ben

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crochet, self sustainability

I was introduced to a really cool crochet pattern: http://heavens-hellcat.livejournal.com/807.html , I finally finished it, it took a few trial and errors for a beginner like me but the result is freaking awesome and I got a lot better at crochet-ing.

Nostrils:
8 sc in ring
FO leaving a bit of a tail.
8 sc in ring, then sc into any stitch on the first ring and go all the way around both of them, ending up with 16 st. Use the tail to sew up any gap between the 2 parts.

Head & Body:
16 sc
do the following reductions at the middle top and middle bottom of the nose
14 sc
14 sc
12 sc
10 sc
do the next 4 increases at the top to create the head
14 sc
14 sc
14 sc
do the following decreases at the top
12 sc
10 sc
8 sc
8 sc
8 sc
increase by one stitch anywhere
9 sc
10 sc
10 sc
10 sc
11 sc
12 sc
do the next increase at the bottom to create the body
18 sc
18 sc
increase every 3rd stitch
24 sc
24 sc
24 sc
do the following increases at sides
26 sc
26 sc
26 sc
28 sc
28 sc
do the following reductions at the sides, but a bit randomly, or there will be a distinct line
26 sc
24 sc
22 sc
20 sc
18 sc
16 sc
14 sc
14 sc
12 sc x 11
11 sc x 3
10 sc x 3
9 sc x 3
8 sc x 4
7 sc x 10
6 sc
keep reducing every 2 st until the hole is too small to do any more
FO

Back legs (make 2):
6 sc in ring;
12 sc x 4
6 sc, dec 2, dec 2, dec 2 -> 9
9 sc
9 sc
6 sc, inc 2, inc 2, inc 2 -> 12
1 sc, inc 2, 1 sc, inc 2, 1 sc, inc 2, 1 sc, inc 2, 1 sc, inc 2, 1 sc, inc 2, -> 18
18 sc
18 sc
3 sc, dec 2, dec 2, 4 sc, dec 2, dec 2, dec 2, 1 sc -> 13
2 sc, dec 2, dec 2, 2 sc, dec 2, 1 sc, dec 2 -> 9
2 sc, dec 2, 2 sc, dec 2 -> 7
keep reducing every 2 st until the hole is too small to do any more.

Front legs (make 2):
5 sc in ring
10 sc x 4
6 sc, dec 2, dec 2 -> 8
8 sc x 6 rounds
keep reducing every 2 st until the hole is too small to do any more.

Spikes on back (make a long as needed):
ch 3, sc into 2nd ch from hook, hdc into 3rd ch from hook, ch1

Wings (make 2):
ch 16
skip 1st ch, 3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 2, turn
7 hdc, 5 sc, 3 ss, ch1, turn
3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 3, turn
skip 1st ch, 2 ss (to make claws), 7 hdc, 5 sc, 3 ss, ch1, turn
3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 2, turn
7 hdc, 5 sc, 3 ss, ch1, turn
3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 3, turn
skip 1st ch, 2 ss (to make claws), 7 hdc, 5 sc, 3 ss, ch1, turn
3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 2, turn
7 hdc, 5 sc, 3 ss, ch1, turn
3 ss, 5 sc, 7 hdc, ch 3, turn
skip 1st ch, 2 ss, 15 sc
Then sc along the base of the wing and along the other side, ch3, turn, miss 1st ch, 2 ss to make last claw.
FO leaving tail to secure the last claw to the rest of the wing.

Ears:
Ch 6, turn
skip 1st st, sc, dc, sc, ss.
Leave the last ch and ss up the other side of the ear to the tip.
FO

Completing your dragon:
Sew it all together!

*** this pattern was slightly adapted (made a bit simpler) from http://heavens-hellcat.livejournal.com/807.html , all credit due to heavens_hellcat ***

I.T., maniacal paranoia

I have recently acquired 5 Foscam FI8918W ip cameras for monitoring my house.

While this may seem like a step towards wearing a tinfoil hat, I have several reasons for doing so:

  • It’s a fun geek project that is a subset of a larger endeavor to wire my house (think remote control)
  • I love to know when the UPS guy dropped a package so I don’t have hundreds of dollars worth of electronics sitting on my front porch
  • I get to know how the freaking chicken get out of their cage
  • I get to know when the fucking raccoon is doing his patrol at night so I can shoot it in the face
  • I would like to do fast motion videos of the garden through the seasons
  • And yeah I’ll admit it, I like to keep an eye on stuffs

These little cams are absolutely great, some key features include: cat5 & wifi (wep, wpa, wpa2) network access, nightvision, pan 300 degrees, tilt 120 degrees, remote control & view. I wish I had bought a couple of outside ones though. The problem with most cameras is that they do night vision by shining some infrared LEDs, if your camera is inside pointing outside, the IR will get reflected by the window and the outside won’t be visible. I have yet to mess with the angles and such to try and fix that.

What an inside camera pointed at the outside looks like at night

The web interface for the cams is great, although not all the features are supported in browsers other than IE (for example sound, microphone and multicam) but video & remote control are fine.

If you want to record what the cams see, you’ll want a server on your network. In my case I use my Linux box and run the following script every hour:

[bash]pkill -9 wget
nohup wget http://<cam1_ip>/videostream.asf?user=<username>&pwd=<password> -O /cameras/cam1_`date +%F_%T`.asf > /dev/null 2>&1 &
nohup wget http://<cam2_ip>/videostream.asf?user=<username>&pwd=<password> -O /cameras/cam2_`date +%F_%T`.asf > /dev/null 2>&1 &
nohup wget http://<cam3_ip>/videostream.asf?user=<username>&pwd=<password> -O /cameras/cam3_`date +%F_%T`.asf > /dev/null 2>&1 &
nohup wget http://<cam4_ip>/videostream.asf?user=<username>&pwd=<password> -O /cameras/cam4_`date +%F_%T`.asf > /dev/null 2>&1 &
nohup wget http://<cam5_ip>/videostream.asf?user=<username>&pwd=<password> -O /cameras/cam5_`date +%F_%T`.asf > /dev/null 2>&1 &
rm /cameras/cam*_`date –date="5 days ago" +%F_`*.asf[/bash]

This hourly rotation makes it convenient to quickly locate a file pertaining to an event you’re interested in. I am removing files older than 5 days but this can easily be adjusted on the last line. The directory where this all ends up is exported to a web server for remote access which yields the following results:

As you can see, an hour on 1 cam takes about 500M of disk space. This is because the cams do not have the processing power to compress the video stream, and this is fine by me, I don’t want them doing anything of the sort. The hourly cron could very well be augmented to encode new files but storage is cheap, my server not beefy and 5 days are more than enough for me.

As for making the cameras themselves available on the web, this frankly takes some guts. This is obviously a very critical device that you do not want anybody to have access to. One could simply forward some ports on their routers and rely on the cam’s authentication mechanism (make sure to change the default of admin/<blank>…). I don’t want the cams to even face the world where they are susceptible to exploits and bruteforce attacks so I proxy their access through my web server. This allows me to restrict IP access (default deny of course). I am also able to keep an eye on the logs and in general adds a layer of protection.

Here is the .htaccess file that does this magic for one of the cams (you’ll need to have mod_proxy enabled)

[bash]Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://<cam_ip>/videostream.cgi?user=<username>&pwd=<password> [P][/bash]

Foscam made it really easy to mess with the cam, all of the options that are available through their web interface are also available through direct URL calls which makes it easy to integrate the camera functionalities in a script (like the recording above). I’ve even started writing my own web interface for semi-public access that allows for visual customization as well and very granular function control.

the following URLs can be appended with “&user=<username>&pwd=<password>” so as to authenticate directly.

  • http://<cam_ip>/snapshot.cgi gives you the current image
  • http://<cam_ip>/video.cgi gives you live video
  • http://<cam_ip>/live.htm gives you live video
  • http://<cam_ip>/set_misc.cgi?ptz_patrol_rate=20 lets you change the rotation speed of the motors.
  • http://<cam_ip>/set_misc.cgi?ptz_center_on_start=0 turns off the initial power-on rotation
  • http://<cam_ip>/set_misc.cgi?led_mode=2 disables the front status LED
  • http://<cam_ip>/reboot.cgi will reboot the cam
  • http://<cam_ip>/decoder_control.cgi?command=0&onestep=1 tilts up
  • http://<cam_ip>/decoder_control.cgi?command=2&onestep=1 tilts down
  • http://<cam_ip>/decoder_control.cgi?command=4&onestep=1 tilts left
  • http://<cam_ip>/decoder_control.cgi?command=6&onestep=1 tilts right
  • http://<cam_ip>/set_misc.cgi?ptz_auto_patrol_type=1 sets the patrol type, possible values: 0: none; 1: horizontal; 2: vertical; 3: horizontal + vertical
  • http://<cam_ip>/get_misc.cgi displays functional values
  • http://<cam_ip>/get_log.cgi displays access log
  • http://<cam_ip>/get_params.cgi displays configuration values

I’m very happy with them, they’re great products and fun to play with. One downside is their microphones which are pretty horrible but I don’t care much about sound. Here are a few pictures of them in action:

Inside cam pointed outside during the day

Nightvision in the chicken coop

[flv:http://ben.akrin.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/11/New-Project.flv 640 480]

miscellaneous

Here are the results of a small study to calculate the distance between words in english and other languages. The way the computation is done is by going through a list of basic english words, using the Google Translate API to get translations into other languages and finally computing a levenshtein between each English/translated pair of words. The final distance is an average.

This only looks at the spelling words, the next step is to look at their phonemes.

Feel free to use the datasets bellow and please let me know what you’re working on 🙂

language      distance from english
Swedish 63.88%
Danish 66.69%
Dutch 66.78%
French 69.31%
German 72.27%
Italian 76.89%
Spanish 82.14%
Albanian 88.61%
Croatian 90.74%
Estonian 91.45%
Polish 92.48%
Hungarian 102.2%
agriculture, self sustainability

With sub-zero temperatures just around the corner, it’s time to remove all the unripened fruits of our plants. Preserve will be made out of the green tomatoes.

img_0003 img_0012

and all that is left of the garden is a decrepit mass of dying plants img_0015

life in the U.S.

alg_jersey_shore_cast

I have a TV in a hotel I’m staying at so I thought I’d get caught up on popular culture. Needless to say the picture is rather grim: 24/7 news channels blowing everything out of proportion, incessant aggressive advertising and the few rather intellectual channels just aren’t very dense.

And then there’s MTV’s Jersey shore… To say that this show is stupid is far from enough. I remember a time when what came out of MTV was a message of provocative anti-conformity with for example Nirvana and Beavis & Butthead. Now even late at night it’s all about mindless consumerism, irresponsibility, self-importance and so much more frivolous shit.

But rest assured, the undermining of women that is present in most music videos nowadays is not in Jersey shore. This is due to the fact that the male characters are also dumb as lobotomized monkeys.

It’s painful to watch even just to make fun of.

life in the U.S.

Taken from Utah’s Hunter Education class:

bear_encounters

Bluff charge? Bears know how to lie?

So remember kids,

– grizzly: don’t even try, drop on the ground and try not to look too tasty.

badass-dude1

– black bear: FIGHT BACK!

tonight_you

agriculture, self sustainability

pict0015 img_0001 img_0010 pict0090Zucchinis, tomatoes, eggplants, salads, pickles, pumpkins, potatoes… et cetera. The garden has been a frank success this year and for the first time since we’ve been gardening.

We have more than enough vegetables for our consumption. We’re canning some of them and although they won’t last us a whole winter a little more effort next year will allow this.

We also have 6 chicken, get about 4 eggs a day and are thinking about a goat.

I feel like we’ve taken a huge step towards self sustainability.

miscellaneous

A while back I heard a show about the rise of methamphetamine in rural America. I didn’t make much of it until this trip. Across all the little towns we visited, signs of meth problems were blatant. While in Salt Lake some advertisement campaigns target meth, they are sporadic and other drugs are also addressed. In rural Montana & Idaho, they’ll paint anti-meth murals on the main town buildings. Meth signs are omnipresent, so are meth users to the more observant eye (not me).

I have to say I was pretty shocked by all this, I did not expect such a widespread and sustained presence. Rural America still has its well known charm but it seems to be struggling against the depravity left behind a drug strained social fabric.

20100729004

20100730008

20100730007

miscellaneous

This trip wouldn’t have lived up to it’s reputation without rain, cold & technical difficulties. While I had hoped that the later would not prevent progress, we did have to bring a trailer pretty far north to get Brandon’s bike back to Salt Lake. Upon arriving in Idaho falls we were met by a severe thunderstorm, we decided to spend the night there but the hotel was such a crap hole we said “fuck it” and loaded the second bike on the trailer and drove back to Salt Lake. This is not the return I had expected but we had to get home. And Nicole rocks for bringing the trailer all the way to Idaho Falls and putting up with the major driving that ensued, I’m in serious debt.

The trip was awesome, being back home is amazing, I fell like we’ve been gone for 2 months. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted to get out of it: a good break outside of my comfort zone and by that token there’s nothing like asphalt moving at 75 mph bellow your feet, wind in your face for hours, camping with wildlife & being far from home.

The grand total for the trip is 1534 miles (2469 kilometers), and we had to work for every mile.

On a side note, the pictures are lacking because of how hard it is to stop, unwrap & get the camera out every time we saw something noteworthy. Motorcycles aren’t great for photography and I now understand the use of helmet cams. So we mostly have shots of when we stopped for breaks. We have a few more pics on Brandon’s camera that I’ll upload later today.

miscellaneous



It’s been a rough day, Brandon’s bike wouldn’t start so we tried to push
start it, jump start it and finally we replaced the battery. This only took
us to Beavertail Hill (which I first missread as Beverley Hills). A major
"oh shit" moment followed. The alternator is probably busted, and we needed
to figure out a way to get back home. Brandon hitch-hiked to Butte MT, I
rode to Idaho Falls ID where Nicole joined me with the trailer. We got back
to Beavertail Hill (many hours north of Idaho Falls and picked up the bike.
We’re now headed back south, I’ll pick up my bike and keep going, Brandon
will drive back. It’s been an exhausting past couple of days. Limits have
been tested.

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