ever, the one I go for.

Enter the Hauppauge 2250. Oh yes, we’re adding live tv to our media PC.

DVR / Live TV functionality is experimental in XBMC. It was originally planned for Eden (version 11), but got pushed back to Frodo (verson 12). It’s under active development, and arguably useable, so I decided to go for it.  After 3 days and a ton of reading, I have it more or less working. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, what is?

The latest PVR builds of XBMC are meant to work as front ends to one of a handful of backend “TV servers,” software which will handle the nitty gritty of managing the TV tuner card. This can be either in the same machine as XBMC or on a separate one. For now I’m working locally. I chose MediaPortal as the backend because it runs on Windows and has a reasonably active community.

Step 1 was to install the card and see if I could get it to even come up in Windows Media Center. And it did! The setup wizard found 10 channels on the QAM tuner. A number of channels, including NBC and CBS, were missing. After about an hour of poking at it I decided to move on to my ultimate target, MediaPortal.

MediaPortal has two main parts: the TV Server and the client frontend. The client frontend is another media center program, which I ignored. The TV server runs as a service under windows, and is more or less invisible once you’ve got it running. It’s managed with its own configuration tool separate from the MediaPortal frontend.

With the TV server installed and running, step 2 was to scan for channels. This took about half an hour, and found hundreds of channels – many of which were encrypted. I deleted all the encrypted channels (marked with a red T). This left me with about 100 channels. Many of these were data channels (which gave an error when I tried to preview them) or otherwise uninteresting, so I deleted those as well. The remaining 40ish channels included broadcast and cable public access stations.

Step 3 was to identify each station and get scheduling data. The broadcast stations self-identified, but the call signs they used were sometimes opaque. WHYYDT is pretty obviously the local PBS affiliate, but it took me a fair amount of googling to figure out that RT is the station formerly known as RussiaToday, and is offered by local independent station WYBE.

Step 4! Armed with a list of call signs for each station, I started creating a grabber file for MediaPortal’s WebEPG plugin. In theory, listing data is sent along with the signal and can be picked up by the tuner, but I didn’t have any luck with that. WebEPG lets you get listing data via the internet. I copied the IMDB grabber included with the plugin and added a listing for each station in the following format:

<Channel id=”RT” siteId=”WYBEDT2″ />

The Site ID is generally the station’s call sign, with DT added to the HD digital feeds. Subchannels (e.g. 10.2) usually have a trailing number. So our local NBC affiliate, WCAU, can be found at WCAUDT and its substation NBC Nonstop can be found at WCAUDT2. You can double-check to make sure you’ve got the right ID by going to http://www.imdb.com/tvgrid/2012-08-01/WCAUDT/, replacing WCAUDT with the call sign of your choice. You should see the schedule for that station.

Lastly, I needed to install a plugin for MediaPortal that will allow XBMC to communicate with it called TVServerXBMC.

Whew! That concludes the MediaPortal set up, now on to XBMC!

In order to play with the PVR stuff you need to install one of the experimental PVR builds. I went with Margro’s build which includes the MediaPortal add-on. Setup in XBMC is fairly straightforward: enable the add on and a new option for Live TV shows up in XBMC. Assuming everything’s been set up correctly in MediaPortal your TV stations and listing data will be populated and there you have it: Live TV in XBMC.

There are a few bugs in my set up, which I assume are a combination of errors in my confguration, bugs in the still-under-development software, and features which have yet to be implemented. These include:

• Deinterlacing problems on some (but not all) HD channels. This is most visible at the edges of moving objects on screen.
• XBMC/MediaPortal only using one of the two available tuners (meaning I can’t watch one thing while recording another)
• Visual glitches in XBMC, like text overlapping itself
• Occasional trouble tuning stations, which is resolved by trying another station and then coming back
• Occasional video stutter
• Live TV can be paused/resumed, but not rewound / fast-forwarded

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s getting there! In theory one TV backend can serve all the XBMC frontend clients on the network, so getting that up in running is one of my next steps along with ironing out some of the configuration problems.

Last week I came across a White Easy Knitter for $25. The White Easy Knitter is made by the same company that made my beloved 1602, and is the same pitch (5mm). The Easy Knitter is a low-end hobby machine, and considerably simpler than the 1602, but the parts and accessories are interchangable. For $25 I wasn’t expecting it to be in great shape, but since replacement needles are about $1 each on ebay I figured it would be a good source for spare needles.

You may remember that my 1602 did not come with a full bed cast-on-comb, and I’ve attempted to make my own. My homemade comb works OK, but not great, and I’ve been keeping my eye out for an affordable replacement without much luck. I have yet to see one for less than $100 once shipping is factored in.

I’m happy to say that the $25 Easy Knitter came with both a full bed of 160 needles (all of which look to be in good shape) AND a full bed cast-on-comb. So that’s $260 in parts right there. The carriage for the Easy Knitter is sold as the intarsia carriage for the 1602, another $50+ part.  It also came with some weights and transfer tools which will work with the 1602. Most curiously and surprisingly, it came with an original copy of the 1602 manual. Most mysterious, since the 1602 manual really doesn’t apply to the Easy Knitter at all.

The condition of the Easy Knitter bed itself is OK. A few of the flow combs are broken, but that doesn’t really prevent it from being used. It’s a very simple machine compared to the 1602. I plan on stealing a few needles from it to replace some bent ones on the 1602, but will otherwise leave the Easy Knitter in tact. It’s considerably lighter and smaller than the 1602, and will come in handy if I ever get around to teaching another knitting machine class.

Overall I feel like I’ve won the knitting machine lottery, with a solid $300+ worth of parts and tools compatible with my 1602 for only $25.

The folks at EagleUp have written a plugin to help you generate 3D models of your Eagle boards. This could be handy for designing enclosures, or just feeling like a badass.

[Dangerous Prototypes via Make]

I spend a lot of time on my own photos for my blog, and a few of them have made the rounds on pinterest/etc. I’m contemplating watermarking my images with my blog URL. This isn’t because I’m concerned about “stealing,” in fact I love it when people reblog my stuff, it’s about attribution. It’s about someone seeing something I’ve done and having a snowball’s chance of learning more if they’re interested.

If someone wants a watermark-free copy for use on their blog or whatever, I’m more than happy to provide it. The image above shows what I’m thinking of adding to my photos from here on out.

So what do you think? Is the watermark shown above an acceptable way of “claiming” my content, or just it just distract too much from the image to be viable?

Wiring for Cat 6 Ethernet

It’s been a little tricky to balance what posts go where, especially when they’re home improvement hacks. The second post in the series about our home network is now up!

A script to generate a daily chore calendar

Because I’m a slob, I have to have a daily check list every day to tell me to clean up. I converted an old page-a-day calendar into a daily chore checklist, with help from Ruby and ImageMagick.