my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘Web cam’ Category

I was lucky to have friends in town for a mutual friend’s wedding this weekend. It’s amazing how many people I know from “the old days” that I’m not in touch with anymore, even though they are good and decent people… we just don’t make the effort to drive to faraway cities (or to the West Coast, for that matter).

The men I talked to were mainly all dads, and I think the consensus was that we take trips mainly with or to family, so other trips to see friends are squeezed out of the schedule. I mentioned to another friend the other day that I’m trying to get all my friends and family in one place, something I called “Total Thomas Convergence” (or TTC for short). I have a few great friends in Buffalo, but in fact everyone I know is extremely busy, as is my little family, so we rarely have social time with grownups who are not immediate members of our family. (Fortunately, the grownups who are immediate members of our family are also good and decent people!)

We did end up having a little bit of a pool party, too, because we had a few people who were in town for the wedding come over. The thermometer in the pool said 80, but none of us who went in the water felt that was an honest reckoning. In fact, one swimmer was sure it was 80 Kelvin, not 80 Fahrenheit.

And I did manage to finish the steps up to the deck before the guests arrived. After they left, I finished the railing and the gate on the deck, so it is now as safe as could be. I have a little more to do on the deck, however, including a handrail for the steps. I’m also going to do a little wiring, so that there is an outdoor, grounded power outlet for the pool filter, and I’ll install a motion-sensor light on the peak of the garage to shine down on the pool. (The web-cams are already installed, but they are not infrared cameras, so the lights will come in handy at night.)

This might be our last day of skiing for the season, but we’re hoping to get one more day in over Easter weekend. In this picture, you see the boys riding up a chairlift without me–I was in the chair behind them with their cousin. This photo was taken with their mother in mind–she doesn’t worry about them when they’re with me at all!

I have a few favorite applications I use on my Mac for doing stuff, but there are times when what I’m using just doesn’t work right or doesn’t do all that I want it to do.

Examples:

• FTP client for connection to web server – I mainly use CyberDuck, but sometimes it fails to delete or rename directories
• a good text editor – I mainly use TextEdit.app, the basic text editor that comes with OS X. What I want is something that will “pretty paint” when I’m writing code. If you don’t know what pretty paint is, don’t ask because you’ll probably never need to know if you don’t code (you can see a sample of pretty painted code in the comment below).
• video chat – I don’t chat much, but when I do I use iChat or Adium. iChat allows for video chatting with other iChat users, but Adium doesn’t. What I’m looking for is a program that allows me to video chat with anyone, no matter what chat program they use. I did find a program called iVisit, but I haven’t tested it much because most of the video chatters I might connect with already have iChat, which works well. What’s nice about Adium is that you can use multiple chat user accounts so that you can reach people outside the .Mac and AIM systems.
• analog video conversion – I’ve got an ElGato EyeTV hybrid, which I can hook up to my VCR to convert old VHS tapes to digital format. I haven’t used it much. What I’m looking for is something that is an all-in-one app that converts to the iTunes movie format.
• webcam software – the iSight camera built in to the newer Macs is cool, but so far I’ve only found one webcam application that uses the iSight camera to automatically capture and upload photos to a server, and it costs $40–the cost isn’t that high, but so far I’ve had a few problems with the trial version (the web site for the application says that trial version is a FULL version, so I don’t think I’ll pay $40 for something that crashes frequently). Ideally I’m looking for something that will use FTP to upload pictures to a server, where I would host a script that automatically (a) displays the latest photo and/or (b) automatically creates photo albums out of the photos in the upload folder.
• calendar sync program – I have a smart phone that syncs to a calendar on any number of computers, but the calendar doesn’t sync with other calendars or web-based calendars. Ideally, what I want is a web-based calendar app that will sync with my smart phone, but which has account management on it so that I can restrict access by user. I’ve experimented with iCal‘s shared calendar feature, as well as google’s online calendar, but they don’t seem to be able to sync–when you import a calendar from another source, it imports every entry, even if there the same entry already exists–so you get two copies, and the same thing happens when you take an iCal or google calendar and import it into my smart phone’s calendar. (I wonder if getting an iPhone would solve this problem… but I don’t want to switch to AT&T. (UPDATE: I found what appears to be the perfect program for $40: The Missing Sync. I’m still looking for a free program, though.)

I’m looking at open source applications first, then shareware, and if I still don’t find what I’m looking for, I’ll consider spending small amounts of money to accomplish what I want (while I hum the U2 song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For“).

What are you using? Do you have any suggestions for me?

I love the IT course I’m taking this semester. It reminds me of what my high school physics teacher (Mr. Hitchcock) would often say: “Let logic prevail.”

So the CPU we’ve built in TKGate can do the Fibonacci Sequence (in Java):

• int i = 0;
• int j = 1;
• int k;
• for ( ; ; )
• { k = i + j;
• i = j;
• j = k:
• }

In pseudo-microcode, it would go like this:

• PUSH
  i:
• PUSH
  j:
• ADD
• STORE
  k:
• STORE
  j:
• PUSH
  k:
• STORE
  j:
• GOTO
  begin:

So the value of k goes up and up:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, … keep going forever!

Cool, isn’t it?

By the way, I have a new challenge, based on the Fibonacci Sequence. Write an equation that represents the place-order of only prime numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence. Anyone want to try that one?

What can your CPU do?