Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Thanks for 20 years of Blogging Dave

Roland — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 23:50:09 +0000

Thanks for 20 years of great blogging Dave. It's been a wild and incredible ride since Davenet when I first read your stuff. Your stuff (code and "content") continues to be great! Keep digging!

Hardware project: FlickrBicyclePi

Roland — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 05:27:21 +0000

Somehow Element 14's UK PR found me and asked me about doing a hardware project with their hardware which they would send me in return for blogging about it. So here's my project:

FlickrBicyclePi! What is it? It's custom device that is mounted on my Bicycle and takes photos every minute while the bicycle is in motion and geoetags them and posts them to flickr.

What hardware will I use (Bold stuff is supplied by Element 14 UK thanks, rest is on my dime)?

Raspberry PI
Raspbery PI Camera Module
GPS
WiFi
Accelerometer to detect when the bicycle is in motion
some sort of case TBD
SD Card
Battery
Power Supply to handle the Battery
a small matter of programming in Python :-)

Wish me luck. This will take lots of help from cool folks like Kip. Want to help? Twitter me. @rtanglao or email roland at rolandtanglao.com

How to debug video playback issues on Firefox for Android

Roland — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 22:14:13 +0000

brew install android-platform-tools
adb shell am start -a android.activity.MAIN -n org.mozilla.fennec/.App --es env0 NSPR_LOG_MODULES=MediaDecoder:5
adb logcat gecko
supporting material:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android
"Arguments and Environment Variables "
--es env# VAR=VAL
where VAR=NSPR_LOG_MODULES=MediaDecoder:5 (the string "MediaDecoder" was found using a google search of DXR
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1047567
http://webcompat.com/issues/275

Colophon: Create your own personal Map tiles (from July 2013)

Roland — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 15:16:24 +0000

If you want to make your own map tile out of many (100s or 1000s) of latitude longitude pairs e.g. from Vancouver flickr photos taken 2007-2011 during commuter hours (7-10am., 3-6p.m), here's how:

Create a file, let's call it "latlong.text" in the format "lat, long" e.g. remove the square brackets from my vancouver 2007-11 flickr commuter file
encode it
- cat latlong.txt | ./encode -o vancouver2007-2011 -z 16
render it
- ./render -A -- vancouver2007-2011/ 16 49.25706 -123.070538525034 49.29808542 -123.159733 > vancouver-2007-2011.try21.png
- (you will have to play around with the lat and long to make sure they cover the area you want e.g. in the above example I made it so that bounderies were: clark park to the south and east, connaught park to the west and stanley park to the north)
And here's the resulting PNG map tile on flickr
encode and render come from @enf on twitter, the amazing Eric Fischer:
- github.com/ericfischer/datamaps
- to compile encode and render on Mac OS X using Homebrew I had to use Ralph's libpng1.6.3 formula

Reading the web in your way is the future even if RSS readers fail

Roland — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 04:45:35 +0000

You ain't seen nothing yet. Low tech small "a" AI, blah blah there is so much we could do to improve our personal Internet reading experience that hasn't been done *yet* by Google Reader or Flipboard or anybody else.

QUOTE from an amazing article that brings up almost everything that you'd want to consider if you read the internet: "Feeding our Reading Habits"

"Don't feel guilty about not reading the millions of pieces of information that pile up on your door everyday. Just don't. Half the battle in this modern era of information overload is learning how to not care about all the information. We call them feeds, or streams for a reason: they never end. Your only goal should be to build a better net. It's not to worry about unread counts or friend requests, or virtual corn fields.

Take your net, dip it into the stream, and see what comes out."

END QUOTE

Sick and tired of the whole Google Reader extended good-bye "intellectual masturbation" :-) ! Let's move on and build something better that makes Internet reading more awesome for those who care about it and ignore those who don't care!!!! Good-bye and good riddance Google Reader, I won't miss you!!!!!!!!!!

Always available Personal Algorithms + Personal Data = Programs that matter

Roland — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 02:17:53 +0000

Always available Personal Data + Personal Algorithms = Programs that matter. Inspired by David Ascher's Personal computing in a decentralized world: a hopeful direction. What if you could keep all of your personal data and personal algorithms in two places so that you always had a backup?

In your home on something cheap and cheerful like a Raspberry Pi AND
With you at all times in your pocket or on your wrist with a portable use anywhere computer like the StormFly.

What if programming wasn't so hard that you had to learn something so rigid like Pascal (the language of Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs) or C++ or even JavaScript but something approachable and more flexible (e.g. IFTTT, scratch, heck even a more accessible version of R). I predict that would allow people to use their personal data in all sorts of "helpful in real life" ways we can't even imagine!

And I don't see why this won't be possible in less than 10 years if not sooner.

Email will inevitably fail so if you foolishly depend on it, learn to back it up and restore it

Roland — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 09:17:25 +0000

If you insist on using email as a file management system, archive system, CRM, database, contact system, knowledge management system , etc then learn how to backup your email and practise restoring your email because it will inevitably fail no matter how reliable your email server and client are. If you don't have time, then pay somebody or do the right thing and move stuff out of email to CRM, blogs, wikis, to-do systems, etc!

The Old Reader is where I am sharing RSS items; also on tumblr via IFTTT

Roland — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:36 +0000

For the 3 people who care :-)

Instead of Google Reader I am using The Old Reader; except for having no business model that I can detect :-) (where do I pay?!?) But it has the all "Old Pre Google+" Google Reader features such as sharing items. If you are a "The Old Reader" user you can follow me directly like in the good 'ole Google Reader days: http://theoldreader.com/profile/roland
If you prefer to follow my shares on Google Reader you can do it here: http://rolandgoodbits.tumblr.com/

Email is not an archival system, file system, knowledge management system or a to-do system

Roland — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 01:52:29 +0000

Email is not an archival system, file system, knowledge management system or a to-do system. If you think it's anything but a dumb temporary message store, you are "doing it wrong" :-) as the kids say. Email is where knowledge goes to die as I blogged about (AFAIK Bill French coined this phrase back in 2003)

Anything valuable in email should be gardened immediately into a blog, wiki, etc. Don't expect to keep every email and don't try; it's futile and not worthy of your attention. Instead mine the knowledge in your email and keep that!

Stop whingeing about how you used to take great photos w/your DSLR but are now mired in a morass of bad cameraphone photos - get a cheap point & shoot and an Eye-Fi card & you will have great photos again w/out the DSLR weight

Roland — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:51:59 +0000

There are countless geeky, nerdy, folks in late 2012 "whingeing" :-) about

how they used to take great DSLR photos but it was too heavy & inconvenient to post photos,
so they switched to a cameraphone
but are tired of its bad photos.

Simple solution:

buy a $150 dollar point and shoot like the Canon Powershot A2400 which you can get for $70 (or a $200 Olympus E-PL1 or EPM-1 with the Olympus bodycap lens for $59 if you want something even more awesome for $260 instead of $150 or less),
a $99 Eye-Fi card.
Carry the camera in your pocket at all times.
Post photos from the Eye-Fi via your cameraphone's WIFI access point

This makes it convenient and quick like your cameraphone but gives you much better image quality that doesn't require filters of doom to make the photos "interesting"!

Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Thanks for 20 years of Blogging Dave

tags:

Hardware project: FlickrBicyclePi

tags:

How to debug video playback issues on Firefox for Android

tags:

Colophon: Create your own personal Map tiles (from July 2013)

tags:

Reading the web in your way is the future even if RSS readers fail

tags:

Always available Personal Algorithms + Personal Data = Programs that matter

tags:

Email will inevitably fail so if you foolishly depend on it, learn to back it up and restore it

tags:

The Old Reader is where I am sharing RSS items; also on tumblr via IFTTT

tags:

Email is not an archival system, file system, knowledge management system or a to-do system

tags:

Stop whingeing about how you used to take great photos w/your DSLR but are now mired in a morass of bad cameraphone photos - get a cheap point & shoot and an Eye-Fi card & you will have great photos again w/out the DSLR weight

tags: