Today's blog post is "Quit My Day Job"
http://www.kellbot.com/2009/04/quit-my-day-job/

In case you weren't aware, I have a pubilc blog called kellbot! at www.kellbot.com
Starting last week I am trying to post something every day. Partially to get back into the habit or writing, and partially to keep me accountable for what I'm doing each day.

I promise not all the posts will be about Tinysaur. I've just been doing a lot of t-saur stuff lately.

Here are this weeks entries if you missed them:

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/packaging-evolution/
The evolution of Tinysaur's packaging over the last few months

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/php-templating-with-mod_rewrite/
A PHP templating system I set up

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/not-yo-mommas-craft-fair/
Recap of the craft show I did Saturday

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/free/
On promos and samples

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/spelling-fail/

http://www.kellbot.com/2009/03/todays-wooden-displays/
My newest wooden Tinysaur display show-off

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that my Tinysaurs will be featured in WIRED UK, a print magazine which is launching April 2. And I'm doing a craft show at the end of this month which will be easy (its in Jersey!) and fun, and Sara and I have applied to two more in April and May.

The bad news is that Tinysaur sales are dead compared to last month, so things are running a little lean (don't worry mom and dad, Chris makes sure I eat well anyway). There's a lot on the horizon, but it's a little dry right now.

In any job, you have some days where you don't get much done, even though you have a lot to do. Those days can be particularly hard to swallow when you're self-employed and it's your own time you're wasting. Today was one of those days.

Days like today really get me down. I have this long list of to-dos but looking at it seems like a moibus strip of tasks which are blocked by other things, which are in turn blocked by other tasks. Its hard to get ahead. I end up reloading Twitter 8000 times as though it is going to magically organize me. Of course it only makes things worse. I fall into this cycle of non-motivation. Everything seems unattainable. And I start procrastinating the little tasks along with the bigger, blocked ones.

Days like today also make me realize that I wouldn't be able to do this without Chris. This being the whole self-employment thing. It's so easy to get discouraged, there seem to be so many barriers. Chris is really good at distracting me from my self-doubt so I can get excited about things and get work done. We're around each other all day most days, and I'd say he's a good influence on me.

Unfortunately for today, Chris is in California Seattle so it's just me and my self doubt, hanging out and hitting 'reload'. And so I'm sitting here whining about how I miss him and thinking "wow this is sort of pathetic, what would I do if he wasn't around?" And after thinking about it for a while, the answer is "something else."

But I really like what I'm doing now, so I hope he sticks around for a while. And I'm not sure if it's because he's done this before or what, but Chris always seems to have a much more optimistic view of the whole "start your own company and run with it" thing. So I'm going to try to work past today and get a fresh start on things tomorrow.

I made a lot of to-do lists.

Edit: Chris is in Seattle, not California. I forget that there is a part of the west coast that is not CA.

I tried to make a tiny city on a ring. It came out OK but I'm still figuring out what scale works with what materials. Also, balsa is useless; never use it for anything.

I have been using a program called QCAD to draw out the designs, and its been kinda frustrating. The documentation for it is terrible. Bre found a guy who does tutorials which has helped a little, but its overall a slow process. In some ways its similar to Rhino, which I learned in college, but the UI is totally different and its annoying. I'm debating whether to reinstall XP on my laptop (it has Ubuntu right now) just so I can use Illustrator instead. Because apparently I have forgotten how much I hate Illustrator.

People have asked me to sell Tinysaurs on Etsy. I'm debating it... I sort of hate selling things on Etsy though. Not because of Etsy, but because its just a pain to ship stuff now that I don't work in a shipping warehouse.

I need to start using / posting this stuff on my public blog but I am too lazy.

Its coming...

Things are generally awesome.

Everyone,

I think it is important that all girls know... when your bra makes a little line on your boob and above it you have breast matter spilling out, bubbling over... that is not "sexy cleavage." That is DoubleBoob, and it means your bra is too small.

Bras are supposed to support your boobs, not mold them into new and exciting shapes. Also, DoubleBoob is not exciting. It is gross.

Taken at 8:08 on 8/8/08

Oh yes, we are the biggest nerds in all of Brooklyn

Woo, my classes at the hackerspace are officially scheduled!

I'm teaching Beginning PHP & DIY circuit board etching. They're on the class list and everything.

ALSO

Adam brought me a large steel sphere. It's 12" in diamater. Not quite as big as the original plan but... it actually works!

This means that Katamari progress can continue.

Also I accidentally got 100 infrared LEDs instead of 50. Do you know how many wiimote projects I can do with that many LEDs?

After being frustratingly stalled for a few days, there was Katamari controller progress!

The digital potentiometers weren't... potentiomiating. At all. They were just turning things on and off in an uncontrolled fashion. I checked the hardware and the code like 40 times and nothing change anything. Except for the time when I shorted out the chip and it got hot.

So finally Dave C offered to look at it, and we went through all the pins on the chip to make sure I wired them up correctly. It turns out I needed pull-up resistors on the unused data input pins, to keep them from reading things incorrectly. So 2 $0.01 resistors later it was working perfectly.

Now I have a circuit that fades LEDs in/out based on how fast I move a mouse. Next step is to do some math to get the values the PS2 is looking for, and then the hard part: building a giant trackball.

I'm actually most skeptical about the physical apparatus. The mouse needs to be pretty much touching the ball to track correctly, and I'm worried it won't spin freely enough. I also think maybe the yoga ball is too light. But I can't think of any other large, heavier spheres I could obtain cheaply.

I need to document this project, maybe I'll work on that some on my time off. I need to learn how to write electrical diagrams. I should scan/post the ones in my notebook. They're really hillariously ghetto.

Also 50 infrared LEDs just showed up. So I think my next project is going to involve wiimote hacking. Oh and learning C for real. T_T

So made of win:

Bre is playing dance dance revolution, eating pizza, and singing "Video killed the radio star" all at the same time.

I find it terrifying to be in front of a video camera, but Bre and his friends are all pretty serious video people, so I guess I need to just get used to it.

Here's a video about the knitting machine which they shanghaied me into doing.



Originally posted by Eric at NYC Resistor.

Edit: I am perpetually forgetting to close quotation marks. I wonder what that says about me.

So it looks like someone tried to steal (or at least fuck with) my scooter.

The ignition was on, the fuel was on (but not the choke), and the gas cap was off. The spark plug was totally fouled, although that's not really surprising since it's been sitting since November.

I put a new plug in and it sparks, and the engine acts like it wants to start up (compression, woo!), but it just won't. I kicked it until my leg was tired. Sometime this week I'm going to stop at a gas station on the way home from work and get a container of gas, and see if it starts any better with a full tank. I'm really worried that water got into the gas tank. It was under cover, and the seat protects it a little, but still. That would suck a lot.
And the fuel tap being left on means there's a good chance the carb float is screwed up, or the carb is just full of gunk in general. Which would suck because I don't even know how to get at it.

It's kinda cold and rainy today, so I don't really have a lot of incentive to fix my scooter anyway.

Vintage scooters FTL.

According to Stuff White People Like, white people like Mos Def.

I like Mos Def.

Therefore, I am white.

Worked on the knitting thing some more today... made the maths a little less bad (but not much). I get the best results with the image converter if I first edit the image in photoshop and use a halftone filter on it.

Biggest accomplishment was adding links to save the whole image as a jpeg / save the chart as a text file.



Gonna put that on (yet another) DS case. But in red/black.

One of the things I'm working on right now is a tool to make knitting charts, which is even more exciting because Bre has a friend who hacked her knitting machine to interface with a PC.

http://fishtop.com/code/knitting/index.php

Right now it reads from either ASCII notation that I made up for it (you can write the chart in a text file and then preview what the knit fabric will look like, or just type in stuff) or attempt to convert an image file into a knitting chart. It does OK on black and white line drawings and horribly at everything else.

Things I am particularly proud of:
* You can put in the gauge of the fabric and it will adjust the image / stitch size accordingly
* Images are rectangular. Knit stitches are not, they are V shaped. When generating the fabric preview, the script takes into account the color of the stitch before/after (meaning that there are really 8 images for the two different colors)

Things I still have to do:
* I want to be able to save the chart as a text file, but haven't figured out a handy way to do that yet
* There's no way to set a target size, meaning if you put in a high res image it will give you a giant chart
* The image conversion maths are really crappy. I should make the more smarter.
* Sometimes there's an extra row or column of stitches that doesn't belong there

After my mildly successful first attempt at a case for my DS, I made a 2nd one. Except I didn't measure this one as well so it is a wee bit too big. The eyeballs act as a closing mechanism, as shown here:



I meant to include a place to hold games, but I forgot. 3rd time's the charm I guess.

There is a particularly annoying meme going around about what a spoiled rich kid you were/weren't. It's written by some fancypants professors (supposedly) which apparently makes it more relevant. It takes up a lot of space and is boring.

To save you from the boredom, I'll just go ahead and tell you that I was an overprivileged white kid.


Dear everyone: the privileges you had as a kid have nothing to do with what kind of person you are. What's more important is whether or not you let your over/under/just rightly privileged youth turn you it a total douchebag, which I think transcends class. Its the true American dream: Anyone can grow up to be a douchebag.

So after reading this on Engadget, I decided to try to make a functioning speaker out of craft foam.

Picked up some magnet wire from Radio Shack and after a little trial and error with the coil, managed to get two working speakers, pictured here:



One is blue and one is purple. The blue one has much better frequency range, I'm not sure if it's because the blue craft foam is thinner or because I used about twice as much wire on the coil. I was not very scientific about it.

Tomorrow I will make one that has a cone-shaped cone, and see if that changes anything.

Side view (click on it to see notes about what everything is):


Upside down:


Its pretty quiet, so tomorrow we're going to try it with an amp. I blew them out a couple times by hooking them up to a battery. The cone (shutup I know its not conical) jumped off the magnet. It was neat.

OH MY GOD

HOW HAVE I NEVER KNOWN ABOUT THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL?



HOW COULD SOMETHING THIS BAD AND RELATED TO STAR WARS EXIST WITHOUT ANYONE TELLING ME?