woolrich follow-up

In 'woolrich', I mentioned the strange telephone call I received on my unlisted home number from the ACLU.

I called my local telco to try to get a really unlisted number the old fashioned way -- by disconnecting service. Unfortunately, my home DSL (from Megapath) comes in on the same circuit. Cancelling service would interrupt my DSL.

Megapath offers 'naked' DSL that doesn't require dial tone service. I signed up for some of that and waited for the telco man to come and drag a new line to my house. They said they would turn up

from 8am to 5pm on the appointed day and that my presence was required. I sat no more than four feet from the door during the entire window and got no telco love.

I can't stand to do it again and so I have to unwind the entire Megapath transaction, cancel the existing DSL, and cancel the phone line just to be done with this nuisance. I may try the cable folks.

I was on the fence about it until the next day. Planned Parenthood called the same unlisted number looking for some year end bucks. It is possible, I suppose, that Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are really two faces of the same giant liberal conspiracy and that I've tricked them into revealing it. I think it is more likely that they share an outsourced call center or databases. I think I've lost for good in any case.

resolve

I'm starting in on my New Year's resolutions a little early this year. One is to monetize you readers even harder.

For the curious among you, the core blog concept of negative product reviews that happen only past the sell-by date of the merchandise is not the path to easy riches. I've decided to stick with it and stay true to my principles. You deserve it.

Here's my offer to gadget manufacturers: Are you bringing a new product to market? Does your competitor's product suck? If so, send me one of their boxes for review! My unusually modest fee is negotiable and may be waived completely if your competitor's widget is bad enough to spark a CPSC recall while in my care. No Microsoft products, please.

host

I spent most of Sunday cleaning up after the previous day's holiday open house. Successful hosts know that party gifts take many forms. These range from a plate of delicious homemade cookies prepared in advance to more spontaneous gifts -- a cashmere coat or gently used handbag laden with prescription drugs, valuable photo identification, and other holiday treats.

When the wreckage was cleared away, I found my favorite party gift was a small FPGA board tucked away in the bottom of a hall closet. It came with a delicious lack of documentation or provenance. It was still in its festive red sparkfun holiday gift box.

The board itself is decked out for the season with festive red soldermask. I remember when all the cool kids used to do that. The board is a 'Papillo One' from www.GadgetFactory.net. It must be the cutest FPGA board I have ever seen.

Papillo One (with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo credit: Your correspondent

Some hobbyists like evaluation boards. I'm not one of them. Where others see discount eval boards as a natural extension of the free sample heroin/semiconductor mentality, I see vendor condescension and lock-in. I think that one of the biggest differences between the original Arduino and an eval board with the same microprocessor (like Atmel's STK500) is that the Arduino is marketed to you as a product that makes sense in its own right. No pesky questions about what the size of your target market is and which industry you work in and the number of employees in your basement workshop.

I actually like the Arduino IDE. For me, though, it's enough to distribute the boards without a crippled evaluation version of a larger and more full featured crippled C compiler.

Just as the Arduino is really not very different from a number of small AVR boards, the Papillo One
is not very different from some other small boards for the Xilinx Spartan 3e. I have only spent a few minutes with the board so far. It's 'killer app' appears to be the included AVR-alike from softcores and supporting patches to let the board be used with the Arduino IDE.

For me, the hardware differences between boards makes less difference than the concept of the board. This board is for fooling around with, not for selling the Spartan 3E. I think that's a good thing.

A full review will come as soon as I can get this to replace one of the Arduinos driving my Christmas lights.

golden age

It is hard to not be nostalgic for the golden age of air travel after a visit to the Airline History Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. I'd share a hyperlink with you but the Blogger interface for iPad is so poor that it doesn't seem to support embedding links. Thank heavens Blogger supports the camera directly. That way I can just take a picture of the URL for you and save you a bunch of trouble. This must be the multi-media I've been hearing so much about.

An URL
Photo Credit: Your correspondent

The Museum's centerpiece is a beautiful Lockheed Super Constellation. Everything about that plane is gorgeous. I think Claire McCaskill, the senior senator from Missouri, must have visited recently. Her office put out a press release yesterday in the form of an open letter to the FAA administrator.


I would just go with a chant -- '2 4 6 8 10 / make flying fun again' and a fist pump. McCaskill singles out restrictions on electronic device usage and then rambles. I haven't read anything duller or less coherent since I proofread my last post on smart homes.

Here's my favorite part:

"As you surely know, the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of many electronic devices during the full duration of a flight, while at the same time using such devices in increasing numbers. For example, a traveler can read a paper copy of a newspaper throughout a flight, but is prohibited from reading the same newspaper for major portions of the flight when reading it on an e-reader. The fear of devices that operate on electricity is dated, at best. Importantly, such anachronistic policies undermine the public's confidence in the FAA, thereby increasing the likelihood that rules of real consequence will be given too little respect. The absurdity of the current situation was highlighted when the FAA acted earlier this year to allow tablet computers to replace paper flight manuals in the cockpit, further enhancing the public's skepticism about the current regulations."

This is a damning criticism of our current copyright rules by a senior lawmaker. Progress! Why should it be a big deal that you want to read some text on an electronic device of your choosing? Sadly, the topic is not copyright reform.

Here's a new argument based on McCaskill's reasoning...

---

the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of fire during a flight. The fear of fire is dated, at best. The absurdity of the current situation was highlighted when the FAA acted earlier this year to continue to allow fiery jet engines to be used during every phase of flight.

A traveler can read a paper copy of a newspaper throughout a flight, but is prohibited from filling the same newspaper with tobacco, rolling it up, and smoking it for major portions of the flight.

---

The ashtrays at every seat in the Constellation speak to Lockheed's position on fire in the cockpit.

I get it. Newspapers are dying. Easing them out of the airline cabin, a traditional stronghold, is really an act of mercy. Still, McCaskill's position is absurd. The existing rules, sane or not, are not actually about newspapers.

I welcome new and better rules. Here's what I fear from McCaskill's office:

The Omnibus Air Travel, Patent, and Copyright Reform Bill of 2013

Whereas the hoarding of Intellectual Property is the engine of our current prosperity and the principal basis of the new American Economy ...

Whereas airplanes are also powered by engines ...

...

... that neither the FAA nor the FCC nor any Executive Instrumentality shall make any rule restricting the freedom of air travelers to consume the properly licensed intellectual property of their choosing during any flight portion on any patented device whatever nor restrict their ability to contact a DRM licensing server of their content provider's choosing throughout flight.

...

smart waste

This week's ewaste is actually a grab bag of broken and obsolete junk from Smarthome.

Here's an old one: Anything with 'science' in the name isn't. I know few computer scientists who would disagree too strongly. Here are two more: Anything with 'open' in the name isn't. Run from anything with 'smart' in the name.

Smartphones seem to be thriving in spite of their name. Some things do. Not 'smart homes'.

I never really understood why large retailers private label otherwise popular products. I

recall the Sears Video Arcade II. This was a VCS-compatible box with bad controllers.

Casual users would never know that it wasn't a lame knock-off. It was actually a rebadged

Atari 2800. It wasn't cheaper than the VCS. Users were never quite sure that it would actually

play VCS games. Sears never offered a large collection of games for sale in stores anyway.

Sears has been rebranding power equipment for almost as long as they have been selling it. For years, they let shoppers in on the ground floor of home automation by rebadging X10 modules and switches. Sears wasn't alone. Stanley, Radio Shack, IBM, and others all slapped their labels on X10 products at one time or another. Only in the case of Radio Shack could this have been a pick-up for brand image. These products were not good.

X10 wall switches were especially bad. I've included a explanatory illustration. The fact that it required one was not good news. They advertise that it works with your standard switch plate. That was worth a mention. It made it easy to gloss over other details. It looked nothing like a wall switch. It didn't work in a very obvious way. It didn't feel good.

Classic X10 wall switch (explained)
Photo credit: X10.com
Used without permission

The X10 protocol itself may have been dodgy and the X10 wall switches may have been confusing. I never had any actually die. Though they are now more than thirty years old, they are still compatible with X10 controllers. They are still for sale on Sears' site though they are now sold through sears.com by X10 itself.

In 1992, a California company decided to actually wear the 'smart' mantle. It seems to be working. smarthome.com is still in business. Smarthome did and does sell X10 gear through a catalog and over the web. They eventually decided that there was a market for an X10-compatible wall switch that looks and feels like something a human would understand. I owned about a dozen of these. The last came out today.

Smarthome sold these as 'switchlinc' switches. They were available as dimmers for dimmable lights and relay switches for other loads. They improved on X10 gear in form and function. Not only were they operable without training, they had EEPROM instead of plastic code wheels. They were (nominally) bi-directional. Smarthome sold a related product called a 'keypadlinc'. These have six or eight buttons to trigger home automation actions. Some of these modules include a local module and can use some buttons to control a local load.

In my experience, these smarthome X10 modules were much less reliable than their actual X10 predecessors. Of the dozen or more that I owned, all failed in less than eight years. Light switches are not supposed to fail.

I recently installed several new switchlinc modules from Smarthome as replacements. These speak a new protocol 'Insteon' devised by Smarthome. I have been using these newer Insteon switches since about 2008 and have had no failures so far though I am on my third Insteon modem.

Wall (switches) of Shame
Photo credit: Your correspondent

X10 would never have appealed to me without a computer interface. I think I have owned almost every X10 computer interface ever produced. I had the original CP-290. I connected it to a Commodore 64. It was terrible. For a time I regretted only being able to throw it away once. I got another chance when I got a second CP-290 to connect to an IBM PC clone. I had the TW523 two-way interface module. That was reliable but very timing sensitive. I got an X10 CM11a bi-directional computer interface directly from the company and I wrote some bad Linux software for it. That flaky module had several flaky variants. I tried all of them.

X10 actually managed to get an interface right some years later with the CM17A 'firecracker'. This was a cheap and nasty little RF dongle that sat on your serial port. It transmitted commands to one of the old fashioned X10 RF bridges used by remote controls. The device itself was reliable. It absolutely could not hang -- partly because it had no state to speak of. Driver programs had to bit-bang X10 RF packets

to it directly through DTR and RTS.

I threw away modems because they died or they sucked. I have only recently started throwing away modems because they became obsolete and I'm not happy about it.

I ordered a new Insteon appliance module this year to replace a twenty five year old X10 appliance module that controlled my Christmas tree for many years. I plugged it in and tried to pair it with my Insteon modem and 'Indigo' controller software. Failure. I bought an upgrade to Indigo. Failure. Failure with a better message that told me my modem was not new enough to control the firmware on the appliance module.

Huh? The appliance module has been basically sorted out as a concept for thirty four years.

I bought a new modem from Smarthome and life appears OK for THIS MOMENT. Insteon was obviously never fully baked if we're still having a think about how to build an appliance module or a modem capable of talking to one.

I now have a 2413 modem. It appears to be working with Indigo. It uses a reliable FTDI USB to serial bridge. The FTDI drivers for Mac are mature. I just replaced a 2414U modem. I have no idea why it had to go. How this thing couldn't speak to a christmas tree is bafflement incarnate. It weighed 280g! It should speak with gravitas! The 2414U had earlier been replaced by a 2412U modem. I don't know what modem lockup problem that was intended to solve but I don't think it took. The 2414U went back into service when the 2412U died. The modem instability may have been caused by one of the last of the original switchlinc switches on its way out.

I tried the 2412. I tried the 2414. I'm hoping the 2413 is the Goldilocks modem. I'll put my numerological superstition aside and I'll keep you posted.

I'm more concerned about upgrade's evil handmaiden obsolescence. With each modem upgrade, I unplug a box from the wall and throw it away. I haven't yet been told that I need to replace an Insteon wall switch because it is obsolete. This most recent appliance module experience makes me think that day is coming.

carbon

It's hard for the laity to know just what to make of Curiosity's carbon find on the red planet.

I flew into DC for business for a couple of days and caught this view of the next Mars rover in front of NASA headquarters.

If this treatment is anything to go by, I think contamination is likely.

Perhaps this is not the next rover. This may simply be a re-purposed runner-up from the design competition for the current mission. In that case, Curiosity killed the (bob)cat.

A future Mars rover? Notice the NASA 'meatball' just below the flag.
Photo credit: Your correspondent

grout

My childhood dreams are reduced to a grout color.

Pre-mixed grout
Photo credit: Your correspondent