Posts Tagged ‘books’

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Shameless Self Promotion

March 19, 2015

I recently read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking. It was a good book but I feel like I should be able to use the information instead of be vaguely amused, somewhat uncomfortable with the anecdotes.

Once again, I started a blog post with a plan and then totally lost the thread by the second sentence. Writing is hard. This blog is where I practice-write. I know it is public so it isn’t my absolute worst attempts (the drafts area is a scary place) but it isn’t an attempt to be professional.

On the other hand, Chris and I have been trying to be professional with writing for Element 14. We have a blog called The Linker that is loosely related to the people was talk to on the Embedded.fm podcast. Readers don’t have to listen to the podcast, the idea is we start from some topic we discuss and explore it further.

In Solving a Different Problem, Chris talked about how a guest said he wanted to explore a business problem instead of a technical one, how that’s neat and different from most engineers.

In How to Win the Hackaday Prize (and Other Design Challenges), I mug about being a judge for the Hackaday Prize (again!).

In Make Anything, Chris starts to explore the idea of how open source hardware is changing the industry.

In the next one, I’ll be talking about how applications matter to me and why that makes working on open source tools difficult, which makes me appreciate them more.

So yeah, I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been writing over there. We are getting paid for that which is nice. Though we’ve both been so angsty over, the material the cost/benefit is not going well. I think after we’ve got a half dozen finished, it will flow more easily. I hope, I hope.

I suspect that will happen around the time we hit 100 podcast episodes. One hundred. That is just crazy. We are still having a good time, still enjoying talking with people and hearing from listeners.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. I’m truly an introvert: I’d rather be by myself (or with Christopher) almost all the time. Without an external impetus and a fair amount of effort, I wouldn’t meet people. But after almost-100 episodes, I feel a lot more connected to the industry and to the the community than I’ve ever felt.

Chris and I have talked about ways to publicize the podcast. I got stickers (ok, the stickers crack me up but they seemed like a decent giveaway for people who want to know the show name when I’m at conferences).

I was looking into going to more conferences. However, Chris pointed out that conference attendees and podcast listeners may not overlap. That prompted me to ask if I could go on The Engineering Commons, they said yes and I did. It was fun, I should see if there are others.

As for conferences, I am going to and speaking at  Solid in June on inertial sensors and ESC-SV in July on making. I’m already nervous.

Other than that, I’ve been working a lot. I have two projects that are currently in the “omg, I broke everything” stage. One of them will be finished in the next week (fix then finish white paper). The other will get fixed and then I can start the fun parts.  (The third one really seems to be in production so it is finished… or would be if they’d pay me. Sigh.)

A week or two ago, a friend asked how things were going. I burbled on about work and the podcast and Chris. Then she asked about non-work stuff, how is that going?

I was couldn’t come up with anything. I mean, I read many books and watch tv but didn’t think we’d have any commonality there. I have some new ipad games I find amusing but those are mental cupcakes so I’m a bit embarrassed about them. House and garden need attention but who wants to hear about my plans for new closet doors and mulch? And my exercise program is going well but I can’t really imagine discussing it. It made me feel a bit one dimensional.

I know that is silly.

Well, if this was a professional piece, I’d wrap it all up and have some grandiloquent point at the end. Yeah, you can imagine that for yourself while I go make lunch

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Books I’m giving my brother for the holidays

December 21, 2014

Last year, I gave my brother a bunch of books for the holidays. He professed to enjoying receiving them all. He hasn’t said which ones he liked reading. But, as a I said last year, we aren’t great communicators.

I also suspect he most liked me setting up his email even more: a “friend” had previously set up his email and it intentionally misspelled my brother’s last name. I, of course, sent the gifts to the correctly spelled name, my head being unable to cope with that sort of breakage. Anyway, I made a corrected email address and then forward the old account to the new one and sent him all the passwords (which he expected me to remember this year, hah!).

When I called to ask for his daughter’s addresses, we chatted for a few minutes. He said he’s reading a lot these days and would love more books, especially science fiction. I got excited, exclaiming I have the perfect gift. Sadly, he’s already read Andy Weir’s The Martian– three times! At least I know I’m on the right track.

I made a new list, partially from the ones last year that I’d forgotten or fell off my list. So far I’ve already bought

  • Neil Gaimen’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I asked Chris where he thought someone should start with Neil Gaimen and he thought maybe American Gods and I thought maybe The Graveyard Book thought that is young adult. But when I thought about about really-good-books without taking into about the author, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is higher in my personal ranking.
  • Ernest Clines’ Ready Player One. As soon as my brother said The Martian, I thought about Ready Player One. I don’t know why they are linked to me, maybe because I wish I’d written these books. No, not because they are popular but because they are deeply harmonic with the noise in my head.
  • Keeping with fiction, I went ahead with Ender’s Game. In Amazon, it is filed under “Classic Science Fiction” which where it belongs. The movie was not as good as the book (in large part because you couldn’t get a kid as young as in the book). I don’t necessarily like Orson Scott Card and I think the Ender books went on for much too long. But this is a great book and it was on sale.
  • Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy. Chris introduced me to this fantasy trilogy. Sanderson is so prolific, it can be tough to figure out where to start. This trilogy is fairly well encapsulated and a lot of fun. I have only dipped my toe in his other work though Chris gets lost in it.
  • Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness. Written by a molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk, I suspect my brother will like this book more than I did. I quite enjoyed the first 25% and then it lost me a bit in the deeper areas of Buddhism. I’m fully willing to believe (and practice) that happiness is a skill that requires practice and attention. However, I’m a product of Western education, the eradication of self is inexplicable to me unless he means balancing the System 2’s lies to cover System 1’s laziness (from Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow). That makes sense to me but I’m not sure that’s… Anyway, my brother mentioned an interest in Buddhism and Happiness is the obvious book for him if not for me.
  • Randall Munroe’s What If? Ahh, come on, we all read the wonderful XKCD webcomic with its mix of absurdity, love, and science. And I read the What If? blog with great enjoyment. I suspect my science-loving brother will love this though I worry that he may not be familiar with Munroe’s other work. I wonder if that will decrease his overall enjoyment, I hope not.
  • Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. Last year, I got the hardcopy of this for several people. My brother-in-law never laughs aloud and he giggled through it. A visiting friend seemed a bit depressed (in part because he was visiting over Christmas to meet stupid work deadlines and because his cat had recently passed away) and we put this in his stocking, getting a few giggles from him as well. It is a great book that covers some fairly deep territory with panache (and humor). I recommend it to everyone. Though I’m concerned about the color images on a kindle (my brother said he had a color screen, I hope it all works out).

I started working on this list last week, making an Amazon gift list so I could pile ideas together. Strangely, this shows me just how much the prices fluctuate. Both What If? and Hyperbole and a Half were discounted 30% when I went to look today (and add another book I was thinking of). Now, I’ve decided to go ahead and leave the list a little broad, maybe a few more things will go on sale, helping me decide what else to get my brother. Some of my other ideas:

  • In the popular science category, I have: Ken Jenning’s Maphead about incredibly interesting subject of geography (yeah, I didn’t think it was possible either), Sam Kean’s The Violinist’s Thumb about genetics (and history of discover), Micheal Pollan’s The Botany of Desire about plants mating habits and how they’ve trained humans to care for them, and James Pennebaker’s The Secret Life of Pronouns about the wonderful world of words and the psychology of interpreting what someone means. Vladimir Dinet’s Dragon Songs about crocodilian (and Russian) mating habits almost makes the list but I think that was because I listened to part of it which set the voice in my head better than the writing did.
  • In science fiction, I have Douglas Adam’s The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which contains all five books. I should just buy this one. It is a little pricier than the cheap ones but, gosh, at a per-word price it is improbably cheap. Heck, I should get it for myself, it is time for re-read of these, they make me happy. Talking about a good value even at full price, my list also has Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. What a romp! But my brother isn’t into computers so the attention to detail may be lost on him (and I already got Ready Player One which is somewhat similar).
  • In fantasy (I don’t normally separate sci-fi and fantasy, any advanced technology looking like magic and whatnot, but that previous bullet was getting pretty long. To keep this short, I’ll just put up some books.
  • Last year’s gifts had a lot of urban fantasy so this year, I tried to be shorter in that. I liked Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City (and the New Orleans sequel). For all that these are full of dead things, it is a more character driven book than some of the others on the list. Other urban fantasy and some pithiness:
  • Back to science fiction or fantasy or whatever
    • Jumper (I love Gould… though I started with Wildside so maybe that is better. But Exo came out this year (Jumper #4) and so this is better path)
    • The Curse of Chalion (Where to start with Bujold? Vorkosigan is awesome but this is standalone. And awesome. But on the pricey side)
    • The Three-Body Problem (I am so looking forward to reading this book myself! I have such high hopes. This may be an example of giving a gift to someone else and hoping they don’t like it and give it back.)
    • Boneshaker (I remain a sucker for Steampunk.)
  • Last (but not least), I really enjoyed the The Best of Instructables. I seldom go to the website (being ad-phobic) and having them in a book has been awesome for inspiration and general interest. But I’m not sure about Kindle. I’d consider sending him Make Magazine but I’m not sure he’d be into that.

Having learned the price fluctuations in ebooks, I’ll watch them for a day or two and sort out what else to get my brother. Though if I was in charge of making profits at Amazon, now that the shipping window is nearly closed, it would make sense to push the prices of all electronic items up a bit for those last-minute shoppers.

What did I miss? Any books you especially enjoyed this year?

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Brother gifts

December 24, 2013

I had this idea for a way to revolutionize the gift card market, at least for digital media services like Amazon’s ebook or Apple’s iTune. Here is how it would work:

1. I’d buy a bunch of items that I didn’t really care if the receiver wanted but I liked for some reason. (For example, spend $50 buying songs with the word “bride” or “wedding” in the title for a wedding present. Or buying songs that spelled out the receiver’s name when put together. Or purchasing a bunch of gag books related to some in-joke I had with the receiver.)

2. The giftee would get the option to accept any (or all) of the items. The ones unaccepted would become a gift card so the recipient could spend the money however they wanted.

Thus, I could spend some time and thought on a gift but the recipient could get something they actually wanted. Win all around.

Happily, while Amazon doesn’t exactly have this, they have something close. I send gift ebook (or MP3s) and the recipient can opt for cash (well, credit) instead.

It has a few downsides but let me change the subject for a bit.

My brother and I aren’t close. I’m a little sad about that but it has always been true. Our mom used to keep us connected but since she passed away a few years ago, we have to work to talk to each other.

I don’t really know what his life is like other than very different than mine. He says he’s happy. He said he liked it when I sent him steaks (and when I sent him towels but not when I sent him cash).

When he visited once and had dinner, he’d read about ShotSpotter and wanted to talk about the math and physics. I think he reads a lot but I’m not sure. I know he has my mom’s old kindle (3G) but not if he used it.  It is weird, not having a clue what he’d honestly need or want.

When I found that he could trade in books for amazon cash, well, it seemed like a good way to give him something useful and spend sometime communicating that, even though I don’t communicate well with him, I do love him.

Here are the books I sent him, along with some reasoning as to why.

  • When my brother was a teenager, he read Steven R. Boyett’s Ariel. It was a dystopian urban fantasy book, published in 1983, about thirty years before the rest of the urban fantasy. (Ok, there was Charles de Lint which is all lyrical but not dystopian, not very gritty.) My brother loved the Ariel book. Also, when I finally got to read it, I loved the book.  A year or two ago, I found Boyett’s Elegy Beach, published in 2009, written so about the same amount of time had passed in the universe. I didn’t re-read Ariel, too afraid it might not hold up. But I liked the new one. It wasn’t great but I wanted to share it with my brother. Maybe it formed the kernel of this gifting idea.
  • Next on the list is the non-fiction Thinking, Fast and Slow. This book is about how your brain works and how to use cognitive psych for fun and profit. It is the best $3 you can spend. I felt like sending it to everyone I know even though few people will make it past the 10% mark. It is not a difficult read but really, really long. I want to read it again but am intimidated as it took months and months to pour thought last time.
  • Since my brother seems to like science, I put in one of my favorite science books of the year: Kraken : The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid. Anything that made me really think about cephalopod intelligence and how aliens may think entirely different than we do… well, I had many lovely daydreams, expanding my ideas. This is an easy read, semi-autobiographical in addition to pop science fun.
  • Next, more fantasy. I got the evil Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One. I love this book and its sequel. And, like so many others, I crave the final book in the trilogy. (The wait is why Rothfuss is evil. Once he gives me the next (and better be final) book, all will be well.) The writing and the story are both exceedingly addictive.
  • I got him The Serpent and the Rainbow. Of all the books on the list, this is the one I wonder if he’s already read. Maybe. And if he hasn’t, will he think I’m attempting to be hip? Ahh, well, it has been sent so I needn’t worry further.
  • Next, more fiction, specifically urban fantasy, I got Jim Butcher’s Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1). I like Dresden a lot, he’s a wizard in modern day Chicago. He is made up of the hard sort of heroism of Dick Francis’ jockeys in a wonderful, complicated world.
  • Though I agonized a bit over the overlap (and inevitable) comparison, I also got Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue: An October Daye Novel. It is also urban fantasy, also a hard sort of heroism (though with a heroine this time). These are both the start of their long-ish series. If you asked which series I most want the next installment of, it would be… Rothfuss, damn him. After that, I’d say October Daye even though my husband has only read (and very much enjoyed) Dresden.
  • Back to non-fiction, the next book for my brother is Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker’s War 1941-45. I want him to understand my love of code, puzzles, and spies. This book has all that and is fun to read… both times I’ve read it. It is another big one but a neat combination of history, autobiography, and cryptography basics.
  • I hope he likes science as much as he’s said. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters is written by Matt Ridley who has written other genomics books that I’ve really enjoyed, he’s a good storyteller. I plan to look for this one for myself soon too.
  • Since I sent so much urban fantasy, I wanted to balance it out with some proper science fiction so Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was next in the list. I like this series very much. The writing is witty and the stories are tightly plotted. Sometimes a little preachy with its politics, this book remains engaging and interesting.
  • Finally, I got him Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I recently started reading this book (and am enjoying it). It gets great ratings and I sort of hope it will help us talk to each other. Plus, on sale for $3 so, win!

So, 11 books, trade-able for about $75 worth of Amazon dollars. The main downside is that he has to trade each one separately instead of getting a list. For $75 worth of $1 songs, this would be cruel. Anyway, I hope he enjoys the books. I sure had a good time picking them out.

Ahh, and the ones I thought about sending but didn’t make the cut? There were a few:

So what else did I miss? What other sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, science, history books do you get for someone you really should know well. I mean, did he read Harry Potter? Would he think those were good or childish? Would I really inflict the endless days of camping on anyone I care about?

 

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MOSFETs, games, and a demonstration of shiny object syndrome

September 9, 2013

Conversation this morning:

Me: You named one of your gadgets MOSFET... 
Him: Yes...
Me: Why? Is it something to do with Star Wars? Boba Fett?
Him: (Uncomfortable silence.) No. They are used in music amplifiers.

I keep coming back to MOSFETs. I keep seeing them in different contexts where they end up being the “oh you just put a MOSFET in there and it will work the way you want” component.

Maybe it is time I learned what this magical component does.

As a pretest, though, I’ll splat out everything I can think of.

  • When I wanted to connect a IO to a motor, the IO pin didn’t have enough current. So the EE (Phil) put in a MOSFET so I could toggle the IO line to get the motor to turn on and off without pulling current through the processor.
  • When I asked Phil about my resistor divider sucking too much power, he said I should put in  a MOSFET so the divider was only on when I needed to measure the battery. I didn’t carefully read the ensuing EEspeak because I don’t have an extra IO pin.
  • A FET is a form of MOSFET. Probably one with less moss… Actually, it is probably that a MOSFET is a form of FET. Probably with more moss. Really though, there is probably no moss, it tends to be damp and that’s bad for electronics.
  • It seems to be a switch that is controlled electronically.
  • They come in n and p varieties. I don’t know the difference.
  • (And this just in!) They are used in musical amplifiers.

So, let’s be clear: I’ve used MOSFETs before. But as I try to design my own hardware, I keep getting smacked upside the head with them, like getting hit with a fish tail as the fish escapes the boat and swims away. That’s always been ok with me: I never really wanted the fish. But now I want to understand MOSFETs. And not just for a few minutes until some shiny other thought comes along.

Let’s go back to what Phil said in my resistor divider email exchange.

To prevent that leakage current you could just put a FET to turn off that voltage divider when you’re not checking the battery voltage. You could use a high-side P-Channel FET, (between VBat and R1) but turning it off solidly would require a voltage equal to (or higher than) the battery, or you could use a low-side N-Channel FET, but then you’d still have the leakage current through the ADC.  Although that 50KOhm is probably only while it is sampling, not when it is not in use.  So that is what I would try for a minimal-part, minimal cost solution, if you have a spare digital I/O to turn that FET on and off…

Ok. Well, I guess I retained enough of that though I suspect Phil copied the paragraph from the last five times I asked him something that required a MOSFET. I suppose what I need to do is use MOSFET in a circuit I design myself.

First, a little more information, courtesy of Wikipedia. Wow, that article is long. Let’s just come back to it, ok?

And since my attention span is tiny this morning, let me tell you about this game I’ve been playing. It is Circuit Coder for the ipad. It gives me little challenges, like build a NAND gate using only NOR gates, then I build what it wants, trying to think through the problem. Here is my half-adder.
Circuit Coder Half Adder solution

I had a decent amount of logic in college, in the CS courses, so this NAND and NOR gates are buried deep in my brain but have a solid foundation. I like the puzzle aspect. I’m a little stuck on SR latches but I have a plan to go read about them and I suspect they’ll fall pretty quickly.

Since some of the puzzles are tricky, there is a walkthrough. I was afraid to look at it for fear of taking away the puzzle aspect. However, the walkthrough is only for the first 3.5 minutes of the game so I am more likely to cheat using a computer engineering text book. And a game that can get me to look up how components work and demonstrate logic gates so effectively… this is more what I want from learning. Sneaky learning. Though, I wish the game had a little more help and could be a little more competitive (what is the minimum component solution for each?). But completing puzzles is very satisfactory.

I was hoping one of the components I need to make is a MOSFET. But looking around now, I don’t see that in Circuit Coder. (Though I do see a review that rates this game highly and suggests Codea as a good learn-to-code game. Whew, expensive though! And then my appolearning “trial” expired and I am considering whether to buy their (too expensive) app so I could learn about other instructional apps.)

And this is why my quest for MOSFET intuition has, to date, been for naught. I keep looking at the Wikipedia article and then finding something else to do. It is too theoretical and not tactical enough: what should I use a MOSFET for and why?

Getting away from the shiny distractions available in Wiki, I switched to looking at Charles Platt’s Encyclopedia of Components in Safari. (If you write an O’Reilly book, you get a free lifetime subscription to Safari online. Happy perk!)

There was nothing about MOSFETs in the table of contents. That seemed so unlikely for a book titled thusly. I searched for MOSFET, found some entries under Chapter 29. field effect transistor.

I bet “field effect transistor” has been used to sound very sci-fi. If I had a band (made up entirely of light theramin), it would be called “field effect transistor”.

And apparently, I should read chapters 26-28 before proceeding so I understand diodes and transistors because those are related.

I had hoped to share my new-found understanding with you in this post. Instead, I feel like I’ve wandered around in circles until exhausted. I’m going to go sit in a corner with this book and see what I can learn.

Or maybe I’ll do some paying work.

Naw, I think I’ll go run errands.

Or maybe push reload on twitter.

 

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Music generator idea

June 25, 2013

OMG, the peeping bird. The Peeper. Sometimes called the FP. It starts at dawn in early April: PEEP PEEP PEEP. It only knows that one sound. And what it lacks in variety, it makes up for with volume. The PEEPs echo off the surrounding houses, giving them resonance. It is unbearably loud, particularly as I’m supposed to be sleeping.

Eventually, in late May, it is joined by another bird, affectionately known as the car alarm bird. Probably a mockingbird, its song is a car alarm: whoop whoop whoop, eee-urr-eee-urr, raaan-raaan-raaan. The first time, it sounded a lot like a car alarm. This year it sounds like a bird’s musical rendition of a car alarm, as though the birds have been playing telephone. It almost pretty, definitely funny. Still, not the way I want to wake up, especially with the FP playing rhythm peeps in the bird band.

Take that as part one of “necessity as a mom” and let’s move on to part two.

When I’m working, I like music but only boring music, music that doesn’t impinge on my consciousness. And I don’t like noise, whether it is the fan of my officemate’s computer or the dishwasher running or the peeping bird (less obnoxious in the office but still quite audible). I know I can buy white noise generator to block the sounds or get noise cancelling headphones. And sometimes I just turn up my music. Those solutions each have some definite drawbacks.

As I was reading about Bug Music and the author’s attempts to play an instrument in line with the symphony of cicadas or even harmonize with the beat box rhythm of a cricket, I started to wonder. Could I make a music generator that would listen to ambient noise and generate some cover for ongoing sounds?

Say the peeper is PEEPing. It is pretty rhythmic as well as tonal. So could my gadget make horn sounds to cover the peeper? And a soft swingy, jazzy riff underneath to maintain musicality? And when the whine of a fan is going, could it take that 8kHz whine and add some arpeggio to relieve the monotony?

There was an iphone app called Ambiance that would play a huge range of sounds- oceans or bird calls or whatnot. It was to help people relax. This would incorporate exterior sounds into that, layering them into the intended soundscape.

And the music generator would let you hear some sounds: a siren going by won’t mix in right away, the music generation processing would need time to acclimate to new environmental sounds.

Of course, I’m just blithely assuming music generation is easy, that improvising is trivial for a computer. But that is an exercise left to the implementer. Anyway, when you are done, please let me know so I can buy your gadget.

 

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