Archive for the 'Geeklife' Category

What do you carry in your backpack?

Saturday, April 27th, 2013

my backpack contents as of april 26 2013

I’m a software developer and this is everything I was carrying in my backpack today April 26th 2013 (from the top, left to right)

  1. A case for SD cards.
  2. Raspbery PI I’m toying with at the moment.
  3. A roll of #punsr stickers
  4. US Passport, you never know when you get a crazy invitation (or emergency) to fly out.
  5. Emergency Icebreaker underwear, you never know if your luggage might get lost, you can at least take a shower and have a fresh pair.
  6. Checkbooks, electronic bank keys.
  7. Snes-like USB gamepad (for the Raspberry PI video game console project)
  8. pens
  9. Microsoft USB wired optic mouse, still my favorite, never worry about not having batteries for it.
  10. Punsr business cards, Tech Consulting business cards.
  11. Amazon Kindle Fire HD
  12. iPad
  13. Beats Pro headphones
  14. toothpicks, so you never have to suffer with food between your teeth for hours.
  15. coins (I try to not have coins, I keep them in the car for parking meters)
  16. Nexus 4
  17. Galaxy SII
  18. USB power adapters
  19. WD My Passport 2TB backup drive (I keep another at home attached to my monitor for automatic backups)
  20. Macbook PRO Power adapter
  21. European power converters
  22. Ethernet cable for the raspberry pi and because you never know when you might need it.
  23. prescription sunglasses, needed in sunny florida.
  24. MacBook PRO 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB ram, 500GB SSD

How to GPU-mine BitCoins on a MacBook Pro

Saturday, April 27th, 2013

I’ve just gotten started into BitCoin a little late in the game (April 2013) and if you’re reading this you’re probably on the same boat.

This post details the steps I took to start mining BitCoins with GPU on a MacBook Pro.

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1. Get DiabloMiner. You will need to have installed git and a jdk (Java Development Kit) to build it.
Clone the source code from the github repository into your computer. From the command line

git clone https://github.com/Diablo-D3/DiabloMiner

after it downloads you will have to build it, invoke

cd DiabloMiner

mvn package

it will download all its dependencies and build itself.

2. Register into a Bitcoin Mining Pool

Now you will see a “DiabloMiner-OSX.sh” script. if you try to use it to mine in solo mode (connecting agaisnt localhost:8332), you will get errors, it seems nowadays there’s only pooled mining (i may be wrong), so you will have to register into a Bitcoin mining pool to make this happen.

I registered my account at deepbit.net, in there you get to enter your BitCoin address to receive your mining rewards.

3. Launch DiabloMiner (in as many machines as you can using your pool mining account)

./DiabloMiner-OSX.sh -u youremail@somedomain.com -p yourpasswordhere -o pit.deepbit.net -r 8332 -g 5 -w 64

and you should see…

[4/26/13 11:02:23 PM] Started
[4/26/13 11:02:23 PM] Connecting to: http://pit.deepbit.net:8332/
[4/26/13 11:02:24 PM] Using Apple OpenCL 1.2 (Dec 4 2012 18:26:30)
[4/26/13 11:02:24 PM] Added ATI Radeon HD 6750M (#1) (6 CU, local work size of 64)
mhash: 46.0/44.4 | accept: 0 | reject: 0 | hw error: 0

Hope this helped you.

Raspberry PI Game Console Project: Getting an OS to run on it.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

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(My previous post)

So now that we have a Raspberry PI we need an ARM based Operating system to go on it.

My original idea is to run Jelly Bean on it, but I couldn’t quickly find an image for the Raspberry PI (which means I’ll either have to find harder or I’m gonna have to bust my ass and build one myself and add all the drivers necessary so that it runs like charm)

At this point I just need to know that my hardware is good to go, so the quickest, easiest way to put an OS on the Raspberri PI that I found was to get a Debian based Linux on it called Raspbian “wheezy”.

You can download the .zip file that contains the image file via http or you can help seed a torrent of it after you get it.

Once you download that you will end up with a 493.6MB .zip file, unzip it, and you will see the 1.96GB 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img file.

Now you have to put that .img file inside the SD card that will go into the Raspberry PI.

I’ll teach you how to do that on a Mac (on a linux box is quite the same, the file and mount locations are probably the only thing that’ll change)

1. Stick the SD card on the SD slot of your macbook.
2. On the Finder, Eject the SD card as soon as it comes up.
3. Open a Terminal
4. Execute sudo diskutils list, you should see something *like* this (this is actually how it’ll look when you’re done)

$ sudo diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk1
   1:                  Apple_HFS Time Machine            2.0 TB     disk1s1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS PICS_AND_MOVIES         999.9 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk4
   1:             Windows_FAT_32                         58.7 MB    disk4s1
   2:                      Linux                         1.9 GB     disk4s2

I want you to notice the “/dev/disk4“, judging by the size, that’s our 16 GB SD card right?

5. Now that we know where it is, let’s copy the image file into it. First make sure to unmount the partitions that are on the SD Card so you can write on it, for example, I have there a Windows_FAT_32 partition I don’t want to loose (disk4s1), you unmount it like this:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

Then copy the image using the awesome dd utility, if the .img file was in your “Downloads” folder the command would look like this. (“if” stands for “input file”, make sure you put the full path to the file, or go to that folder and execute the command below)

sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk4

This will take a few minutes, be patient.

Once done, take the SD card, put it in the Raspberry PI SD Slot, hook it up to a monitor and power, snap a mouse and keyboard, and boot. It should work.

My First Raspberry PI Project: DIY ARM Video Game Console.

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

I got everything on amazon, didn’t pay for shipping (Prime member):

raspberry_pi_diy_game_console_nes_snes_sega_n64

So far I bought:
- Raspberry PI ($48)

- Raspberry PI case ($14)

- Power adapter ($2.25)

- SNES-like Controller with USB jack ($10.75)

- SanDisk SDHC 16GB class 6 (30mb/s) ($15)

I first intend to install Ubuntu ARM along with several video game console emulators for NES, SNES, SEGA, N64.

People at the Raspberry PI G+ Community have suggested instead to install arch linux and keep it light, I’ll go first for ubuntu since I know it well.

However I’m thinking that a more interesting option, given that it has an ARM processor is to install Android Jelly Bean on it and see if not only I can run game emulators on it, I’ll be running and testing FrostWire for Android on it.

Ever since I started developing FrostWire for Android I’ve thought that Android has everything in it to be a desktop operating system, maybe Raspberry PI’s will be the hardware I’ll use to prove my vision.

The idea is to end up with a nice tutorial on how to do this after I’m done so you can all do it. In the meantime I’ll keep posting updates.

jar dependencies if you plan to use the cling UPnP library in your android project

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

This took me quite a while and lots of runtime errors, here are the minimum jars I needed to add to my project since now cling when used on android needs jetty, and damn jetty is broken into a thousand little jars for maximum modularity.

These are the one jars that I needed to not have any more runtime (class not found) errors

jetty-security-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-http-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-continuation-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-io-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-util-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-server-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-servlet-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
jetty-client-8.1.8.v20121106.jar
servlet-api-3.0.jar

How to enable adb logcat on Android 4 (debugging output)

Monday, March 4th, 2013

So you got a new Nexus or another Android running Android +4.2 and there’s no “Applications” menu entry in the settings menu.

No worries.

Go to the “About phone” entry at the bottom of settings, then scroll all the way down to the “Build number” menu entry.

Tap on it SEVEN times. (You’ll see funny “toast” messages come along)

When you go back to the main “Settings” menu, you will see a “{ } Developer options” entry.

Cheers

Skiing tips for turns

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Took a skiing lesson, I’ll write all these tips here so I can read it next year or the next time I go skiing now that it’s all fresh in my mind:

1. When it’s time to turn, don’t think about breaking with the turn, once you’ve turned the ending position of both skis will make you drop speed.

2. Always put your weight on the downhill ski, never on your uphill ski.

3. Don’t lift your uphill ski as you turn, it’s not necessary.

4. Don’t put them so close together as this will make you put weight on the uphill ski.

5. The uphill ski must barely be pressing against the snow, it should feel the same as when you slide two skis together down perpendicular to the slope from a standing position.

6. Your torso must always be facing the same way as your skis, don’t try to turn with your torso so much (as when you’re learning to turn with plows)

7. You can use your pole to turn when it’s steeper (if you don’t have to think about all the prior tips), still learning this one.

8. After you turn, try skiing on the edge of your skis.

9. If your legs start opening as you ski after the turn, shift your weight towards your downhill ski and bring your uphill closer, not the other way around (cause of falls)

10. After you can do all previous 9 without thinking, try to ski on the hill facing edges of your skis as soon as you make a turn, this is how you start training for carving. You should be leaving to thin lines of snow behind you.

Remee Unboxing

Wednesday, December 5th, 2012

Welcome to my Remee Unboxing, unlike every other night I think tonight I’ll actually want to go to bed because there might be a chance towards doing something productive or fun while I’m in temporary death mode.
(more…)

Can the brain of a man be programmed by man-conceived language and programmers?

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

When you try to express thought, intent, backed behind some other abstract motivation as a way to cope with the boredom of “reality”, a.k.a. we’re just a bunch of fucking fancy monkeys on a spec of dust. playing a social mind/video game we that must of us somehow respect called “society”, it’s only because our advanced brains have managed to build common abstractions upon abstractions product of which we have things like the technologies that make our lives so much easier.

We’re so advanced now that we have created different conventions of thought to express ideas, some simple, some so genius that can only by understood by few but admired, adored and never really understood by the majority, e.g. nanoscale chip design, nobel prize winner discoveries, Mozart’s work, The Google Search Engine. These individuals managed to be WAY WAY more prominent than the rest, they’re so prominent in fact, that the product of their focus and work has managed to linger in the brains of many of us, ideas, constructs and abstractions so powerful that never die and that actually make it into the real world to change reality.

However, these minds of ours keep expressing their thoughts using the same conventions: Language, Math, Technology, Art, (I’ll even put Religion on this list), and languages, languages, languages, in my case the most amazing abstractions I’ve ever come up with are expressed using computer programming languages.

There’s a certain difficulty in expressing thought and logic through mathematical based logical expressions, tokens, and commands, upon which we start building all sort of high level abstractions, some that could never be matched to what most people realize reality is about.

A programming language is certainly a much lower language than the one that runs on the ultimate computer of all, the human brain.

The human brain runs such an amazing architecture that it can understand thought to such extent that we can collaborate or admire the thoughts of others, e.g. Musicians, Music Lovers, Artists, Art Lovers, Scientists, Science lovers (most geeks are in this group), Film.., you get it…

Once you realize this, you can begin to try and express what you feel or recognize from world with your own abstractions, most of them are probably impossible to expres unless someone is on your brain. I think these are the hidden lower levels, less secure levels of the programming language of the matrix. ;)

Eventually we realize that we can’t be programmed (ultimate human ego trip follows…) that we are like the center of the matrix, the one that runs that simulation, we’re just a special combination of matter in the center of the very universe, capable to start to describe itself, the more it can describe, based on what it learns, it’ll ultimate find out through the spread of thoughts like mine that WE are the creators of the universe, we’re just busy enjoying the moment a little too much now.

So life… if you are elsewhere out there, you’re just another awesome combination, confabulation of a massive amount of atoms to form conscience.

Then, if lower languages born out of such a capable computer, a computer that runs on any language and that learns instantly sometimes to repeat the motion of lots of atoms the same way (thought, cause, reaction), you must realize that it is your mind that programs the universe. Then you can control it.

Are you still up here with me? ;)

PS: And of course, you must start by trying your universe manipulating programming language (run in that brain of yours, what a cool “cpu architecture” eh?) by manipulating others to do as you please, just make sure to use them wisely. #hipnosys #massiveHipnosys

My first Facebook Gift Experience

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012


November 22, I buy a gift for my wife.

I notice the selection is already sizeable, seems like they’ve cut out deals (or just integrated) with Starbucks and other smaller but exclusive brands. I’ve picked a Sarabeth’s Jam, I’m given the option to choose the flavor or to let my wife pick the flavor for herself.

After I’ve done the purchase, I see the gift in the Newsfeed, Facebook has been cool enough not to make it public by default, it’s only been shared with Friends, I can choose to change privacy just like any other post on the newsfeed.


One cool detail that plays with the minds of everyone looking is that the present is still under wraps and it will remain that way until my wife opens the present and sets up a shipping address. They want to make the surprise element last for as long as possible creating attention towards the gifting experience on Facebook.

November 24, the gift has shipped

Maybe their volumes on opening were large, kinks needed to be addressed, it was thanksgiving weekend (not everybody was working), but it took way too long between ordering and shipping.

November 26, gift arrives 4 days later.

How did they manage to squeeze all that on that tiny box?

Notice the details on the packaging, Facebook has made sure to put a signature and to make their brand stay with us to create word of mouth by putting the gift on a Facebook branded cloth bag that you’re not going to trash. In the case of the jam we have the added bonus that the packagers have included 2 gel packs that I get to keep and reuse.

The contents have been very well packed, the Jam jar is safe and the contents delicious.

Have you sent or received a gift on Facebook? How was your experience?




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