Gus over at Swamplot wrote it up as a story, after some back and forth on e-mail with me. And then Swamplot’s write-up got picked up on slashdot.org.
First of all, the photograph was NOT photoshop’ed. It went straight from my iPhone to Natuba (what I use to post photographs to twitter) with no editing in between. If anyone is at Hobby Airport and wants to see this thing, it was in the men’s restroom near gate 51 last week Wednesday.
More importantly, though, what’s the story here? Is DHS actually monitoring airport restrooms using cameras installed at the urinal? I exchanged emails with Marlene McClinton at the Houston Airport System (as a side note, HAS uses SnapStream to monitor mentions of themselves on TV) over the weekend and she wrote:
…I talked to all of our security folks and they talked to DHS and said no way, there is no such program or video or cam in stalls or urinals.
So it sounds like this was a simple prank… I’ll update this post if I hear anything else from DHS or from the Houston Airport System (HAS was going to check out the particular location I mentioned seeing the stickers at).
“I’m sure this is a prank. Since this is generating bad publicity for the DHS, they will probably catch the person who put these stickers on the urinals after reviewing the video from the real, covert hidden cameras they have covering the urinals.”
Earlier this year, I embarked on a project to convert an old Dell laptop of mine into a digital photo frame. This particular laptop was one that had been used by my youngest sister in college. A Dell Latitude CPI, it:
had a slow 300 MHz Pentium II processor,
it was incredibly heavy and, as an added bonus,
at some point my sister had managed (by mistake) to burn a hole in plastic shell with a candle.
But the 13″ TFT backlit LCD worked just fine, so I was excited about turning this otherwise crappy laptop (aka a craptop!) into a photo frame.
So I turned one of these:
…into one of these:
Here’s how I did it…
First, the supplies I used (all the prices are approximate):
“Shadow box” photo frame (2″ deep to hold the LCD + laptop) — $20
Foamcore board (1/4″ thickness, this was used to mount the LCD inside the frame) — $10
Matte (sized to the frame on the outside and sized to the LCD on the inside) — $10
Duct tape (quack quack!) — $5
Styrofoam blocks (used as spacers inside the frame) — $5
And there were some tools involved, mostly standard stuff:
Misc screwdrivers – to, you know, remove and replace screws?
Chisel – some of my wooden frame had to be chiseled out to make room
X-acto Knife – used this to cut the foamcore LCD mount to the right size
Ruler – to measure stuff
Scissors – to cut stuff
Here were the steps involved:
1) Prep work
First, I experimented a bunch with:
taking the laptop apart (Dell publishes their service manuals publicly so this was straightforward)
the software stack on the laptop — more on this later, but I was trying to find just the right configuration
This laptop was old enough that it didn’t have any wi-fi. And all the old PCMCIA wi-fi cards I could find were old enough that they didn’t support the latest Wi-Fi standards (namely, WPA2 for Wi-Fi security). So I bought a cheap Linksys PCMCIA WiFi card on eBay to get WiFi.
The IDE hard drive that came with the system was loud (sounded like coffee grinder!) so I bought a CF to IDE adapter (also on eBay!) and as cheap a CF card as I could find. Here’s a photograph of the totally silent “hard drive” I’m using:
I also researched other people’s digital photo frame projects. This popular science article was helpful. And Brent Evans’ blog posting on his Geektonic blog and his flickr photostream (complete with annotations explaining steps he had gone through) were incredibly helpful. Two other sites I found amongst my notes:
Most importantly, I removed the bezel, plastic back, and other hardware from the LCD. But this also included removing the keyboard/touchpad and some other miscellaneous parts.
I decided to leave the keyboard/touchpad off the unit. Sitting upright in a frame, they aren’t things you’ll want to use and keeping them would have made for thicker frame innards. The laptop parts that didn’t make the cut:
Including the laptop cover with the candle-burned hole in it! 🙂
3) Cut the foamcore to fit the frame and LCD
Cutting the outside of the foamcore to fit the frame was easy — I just measured the frame opening and cut the foamcore to a rectangle of the same size. Cutting it to fit the LCD involved tracing an outline of the LCD and it’s associated and then going at that outline with an x-acto knife. All the while, I made sure that everything was going to line up with the matte inside the frame.
4) Mount the LCD inside the foamcore
Dropped the LCD, face down on a table, into the foamcore so the LCD was flush with the surface of the foamcore and then put duct tape around the back, on the interface of the foamcore and the LCD. Here’s the LCD mounted inside the foamcore:
5) Cut styrofoam blocks to use as spacers
The laptop needed to be an inch or two above the bottom of the frame box so I cut a styrofoam block. In hindsight, something other than styrofoam would have worked better. The styrofoam I used leaves behind a white “dust” that I was constantly having to clean off the glass and the matte of the frame (reminds me of an article I read many years ago on Philip Greenspun’s site about a Boston framing shop that bought a surplus clean room from National Semiconductors to do all of their framing inside of… they would have hated killed themselves over this styrofoam!)
You can see the foam block in this photograph:
6) Modified the frame for power cord, laptop WiFi, venting
I needed an opening for the power cord to come out from (used scissors to cut myself one). And I needed a bit of extra space in the shadow box to fit the Wi-Fi card on one side and the power connector on the other side (used a chisel to cut the necessary sections out of the wooden frame).
And then I felt like some venting was called for so I punched some very crude holes around the heat sink/vent area of the laptop motherboard.
The frame was chiseled out for the power supply connector and the WiFi card:
———————
And as far as the hardware goes, that was pretty much everything I did! I was reasonably happy with the hardware in the end. Some improvements that I’d like to make eventually:
The power on/off button is inside the frame… I’d like to cut a hole in the back large enough to stick my finger inside and push the power button. When I have to reboot the thing with that, opening the back up and then closing it up again is a pain.
It’d be cool to install a small webcam in the matte of the frame. That way when I’m out of town, I could easily video chat with my daughter. Installing a webcam probably wouldn’t be too hard. An idea I heard from Zack (at SnapStream) was having a “mirror mode” for the frame so people would see themselves in the frame when they looked at it. Also something cool that I could do with a webcam.
If you look at the WiFi card above, you’ll notice that I removed unmounted the built-in speakers from the frame of the laptop… Would have been nice if I could have mounted them flush with the sides of the frame. Then again, I’ve never used music with my digital photo frames. This would be more useful for some of the non-photo frame things, like the video chat described above, that I might do with this thing.
Now onto the software side. I reinstalled Windows XP on this particular laptop from scratch. Here’s a photograph of the thing booting into Windows:
A list of things that I did once I had Windows XP running to make it more “photo frame friendly”:
Installed LogMeIn — allows me to operate my frame remotely over the network (means I don’t need a keyboard/mouse directly attached to the frame)
Install Google Photo Screensaver (I ended up NOT using this… more on this below)
Install Windows XP PowerToy – TweakUI (I turned on autologon so the frame would go straight to the user desktop and start doing its thing)
Change power settings so the screen doesn’t turn off and the hard drive doesn’t turn off.
Turn off simple file sharing in Windows XP and share out, password protected, the hard drive (so without having to use LogMeIn I can access the frame’s hard drive)
Expand pagefile size — I only have 64 MB of physical RAM so I expanded the pagefile size for more virtual memory
Change Windows settings from “double click” for launching things to a “single click”
Turn off visual effects (under System -> Advanced -> Performance)
Disable and stop certain services (PC Tools)
The main software, the “screensaver” that would show photographs… I initially hoped I’d be able to use the Google Photo Screensaver. I publish almost all of my personal photographs to Picasa Web as “unlisted” albums (meaning they aren’t publicly accessible unless I send someone the link). The cool idea behind using Google’s Photo Screensaver is that it can automatically downloads photographs from a Picasa Web account… including “unlisted” albums. You give it your Picasa Web username and password and it does the rest.
The problems with Google’s Photo Screensaver:
1) It seems to NOT download new photographs while the screensaver is running: Since my “computer” (aka digital photo frame) is going to be in screensaver mode all the time, it needs to download new photographs WHILE the slideshow is running. Not in between runs of the screensaver.
2) And then even if you get your PC out of “screensaver” mode every so often, it’s not clear WHEN Google Photo Screensaver goes and downloads new stuff. Or what stuff it will download. You can’t configure what it downloads or when it downloads that stuff.
3) When I figured out that the Picasaweb automatic download thing wouldn’t work, I thought maybe I’ll write my own Picasa Web downloader and then just use Google Photo Screensaver’s ability to show photographs in a particular directory. Well, it turns out that GPS doesn’t recurse subdirectories with its “play photographs directory _____” feature.
So the solution I ended up going with was Windows XP’s built-in “My Pictures Slideshow” — a pretty barebones thing that was included in the original version of Windows XP in 2001. It cycles through the photographs in your My Pictures directory, including the photographs in subdirectories. It’s not as good as it could be… if you add new photographs, you have to take your PC out of screensaver mode before it’ll refresh its list of photographs. So updating it involves:
1. Copying new photographs to the My Pictures folder over the wireless network
2. Using LogMeIn to “press any key” to turn off the screensaver… this causes the screensaver to refresh.
Kind of a pain, but all-in-all, I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Maybe I’ll do another post on the potential that I think this thing has to be a new and useful type of device inside the home. Meanwhile, here are the rest of the photographs of my laptop converted to a digital photo frame:
Matt Cutts asked earlier today what other people were seeing for Chrome browser share in March 2009. I pulled www.snapstream.com’s traffic stats from the last two weeks (March 20th through yesterday) and I show Chrome at 3.25%… about half of the 7% that Matt reported for Chrome on his blog. Another interesting note: Matt’s blog and SnapStream’s website are flip flopped on visitors using Internet Explorer and Firefox.
(I cut the # of visits column out of the table below, I will say that the total number of visits in the past two weeks was >100,000)
One of my weekend projects a few months ago was making it so I could open the garage door on my house with my iPhone. Here’s how I got it working.
First, a quick demo of the final product. Once I got everything working, using this thing is pretty simply. I launch X10 Commander on my iPhone:
Then I tap the “ON” button with my finger and after a small lag (1 second?), my garage door…
…springs open! (or closes).
“Who cares?” you ask… well, having my iPhone to control my garage means:
I can be in a car that doesn’t have my garage code programmed into it and open/close my garage (e.g. a friend’s car)
I can go out for a walk or a run, close the garage door behind me and open it again when I get back home
Generally speaking, it’s one less box to worry about when I go out
I can open and close my garage door from my iPhone… just for the sheer pleasure of the act
And of course, I have a cool thing to show friends when they come over. 🙂
So how does this all work? Pay attention because it’s a somewhat long-winded chain of events that makes X10 Commander control my garage door (almost a Rube Goldberg machine!):
1. I have the X10 Commander iPhone App installed on my iPhone (link, $9.99):
2. It talks, over my home wi-fi network (a pair of D-Link DIR-655s setup as access points), to the X10 Commander “Server” software I have running on an always-on Windows XP PC upstairs in my home office:
3. The X10 Commander Server software talks to an USB to RF X10 interface (the X10 CM19A)dongle on the same Windows XP PC:
4. That dongle on my computer talks to an RF to X10 interface device (the X10 TM751) plugged into a nearby power outlet:
5. Now we move downstairs to the garage where I have an X10 controller for low-voltage devices (an X10 PUM01) plugged into another home power outlet:
6. And the terminals on the X10 low-voltage control device are spliced into the control wires for the garage door opener:
7. And the control wires are, obviously, connected to the garage door opener which opens my garage:
And that’s it!
It’s all run pretty reliably for a couple of months now and never fails to impress. Surprisingly the most fragile piece has NOT been the Windows XP PC (would have been my first guess), but the TM751 (step 4 above). Because it’s connected to a childproofed power outlet and it’s at the entrance to my home office, if it’s ever brushed by a passing child, a the cuff of my pant, or a projectile toy, it easily loses contact. But even this hasn’t been a big deal — I can only remember one occasion where the whole thing hasn’t worked since I set it up.
Another tip: A lot of the X10 stuff can be found on eBay and elsewhere online at pretty low prices. The $$$ savings are nice and I personally make an effort to avoid buying anything from X10.com thanks to their <BLINK>WOW!! DO WE HAVE A DEAL FOR YOU!!</BLINK> style of website design and ecommerce tactics (not to mention that almost every page on their site starts a video with audio and then there are the bikini-clad women being spied on and… sigh, I should just stop. Please tell me you won’t spend any of your money at X10.com?).
We lost track of time on our bike ride and got their late, but luckily tofu13 got a nice video. A friend of mine that lives in the building behind the Compass Bank Building (the video has shots of some people on their balconies in the same building) said the implosion shook his building and woke him up.
I happened to be on Post Oak (near the Galleria) earlier this morning and I had my camera with me so I took some photographs of the Compass Bank that’s Houstonist reported is going to be demolished tomorrow, Sunday March 15.
If you’re wondering where the building is located, it’s across the street from the Sports Authority and near Maggiano’s Little Italy on Post Oak, just up from Westheimer and Post Oak. Here’s a Google Maps Street View of the building.
While Houstonist reported the building will be demolished at 7:45am, the foreman I talked to said it would be more like 7am to 7:30am. People who want to watch will be able to from the Hilton, about a block away, a little bit north of Post Oak. According to the guy I talked to, past there, all traffic (pedestrian, car, bicycle) will be blocked.
If the timing works out I’ll be there on bike with my camera!
This weekend, I set my sister up with some whole home audio courtesy of her iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and a couple of Airport Expresses (Lifehacker’s how to). One Airport Express and speaker pair went in the kitchen but the cables were a huge mess:
the Airport Express and speakers each needed power
there was the cable connecting the speakers together
there was the cable connecting the speakers to the Airport Express
add to that the existing power cords for a digital photo frame and a cordless phone charger power cord
This is a good time to explain this particular sister of mine: I call her the Indian Martha Stewart (before Martha Stewart went to jail — ie when she was just known for being an freakishly obssessive homemaker). Yup, that’s an accurate description of my sister. So I knew that left alone, the mess of cables wasn’t going to survive more than a few days.
I found a solution in a wicker basket. Here were the ingredients for my solution:
a wicker basket (for some reason, my sister has a cabinet full of these things)
some hefty scissors
a bunch of cable ties
1. First, this particular wicker basket had a bunch of internal compartments. I remove most of the walls that created these compartments with the scissors.
2. Removing the compartments made it so I could rest the squid power supply inside the thing. The tentacles plugs were essential — with them, I could bend the outlets around the inside of the basket.
3. I cut square openings (about 1.5″ by 1.5″) on the left, right and back of the wicker basket.
4. Then I positioned everything inside and outside the basket and cable-tied all the loose cables, plugged everything in, and pushed everything inside the basket as low-down as possible. Done!
Visiting my sister, I noticed that all their icons had disappeared from the dock on their iMac. I asked what had happened, and my brother-in-law said, “That Mac is just strange!”
After thinking about it for a bit I figured it out: one of my sister’s children drags the icons off the dock because of the very cool poof-of-smoke sound and animation. Ha!
Since he just giggled when I asked him to stop doing it, I figured I needed a way to actually lock the dock. It turns out that this is possible with OS X’s parental controls, BUT you can’t apply parental controls to the admin account. And of course, switching between users being what it is in OS X, creating an another account wasn’t likely to work for my sister’s family.
So I found a useful piece of software called SuperDocker by Ed Shiro that has a simple checkbox to lock the dock. Works perfectly!
I’ve had several e-mail exchanges in the last month regarding Boxee and what I consider to be the market’s second attempt at digital media adapters (the first was marked by devices from companies like BroadQ, Digital 5, Mediabolic, Oregan Networks). And in those e-mails, I pretty much anticipated what’s happening now between Hulu and Boxee (Hulu’s blog post, Boxee’s blog post). Things I’ve had to say:
“Generally, I think 3rd parties like Boxee that are trying to channel content from sites like Hulu to the TV without deals in place with those sites are headed for trouble. I think the Hulus of the world are going to really want to tightly control how they get delivered on the TV (and in some cases, they won’t want to see their content delivered on TVs). I think the way Roku and Netflix are working together is probably a model for partnerships like this.”
In an e-mail exchange with Brent Evans (author of the GeekTonic blog):
“What is Boxee’s value add? They are essentially a user interface wrapper to a bunch of online services. Eventually, I think those services (Hulu, ABC, etc.) will own their own living room user interfaces. Maybe Boxee will goad the market into getting to that point…”
And in another e-mail exchange:
“The more a company can cut real bonafide deals with these content sources (like Roku has done with Netflix), the more successful they’ll be. Most of these devices just scrape sites like Hulu and somehow display their flash player content on the television — ie Hulu, CBS, etc (the content publishers) can easily break all these devices that don’t have real partnerships. That I can tell, they aren’t doing anything illegal per se, but it’s more that Hulu will eventually want to control and dictate the business terms of Hulu content on the television.”
So I wasn’t at all surprised by Hulu’s announcement that they had asked Boxee to remove them. Not that I think it’s a BAD idea for Boxee to channel Hulu’s content… As long as Hulu’s ads are being displayed, it doesn’t break their business model so they should eventually be open to this kind of syndication.
So why does Hulu want to cut-off Boxee (who, according to the Boxee blog post, drove 100,000 views on Hulu last week)? My guesses:
Officially or unofficially, Hulu’s content licenses may limit them to delivering content on a traditional PC with keyboard and mouse. Getting onto the TV might be make Hulu a threat to existing revenue streams created by the same content on the traditional TV. And Hulu may not be delivering as much money per “view” (or whatever metric) as those existing revenue streams deliver.
Hulu just may want to control their TV experience themselves. They have been very purposeful in the design of their website. Why wouldn’t they want to be similiarly purposeful in the design of their user interface on a television? Or if it’s not UI design, they may just not want Boxee to get too powerful at this early stage in the game.
