A Few CyanogenMod 7.1 on Nook Color Fixes

Posted on November 21, 2011 by brousch

I’m currently running CyanogenMod 7.1 on my Barnes & Noble Nook Color and I absolutely love it. I feel like I’m living in the future when I use this thing. However it’s not perfect, and I have rectified a couple of annoyances that I should document here for anyone else with these problems who should wander by.

Old Android Market installed

I’m running CyanogenMod 7.1 on both my Droid phone and my Nook Color tablet, but for some reason one of them had an old version of the Android Market. Unfortunately I can’t remember now which one was stuck on an old version. I ended up slogging through the interwebs until I found a working up-to-date APK for the Android Market. I’ve stashed a copy of the Android Market 3.1.5 APK in my Public Dropbox for anyone else who needs it.

Unable to install Google Earth app

Google Earth on Nook Color
For some reason the Android Market said I could not install the Google Earth app. I have no idea why. I ended up scouring the backwaters XDA and came upon an APK for it. This installed and is working well for me. I have placed a copy of the Google Earth APK in my public Dropbox for anyone else who needs it.

Weirdness in the Nook for Android app

Broken Nook for Android MagazinesWorking Nook for Android Magazines
I subscribed to Popular Science and National Geographic magazines while I was using the standard Nook Color operating system. After my upgrade to CM7.1 I could only download the first issue of each magazine because they all appeared stacked on top of each other. I finally stumbled on this CyanogenMod forum post which offered a few possible solutions.

To save you some reading, it looks like CM7.1 sets the Nook Color screen’s DPI to 160. The Nook for Android app assumes that the density is more than 160DPI, and this apparently causes the problem with the magazines stacking. I installed the free LCD Resolution app from the Android Market and used to set my resolution back to the default 169DPI. This fixed the problem.

Posted in android, tech, troubleshooting | 8 Comments

What I don’t Like About Apple

Posted on October 7, 2011 by brousch

Note: Most of this post was written before the death of Steve Jobs, but his demise and the outpouring of admiration for him and Apple was the impetus for me finishing it.

I have had a few people recently ask me why I don’t use my Macbook any more. I have answered those queries when they came up, but I’d like to put a few more of my thoughts and beliefs out there for future reference.

I was (and still am) a Linux user before I used Apple. The spirit of openness, sharing, freedom to use, and freedom from cost of the Linux ecosystem has had a big effect on my technical usage and community participation. I hate licenses – not so much because they cost money (everyone has the right to make a living) - but because they are an artificially-imposed annoyance whenever I have deal with a licensed program. The groups I run and participate in are genrally free of cost and are open for anyone to attend and contribute to.

I don’t actually hate Apple. In fact, I love a lot of their products. I have an old G4 PowerMac, a Macbook Pro, and there are a few iPods scattered around the house. These are some of the nicest computers and devices I’ve ever used. They’re stable, powerful, easy to use, and beautifully designed. I feel a psychological urge to use these things – kind of like an addiction. However I currently don’t use them and won’t buy another Apple product because I feel like a hypocrite when I do.

There are currently two big issues holding me back from buying and supporting Apple:

Software Patents – Apple is very aggressive when it comes to defending their software patents. I have a big problem with software patents and I try not to support companies that are actively making the situation worse. I think their lawsuits un-competitive and a huge waste of money and court resources that should be spent on more useful endeavors.
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/apple-receives.php

The Walled Garden of iOS – If you want to develop for the iPhone or iPad, you have to buy an Apple computer. And then you have to pay Apple $99/yr for the privilege of letting people install your app, assuming Apple approves of it. This creates a large barrier to entry for anyone that wants to casually play around with mobile development, especially for the underprivileged. I cannot support this artificially expensive and closed development model when free, open alternatives like Android exist.

There are also a few little things that annoy me about Apple products. These don’t keep me from using Apple, but they do help to keep me on Linux:

  • Inflexible interface – Use your interface the Apple way or you will be annoyed.
  • Half-assed support of open source – (GTK, fink/macports/homebrew, Python)
  • Expensive – You have to pay for pretty much any little add-on or program for OSX. Things that are free for Windows or Linux are often for-pay on OSX (VMWare Fuse vs VMWare Player)

I think software patents and the associated lawsuits are stifling innovation and progress, especially for developers not backed by big companies with a patent war-chest. This is holding all of us back from experiencing better technology and the freedom to use it how we want to.

I also think that the artificially closed and expensive iOS platform is not good for education, especially with regards to the underprivileged. Unless you have money, you can’t play in the iOS walled garden. This is not how we create a level playing field.

So, until these issues are fixed, I’m going to try to fight my Apple urges.

Posted in evil-list, rant, tech | 3 Comments

An Idea for Improving ArtPrize Voting

Posted on September 30, 2011 by brousch

The Idea: Check in via mobile at each piece of art you visit

Most everyone agrees that the top 10 winners of ArtPrize 2011 are terrible. Why is this? I think it’s because the voting is so unrestricted. You can vote for anything and as many things as you want to. Heck, there’s no attempt to even determine whether you’ve actually seen the exhibit you’re voting for or against.

I think checking in at each exhibit would greatly improve the quality of voting at ArtPrize.

This could be accomplished by a few methods, from simple to more complicated:

  • Typed in code (can be abused by someone posting a list of all codes)
  • QRCode (can be abused by someone posting a pic of all QRCodes)
  • QRCode + GPS check
  • RFID (need special equipment)

Then you can do things like:

  • Your votes are weighted based on how many exhibits you actually visited
  • Give a maximum number of votes based on how many exhibits were visited (1 for every 10 exhibits)
  • Restrict voting only to exhibits you’d actually visited

This would give attendees:

  • A convenient list of the art they’d seen over the voting period (it’s hard to search site now)
  • A short list to help decide what to vote on (if restricted # of votes)

Statistics from this could be used to determine things like:

  • How big of an effect venue has
  • Whether the voting window is large enough for people to see everything

New types of prizes and games also become possible:

  • Souvenir or virtual badge for people who visit 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% of exhibits
  • Badge for people who visit all of a type of exhibit (paintings, sculpture, etc)
  • Badge for people who visited everything in a venue
  • Most raw votes (current)
  • Highest % of votes by visitors
  • Most visited exhibit
  • Most visited venue
  • Venue-specific prizes like:
    • Most votes at a venue
    • Highest % of votes at a venue
So what do you think? Feel free to chime in with your ideas and opinions below.
Posted in fluff, rant | 4 Comments

Catalyst Radio Interviews GRWebDev on WYCE

Posted on June 27, 2011 by brousch

A few weeks ago Ross Hunter and I were interviewed by Denise Cheng on WYCE‘s Catalyst Radio. We talked about CoNGA West Michigan, the Grand Rapids Web Development Group, and the tech scene in Grand Rapids.

A link to Catalyst Radio’s archive copy of interview is coming soon. In the meantime, you can listen to these recordings I made of the interview.

Full Episode of Catalyst Radio Interview with GRWebDev including News and Music (27MB)

Catalyst Radio Interview with GRWebDev (Interview Only) (13MB)

I was happy with how the interview turned out. Denise did a great job of cleaning it up and making us look good. My thanks to The Rapidian, WYCE, Catalyst Radio, and Denise Cheng for having us on!

Posted in grwebdev, internet, tech | 1 Comment

Machine Vision at GRPUG

Posted on June 1, 2011 by brousch

The vast majority of the software I write doesn’t interact with the physical world outside of a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. I think part of this is because I’m a lazy coder, and the digital world is so much easier to deal with – everything is a 1 or 0, True or False. There’s very little wiggle room or slop. In the real world, things are analog and messy. Nothing is ever really perfect, so I’m never sure if something is done or correct. I think another reason for the digital focus of my work is that it deals mostly with things that are already in the computer. My programs generally deal with shuffling around or modifying pre-existing data. At any rate, there’s always a human sitting between the computer and meatspace, which is why I was so intrigued when GRPUG regular Dave Brondsema hooked us up with our recent guest presenter.

Nate Oostendorp is an Ann Arbor resident hanging out in Holland for the summer to pimp his new company Ingenuitas and the open source software on which it’s based. The company is creating SimpleCV, an easy to use Python wrapper around various other enigmatic open source machine vision libraries such as OpenCV. Their aim is to make it easy for anyone to hook a camera up to a computer and start using machine vision in their projects.

KinectNate took the GRPUG through some simple code examples for using SimpleCV and then gave us a demo using a Kinect plugged into his laptop to detect when something had moved or been occluded. It took some time and fiddling to calibrate – apparently it’s very picky about lighting – but eventually it worked. The trick is to understand some of the rather complicated algorithms behind motion detection to discover which one will work for your particular application. At this point, it’s a lot of trial and error to find a good algorithm and then to tune it to your environment.

SimpleCV has already made machine vision more accessible to the lay-programmer, but it still has a ways to go. There ‘s a lot of arcane, mathematical knowledge you need to understand to get the most out of the system, or you’ll spend a lot of time fiddling with options. Nate and Ingenuitas are really diving into the very technical machine vision community so they can create a simple system for the rest of us.trailer movie Get Out 2017

There were a lot of people interested in the presentation who couldn’t make it out to the GRPUG meeting, so I’m trying to arrange another presentation from Nate. My plan is to bring together the GRLUG, the WMLUG, and The Geek Group for big ole geekout around open source, Linux, and machine vision. Stay tuned to your favorite mailing list for details.

Posted in grlug, grpug, internet, linux, planet-ubuntu-users, python, tech, ubuntu-michigan, wmlug | Leave a comment