Uncategorized

Liveblogging a Comic Con

Kelly

Today and tomorrow I’m selling Tinysaurs at King Con, a comic and animation convention in Brooklyn. Unlike other shows I’ve done this year, I have neither my intrepid booth-mate Sara nor my faithful sherpa boyfriend Chris to keep me company. It’s just me sitting at my booth, trying not to go stir crazy (things are a little slow so far).

I’ve been twittering but at this rate I’m not going to have any followers left if I keep updating my status every 10 minutes. So instead I’m liveblogging the event. If you don’t hear from me for a while it’s because I’m busy making zillions of dollars or have become unconcioous. Or both.

10:45 Most people are set up at this point. What’s surprising is how many tables are completely empty. Not sure if they’re no shows or just running late. There’s clearly a community similar to the craft show vendors. Lots of milling about, chatting, and catching up. A few people stop by and mention that they’ve seen my stuff on The Internet(tm).

11:22 First sale, a belt buckle and a belt.

12:05 A  small child with curly hair comes up to my booth. He points at the large stegosaurus model. “Is that a dinosaur?” he asks. “Yes,” I reply. “Is it made of something?” Why yes, yes it is made of something.

1:23 Sales are pretty good. Traffic isn’t super heavy but lots of folks are interested in my stuff. One thing has become clear: I don’t have enough large belts. I stock mostly mediums because that’s what sells best at craft shows. Guys are bigger. Ergo, bigger belts.

4:40 It turns out there’s not a whole lot to blog about, live or otherwise. Traffic is steady, sales are decent. Not earth shattering, but solid. I’m hungry and tired, but without someone to watch my booth I’m pretty much stuck here. And since it costs admission to get in I can’t easily get someone to bring me some food. Clearly a lack of planning on my part.

5:33 Found out there’s a cafe upstairs in this building, and got someone to watch my stuff for a few minutes while I grabbed a snack. First time I’ve left the booth since I got here at 10am. I was torn between the pumpkin muffin and the apple muffin, but now I’m wishing I’d grabbed both. Or better yet, a hot dog. Not that they sell hot dogs at that cafe, this is much too classy a place for that.

I know, this is riveting stuff.

Uncategorized

One kitten forward, three kittens back

Kelly

On Tuesday morning we took our foster kitten Vader back to Liberty Humane Society. At over 2 lbs he was ready to be fixed and adopted out. He seems to be completely recovered from his surgery and was climbing all over his cage like a monkey. The shelter staff said his size and personality should make him quick to adopt, viagra pills for sale and they’re probably sending him over to Petsmart on Saturday for the weekly adoption event.

Today I went by the shelter in the morning to volunteer, and uh, ended up bringing home three more kittens.
A litter!
I didn’t mean to, really!

There was a lot of cat shuffling going on as there are more cats than places to put them. It’s like a game of cat tetris seeing which cats can tolerate sharing a cage, who needs a big cage and who needs a small one, who dumps their water on the cage below them, and who will steal food from the cage next to them. At the end of the tetris shuffle there was a box of kittens without a good place. After a hard sell from the shelter staff (which was totally unnecessary as I was already weak from missing Vader) Chris and I are fostering them until Thanksgiving.

I think I’ve become a cat lady.

Programming

Most Useful CS Classes?

Kelly

One thing that’s clear about my quest for higher education is that I’m going to need some undergraduate level classes to fill in the holes of my self-taught education. I’ve been looking through course catalogs for various programs to get an idea of what I’m missing, but it’s hard to tell what would be valuable and what’s just filler.

For folks who got viagra online without prescription an undergraduate degree in computer science, what classes / topics did you actually find useful? I know I need to brush up on my math, I haven’t done anything resembling a proof in about a decade. Most of the programming I’ve done has been for the web. Lots of figuring out when to access and how to store various bits of data, but not much recursion. I’m used to speed being a factor of how often you hit the database, not how you’re manipulating the data.

I’ve found a community college locally where I can pick up some classes on the cheap, including one called “Language Independent Design Tools” which covers problem solving techniques, modular design, how to perform a proper trace, subroutines, etc. It could be either really useful or entirely too general, it’s hard to tell from the course description. It requires “Intro to C#” as a co requisite, which sounds like a lot of “this is a variable, this is a function.” Bleh.

Speaking of classes!

I’m teaching Intro to PHP at NYC Resistor in December. It covers the basics of the language, and doesn’t require any previous programming experience. Working knowledge of HTML is a big help, but not strictly required. You can sign up online, the class is taught at the NYCR Hackerspace in Brooklyn.

I’m thinking of teaching the GD image class again, because it’s fun to draw graphs and calculate resizing, shifts, etc. But the last one wasn’t very well attended so I’m not sure.

Personal

Healthcare Fail.

Kelly

I haven’t been listening to much of the healthcare political banter because honestly I don’t think it’s going to get anywhere. Universal healthcare sounds great, except for the fact that the healthcare still sucks.

I’ve been trying to set up a doctor’s appointment with a psychiatrist to see if I have ADHD. I don’t have a GP, so I call my viagra without prescriptions insurance company for a referral. They gave me a list of people I can go to, I say thanks and start calling them.

I made it through the list of 6 doctors they gave me (which seemed plenty at the time) without having a single office answer the phone. I leave messages on answering machines. I go online to bring up a wider list. After an hour of calling places to find they either don’t know how to use a phone or aren’t accepting new patients, I finally find the one doctor in the entire New York area who is both available and accepts my insurance. Hooray. I set up an appointment.

Apparently I have to call my insurance company (Oxford/UnitedHealth) to get an authorization. Except sometime between last week and today I have managed to misplace my insurance card. So I call the insurance company.  They can’t find me in the system, hold on while we transfer… oh wait I just got dumped back to the automated voice prompts. Next rep, “oh you need to call this other department, you’re with a different group.” And so on and so forth. After two disconnects and 5 different reps, I finally get to someone who is capable of finding me in the system. I ask if I can have a temporary card emailed to me. She says sure, it’ll go out in 1-3 business days.

What? How does sending an email take 1-3 business days? How is there not a button they can hit which simply pre-fills a PDF with my subscriber ID and group number?

Ok fine. I get my number and plan on just printing it out for the doctor. I get transferred somewhere else, listen to some really not very calming classical music on hold, and finally get my authorization number. They ask the address of the doctor, which I’ve of course forgotten. So I look it up online.

I found the doctor’s address on one of those “rate an MD” websites.  Along with a number of reviews for the doctor. The verdict? Terrible. The kind of shrink who just wants to throw a prescription at you, take some money, and shove you out the door. The kind of shrink I hate. I’d cancel my appointment and make one elsewhere if it were possible to get anyone else to answer their phone or return a call. Since that doesn’t seem to be in the realm of possibility, I’m stuck with this guy. Maybe he’s really great and the 10 people who wrote terrible things about him are really just crazy. I mean, they are seeing a psychiatrist.

I could go out of network but wow that’s insanely expensive. My out-of-network coverage is pretty much a joke. So I get to go to the one in-network doctor I can get a hold of, who doesn’t seem like a good fit for me at all.

But at least with the new government healthcare plan, everyone in America will be entitled to the same infuriating service I’m enjoying oh so very much right now.

Personal

Graduate School?

Kelly

Yes, the earth has stopped rotating. I am officially considering graduate school.

People who know me well know that I don’t generally advocate going for a graduate degree. I feel many students are mislead by universities regarding the value of said degrees, and many people would be better served simply getting in some real-world experience.

And yet I’m considering grad school. For software engineering.

So why the change of buy cheap viagra internet heart?

Primarily, I want to learn new things.  I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in metalsmithing. Which is great, and I’m proud of that degree; I worked hard for it. But I also do a lot of professional web development and programming. I’ve learned most of it through the school of hard knocks. I’m self employed, and while one might think that would make it easier to take time to learn new things, in some ways it becomes more difficult. It’s easy to overdue “work time” and spend 12 hours a day on my business, leaving little time for anything else.

In addition to polishing my skills, I decided the degree was worth something to me. If my Bachelors was in CS or math, I’d probably skip the official degree program and just take some continuing ed classes. I’m after the information, not the acronym. But after talking to a few people I think there’s a benefit to having a degree in computer science on my resume. As much as I wish it wasn’t, sexism is still an issue for women working in technology and science. Having an advanced degree can help combat that, although it’s a shame that it even has to.

I’ve more or less decided to go into software engineering, as opposed to “computer engineering” or “computer science.” Admittedly before I started looking into grad school all these terms sounded identical to me. The Association of Computer Machinery put out a curriculum which breaks down various computer sciences into a few different disciplines. The article itself is a bit dry but there are some very useful charts and graphs which help me figure out how my interests lined up with different programs. You can find it here if you’re interested: http://www.acm.org/education/curric_vols/CC2005-March06Final.pdf

Now comes the daunting task of picking a college and getting admitted. I’m going to have to use all of the work I’ve done since college graduation to show my aptitude and interest in software engineering, since my college transcript just shows that I’m damned good at metalsmithing. I was hoping to take a few undergraduate classes as a non-matriculating student at a university I’m interested in to get a feel for it and meet the faculty, but it looks like most CS programs don’t let non-majors take classes. Without a lot of connections to academia, the graduate admissions process is pretty intimidating. When I was in high school, my college counselor seemed superfluous; I already knew where I wanted to go. Now I’d give my left arm to have someone help me navigate the sea of programs and paperwork.

I’m not looking to relocate, so I’m sticking to colleges and universities within a reasonable commuting distance (via public transit) to my home in Jersey City. So far I’ve checked out Rutgers, NYU, and Stevens. I’m still on the fence as to whether I should go for a masters or a PhD. A PhD sounds like it might be more interesting, but I’ve got mixed feelings about setting aside such a huge chunk of time. Would becoming a PhD student mean I’d have to leave my business behind?

One thing I’m oddly looking forward to is the GRE. I’ve always done pretty well on standardized tests.  Do you still use a number 2 pencil and fill in the bubbles? I find that to be immensely satisfying.

Hacking

Thermal Printer Success!

 Success! I’ve managed to print to the thermal printer by sending commands over my homemade connector cable in HyperTerminal.

Picture 027

 There were a few breakthroughs which helped me get to this point. On the off chance they might answer, I asked the manufacturer for the pinout information for the serial port on the PD-22. Not only did they send me a pin diagram, viagra in the uk they also included a schematic for the cable.

Pins 1-8 are straightforward and what you’d expect to find on RS232. I was originally thrown off because 9 looked like signal ground. Pins 9 and 10 are tied to each other, and go to signal ground internally. I think this is used to indicate that the cable is present, as the printer defaults to IrDA otherwise. I’ve updated the Eagle schematic to tie 9 and 10 together and removed the traces which aren’t connected to anything.

I didn’t have a chance to etch the new board yet, but really wanted to try things out so I made do with the old one by just putting a blob of solder between pins 9 and 10. It’s not very pretty, but it works!

Picture 026

The next step is getting this contraption working with the Arduino instead of running off a USB serial port on my laptop. I have to read up on the SoftwareSerial library, as I haven’t really done anything with it before. I also need to read the command sheet more carefully, I’ve figured out how to print, and turn the thing off via serial, but haven’t got it to feed the paper after printing. Right now I just press the feed button.

But it works!

Hacking

Thermal Printer Hacking

 As part of my knucklebuster hacking project, samples of viagra I’ve been working with a portable thermal receipt printer. I picked up a Citizen PD-22 on eBay at a very attractive price, but later realized why it was so attractive: the printer uses a proprietary RS232 cable, and replacements are hard to come by at any price, much less a reasonable one.

Mysterious Port

Aside from that hitch, the printer itself is great. I found a full list of the control codes on the manufacturer’s website, and got it to spit out some configuration information. It runs on 4 AA batteries, which fits the bill of "portable electricity" for our show. 

The printer also has an IrDA port, but after poking at it for a day and talking to a friend about it, I’m abandoning hopes of getting the Arduino to interface with it. I have a bunch of IR LEDs, but the IrDA protocol is apparently a big pain.

Poking around on DigiKey didn’t bring up any connectors which fit the bill, so at the suggestion of someone on the NYCR Microcontroller Study Group list I set about building my own by etching a tiny PCB with appropriately spaced traces.

A pair of calipers measured the traces at 0.8mm, so I came up with a board in Eagle, shown at left. It’s super simple, just 10 wires and 10 holes. I plan on using a Makerbot to make a nice little housing for the board, after I trim it down some. 

Note that the traces fan out at the end simply because I am not very good at soldering in small spaces, and i wanted plenty of room for error since I was using the toner transfer method of making the PCB. 

The board was actually a bit too thick, and while someone more patient might have ordered thinner copper-clad board, I am nothing if not impatient so I took it to the belt sander to remove a little bit of material from the back.

 After some trimming I got something which appears to work! I’ve located power and ground on the pins, but not much else. None of the other pins seem to be saying anything, which is surprising.

Still left to do is drilling out the holes for the wires and soldering them up. Then I’ll cut/file the excess board away and build a little housing for it on a Makerbot. I may decide to re-etch the board with slightly longer traces, right now there’s *just* enough room to clear the printer housing. That and one of the traces didn’t come out quite right (although it’s still serviceable as-is).

Admittedly, I did end up ordering an official cable for the princely sum of $35. I figure I can use it as a control, and to double check that I’ve figured out the pins. So far I haven’t located TX/RX. I would have expected RX to be floating, but my cheap RadioShack multimeter shows no signs of life on the other pins.

 

Hacking

New Project: Digital Knucklebuster

 I’ve been doing more craft shows recently, and if there’s one thing I really, really hate about them it’s dealing with a knucklebuster. For the uninitiated, a knucklebuster is the little manual credit card imprinter you use when you don’t have access to an electronic terminal. They use pfizer viagra cheap carbonless paper to make a physical imprint of the raised numbers on the card. They’re tedious to use and I hate them.

There are a number of products commercially available which use cell phone service to provide a modern mag-strip reader and processor. The problem with these is that they’re pretty expensive for someone who only does a handful of shows a year. The hardware costs around $1000 and there’s an associated monthly fee. Sometimes there’s even a gateway fee on top of that, so by the time you add in your credit card processor you’re looking at a 6-10% discount plus about $50 a month in fees. Gross.

The plan is to build a digital knucklebuster. Something which makes the credit card swiping process a little less painful. There are two main requirements: it must be battery powered as electricity is generally an expensive add-on at shows (if available at all) and it must not require cell phone or internet signal. I have a knack for doing shows in buildings with no reception. I’ll still have to take the receipts home and process them, but hopefully it will be less tedious.

The two main components to the project are a magstripe reader and a thermal receipt printer. I found the magstripe reader at allelectronics and a cheap battery powered thermal receipt printer on eBay. I plan to run the whole thing off an Arduino and put it in a nice looking enclosure. No one wants to run their credit card on something that looks like a hacker made it.

I’ve also picked up a numeric keypad and small LCD display for entering in the transaction amount and any other important information. I’m on the fence as to whether I want to program in my products / prices and have the line items on the credit card slip. If not, I’ll have to write one for my records.

I haven’t done much work with serial devices, but I’ve found a couple good posts which should help me figure things out.
Tom Taylor wrote an Arduino sketch which takes web data and prints it on a thermal printer. I found a great tutorial for reading a magstripe reader with a Sanguino, so I’ll either adapt the code for Arudino use or just use a Sanguino. I haven’t figured out if I need the extra beefiness of the Sanguino.

For duplicity, I plan on storing the credit card number on an SD card, as well as printing it in a QR code on my copy of the receipt (the one they sign). While I’m not super-stoked about the level of security here, I feel it’s comparable to how I’m doing things now: carrying around a pouch full of credit card slips, each with the information imprinted on it.

There are a couple problems this project doesn’t address, plain old credit card fraud being the first of them. Just like with a knucklebuster, we’re not running the cards at the time of sale, so it’s entirely possible someone’s card could be declined when we run it later. There’s also something the knucklebuster provides which I’m not sure if this will: proof the card was present. Visa/Mastercard accept a knucklebuster receipt as proof of the card being present. They also consider a swiped card proof (but not a keyed one), but I’m not sure if that’s due to some of the data collected, or some other mystical check performed on auth. While chargebacks at craft shows are rare, they do happen.

I’ve started working with the printer, but haven’t gotten very far, so I’ll save that for the next post.

Crafting

Dinosaur Moleskines!

 I’m incredibly pleased to announce a new product line: embossed Moleskine journals!

Dinosaur Moleskine

They’re currently available in the Dinosaur buy viagra now and Deer design. These are genuine Moleskine notebooks, not cheaply made knock-offs. They’re filled with 200 sheets of creamy lined, plain, or square grid paper. Each notebook has an elastic band to hold it shut. I’ve got one I’ve been using for years, they’re perfect for fitting in a purse or small bag.

They’re now available in the Everything Tiny Etsy Shop!

Business, Crafting

Crafty Bastards and Tinysaurs Under Glass!

First thing’s first: if you haven’t already, vote for Tinysaur in the Craftiest Bastard Contest. If you live in the DC metro area, come by the show on Saturday, October 3 (eek, that’s tomorrow!). The show is in Adams Morgan, details can be found on the Crafty Bastards webste.

I’m excited because I’ve got some new items for this show… stuff which isn’t even available in my online shops yet! It’s been in the works for a while, and I’m proud to present you with:

Tinysaurs Under Glass

Triceratops Under Glass

The glass bell jars are hand blown by Kiva Ford. They look way better in real life than in the snapshot I took earlier. Turns out glass domes are sort of tricky to photograph. I’ve made them for T-Rex, Triceratops, Woolly Mammoth, and the Butterfly. Sorry, no love for Stegosaurus. he’s just a wee bit too long.

Due to the inordinate number of things that could go wrong in shipping (well OK just one: breaking) I probably won’t be selling these online soon. Unless I can come up with a way of packaging I feel is secure enough. So you’ll just have to come to the show to see them.