Author: rakesh

Laser etching a laptop in Houston

I’m working on getting a Macbook Air laser etched so I set out this morning to find a vendor in Houston that could do it for me.  Searching for ‘laser etching macbook’ I found an article on the Make Magazine website mentioning that they used an Epilog Laser.

So I talked to Epilog Laser and they gave me the name of their distributor in Texas, Engraving Concepts.

And then the nice people at Engraving Concepts recommended a few different companies for my laptop etching job:

Texas Laser Creations
713-553-1346
Greg Lindsey
http://www.texlaser.com/

Monarch Trophy
713-464-1122
Randy Brummel
http://www.monarchtrophy.com/

Academy Awards
713-529-0130
James Bonatto
http://www.academyadvawards.com/

Hope this is useful to others!

UPDATE: Here’s the design I came up with:

macbook-air-done

(The artwork came from vectorstock.com, the template from Instructables, and I’m having the etching done by Monarch Trophies. They’ve never done laptops before but they have 4 Epilog lasers and after reading the online resources on laser etching the Macbook, they were comfortable taking on the project. They’re charging me about $50 — $15 for setup and $35 for the actual etching.)

UPDATE 2: I ended up going with Monarch Trophy. Here are photographs of the final laser-etched Macbook Air.

Getting around the current Google Apps and Gmail slow-ness

Like many others, I’ve been getting a very bad user experience from Google Apps (Premier Edition — ie we pay $50 / user / year) and Gmail since early yesterday, Monday, December 8, 2008.  “Very bad user experience” means that everything is running slow.  For example, some of the things that I’ve experienced consistently for the past 36 hours:

  • I click “Send mail” and rather than just sending the message, the Gmail status indicator says, “Still working” and then, maybe 60 seconds or 90 seconds later, it actually sends the message
  • You try to use the new “Tasks” feature and start adding stuff and the Tasks menu comes back and says that it’s lost its connection with Google’s servers and your changes get lost.

This service failure from Google Apps and Gmail has resulted in a lot of loss of productivity and general unhappiness for those of us at SnapStream who spent a lot of time in e-mail (as Lev Grossman very astutely wrote, “when our tools are broken, we feel broken”).

But I think I’ve come across a workaround to the problem!  As suggested by @HughesJW on twitter, I switched from using Google Mail’s http:// server to their https:// server — and everything is running normally now!

While generally speaking, using https:// is slower because of the overhead of everything getting encrypted and then decrypted, the Google Mail slowdown is so bad that the https:// feels normal!

If you’re experiencing this problem, I hope this helps!

Comparing the Palm Treo 680 vs. the Palm Treo Pro

My Dad’s a diehard Palm Treo user.  It’s just what he’s familiar with, so as much as I’d like to upgrade him from his Palm Treo 680 to an iPhone, I think he’d really miss not having a keyboard.  So I’m thinking about switching him to a Palm Treo Pro to minimize the switching cost.  Couldn’t find a god comparison of the two devices so here’s one:

  Palm Treo 680 Palm Treo Pro
Dimensions 2.3″ x 4.4″ x 0.8″ 2.4″ x 4.5″ x 0.5″
Weight 5.5 oz 4.7 oz
Software Palm OS Windows Mobile
Network GSM/GPRS Edge (quad band GSM) GSM/GPRS Edge (quad band GSM) + 3G HSDPA/UMTS
Processor 312MHz Intel® 400MHz Qualcomm® MSM7201
Screen size 2.75″ diagonal (320×320) 3.5″ diagonal (320×320) (source)
GPS No Yes
Wi-fi No Yes (802.11b/g)
Built-in chat No Yes (on Wi-Fi only)
Connectors Power: proprietary Palm connector
Headphone: proprietary 2.5mm		 Power: micro-USB (same as Blackberry, etc)
Headphone: standard 3.5mm

(Actually, I did find a comparison of all Palm devices, including the Treo 680 and the Treo Pro, on Palm’s site, but it didn’t have all the information I was looking for and had some annoying quirks… like rather than list a dimension as 4.7″ it was 4.69″. Ahhh marketing.)

Model rocket launch this past weekend

We launched a model rocket this weekend:

I was into model rockets when I was in grade school through high school so I guess this is nostalgia. Need to get one of those video camera payload rockets next and capture a video of the flight up and back down. This particular Estes rocket got lost — it went up perfectly, the parachute deployed perfectly and then in the middle of chasing after it, it disappeared. I think it landed on top of a building. Anyways, we’ve already got another one built and ready to launch… maybe this long weekend.

Need to find a bigger field here in Houston — we launched this one at Rice’s intramural fields. Suggestions?

Nice summary of “New Business Models for News” event

I wish I had attended this event, but having missed it Chris O’Brien’s summary of the event is a good one. An excerpt (boldfacing added by me):

My main takeaways from the day were far different what I would have expected going in. I’ve been in search of new ways to generate revenue to maintain the newsrooms we have (or some version of them). But the big lesson of the day was to focus on the other side of things: Cost. There was widespread agreement across the day that cost structures of newsrooms need to be dramatically lower. But before you think I’ve become a cheerleader for the rampant corporate cost cutting plaguing us, hear me out.

Update: Jeff Jarvis, one of the organizers for the “New Business Models for News” event at CUNY, just posted his summary of the event.

Getting Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to work

 I’ve been using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for some data collection and verification recently and it’s a really amazing service. I can get simple rote tasks performed on datasets pretty quickly. So I thought I’d share some of the minor hurdles I had to overcome to get the import of my “input” data to work correctly for me. I started out with an Excel worksheet and I exported from Excel to CSV. Upon trying to upload my first set of data (after I created my MT “human interface task” template), the first error message I encountered was this one:

Header columns should not be blank. 

 This one is pretty simple — I had a column in my worksheet that looked empty but had some spaces in it. So when Excel was creating the CSV, it was creating an empty “column” and AMT was barfing on this. Fixing this was easy — I just deleted the offending column in Excel and re-saved it as a CSV. The other error message I encountered was this one:

Could not create batch. Invalid input data on line 320. Click here to learn more about acceptable file formats. 

 So what’s happening here? Basically, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk barfs on special characters… perhaps, only if they aren’t properly encoded? I’m not sure if there’s another solution to this, but what I did was do a search and replace in my trusty text editor (UltraEdit FTW!) and kept re-uploading until I had replaced all the offending characters. My list of offending characters that I had to search and replace: 


’ (replace with ‘)
ñ (replace with n)
“ (replace with “)
” (replace with “)
— (replace with -)

Gmail tip: searching by the first post in a conversation

For those of you who are Gmail (or Google Apps Mail) power users, here’s a little hack that I figured out.

I use the “to:” and “from:” Gmail search parameters all the time to pinpoint an e-mail that I’m looking for.  But have you ever wanted to find an e-mail that you know was the *start* of an e-mail thread (thread = what’s referred to in the official Gmail lingo as a conversation)?  Well, even though Google Mail hides ’em from you in conversation view, all reply subject lines still contain the standard “Re:” string and all forwarded e-mail subject lines contain the standard “Fwd:”.So all you have to do is take the search you’re doing and have it exclude any subject line that contains Re: or Fwd:! 

For example, if I’m looking for every e-mail from my friend Shashi that he originated (vs. an e-mail that he might have been received and subsequently replied to), I’d do a search like this:

 from:shashi -subject:Re: -subject:Fwd: