Category: Hacking

Hacking

Exploding Capacitors

When I went to boot up an old computer which had sat dormant since I moved in April, nothing happened. No lights, no whirring, nothing. I assumed it was a bad power supply, and left it for another day. Over the weekend my boyfriend got sick of seeing it out, guts exposed to the world, and threw a new power supply in it. Still no life. Then he pulled out everything but the motherboard, and canadian viagra for sale it booted! Or at least, as much as a computer with just a motherboard can.

As he added each component in one by one, the culprit became clear without even having to power up the machine:

exploded capacitors

Not seeing it? Here, let me get a little closer:

This is, or was, my video card. A reasonably nice (at the time) 7600 GT. The most remarkable thing is that this is not the first time I've seen this happen to this particular card. In fact, it's the third. Two other friends of mine have had theirs blow capacitors as well. And a google search for "exploding capacitors 7600" brings up tons of results.

Goodbye, video card. We have these in a number of the computers in the house, including my main machine. I wonder how long it will be until the next one goes.

Hacking

Register for the 48 Hour Hackathon!

Don't viagra prescription forget to register for the hackathon! It's totally free, but we're asking folks to sign up so we can get an idea of how many people to expect!

NYC Resistor's first 48 hour hackathon will run from 6pm Friday, Feburary 12 to 6pm Friday, February 14. At the end of the hackfest there will be time to share your projects as well as exciting prizes for the most awesome hacks.

You can work by yourself or with a team, and if you don't have a team/project we'll assign you to one. Projects we've heard buzz about include:

  • Re-enabling the 1930's teletype
  • Building props to do a trivia quiz. Buzzers, lights, etc
  • Subway wifi radio station aka "Radio Free MTA"

 

The format is open, you're welcome to come and go as you please. We'll keep the Club Mate flowing and follow a loose schedule of demos and workshops to help spark your imagination. PS, interested in giving a demo of some sort at the hackathon? Contact Kelly!

Friday, Feb 12

6pm – 8pm: Intros and whatnot. There's no formal registration, but it would be nice if folks introduced themselves and what they're working on

8pm – 12am: hack hack hack hack hack

Saturday, Feb 13

12am-4pm: hack hack hack hack

Afternoon-ish: Makerbot demo! Watch as Widget produces widgets with his magical printing device!

12pm – 2pm: Soldering lab! Practice your soldering skills. We'll have some of the TV-Be-Gone kits on hand for folks who want to learn to solder (or just irritate employees at Best Buy)

4pm – 6pm: GO EAT SOMETHING. We'll need to make space for the Audio Fun with Coils class from 4-6, so it's a good excuse to get some food, take a shower, reunite with your kids, etc.

4pm – 12am:  hack hack hack hack hack

Sunday, Feb 14

12am – 5pm: hack hack hack hack

7am: Late night breakfast. We'll strike out for food before the valentine's day brunchers are even awake.

5pm: PRESENTATIONS! Everyone will get a few minutes to show off what they did. We promise this won't be long and painful. 

5:45- 6pm: We'll award awesome awards, tidy up, and have you all home in time for Valentine's dinner.

Hacking

Parts Vending Machine

I've been slowly (very slowly) setting up a small store at Resistor to carry electronics parts and prototyping tools, since there aren't any retail stores in town pfizer viagra cheepest prices where you can pick up an Arduino RIGHT NOW. While ordering parts and figuring out where it will all go, I had a vision:

Vending machine full of components!

I've been surfing Craigslist and eBay, and while I'm not allowed to bring any new equipment into the space until we're all settled in post-move, it looks like a used vending machine can be found for $300 – $700 depending on what you're looking for.

One of the old school snack machines sounds just about perfect, but the one we found can only handle prices up to $3.95. Most vending machine hacks I was able to find were about getting free stuff out of them, not modding them to sell out of. Another fun hack which probably wouldn't be terribly difficult would be hooking it up to the net and letting people pay with PayPal or credit card.

I'll continue to hunt for the perfect machine, but in the mean time I'd love to hear about any vending machine hacks folks have seen or done. Because clearly what we need a robot who sells robot parts!

Hacking

Kindle vs Nook: 5 minute review

Kelly

Tonight at Resistor someone came in brandishing a Nook, so of course we all crowded ’round to see if what we’d read was true. Was it really painfully slow? How does it look? Will it crush the Kindle with its bare hands when B&N finally get their supply chain straightened out?

I am not an ereader connosoir. I’m still waiting for the first good Ebook reader to come out. I was hoping the Nook would be it, but for the time being I’m going to have to say there still aren’t any. With a software update the Nook might be a contender, but right now it feels a little half baked.

We held a Kindle up next to it for comparison. Size wise they’ll take up about the same space in your purse. They Kindle was a little bit more comfortable to hold, but neither was particularly uncomfortable. I don’t know what the official specs are on the screens, but the sizes seemed comparable. The Nook’s eink screen looked a lot better than the Kindle’s. The kindle looks like a newspaper, whereas the Nook looks more like a paperback book.

The Nook’s page refresh rate isn’t as fast as the Kindle’s, but honestly it didn’t bug me. What did bug me was the slowness of the UI on the LCD.  This is the same thing pretty much every reviewer has complained about. It sucks.

Typing on the Nook’s software keyboard was only moderately irritating.  I am as a whole not a fan of software keyboards. I don’t understand people with iPhones because they keyboard drives me nuts. The Kindle wins there hands down by having a physical keyboard, although it then loses points for having all that single purpose space.

The Nook makes me appreciate a few things the Kindle does well, but doesn’t change the fact that the Kindle isn’t the device for me. A firmware update should move the Nook from “early adopter toy” to “useable ebook reader” but I’m not convinced B&N has got it right yet. I think for me the ideal reader would be less of a e-ink wannabe tablet computer, and more like the Cool-ER reader, although the Cool-ER currently has a price tag that’s about $150 too high and a reportedly miserable UI.

So the wait for a good e ink ebook reader continues.

Hacking

Zipcar!

Kelly

Last month I finally got around to joining Zipcar. I’d thought about it for years, but took the plunge when I was trying to find a doctor who took my health insurance. Most of them were sale of viagra in Deep Northern Jersey ™, and really needed a car to get to.

Today I took a car out for the first time. I’ve heard mixed reviews of ZipCars: some people love them, some people say the cars are never there when you need them. I’m assuming this is because people return them late. I booked a two hour slot for what I hoped was about an hour and a half long trip.

And it might have been an hour and a half long trip had I not a) gotten horribly lost and b) made the terrible decision to head out to the suburbs during a rainy rush hour. It took us about 45 minutes to get to our destination (Google Maps had estimated 15). Luckily there wasn’t a reservation after us, so I was able to extend it 30 minutes. We made our two stops (art supply store and hardware store) and I got the car back at exactly 5:30.

I have to say that after driving through suburban northern New Jersey I finally understand why everyone hates Jersey so much.  But the ZipCar experience was a pretty smooth one. I was embarrassingly a little bit excited about the fact that I could just go online and magically have a car for a few hours. There are a number of cars parked within a 10 minute walk of my house. The rates seem a little steep (our 2.5 hour excursion cost about $35 after taxes). Then I remembered how much it cost to insure and maintain my car back when I had one, let alone the cost of gas or the car itself. For as often as I need a car, maybe once or twice a month, the ZipCar is an obvious win.

I’m sure at some point I will have a run in with a missing or broken car, and curse all things ZipCar, but so far it’s been a pretty pleasant experience.

Programming

Etsy API Fail – Well, Ok maybe not.

Kelly

I’m working on a new project which uses Etsy’s API. As far as APIs go, theirs is pretty neutered. There’s no user authentication whatsoever so the only data you can get from it is what’s available to the general public. Since you can’t authenticate, you certainly can’t write any data, so things like allowing users to add Etsy items to their favorites aren’t possible.

Working with their API I found another “quirk.” If you try to getUserDetails on a username which doesn’t exist it won’t return null or false or an empty object. Instead, it responds with HTTP status code 404.

Wait, what?

This means I have no way of differentiating between an error in my URI and a simple case of a defunct username. In fact, this behavior is contrary to what Etsy’s own documentation suggests. Their sample code dies on any status besides 200, which makes sense although you’d probably want to handle the error more gracefully. Now I have to look up the status code and try to guess whether I got the 404 because of a malformed URI or because the username was wrong. That will make debugging super fun!

404 is an HTTP error. A correctly formed API query with a null result should not return a 404. Argh. In english terms, a 404 means “I don’t have the information you’re looking for.”

You could argue that Etsy simply doesn’t have the userinfo for that user, because it doesn’t exist, and therefore 404 is appropriate. But that’s a cop out. Etsy DOES know that user’s info: it’s empty. If I’m querying a database of all known users, and getting back a subset of said users based on my input, Etsy’s response should be “there aren’t any matching users” not “I don’t have that information.” A 204 error would be more appropriate.

Edit: Apparently this is becoming a common thing.  Although I haven’t seen it with any other APIs I’ve worked with. And let me state for the record that just because other people do it doesn’t make me think it’s any less of a dumb idea.

Edit again: Someone who is less sleep deprived than myself pointed out that the body of the 404 responses does contain useful information, which I had missed earlier. So in this case I will concede to being wrong, although I am still not a fan of this approach because it means my script relies on the exact English wording of their error messages. Carry on.

Hacking

Intro to Algorithms, success!

Thanks everyone who came out to Intro to Algorithms this past Sunday, we had way more turnout that I was expecting! About 15 people in all. 

We'll be picking up the course again this week on Sunday at 5. It's OK if you missed last week, just watch lecture 1 at home and take a look over the homework / reading assignments.

We've started a Google Group to further the discussion of the class materials: how to buy viagra in canada NYCResistor: Compsci. This group is open to everyone, including folks who aren't coming to the in-person classes but are watching the material at home. 

See you on Sunday!

Hacking

Sweet Classes at NYCR

Kelly

Right now there is a super sweet list of classes coming up at NYCR, so many I wish I had the time to take them all.

I’m teaching my standby Intro to PHP class again, and also trying out a new one: Designing with QCAD. QCAD is used for 2D drawing, and is 50mg viagra retail price a great tool for designing things to be laser cut.

Aside from what I’m teaching there’s a DIY Vacuum Form class coming up this weekend, and a Hacking Classic Nintendo Games class I’ll sadly be missing due to Thanksgiving. Soldering 101 has been merged with Arudino 101, bringing you a class which teaches you to solder AND make things!

Overall I’m really excited and hope the classes are well attended. We’ll see how badly the holidays screw up everyone’s schedule. Stupid holidays.

Hacking

Introduction to Algorithms at NYCR

Kelly

Introduction to Algorithms

What’re you doing Sunday evening? Nothing? Come down to NYC Resistor where starting this weekend we’ll be working through the Introduction to Algorithms course available through MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. What’s OpenCourseWare?

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

We’ll start at 5pm and the lectures run about an hour and viagra and canadian a half. The time may shift a bit each week due to other classes happening at the space, but we’ll post it on the calendar well in advance. The class uses the text “Introduction to Algorithms” which you may want to pick up or borrow from a friend. We’ll try to scrounge up a couple copies to have on hand.

This event series is totally free to attend, but if you enjoy it please consider donating to the MIT OpenCourseWare project!

This week we’ll be watching Session 1: Introduction – Analysis of Algorithms, Insertion Sort, Mergesort

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.