Posts Tagged ‘reviews’

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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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Tesla!

February 16, 2013

lt has been a month so I figured I’d talk about the new car, give it a review. And then this week was full of NYT and Tesla arguing like internet n00bs (proving, even if you are the NYT and CEO of a medium-sized company, someone on the internet is wrong).

Let’s recap my views on the Tesla… I thought it was silly and expensive. While C likes bleeding edge technology, I’d rather wait until someone else dealt with the bugs before getting mine. Since I write (err, fix) bugs for a living, well, I understand that it just takes awhile before things are solid.

Also, it is an expensive car. Really, really expensive. We could use that money for something else. Something worthwhile. Maybe three normal cars that we juggle in the backyard using our giant robot.

More than a year ago, I tried to get a friend to convince C it was silly to put down the deposit on a car that wouldn’t ship for a year and would be on the gushing bleeding edge. Said so-called friend told us he’d already put down his deposit; my hope for rationality was quashed.

Then it was like a game of chicken. I figured C would use his refundable deposit to have a stake in watching things. It would be amusing to him. And we’d never go through with it. Because, wouldn’t it be better to have a giant car juggling robot? Or something?

In the end, it is much cheaper to buy the car than to put my foot down and have my husband be unhappy. Clearly, I am a pushover for him.

But I wasn’t entirely a pushover for Tesla.

I didn’t like that Tesla isn’t a car company. While I don’t like the car lots or the dealers, I understand the process. Tesla isn’t that and I’m not confident I can navigate the shoals of an up-and-coming car manufacturer. Plus, I saw Tucker. I know how this story can end. (The Tesla has side headlights that come on when you turn, highlighting where you are pointing. It was eerily familiar after the Tucker movie. Also, quite amusing.)

Tesla did not help their case during the decision-making process. We went to one of their test drive extravaganzas, with balloons, soft-serve ice cream, a DJ, and the opportunity for one of us to drive the car on windy roads while the other one tries not to throw up on the super-expensive backseat. I hated the whole event. I was frustrated I couldn’t talk to the salesfolk because the music was so stupidly loud. I declined to ride along as I tend to get car sick and already knew the road they were taking; it wasn’t going to end well for anyone. I generally made my husband unhappy with my complete crankiness. But he still enjoyed test driving the car.

I was worried that we’d get the car and I’d still be cranky: unable to drive it for fear of hurting it, unable to look at it without thinking how many hours we’d have to work to pay it off, unable to ever bond with something that financially irresponsible.

It took two days. Maybe less. We got the car on Saturday, took it for a long drive, had annoying problems (had to stop at a gas station! oh, the chagrin!) and eventually came home with me liking the car but not loving it (also, slightly carsick). I didn’t drive it until Sunday and then only to pop to the library and back: boring, even in a nice car.

The next day, I took friends out to lunch in it. I accelerated outrageously and cornered hard (I <heart> freeway on-ramps). I showed them the frunk (front trunk). They oooh’d and aaaah’d over the utterly ridiculous retracting door handles. We talked about the car always having a full tank when it leaves the house. They played with the sunroof. I showed them the adorable key (vroom, vrooom!).

In showing them the sweetness of the car, I somehow realized I’d fallen for the Tesla.

It’s name is Electron.

C says it is too dirty for a photo shoot, I’ll just take a picture I’ve been thinking about for awhile…

 

Let's take a look at what's under the hood...

Let’s take a look at what’s under the hood…

Hey! This car is puppy powered!

Hey! This car is puppy powered!

Does anyone have 30-60 hamsters I can borrow? I think that will be even funnier.

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Things I learned from the zombie apocalypse

July 23, 2012

I never expected to recommend a zombie apocalypse book to anyone. I don't read horror and I don't like zombie movies (excepting Shaun of the Dead, of course).

So, when a zombie book was on my Hugo ballot (so worth it!), I grudgingly read it. Actually, to keep the stakes low, I started with the Hugo-nominated novella. It was good, it had promise, a good wind up story, and excellent Once upon a time.

I figured I would read the Hugo-nominated novel (once you pay your bucks, you get a bunch of books, might as well read through them), even though the novel was the second in a trilogy. Basically, cynic that I am, I wanted to know whether it was worse than Martin's Thrones book (ahem, not a fan) so I could do my judgely duties.

The zombie book got me on the first page. It sucked me in so much that at the end of the first chapter of my free book, I went back to the first book in the trilogy, bought it, and devoured it. Then back to the Hugo packet to read the second. Then bought the third. It was a weekend where I got very little done. And then, two weeks later, I re-read all three because I'd been thinking so much about them. (Calibration: My usual re-read rate for books I like very much is once a year.)

Before I go on, I should at least give you a link to the books. The first one is Feed by Mira Grant. Start there. The novella was Countdown down but it is a prequel/origin story so maybe save it. You can find the other books from there. One itty-bitty spoiler: at the trilogy end, there is an end. Kind of refreshing, actually.

Inexplicably, I'm still thinking about these books that are about the zombie apocalypse. I find myself applying them to the world at large. It is a little weird. Maybe if I tell you about them, it will be some sort of catharsis and I won't have to think about them any more. (Doubt it.)

Fear does not make you safe.

When we heard about the horrible, senseless tragedy in Colorado, the tickets we had for the noon showing of Batman were not as shiney as they had been the day before. Terrorist? Whack job? Did it matter? Why should this nutter stop us from seeing this movie? Or taking the fun out of it?

And not just current events, this applies to all of the times where it is easier to avoid something that seems scary. Even taking a Tylenol. But being afraid doesn't make anyone safe. Being vigilant (and, according to the zombie books, armed) can keep me safe. But just being afraid and hiding? Not so much.

Another theme of the trilogy is that people in power will use fear to keep people complacent, an illusion of safety through control. Anyway, I didn't highlight this as a lesson learned because I think it should be self-evident to anyone paying attention to TSA and the War on Terror. But let's move on…

Politicians should check with six-year-olds.

In one scene in the book (not a spoiler), a character says that the president should have run his plan by a child. If the child says that the president will never get anything in his stocking but coal ever again, well, maybe it isn't a good plan. This seems like a good idea to me. Maybe then we could avoid murder drones, and broken promises.

What happens to make it all complicated? Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes there is right and there is wrong. I tend to live in a very gray world, really able to see reason in both sides of just about every issue. And yet, I hope my actions are mostly on the side of good. And I agree that six-year-olds have an intrinsic morality (thought it can be bloodthirsty).

I like Seanan McGuire's writing very much.

(Mira Grant is a pen name.) And now I've got a couple whole series to read. In fact, I read Rosemary and Rue this afternoon, a different series in a different world. It was urban fantasy not science fiction (not horror). And no zombies. Which is fine for now, but I do hope there are some zombies in the future.

 

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Oh! They love me! They really love me!

June 14, 2012

One of my first reviews for Making Embedded System came on the O’Reilly site and it was a not a good review. I mean, it was a bad review (and it wasn’t particularly well written).

It was somewhat heartbreaking to have put all that work into a book and then have someone bash it. And he hadn’t really read it (one of the things he said was terrible was, funny enough, something I was saying was terrible if only he’d done more than flip through it).

Ouch. But I try (try really, really hard sometimes) to learn from mistakes and to be as mature as possible about such things. I totally agree with this author’s posting: “The biggest enemy of our careers is not bad reviews, but obscurity.” As with my view on ebook pirating, I may not like bad reviews but I do want my book to make ripples. I am not yet to Scalzi’s delighting in one star reviews but I’d almost (almost, maybe) have bad reviews than nothing. Of course, Scalzi’s examples are much funnier than mine. And he’s got a thicker skin from years of doing this.

But as we were gone on our cross country trip, two more reviews were added to my book on Amazon, heaping my collection of 5-star reviews there to a lucky 7.  (Which isn’t to say that 8 or 9 or 53 would be unlucky, feel free to add more, I won’t mind.)

Now, I will admit that I know Ken Brown, one of the Amazon reviewers. And when he said, “Well, is there anything else I could do?” after tech reviewing it (and doing an awesome job with the review), I immediately asked if he could pretty please write a review.

Still, seven people like my book enough to take the time to write a review in Amazon. I’m sometimes surprised by what they liked most about it. I mean, check this out from James Langbridge, a guy I’ve never met (though we exchanged emails after he entered some errata):

This book is full of technical detail, but more importantly, it is full of wisdom. I had fun reading this, and to the question would I recommend this book to a friend? I already have, to junior members of my team.

I like “I had fun reading this”… such a wonderful thing to say about a technical book. And this:

I would say that the most valuable contribution this book makes is in explaining the design integration of hardware components and basic EE-technologies to a software developer who has not yet experienced the design of a sophisticated embedded system. – Ira Laefsky

And then on Goodreads, someone said exactly what I could have wished for:

I wish this book was around when I started working.

Because that is the book I wrote: the one I wish I had when I started.

 

 

 

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