I've got a bit of an electronics hobby and my favorite place to buy cool things is SparkFun.com. Now, they've given me yet another reason to love them:

They're giving away up to $100 in free stuff (you pay shipping) on Jan 7, 2010.

More details are available at http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305 but this works out to a $100 discount running for a few hours or up to a maximum dollar value. I'll certainly be trying to get some gadgetry but even if I miss out this just proves how awesome of a company they are.

I've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about NUI or Natural User Interfaces. I've been an iPhone owner for almost 2 1/2 years, just picked up a Magic Mouse (though what I really want is a trackpad attached to my keyboard), etc. I'm getting really close to the point of building my own multi-touch table (thanks to the awesome guides at http://www.nuigroup.com) and am still excited about doing so. That said - take a look at this this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Not sure how I feel overall about a projector constantly illuminating the world around me, but it's a ridiculously cool concept. Now I just need one of these to look at resistor color codes and tell me what it is...

My wife and I are pretty avid car buffs and can usually have conversations about most Japanese cars. Our current baby is an 05 RX-8 that really needs a partner in the garage and about town. We've got a couple of daily drivers but really enjoy driving a stick shift and actually feeling connected to the cars we're driving (which really is the opposite of what most people want these days.)

We've been looking at various cars for several months now, and as one useful aspect of the current state of the economy, dealers are foaming at the bit for anyone that might buy a new vehicle. As such, we've been able to drive almost anything we've wanted and have significantly narrowed down the list. For pure fun, I thought I'd record some of my opinions here.

First, a bit about the requirements:

• Mainly a car for my wife, but something I would enjoy driving as well
• Unless absolutely amazing, it has to be a stick shift. Yes I know they make cars where the computer shifts faster than a human, blah blah blah. Yes, I know that they have "paddle shifters like a Ferarri." Yes, I know you can go into sequential shift mode on most automatics. Doesn't matter - we want a stick shift - which has made this task significantly more difficult.
• Rear wheel drive - possibly AWD but probably not.
• Handling - I grew up thinking horsepower & torque were the most important things - I was wrong. One of the best things about the RX-8 is even though it's about 230HP, it can turn on a dime and not feel like it's going to lose a wheel doing it.
• Reasonable power to weight ratio - Not just a pure hp number, but something that feels like it's moving.
• Proper mix of technology & reliability - We hate built in Nav, movie watching, etc. We like iPod / Aux connectivity, a measure of comfort, etc.
• Appealing look - This is obvious, but the standards change based on the car.

There are other aspects, but it all basically rolls down to a feel for the car and how much fun is it to drive. So, here's the list...(in no particular order - and these are all things we drove - there were others we considered)

• Infiniti G37S Coupe
• Infiniti G35 Coupe (Used)
• Mini Cooper S
• Pontiac Solstice
• Volkswagen GTI
• Volkswagen Jetta Wolfsburg
• Lexus IS 250
• Nissan 350z
• Mazda MX-5 Hardtop Convertible

Over the next couple posts, I'll provide a bit more review of each vehicle and what I think we'll end up choosing.

Around July last year, I purchased Charlene (The Simpsons, "Dead Putting Society"), my 17" MacBook Pro with the nice glossy high-res screen, etc. As part of this purchase I added a Sprint AirCard, in this case the SierraWireless 597E ExpressCard device that fits perfectly in the slot on the left side of the computer. It's always worked well (save for certain hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago who obviously want you to buy the overinflated hotel access) but one feature was always left out on the Mac side - GPS. It also really stunk that I could even boot up a Windows session in VMWare and the GPS data would appear perfectly. In other words, it was simply a matter of sending the right commands to the card to activate the GPS data. I did spend quite a long time fiddling around trying to find the necessary sequence to activate the GPS functionality, but to no avail. Much like other little projects I've come up with, this got moved to the back of the list for later consideration.

Today I was reading an article about running OS X on one of the new Dell Mini 9's, something I've contemplated myself several times. This was full of fairly useful information, including a note about a program called Sprint SmartView for any of their AirCards, that also enabled GPS functionality on a Mac. Unfortunately while pleased with Sprint's EVDO service, I have less than favorable things to say about their customer service (*WHY does the forgotten password web functionality not realize that you can't accept an SMS message on an aircard? And WHY does support not realize that them doing the same operation not help?....*) I chalked up the fact that I had never heard of this new release to similar behavior, but quickly put it behind me after I downloaded and installed the app (Here if you need it.) Other than an irritating reboot likely required due to a kext, the software works perfectly and even lets you access the GPS data in NMEA form - on one of the serial ports created when you use the card. Nice job Sprint!

One final note, if you do pick up an ExpressCard and then get irritated when you realize you want to use it in a non-ExpressCard equipped system, all is not lost. At the base most AirCards are actually USB devices in a PCI Express / ExpressCard form. On a Mac, the easiest way to determine if your card is like this is to open the About This Mac and click on More Information to open the stats about your computer. Under the Hardware: USB section you should see a USB Bus with the AirCard device listed. If so, you can actually use a USB to ExpressCard adapter. There are more expensive options available too if you want to buy direct from Amazon (ie, this.)

I've been using ExpanDrive since shortly after it appeared - it works flawlessly for what I need (including editing files on remote web servers, easily copy files, etc.) I recently completed a satisfaction survey for them - in return they provided two coupons for 50% off ExpanDrive or the Windows version, SFTPDrive. If anyone could use either of these coupons, just shoot me a message in the comments - first to ask gets them.

I've been working on an amusing project for quite some time that will be better served with a wireless camera to snap photos of the action. I had been leaning toward the AIC250W due to its relative cheapness (approx $50-$100 depending on the mood at Fry's.) That and you can simply grab a copy of the current frame by making a web request to http://cameraip/IMAGE.JPG?cidx=randomtimestamp (Thanks to Scott Hanselman for that tidbit.) Unfortunately the camera has gotten a bit difficult to find, especially for a good price. Enter its successor - the Airlink SkyIPCam 500W - Wireless, smaller, supports "Night Vision", motion detection, etc, etc. More importantly, it was on sale for $70 a while back so I picked one up.

I finally got around to unboxing the thing yesterday and started fiddling with the included tools. PC only to setup, but once configured you can use a Mac / Linux to actually view the video / images / etc. The issue is that this is not what I want it for - I need to make quick snapshots. So I tried the link as described above - and of course it didn't work. Looked at the page source, but it mostly uses an ActiveX control or a Java applet so the actual HTML / Javascript is fairly useless. Tried Fiddler, but it would crash IE immediately when I accessed the video page. Time to pull out Wireshark. Captured a couple of seconds of traffic and found the clue I needed. The default view for this camera will give a live video stream (Motion JPEG format) - looking through the capture I found the initial HTTP request:

http://camip/cgi/mjpg/mjpeg.cgi

This will automatically feed you a binary stream of the current video. Now based on Scott's article above, I'm guessing there's some more processing that needs to be accomplished, but that's for another day. I still wanted an immediate snapshot of the current image. I fiddled with the URL a bit and finally found what I needed:

http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi

This presented exactly what I wanted - a jpeg file of the current view. This still requires authentication (yes, I checked) so you do need to use a tool that supports user authentication (ie, wget --user username --password password http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi) or code it appropriately into whatever tool you're using.

I do have a feeling there's also a way to get an MPEG4 version of the video based on a hint in the Users Guide, but initial tests haven't worked yet. My bigger pressing issue is getting the wireless networking working properly with the security settings I have in place... Anyway, I hope this helps someone - I'll reveal more of my project soon enough.

Well - after spending way too much time dealing with the details of writing my own blog engine, I decided to go with a known quantity.  ASP.NET MVC is pretty cool, as is LINQ, but dealing with updating the DataContexts is pretty terrible.  Anyway, I've got to get the first post out of the way and go from there.  Eventually there will be content of interest here and eventually even some readers.