Staples Easy Button Hacking

For a project at work I needed a solid button that would be easy to press. It turned out that the Staples Easy Button was a perfect match for what I needed; heavy, easy to locate without looking for it, a great size, and it was just a single button. I opened it up and removed the speakers and disconnected the majority of the inner workings, rewiring some bits so that I could run a wire out of it and into the serial port of a computer. Then I could use the button as an input device. It worked perfectly.

Here is a step-by-step gallery that shows how to dismantle the button, remove the speakers (you could leave them in, but what’s the point? Why not take out the free speaker for use somewhere else?), tap into the switch, and re-assemble.

We start by removing screws. Keep removing screws until you can pry the speaker out. Cut the red wires and remove the speaker. Reassemble the button most of the way. Remove the resistor on top. Also cut the black and white wire coming from the battery case. Cut the traces to the chip (the black mound). Solder wires at the points shown on the images: there’s one point where the resistor used to be, and one point that’s just a bare hole. Then solder the other ends of those wires to the black and white battery wires. Now reassemble completely. You can now tie or solder wires to the pads where the batteries go and use the button for whatever application you have.

I play with fusion

As a resident of the Tri-Cities, I am close to the Hanford area and have access to a wide array of nuclear materials…

What a great way to start off a story, huh? What really happened was last night I did some ballroom dancing and decided to play around a little. The DJ was doing an absolutely horrible job (we heard the same song 4 times in an hour). I was getting tired of doing the same dance to the same song, so I decided to change things up a bit, and fortunately my partners were open to the idea and had fun, too. The idea was simple; at various times throughout a song I would just switch dance styles, sometimes letting them know in advance, and sometimes just springing it on them. We might start off doing a salsa, move into night club two step, slide into east coast swing, then hurry into the hustle, then migrate to the west coast swing, and then choose cha cha. Sometimes the transitions were flawless and looked great. Sometimes I picked the wrong part of the step to change styles, but it was a lot more fun than doing a single dance for a whole song. Plus, we could start to choreograph the dance styles to the music as it changed, moving away from night club two step when it got too fast, or into east coast swing when it got fast enough. I only got to do this with a couple of the ladies who danced with me, as they were good follows and could quickly adapt to different steps.

It’s definitely something to remember and work on in the future. It’s just too bad the ladies were old enough to be my mom (they were telling me about their kids in college).

Dancing movie worth seeing

Those who know me know I am an avid and well-rounded dancer (except Tango and line dancing. I’m not a fan of those, but I can honestly say I tried them and they just didn’t agree with me). I like ballroom, swing, latin, hip-hop, break, everything. I like bringing them together, too, and playing around with the various dances. I also try to keep up with the new stuff.

Those who know me also know that I am an avid and well-rounded movie watcher (no exceptions there. I’ll watch a classic, a comedy, and a chick flick in a row without flinching).

So it should make sense then, that a movie about dancing would be great for me. This particular one was a documentary, too, so it had all kinds of potential. The movie is called Rize, and it’s about a newish form of dance called krump coming from South Central L.A.. Krump is probably best described as a fusion of hip-hop, African tribal, rage, pop’n’lock, and break. The music is rap with a heavy beat and fairly fast.

Rize will make you uncomfortable. The motivation behind the dancing is expression of rage and frustration with their situation in the ghetto, and the movie makes that very clear, starting with some brief history about the race riots and Rodney King riots, followed by a scene that involves some dancers re-enacting the beating in dance form, and the interviews are always talking about how difficult life is where they are. But the form of dance itself is a very positive thing because it is an outlet for their feelings that is safe, it provides a familial alternative to the gangs, it keeps them away from drugs and violence, and it gives them hope.

I’ve known about krumping for a while, and I’d seen some clips online, and even borrowed a few moves, but when I watched the movie, the moves and the clips gained a whole new context that made them a lot more powerful.

I haven’t given away too much of the movie, so please don’t think that reading this was even close to saving you the time of watching it. This was my first documentary of 2007, and it’s going to be tough finding a better one this year.

Coconut Shrimp

These will turn out fantastic. They’re best served warm or right off the frying pan.

This isn’t a recipe so much as a process.

  • Remove the shells from the thawed, uncooked shrimp. Traditionally, the tail part is left on, but it’s annoying at eating time, so you can take the whole shell off if you want.
  • Rinse off the shrimp an remove most of the excess water, but leave them damp.
  • Heat a frying pan to medium heat and put about two tablespoons of butter in. Have lots more butter available.
  • Prepare a shallow bowl with flour in it.
  • Beat two eggs into a second shallow bowl and put that next to the flour bowl.
  • Put coconut flakes into a third shallow bowl and put that next to the egg bowl.
  • Put a paper towel between the coconut bowl and the frying pan.
  • Put a paper towel after the frying pan.

You should have an assembly line that looks like the following:

  • Shrimp
  • Flour bowl
  • Egg bowl
  • Coconut bowl
  • Paper towel
  • Frying pan
  • Paper towel

Put about 15 shrimp through the assembly line. First dip them in the flour bowl, then dip them in the egg batter and let the excess drip off, then roll them in the coconut, and place them on the first paper towel if you don’t have room in the pan. Put the shrimp in the pan for about 2 minutes on each side. Watch the butter and add more as necessary to make sure there’s enough that it doesn’t start burning. Also watch the coconut flakes that fall off. They have a tendency to burn after a while, and then they stick to the new batches of shrimp and look bad, so occasionally you may have to just wipe the pan clean and start over with new butter. After the shrimp are lightly brown, take them out of the pan and put them on the far paper towel so they can dry off a little (that is, so the excess butter can soak into the towel).

Serve immediately.

 

Good dinner, good workout, the New Year is starting off well

The New Year has been treating me well so far. Today I woke up before my alarm clock, showered, had time to make sausage and eggs for breakfast, and got to work before 7. This is in sharp contrast to the past few months, when I was snoozing for an extra hour and a half, skipping breakfast, and moseying in to work at 8:30. It was a productive day, too, with some great bits of code and no struggle to get to 9 hours. A coworker was feeling festive last week and wrote a poem in an email to describe the feature he had implemented, so I continued the tradition in an email today, and struggled to find something that rhymed with bitmap (ultimately I settled on mishap).

At home I made myself a nice dinner of elk steak from my grandpa, shrimp sauteed in garlic butter, and a spinach salad, accompanied by a glass of wine while I watched a Nova special on the Wright brothers. Then I went to work out for a bit.

Yes, things are off to a good start so far.

Coconut Shrimp are SO EASY! Cake frosting is not.

In preparation for the new year party I attended, I decided to make coconut shrimp. I found many recipes, and all were very different. You’d think there’d be some consistency between recipes when making a specific dish, but this was not the case. I decided on one for which I had all the ingredients (I have moments of intelligence sometimes). The process was very simple. First, I thawed and shelled the shrimp, leaving the tail on. Next, I prepared an assembly line that included first a bowl of flour, then a bowl with two beaten eggs, then a bowl of coconut flakes, then a frying pan with a couple tablespoons of butter on medium heat. The shrimp went through the flour first, which stuck because the shrimp were damp. Then they were dipped in the egg, which stuck because the flour was dry. After letting the excess egg drip off, the shrimp were dipped into the coconut and rolled around to make sure everything was coated. Then they went into the frying pan. After a couple minutes, I flipped them over so the other side would be cooked, and when they were finished I put them on a paper towel to dry off. Every second batch I washed out the pan because the coconut that fell off would start to burn. I also had to keep adding butter to the pan.

In the end, though, I had made about 50-60 coconut shrimp, and they were still warm when I got to the party. Very tasty. I’m definitely saving that ‘recipe.’

All was not well in Bob’s kitchen last night, though. I made a sheet cake from scratch and was happy with the results, but I needed a frosting, and didn’t have any good recipes that also included ingredients in my kitchen. This is a frequent problem because I have a hard time maintaining a stock of perishable exotic ingredients and whenever I try I end up with many losses.

Anyway, I tried to make a frosting, but the first recipe flopped. Essentially butter and confectioner’s sugar, it never solidified (I’m also short a mixer, so mixing by hand is a bit limited in its success). That went down the drain and I tried another recipe, this time involving shortening. Still no luck, but it didn’t go down the drain yet. I found a third recipe that included the same ingredients plus one or two others, so I morphed the second attempt into the third, with still no luck. By this time I was convinced that the lack of a mixture was a significant factor. It was getting down to the wire and I still didn’t have a frosting, so I gave up and went to the local Safeway, where I bought some frosting. It was sad, but unavoidable. With the frosting and the sprinkles, the cake looked great, and I was happy to discover later that night that it tasted even better than it looked.

Corvallis

I stayed in Richland the night of the 23rd, and then left on the 24th to go down to Corvallis to be with other family for Christmas. The night that I arrived was when all the gift-giving took place. We did a Secret Santa thing so that each person would get something they wanted and nobody would get left out or get a whole bunch of presents they didn’t want or need. I had asked for a donation to the Oregon State University Honors College and a bit of food for the stocking, and was happy that that was exactly what I got. Some wine that I like, homemade smoked salmon, and homemade fudge. It was great. I also enjoyed seeing everyone there.

The next morning was a Christmas for the cousin’s kids. They were fun to watch and play with. That evening we had a turkey dinner. On the 26th I headed back to Richland.

Great Falls

I returned from D.C. on the 19th of December, had my marathon of work on the 20th, and took off on the 21st to go to Great Falls. It was an 8 hour drive, and there were some sketchy parts that go along with winter driving. On the road to Spokane, things started off great, but eventually I felt like something was wrong. I’ve been with my car for over 80,000 miles and 6 years, so I have an intimate knowledge of how it handles, and something just wasn’t right. As I headed up a small hill, I figured out exactly what was wrong. The spedometer started bouncing between 70 and 80. At first I thought it was odd, and then I realized that it was the cruise control trying to keep my speed up as the tires were slipping on ice. Realizing that the road was slippery made all the pieces fit into place and I changed my driving style immediately. The strange road conditions lasted all the way into Idaho when I got to the passes (which were surprisingly manageable).

Once I was in Great Falls, I found my sister’s apartment, and we met my mom for dinner. Afterwards, I saw a friend from high school and we caught up. We got kicked out of the Barnes and Nobles because they were closing, so we went to a nearby bar, and I realized how much I appreciate the no-smoking law in Washington. I went back to my sister’s place and hung out with her friends until late, when she kicked them out. The next morning I met mom at her apartment and we started packing all of her stuff. She was moving to Kansas to go to graduate school. She hadn’t really started packing, and she had planned to leave the next morning, so we had a lot of work to do. Fortunately, we got it all done. We picked up boxes from Katie’s job at the mall, had lunch with one of mom’s work friends, and picked up the U-Haul. In the evening, we started packing it.

Packing the U-Haul was too much fun. It was a giant game of Tetris, except the rows wouldn’t disappear. I have to admit that I did a spectacular job of packing it. Incredibly, everything fit. Even more incredibly, I had managed to save room for a table and two chairs that we were originally convinced would never make it, AND we realized that the minivan pulling the trailer was empty, so we got to take some stuff out and put it in the van. Fortunately, she made it to Kansas safely, so the packing must have worked.

I was under a time crunch with the packing, because that night I was meeting some high school friends. We got together at a place called the Sip ‘n Dip, where a large glass window views the inside of a swimming pool and mermaids occasionally swim around (yes, in Great Falls, MT. It’s odd, isn’t it?). It was nice seeing the friends. They’re doing well for themselves.

The next morning I went to breakfast with the sister and the mom, and then we parted ways; mom going East, me going West, and Katie going back to her apartment. The drive back had some excitement, this time on the pass, where it hadn’t been plowed and I couldn’t go more than 40 without sliding. I made it back to Richland safe, though. This was the 23rd.

D.C.

On my way back from Tampa, I was fortunate enough to have an overbooked flight and a flexible schedule. I volunteered my seat for a flight 4 hours later, where I was given a first class seat and a free round trip ticket good anywhere in the 48 states and some money for lunch. So I sat in the airport for an extra 4 hours and read the book that I would have been reading at home anyway. As the next flight came around, the same thing happened, and I volunteered my seat again, this time getting a voucher for dinner and breakfast, a night in a hotel, and shuttle to and from the hotel, as well as another round trip ticket. It was a pretty sweet deal, and I had nothing else going on that night that required me to be in Richland.

This is a long way to tell you that in mid December I used one of those tickets for a trip to Washington D.C. to explore the city and see a couple friends. I was able to stay at a friend’s house while I was there, and the flight was free, so it was a fairly cheap trip for me. I did a lot of exploring, and had a really good time while I was there. There were a lot of younger people around, there were so many things to do and see, the Metro was amazing for getting around, and the feeling of the place was great. In one day I did the entire mall. I started at 7:30 am and walked straight until 5:30. I had done 8 miles by 10:30. By the time I was done, I had gone well over 20 miles (I used google maps to trace my path and measure the distance, but I have to estimate all the walking I did inside the museums). My feet had never felt like they did that day. It was intense, but very cool. It’s incredible to be so close to so many important things. I can see how people get used to it living there, but as a tourist, being near all these buildings and artifacts and their history is amazing.

We did other stuff, too, like go to a nice restaurant, see a play, and go dancing. There’s so much in D.C. and it really appeals to me. I can definitely see myself living there and doing interesting and important things.

On the way back, I passed through Denver the night before the storm, so I got lucky. The next day I had scheduled all of my meetings for the week at work, because I had only planned to work one day that week, and I needed to get a lot done. I had 5 meetings that day and got a ton of work done before heading to Great Falls for the next part of my whirlwind December.

Tampa

Back in November I went down to Tampa for work. The project is called InfoStar, and the purpose of the project is to provide information about the Supercomputing 2006 conference to conference attendees. The tricky part, though, is that it’s dynamic data from a variety of sources, it’s available to anyone with an internet-enabled device, and it has to look good on a computer and function well on mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones. This project is my baby. This is my third year on the InfoStar project (and the third year of its existence), and this year I was the project lead. The first year we had a group of about 15 people that were involved. This year, we were 2. I wrote all the code, did all the graphics and advertisements, took care of the hardware, and did all the testing. And all of this on a budget so thin I ended up donating many many hours of my own time.

The site had everything about the conference, including the schedule (updated regularly to reflect room changes and cancelled events), maps of every location, a list of exhibitors and maps to their booths, web cameras throughout the conference area with time lapse videos of each day, relevant news, a photo gallery, a blog, a bulleting board, local weather, a fully functional search engine, and even some neat visualizations of the events at the conference. It was all written from scratch this year in a few weeks. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to test as much as I wanted, or do some things that would have made it more friendly for mobile devices, but that didn’t stop the praise from coming. I had people telling me how useful it had been for them, how they had made it their home page for the conference, how we should be marketing this to other conferences, how they’d love for me to work at their company (including “You’re the one responsible for InfoStar? You want a job at _____? I’m serious.”). Overall the feedback was great, the site worked out fairly well, and people are more enthusiastic about it. Of course, I focus a lot on what didn’t work out so well, what I could have done better, what still needs to be done, and all the other healthy pessimistic thoughts.

If you’d like to see the site, it’s still up: http://infostar.supercomputing.org/sc06|SC06 InfoStar site

The trip to Tampa was interesting. I’ve been trying to explore different places to find one where I’d like to live, so I was excited to see Florida. By the end, though, I wasn’t disappointed to leave. I was in downtown Tampa, and there were absolutely no places to eat. Each evening I tried walking in a different cardinal direction, and by the time I found a place and returned, I had burned more calories walking than I took in, so I was a very hungry boy for a while.

I ventured to Ybor city one night, which was a very positive experience. I found a sushi bar, and as I was about to leave, a loud trio entered and quickly became my friends for the night. We enjoyed some free saki from the owner, then headed over to a fashion/art show a few blocks away, where my new friends knew the live band, and I got to do some swing dancing. Then we had some aloe juice at a jamaican stand (it tasted like liquid salad) before heading to an irish pub. We hopped in a cab and went to a club by the airport, where we eventually separated for the night and I headed home.

The vendor parties were a lot of fun, too. The Microsoft party supposedly cost about a million dollars (but that’s just rumor), and they had a few places to dance. During the conference, people would occasionally recognize me as ‘the dancer,’ which is always pretty cool.

Tampa, though, is definitely not the place for me. It takes a long time to get anywhere. Looking at a map, you’d think I couldn’t have missed the ocean, but apparently it would have been a 45 minute cab ride to get there, so that didn’t happen. I also had a hard time getting used to hearing all the southern accents. As a native to the Northwest, I’m accustomed to clear speech and this was not. Everything was flat, too. There was no profile to the land, but that might just be because it was all underneath concrete.

So overall, it was a good experience, and I did good work on the InfoStar project, making the lab look good and getting some publicity. I got paid to tour a city I’ve never seen before (well, if you consider how many unpaid hours I donated and the number of hours I’m behind at work because of the trip, I actually paid quite a bit for it).