Prufrock's Apprentice

Re-recognizing an internal SD card reader

2012-01-13T14:01:00.000-08:00

Last week I accidentally hit the "Safely Remove Drive" option instead of the "Eject Disk" option for my internal SD card reader in Ubuntu. After doing this, I could not get the computer to show the card reader, even after following forum advice to unload and reload modules and at last resorting to a reboot.
I recently picked up a cheap used usb video-in device, and when trying to get it to work in Ubuntu I tried running lsusb to find out if the device was recognized. lsusb took a long time to run, and when I checked dmesg I saw a number of errors of the form

device descriptor read/64, error -110

Searching on Google turned up this page, where users reported that shutting down and unplugging the system fixed their problem. I gave it a try, and sure enough it worked. I'm posting this because I didn't see anyone suggest this fix for the problem caused by using "Safely Remove Drive". Hopefully someone else with the same problem can find the solution here.

Segfault write-up

2012-01-06T23:23:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to documenting some info about my homemade balancing scooter. See here.

Watching LDS General Conference on the Nintendo Wii (and other devices)

2011-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

This weekend is one of the biannual General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church). It's a chance for us to hear timely counsel from the inspired leaders of our Church, including men we believe to be God's prophets.

We have an Nintendo Wii hooked up to our TV, so I wanted to find a way to watch General Conference through it. The Church's website has a streaming video player, as well as a link to a low-resolution mms stream. I have WiiMC installed on our Wii, and the low-res stream works in it, but has a bit of lag and is low-res (not that it matters that much when you're just listening to people talk). After some poking, though, I found the source of the video in the streaming player. The current stream (Saturday morning session, October 2011) is at http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satameng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190841497001. I'll update this today and tomorrow if it changes.

I expect that this will work with other devices, e.g. XBMC on the Xbox, the PS3, and possibly various set-top boxes.

Update: Saturday afternoon - http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satpmeng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190861917001

Indic script convertor

2011-09-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

I found this a while back and it has taken me a while to find it again the few times I've wanted to use it, so I'm going to post about it here. It's an online tool that converts between a number of Indic scripts, including Thai and Khmer.

http://www.virtualvinodh.com/aksharamukha

Map of LDS Missions

2010-11-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

I couldn't find a good map of the missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS or Mormon Church), so I made one. A .kmz file (for use in Google Earth, etc.) is here, and you can view it in Google Maps here. The data was generated from an unofficial list on the LDS Mission Network website. The markers are in the city for which the mission is named, not at the location of the mission office.

Stuff white people like

2010-10-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

Just in case you haven't seen this already, I thought I'd share. Michelle and I watched it four times yesterday, and the kiddo thought it was awesome.

Free Hugh Nibley (and other authors) ebooks

2010-07-13T20:06:00.001-07:00

I posted about this elsewhere a little while ago, so apologies if this is old news for some of you. I recently discovered that the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, has made the text of many or all of the books they publish available online. This includes the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.
I've been wanting the read Nibley's books for some time. Now that they were available electronically (and for free), I wanted to be able to read these texts within FBReader, the ebook reader that I have on my Nokia N800. I put the first one into a epub-formatted ebook by hand, but then, seeing as there are many more of these books that I am interested in reading, I decided to write a Python script, GetBook.py, to generate ebooks directly from the website. Given the book ID encoded in the book's URL, it grabs the book title, author, chapters, and text, and formats it into a epub ebook. It works quite well, although I am aware of at least one small bug that I haven't fixed yet. The script and instructions for using it are posted on my website. Let me know if you need any help with it or have any suggestions for making it better.

NB: I've had a number of requests for me to send the epubs to people. I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I'm not sending them to people at this point.

Bread Bowls!

2010-01-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

I made potato soup and bread bowls for dinner tonight. Here's how they turned out:

I'd been planning to make the soup since we have a surplus of potatoes that are on the verge of going bad, and I'd been thinking of making some bread, so I thought I'd try making bread bowls. They turned out a bit smaller than I was expecting/hoping, and the inside was a bit denser than I expected. I'm thinking I let the dough rise too long before punching it down and forming the individual . . . loaves(?). If any bread-making experts are reading this, feel free to tell me what I might have done wrong.
We decided that potato soup probably isn't the optimal filler for bread bowls--it ends up being too starchy and the bread doesn't really absorb the soup (which I suppose could be a good thing, depending on your point of view). I decided that the line between creamy mashed potatoes and potato soup is very thin. I also decided that someday I should make bread bowls in the shape of potatoes, slice them open rather than cut the tops off, and fill them with potato soup, maybe with some sour cream on top.

Ukrainian & Vietnamese

2009-08-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

"little bit" in Ukrainian = "чуть-чуть" (transliterated "chut'-chut'")
"little bit" in Vietnamese = "chút chút"

Coincidence? You decide.

(For those of you wondering why I know this, I learned some Vietnamese while in Thailand, and Michelle spent some time in Ukraine. She'll often ask for "chut'-chut'" of some snack I'm eating.)

The Segfault

2009-07-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm embarking on a project, sort of a hobby project. I'm working on building a homemade Segway-like vehicle. A couple other people have done this and documented it. The best one I've seen was put together by a fellow named Trevor Blackwell and is documented here. He seems to have money and didn't skimp on the parts he used. I, on the other hand, am a poor grad student. He doesn't give a total cost, but he does mention that his original version cost less than half as much as a real Segway, so let's say $2500. For his second version, his motors were $286 each (2), and the batteries were probably $18 each (60), so that's about $1650 already, and another $450 for the motor controllers makes it conceivable that it totaled more than $3000. I'm not going to spend nearly that much. I'm predicting about $500 total. A future post will detail my predicted cost breakdown. My next post, though, is going to be about the nifty features that I'm going to add, that the original Segway doesn't have.

By the way, as the title of this post indicates, I'm calling this project the "Segfault." Those computer geeks among you will recognize this term; for the rest of you, "segfault" is the commonly-used shortened form of "segmentation fault," a computer memory error. It came to mind when I was thinking of names for the project, and it seems to have stuck.

Lost in Translation

2009-02-25T22:28:00.000-08:00

I'm subscribed to a translator website through which I used to get some freelance Thai-English translation jobs. The site features a message board where people can ask for translations of words or phrases and members of the site post translations and critique those of others. I've recently been a little annoyed by a couple of "translators" who don't seem to understand that looking a word up in a Thai-English dictionary and writing down the entry does no good if you don't understand what it means (and then use the dictionary to tell me that I don't understand what an English word means). /end_rant
A submission today took the cake. The requested translation was for the phrase,

Our hero is efficiency. and our hero is chomping at the bit.

Apparently it's some cheesy company motto. The posted translation was

ฮีโร่ของเราเป็นอาหารที่มีคุณภาพและรับประทานง่าย

For those of you who don't read Thai, this roughly translates as

Our Heroes [they just transliterate the English word] are quality food and are easy to eat.

As evidence of the quality of their translation (the translator gave this translation a "Highest" rating, which you typically do if you are absolutely sure it is correct), the translator referenced a English-Thai dictionary entry explaining that a "Hero" is "a type of food consisting of meat, cheese, tomato, onion, and lettuce on bread," as well as a recipe for a hero sandwich and two websites about where to get hero sandwiches in New York. It was hard not to go to town in my critique of their translation.
For any Thai speakers, I submitted the rough translation of

วีรบุรุษของเราคือประสิทธิภาพ และวีรบุรุษนี้กำลังร้อนรุ่ม

Like I said, it's a rough translation, but I think it gets the meaning across. I feel like "ประสิทธิภาพ" doesn't quite convey the time-saving meaning that "efficiency" has come to have, but I'm not sure what Thai word would do a better job. Coming up with something for "chomping at the bit" really made me miss a sweet illustrated book of Thai idioms that one of my mission companions had. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions.

Or am I? . . .

2009-02-16T14:47:00.001-08:00

First, some background info. A UW student has put together a service called One Bus Away (http://onebusaway.org/), which interfaces with the city bus information system to let you call, send a text message, or check the web site to find out how many minutes early or late your bus is going to be. It's really handy, and I use it pretty much every time I catch the bus, now that we have unlimited text messaging. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

So I was waiting for the bus this afternoon and had already found out that the bus was going to be 10 minutes late. A fellow at the stop asked me and another person if we were both waiting for the 75--he wanted to make sure he hadn't missed it. I told him that the bus was going to be about another 6 minutes. He nodded, then seemed to realize that that was rather specific information I had, and asked me how I knew.

I should have told him I was psychic.

By the way, the punctuation in the title for this post is the "correct" way to use a question mark with an ellipsis.

[sic]

2009-02-08T15:57:00.000-08:00

"I used to be a cemetery teacher . . ."

-Part of someone's comment in church today

I chose the wrong field

2008-11-09T21:10:00.000-08:00

I was trying to find a study about runners' health and yogurt that Michelle had heard about somewhere, and my Google Scholar search results included an article titled "Effect of Yam Yogurt on Colon Mucosal Tissue of Rats with Loperamide-induced Constipation". Why am I studying the sub-millimeter accuracy of Newton's gravitational square law when I could be spending my time with a topic like this?

Online game of the day

2008-11-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

Factory Balls 2
I like logic games like this.

The U.S. are . . .

2008-10-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to "today's" Calvin and Hobbes strip, I realized that "United States of America" should be treated as plural. Henceforth, I'm going to try to do that. It has some interesting political connotations that I think I like, but let me know if I'm off base. Granted, this is going to make some ideas harder to convey, since you can't say "The United States are the world's only superpower." Maybe "The United States constitute the world's only superpower"?

Odin is the new Freyja

2008-10-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

So most students might feel a bit of relief once Friday is over, or maybe Thursday if they've managed to not have any Friday classes. For me, it's Wednesday. The one class I'm taking for credit has homework due on Wednesdays. Every week on the bus home Wednesday night I remember that I don't have any more homework that week, which makes everything better. Wednesday is the new Friday.

Making Yogurt

2008-10-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

In Thailand there's a drinkable yogurt that we bought almost every day. I decided I wanted to try to make some, and instead of using store-bought yogurt I looked into making my own. It turns out that it's pretty easy. It's even easier if you use dry milk instead of fresh. The thing to remember is that you want a sterile environment to put the yogurt culture into, so just keep track of keeping things clean.

Boil about a quart of water (to sterilize it).
Put 3 & 3/4 cups of the water into a (clean) 1-quart mason jar or other similar container.
Once the water has cooled down some, add1 & 1/3 cups dry milk powder and mix. I just put the (sterilized) lid on and shook it so I didn't have to worry about sterilizing a stirring implement.
Cool the milk to less than 140 degrees and add a few tablespoons of live-culture yogurt.
Keep the mix at ~110 degrees for about 8 hours. I filled two other mason jars with boiling water and put them in our handy Thai cooler, with a towel under them so as to not melt the plastic. I then put the towel over the top of them a bit and put the jar with the mix on top and put the lid on the cooler.

When the mix has become suitable yogurt, flavor as desired. I was able to match the Thai stuff pretty well by mixing in some juice and sugar.

I haven't tried yet, but adding more milk powder is supposed to thicken the yogurt up substantially.

I need to come up with some appropriate title for my kitchen experiment series. Any ideas? Next up--beef fat candles.

BYU Speech I need to listen to/watch

2008-10-21T20:09:00.001-07:00

Science, Faith, and the Nobel Prize
Bill Phillips
http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=966&tid=26

Another book

2008-10-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concept to Relativity and Quanta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Physics

Book to read

2008-10-21T19:22:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start posting books I need to read here.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat

Pepper Jam

2008-09-27T23:15:00.000-07:00

So a month ago my friend Conrad (aka the Chief), his wife Dani, their friend Syd, and my pal Dave (aka Little Davey) came up to Seattle for a concert. They stayed with us and were kind enough to take us to a Mariners game and out to dinner at Anthony’s Bell St. Diner. Dani and Conrad also brought a good deal of produce from their garden--a few squash and zucchini (as dictated but Utah tradition), a couple bell peppers, and ~15 Hungarian hot peppers. That weekend Michelle went to cross country camp and I had to figure out something to do with all those peppers. We've had some pepper jam before that we got at Pike's Place Market, so I decided to try making some. I found a recipe in the pectin package insert (here) for jalapeño jam, so I just used that. It was technically a recipe for canning jam, but I just put it in freezer containers and froze it.

It turned out pretty well. It packs more of a kick than I expected, and it doesn't look great, but it tastes pretty good. It's really good on zucchini bread or with cream cheese and cracker.

SAFETY NOTICE: While you can use a canning jam recipe for freezer jam, you SHOULD NOT use a freezer jam recipe for canning jam. Canning jam recipes are formulate to preserve correctly, while freezer jams aren't.

Lessons Learned:

	If/when I make this in the future, I think I may go with yellow food coloring instead of green. It took me a couple tries to get the color somewhat appealing, while not looking to much like a mint jelly.
	I also think I'll leave out any red peppers. There was one in the bunch, and I though it would add some cool color to the jam, but I think it makes it look even less like food.
	You always need a bigger pot. I thought this one would be big enough to allow for the foam/bubbles/froth, but it wasn't. Runny jam mixture is a real pain to clean up, and I don't think the stove burners liked it very much.

Qualifying Exam

2008-09-03T00:37:00.001-07:00

These questions are typical ones for our physics qual, which I'm taking next week.

Viewing the U.S. as roads

2008-04-30T21:08:00.001-07:00

http://benfry.com/allstreets/index.html
This pages shows a map of the U.S. consisting solely of simple lines for all of the roads. It's really interesting to try to pick out geographical features by analyzing the surrounding roads. The checkerboard of preserved farmland in the midwest is also very striking. It turns out Ben Fry (the ~~creator~~ ~~artist~~ artist who created this piece) is a specialist in visualizing data and just had a book published with that title. Check out his web site when you have some time to burn--he's done lots of cool stuff and has links to similarly cool stuff.

Antithesis of orange juice

2008-04-21T23:26:00.001-07:00

Some things have opposites.
Some things don't.

Drinking orange juice after brushing one's teeth, has an opposite, which is
Drinking hot chocolate after brushing one's teeth.

What's that you say? Those things are too similar to be opposites? I have two replies:
1) Opposites typically have more commonalities than differences. Boy and girl are opposites, but they are both human, both young. Black and white are both colors.
2) Try it.

(Brushing your teeth makes orange juice taste bad because the foaming agent in toothpaste, sodium laur-something sulfate, blocks the sugar receptors on taste buds.)