Authorizing Instagram Access to Twitter Account With Two Factor Authentication

I had some issues reauthorizing the Instagram app's access to my Twitter account because I have Twitter's two factor authentication turned on. The login page doesn't handle the authentication code Twitter sends me via SMS. 

The solution is to generate a temporary app password from Twitter. In the "Security and Privacy" settings, there's a "Generate app password" button. Use that instead of your normal Twitter password in the authentication page inside Instagram and it'll work.

Fixing "Makehuman is damaged" on Mac OSX

If you download MakeHuman for Mac OS/X and it won't open due to the error message:

"MakeHuman" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

The quick simple fix is to run the following from a Terminal session

xattr -rc /Applications/MakeHuman.app/

Update on Makerspaces / Hackerspaces in Tampa Bay

This week marks one year since we opened Tampa Hackerspace. It's a great time to take another look at other makerspace / hackerspace groups and efforts I know of in the Tampa Bay area.

Tampa Hackerspace (expanded)

The one I'm most excited about is Tampa Hackerspace, since I've been a part of it. We incorporated as Inspiration Labs in April 2013, had a lot of meetings, appointed a board, approved bylaws, did some team-building projects together, grew our community, and looked at a lot of real estate leads throughout the spring and summer. Finally in August 2013 we had a great opportunity to move into some space leased by CoWork Tampa. We got enough people together to join as members and we started paying rent there. We've grown consistently since then and have steadily turned into a fledgling hackerspace. We ran a successful $16,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign and have raised over $24,000 more through grants. We've purchased some equipment and lots more is just waiting on grant processing and the purchasing process. In June 2014 we moved to a new 4,000 square foot location near Westshore / Tampa Airport). We've now grown to over 50 paying members and hundreds have taken at least one of our classes. Not a bad start.

We keep growing our equipment but currently have three 3D printers, two Shapeoko CNC mills, a decent soldering/desoldering/rework electronics bench, a woodshop, welder, small vacuum former, sewing gear, and more. We're getting close to acquiring a laser engraver / cutter, which will be a big step. Update: Our laser cutter / engraver is now installed and running.

We run a pretty busy schedule of events and quite a few classes that are open to everyone - member or not. We run two "Open Make" open houses a week - Tuesday evenings and a special kids one most Sundays. Everything is scheduled through Meetup.

USF X-Labs (expanding?)

USF X-Labs is in a bit of a transition right now. I wish I knew more but my understanding is that they finally have a larger space on campus and some real backing to really grow into a campus makerspace. They've done some great projects and education already so I'm pretty excited to see them expand.

Innovation Lab at St. Petersburg College - Seminole (open)

The Seminole Community Library at the Seminole campus of St. Petersburg College now has a small but nicely equipped makerspace. My understanding is that it's open to SPC students and non-students with a Pinellas library card.

Pinellas Hack Shack (open)

Pinellas Hack Shack is a small but active space in Pinellas Park. They have a great mix of Linux/software hacking, especially to benefit charitable organizations and physical projects like woodworking.

MOSI IdeaZone FabLAB (open)

MOSI's FabLAB is still around and has a good set of gear available to members, including a laser cutter/engraver, 3D printers, a small plastic injection molding machine, a small CNC mill, a small wood shop, vinyl cutter, and embroidery machine. They offer classes for kids and adults. They are generally open from roughly 10-5 or 10-6 seven days a week, though they currently are open on Tuesday evenings for an "Open Make Night".

Community Innovation Center (back in planning)

The big news throughout the past year has been the Community Innovation Center (CIC), which was a collaboration between the John F. Germany Library in downtown Tampa and the non-profit Learning is for Everyone. After several delays, this finally fell apart in June 2014. The library space does live on as The Hive though and Learning is for Everyone has stated that they intend to still open a Community Innovation Center outside of the library.

The Hive (partially open)

The Hive is the new name for the John F. Germany Library makerspace. The CIC plan was for a 10,000 square foot facility with roughly a third of that set aside for makerspace-style workshops and the rest used for robotics center, meeting rooms, etc. I'm not certain if some of that plan will change going forward. They do have a video suite, I believe with cameras, editing gear, and a green screen wall. They also have I believe two MakerBot Replicator 3D printers which will hopefully become available for use soon. The last word I got was that the space is expected to officially open in October 2014.

Update: They had their grand opening Nov 15, 2014 and are now open. In addition to the two MakerBot Replicators, they also have a Shapeoko 2 CNC.

St. Pete Makers (coming soon)

St. Pete Makers is a growing group that is starting a makerspace in downtown St. Petersburg. Tampa Hackerspace helped give this a little push to get rolling but it's got some good momentum now. We're really hopeful that they can open a space in the next several months.

Sarasota Makerspace / Faulhaber Fab Lab (coming soon)

They've been through a rough journey but are back on track. The G.Wiz museum in Sarasota finally closed for good. All of the Fab Lab equipment was auctioned off but the Faulhaber family apparently repurchased most of their donations at auction and they will go back into a new makerspace in Sarasota at the Sarasota Science Center.

NakedMake (open?)

The unusual NakedMake in Land O Lakes is actually a fairly well-equipped space but hasn't really drawn a lot of people. I've heard (unconfirmed) that it is closing.

The Roosevelt 2.0 (closed)

The Roosevelt 2.0 closed in 2013 and hasn't reappeared as far as I know.

Hernando Makerspace (stalled?)

An effort to organize a makerspace in Hernando seems to have stalled.

New Port Richey Makerspace (dead?)

This effort to start a makerspace in New Port Richey seems to have died out though I keep hearing from people with interest in one.

Tampa Hackerspace: Full Speed Ahead

Exciting times at Inspiration Labs and the Tampa Hackerspace. We had a great turnout at last night's meeting, our first since committing to leasing space. We had about 30 people and a great mix of interests - info security to robotics to wearable technology to molded chocolates to cosplay to biotech. We spent a bit too long having everyone introduce themselves but it's so great to hear all the skills available and projects people are working on. We could fill 3 classes a week for the rest of the year just from the expertise in the room last night.

We took a lot of questions and I know a few didn't have great answers. Like I said at one point, it's going to be a bumpy ride over the next few months as we grow the space and figure things out. But I've never been more excited and more certain that we're on track for a great hackerspace - something that's long overdue in Tampa.

I don't really want to completely recap where we are in our plans because we'll be doing that on the Inspiration Labs blog shortly. But we will be leasing space at CoWork Tampa - the big open meeting room that we've been using. It is office / meeting space and can support the cleaner and quieter fabrication work. We are pursuing several options to handle the messier / noisier equipment like woodworking, welding, etc.

Our next steps are to build out the space a bit, starting with a few locking cabinets and workshop tables. We have a good array of donated / loaned equipment that we will be moving to the space as soon as we have storage for it. We have a group working hard to prepare a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a few key pieces of equipment - starting with a 3D printer and a laser cutter / engraver. We will be sorting through the class options and will be offering more classes soon.

I'm really looking forward to looking back at this post sometime next year and remembering when this hackerspace was just 30 people in a room. Just a few months ago it was 3 people talking at the Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire.

Nexus 7 4.3 OTA update failing because of /system/bin/debuggerd

When I went to flash my rooted but stock Nexus 7 with Android 4.3, the update was failing because the /system/bin/debuggerd was not the version it expected. This is apparently because stickmount does some tricky stuff with debuggerd in order to work. You get an error like this: "assert failed: apply_patch_check("/system/bin/debuggerd","1ed6f..."

I was able to fix this and get 4.3 installed. Since I couldn't find a walkthrough for this, here's what I pieced together in case others have the same problem.



First, you need the right debuggerd file. For the 4.3 update (coming from 4.2.2), you can get a copy from this XDA thread (post #4 by tiggggr).

Now to get it in the right place. There are a few ways to do this. I used adb but it can probably be done with most file explorer apps. First copy the debuggerd.rename.zip you downloaded onto your device somewhere:

adb push debuggerd.rename.zip /sdcard/debuggerd-4.2.2

Then you need to be able to write to the system partition, stop the debuggerd, make a backup if you want, then copy the file:

adb shell
shell@android:/ $ su
shell@android:/ # busybox mount -o remount,rw -t auto /system
shell@android:/ # stop debuggerd
shell@android:/ # cp /system/bin/debuggerd /sdcard/debuggerd-backup-old-bad-version
shell@android:/ # cp /sdcard/debuggerd-4.2.2 /system/bin/debuggerd
shell@android:/ # sha1sum /system/bin/debuggerd*
a2323a0c8e245e3879d6b8beff6b2c4802045271  debuggerd
df2e705da097e4d535b4f4d98fab3bd76601e76c  debuggerd.backup

I already had a backup copy of debuggerd in my /system/bin and you can see that now debuggerd has the right sha1 hash so the install will continue.

I had to do a similar thing to restore my build.prop from a backup on my device:

root@android:/system # cp /mnt/shell/emulated/0/build.prop.bak build.prop

[Update] Here is a copy of my build.prop that matches what the install script expects: build.prop

shell@grouper:/mnt/shell/emulated/0 $ sha1sum build*
48f7593c2ff2fa85a147639fd7b77c3bc0607249  build.prop.bak


Now to get root back...

[Update]
Getting root back on my Nexus 7 was easy enough that I didn't mention it earlier, but a few people have asked. I pieced together the steps from this Google+ post and part of this XDA thread into hopefully a clearer walkthrough, if this helps anyone. You could use TWRP instead of CWM, but CWM worked fine. Note that this is for the WiFi Nexus 7 (grouper) and there are different downloads for the GSM / 3G version (tilapia).

1. Download SuperSU from here and copy it (I used adb push) to the Nexus 7
adb push ~Downloads/UPDATE-SuperSU-v1.43.zip /sdcard/
2. Download the latest CWM recovery from here
3. Flash CWM recovery:
fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.2.3-grouper.img
4. Reboot into CWM recovery and pick the "recovery" option
5. Flash the UPDATE-SuperSU-v1.43.zip file from /sdcard
6. When the device reboots, if it asks if you want to disable flashing stock recovery, answer No.

You should have root back.

[Update]
If, like me, you have the same issue updating to JWR66Y from JWR66V, here is a forum post with the right debuggerd.

I also had a permissions error (set_perm: some changes failed) but following this post, I unrooted before applying the update (using CWM) and it worked.

The New Flickr

The new Flickr changes are a nice step, but very late in the game. I gave up on them two years ago and migrated to Google - Picasaweb at first but now that's been assimilated into the Google+ brand. I'll probably try uploading some new stuff to Flickr because 1 terabyte of full resolution photos is a huge carrot. But...
I went to look for their desktop apps to upload photos and they're still around, unchanged since 2009. Not one single update or bug fix in FOUR years. That's the Flickr I left.
I tried to use the new Android app and I couldn't log in. Looking through the app reviews, plenty of other people had the same problem. That's the Flickr I left.
I tried the Windows Phone app, but it also just errors out logging in. The reviews are full of people having the same issue. The app hasn't been updated in 15 months. That's the Flickr I left.
I tried the iOS app but it hasn't really changed, despite having an update published today. At least I was able to log in. It still isn't a universal app, so it doesn't really support the iPad. That's the Flickr I left.

Tampa Bay "Geek" Calendar

I migrated my Tampa Bay "Geek" Calendar to a Google Calendar. Now it should be a little easier for me to keep updating it and much easier for people to subscribe to it.

Again, I can't catch every event in the area, but I'll try to add all the more unusual and non-recurring events I find. There will always be more Meetups and User Groups than I can cover.

Using Google Hangouts to Play Windows Media on the iPhone

Last weekend I was watching the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship through the NASA TV streams. I had to run out to baseball practice during final alliance selections and was going to miss it, unless I could get the stream working on a mobile device. The problem is that their streams use Windows Media. First I tried VLC and GPlayer on my iPhone but neither worked. Then I tried my Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7.8. It's Microsoft, so it should work, right? Nope. Then I went through several Android media players on my Nexus 7 but none I tried could support the stream.

I was on the verge of just leaving something running to record the stream at home and watch it later when it hit me. I set up a webcam pointed at my laptop viewing the stream and started a Google Hangout. I could easily connect and reconnect to the Hangout with my iPhone or any of my devices (except the Windows Phone - still waiting on a Google+ app there). So I got to catch the alliance selections live, thanks to Google Hangouts.

Out With the Old

I resisted as long as I could, but I finally had to update this blog to use the "new" Blogger templates to take advantage of a number of newer Blogger features introduced in the past few years. I'd miss the old look less if the theme editor here had enough options so I didn't have to edit the template manually and add CSS to get what I want, but I already had to dig into it to fix page titles. Except for this blog, I've pretty much moved on to Wordpress where plugins can handle all the stuff I want without having to hack up Blogger templates. I'm still not happy with this background image, but it'll probably be here for years.

Makerspaces / Hackerspaces in the Tampa Bay Area

This past weekend was the second Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire. There were some great conversations there about finally getting a makerspace or hackerspace in the Tampa Bay area. We had a lot of these same talks last year, but this year I think we might finally have the critical mass of people to get things started.

There are two efforts to start one that I'm aware of. The first is the LI4E Makerspace. They are focused on starting one or more makerspaces at Pasco County libraries. They have also recently signed an agreement to take over a South Tampa house and re-fit it for public creative use.

The second is Makerspace Tampa Bay. That group had stalled out in recent months, but has now been renewed with new leadership and is making a good push to build a solid core group and get a facility open. They have a website, but if you are on Facebook, there is a lot more active discussion on their Facebook group, Makerspace Tampa Bay.
[Update May 2013: I have joined the board of directors for this group and will hopefully have some good updates throughout the rest of the year.]

There are three four alternatives in the Tampa area that approach what a makerspace is:

The biggest and closest to a makerspace is the MOSI IdeaZone. It's a fantastic space on the ground floor of MOSI and has a growing collection of equipment, including 3D printers and a laser cutter. They offer classes for both students and adults. 

The USF X-Labs has built a number of cool science demonstrations, including this massive Tesla coil. I don't know much about their physical space, but it's worth checking out if you're a USF student (and maybe even if you aren't). 

The Tampa Amateur Radio Club is a bit of a stretch to call a makerspace, but they do have a nice facility with a great ham radio shack. More importantly, 2-3 times a year they run TARCFest, a tailgate / flea market with a lot of radio and electronics equipment.

The Roosevelt 2.0 is a "creative urban renewal project" in Ybor City. It's an interesting mix of a cafe, meeting space, market, art studio, garden, and more. 

A little further outside of Tampa, there are two good maker spaces:

The FamiLab in Orlando has great family-friendly programs and has even hosted Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi fame. 

The Fab Lab at GWiz in Sarasota has fantastic gear, including a big CNC machine and a mill. Unfortunately, I believe they are still closed as GWiz continues to struggle financially and remains closed after many months "for renovations".

Finally, if you missed it, check out the White House Hangout: The Maker Movement, a Google+ Hangout with a number of prominent makers and makerspace founders / users.

Chromebooks for Education

I've been looking a bit more at Chromebooks for Education. Thinkamingo has been doing quite well building up a portfolio of educational mobile apps, but the rise of Chromebooks in schools is something that we can't ignore. So we'll continue to think what role we could take in an entirely web-based environment rather than a on-device tablet environment like iPads.

Chromebooks certainly make sense for a school, especially given the difficulty of managing iPads (or other devices) as a group. I really like the idea of schools being able to quickly swap out broken devices or even loan devices to students without needing to install or replicate anything.

One great point is that adopting an online-only environment, with or without Chromebooks, is really the best way to enable bring your own device (BYOD) because it opens up the environment to a wide range of devices. Right now, it's virtually impossible for an app-based curriculum to allow students to bring a mix of iPads, Kindle Fires, etc. because so many apps are only available on one platform. But as long as each device has a decent browser, all can use well-designed websites.

A couple Chromebook resources I've been looking at:

• A decent blog post about the different models of Chromebook available
• Google's own list of Chromebooks for Education
• This Google+ Hangout talking about a school's deployment of Chromebooks
• Some Google+ communities: Chromebook EDU, Google Apps for Education, and Google Apps in Education

I'll keep adding to this post if we go anywhere with Chromebooks. I played with booting ChromeOS in a VMWare instance but have had some problems. I'm really tempted to get one of the Samsung Chromebooks as a test device, but I think my desk and laptop bag are finally at their limit of devices.

Update: This isn't really for educators, but this is a good post on developing on the Chromebook.

DD-WRT Wireless Connections Failing

This morning my Asus RT-N16 router with DD-WRT stopped accepting wifi clients. Nothing could connect to the access point. I could see that it was still broadcasting, but it was acting as if the WPA password had changed. I powered off the router twice, waiting a few minutes, etc. Nothing. I connect a laptop via ethernet and looked over all the settings but everything looked fine. I was ready to reload the router completely when I found this old thread and tried the advice. It worked. I didn't add it to my startup script though. Hopefully it keeps working without me needing to do that again.

I case anyone else runs into this, the fix was: I ssh'ed into the router and ran:

ifconfig eth1 down
ifconfig eth1 up 

I'm still not quite sure what interface eth1 is since br0 looks like the LAN side and VLAN2 looks like the WAN side, but it did work.

Brick Buddies - State Champions!

This weekend 5018 Brick Buddies, my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team that I help coach and mentor, won the Florida state championship!

Brick Buddies went into the state championship ranked as the #6 team in the state (out of 72) and finished qualifying matches with a 5-1 record and in third place behind two undefeated teams from nearby Middleton High School in Tampa: 3846 Maelstrom and 4997 Masquerade. Masquerade is last season's world champion and also won this season's Kentucky state championship last weekend.

After a lot of discussion and examination of possible alliance partner picks, the team decided to accept an alliance invitation from 3846 Maelstrom rather than remain the captain of the #3 alliance. That was a little controversial because that almost certainly meant giving up any chance of going to the world championship, but after a long season of competing against both Masquerade and Maelstrom with zero success, the chances of beating both of them twice with any of the available alliance partners looked very low. Either of them would be perfectly capable of winning this season's world championship and it's a real shame that both won't get that chance.

With a solid #1 seed alliance of 3846 Maelstrom, 5018 Brick Buddies, and 3839 NeXT, they moved on  to the elimination rounds. They won their first semifinal matches to advance to the finals. After losing the first match, they came back and won two matches in a row to take home the championship.

The drive team (which is the entire team of three kids) did very well, winning 5 of the 6 qualifying matches and all three elimination matches they competed in. They made the most of line bonuses whenever possible and mixed offense and defense very well. They also made great use of taking away ownership of pegs to eliminate line bonuses by opposing alliances.

The hard work on autonomous mode programming, especially by Sumukh, resulted in them scoring the 50-point bonus ring in 4 of 6 qualifying matches and in the crucial final elimination match. That was far better than any other team did in autonomous mode, where the robot drives itself based on timing and sensor inputs. One of my favorite moments was when an opposing robot hit them and knocked them off course. The robot still found it's way back to the floor markings and followed them to end up in an almost perfect position to score the ring.

They did great in judging as well, winning the PTC Design Award and being finalists for the Rockwell Collins Innovate and Connect awards. They were the second runner-up for the top judged award, the Inspire Award.

My goals for the team all season were to make it to the state championship, get to play in the elimination rounds, and get mentioned as a finalist for the Inspire Award. They achieved all three, blowing away the first two.

All of this even more amazing considering that they are the smallest team in the state. Most teams are made up of about 10 high school students, often from engineering magnet schools. Ours was one high school sophomore and two eighth graders and runs out of the coach's driveway / living room. The kids aren't as short as they were last season, but they still get "that's the whole team?" comments.

It was great to see all the hard work by the kids, coaches, and parents pay off.  If anyone is interested in mentoring or joining FIRST robotics at any level, feel free to contact me or Shelley Kappeler, the head coach for Brick Buddies.

1447 Movie Titles Without an "S"

This is all over Facebook this week, and probably will be for the next 12 years. So a minute with sed/grep and here are 1447 movie titles without an "S" in them:

10,000 BC
13 Going on 30
1408
17 Again
18000 Dead in Gordon Head
187
1941
2012
2046
24
25th Hour
3 O'Clock High
300

Where did January go?

So January blew right by without me blogging at all. I'd even pledged to myself to at least post a weekly recap of interesting links and news, but here's at least a monthly recap:

Thinkamingo

I've been busy at Thinkamingo, working on some new app projects that haven't been published yet. I also shipped Name Dice for Android and the Amazon / Nook versions shouldn't be too much longer. I shipped updates to our Sports Card apps to fix numerous bugs and expand the color choices for the included card template. Behind the scenes, I also consolidated the separate copy-n-paste XCode projects into one reasonably well-managed project with targets for each app. That should hopefully scale when we add additional sports. Finally, I submitted ports of our Android apps (Lists for Writers, Story Dice, Name Dice) to the BlackBerry app store using their Android runtime. It took a few slight changes, mostly to handle different market links, but it was fairly quick and easy.

FIRST Tech Challenge

Team Brick Buddies has been busy getting ready for their league championship and the upcoming state championship. At the league championship, the robot ran fairly well except for a flakey NXT cable. Between strong driving, a solid robot, and a little luck, they finished qualifying rounds 4-2 and in 3rd place. They picked a good alliance partner in Team Duct Tape and went on to win in the semifinals. In the finals against Masquerade and Maelstrom, two very strong teams from Middleton High School, they  fought hard but lost. In judging they did well and were finalists in multiple categories but finished in second place behind Masquerade for the overall judging for the Inspire Award. They'll likely head into the state championship in 5th-7th place in the state (out of 72 teams). They clearly have some work to do if they want to really push the top teams and fight for a spot at the world championships.

Geek Calendar

I've been meaning to try to set up a "geek calendar" of some sort with upcoming techie-style local events for developers and parents. Here's my first set of events: Tampa Bay Geek Calendar.

Busy Year

I couldn't let 2012 come to an end without a single blog post here. I have almost a dozen draft posts from this year sitting around with about a paragraph done, so maybe some of those will make it onto this blog. But this has been a busy, hectic year.

The biggest thing for me this year has been building Thinkamingo - our new educational app development company. We grew the company from zero to a viable business in 2012. In the process, I've learned iOS development and a whole lot about app marketing. In the past year I've shipped 12 iOS apps (though our 5 sports card apps share a lot of code), 2 Android apps, and 1 Windows Phone app. Not every app has been a success but some have far exceeded my expectations. Our apps have appeared on high profile blogs and even on Boing Boing and NPR - both thanks to Make's Mark Frauenfelder. Not a bad first year. We look forward to really growing the business in 2013 and someday being able to share more of our numbers and growth story.

Another big thing in 2012 has been mentoring and coaching my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team, Team Brick Buddies. They're a small team made up of mostly middle school students competing against a lot of high school teams. They did very well in the rookie season, making it to the state championship.  They are now mid-way through their second season and already planning for the state championship. They're also building up quite a trophy shelf by winning one tournament last season and winning a judged award at every single event they've been to. To cap it off, they won "most popular exhibit" at the TBTF coolTech 2012. They've also competed in MoonBots for two seasons and we've had a great time getting to know the Orlando area Google Lunar XPrize competitor, Omega Envoy. It's been a lot of work (and driving) but it pays off when I listen to what people say after meeting the kids and hearing them present what they're doing. In 2013 I'm expecting to return to FIRST LEGO League as our son and his friends should finally be old enough to compete. 

2012 has also seen a lot of Cub Scout activities. Though I've had to decline so many opportunities to volunteer (in scouts and other places) to work on our business, we've been busy camping, working on achievements and belt loops, and trying to win at Pinewood Derby.

This fall, I took a train trip to Williamsburg / Jamestown with my mom and my son. I haven't ever really travelled by train except for a few quick trips from Princeton to Manhattan. Train travel is ... different. It was nice having plenty of space, weird not going through security at all, frustrating to sit motionless for hours, and ultimately exhausting to spend 22+ hours on the train each way. The particular train didn't have wifi (some do) and we lost cell coverage quite a bit. It did have electricity and I packed plenty of movies, ebooks, and music for the trip. Williamsburg and Jamestown were good to see and a reminder that one of our goals is to get travelling while the kids are old enough and young enough to appreciate the things we visit. We have to get busy though.

Tampa had its first Mini Maker Faire in 2012 and there are at least two local makerspace efforts in the works. I would love to see at least one get started. I did get two Raspberry Pi boards and a STM32 board to play with some electronics but haven't done much yet.

On the gadget front, I also picked up a Nexus 7 tablet. I've had an Android phone before and the kids have Kindle Fires so I wasn't new to Android, but the Nexus 7 is a real game-changer. Much faster than the old phones I had, big enough to really read on, small enough to carry almost everywhere, cheap enough to not worry too much about breaking, etc. It's become the device I use the most (other than my laptop) even being wifi-only.

I've done almost nothing on most of my hobbies in 2012. I barely touched amateur radio. I don't think I took any serious non-snapshot photos or did any artwork outside of some Thinkamingo projects. I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2, which has finally replaced Quake III Arena / GTA as the video game I use to blow off stress. In 2013 it would be great to replace that with actually getting back on the bike and putting in some real miles.

So that's a short version of my 2012. Hopefully I'll post again before 12 months pass.

BarCamp Tampa Bay 2011

Creative Brainstorming Session

On Saturday I went to my first BarCamp Tampa Bay. I'd seen them pop up for a couple years but I hadn't made time to go to one. This year I finally made it.

One of the distinguishing features of BarCamps is that there is no set schedule or speaker list before the event. Potential speakers sort of offer up their talk topics and people shuffle the talks around on the wall until a schedule is worked out. I have mixed feelings about how well this works. I would have loved for attendees to have more input into what talks sounded more interesting and adjust the schedule accordingly, especially to avoid overlapping talks that might appeal to the same audience.

As a side note, I tweeted photos of the current talk schedule. It's a little frustrating that there was no other way to get to the schedule online, especially since talks were spread over two buildings with quite a hike between them. It's complicated by the fact that the schedule can change throughout the day. Maybe next year we can set up a quick webcam or something to make it easy to check the schedule online.

The mayor of Tampa, Bob Buckhorn, came out to help kick off the event. It was great to see him there for what sounds like more than just a token demonstration of his support for technology startups in the area. He mentioned his daughters going off to college and said something along the lines of "My daughters won't come back to Tampa for jobs at a call center but for the jobs you guys create." He hung around for a while and got to meet a lot of attendees.

My first talk was by Marvin Scaff of Gazelle Lab, a fairly new incubator / mentoring company in Tampa. The talk started a little late so it was unfortunately cut a bit short, but it was still interesting. He introduced Gazelle Lab and ran through some tips for dealing with a mentor and making the most effective use of their time. Gazelle Lab follows the TechStars model and Marvin really recommended that people read their Do More Faster book. I've been following Paul Graham's YCombinator and techie-oriented Hacker News, so I'm really excited for Tampa Bay to have something like this started here locally. I've seen what a difference ATDC and other programs make for Atlanta and Georgia Tech even though they're Not The Valley.

My next talk was from Fritz Eichelberger from HotSpaces. It was theoretically a talk about "crowdsourcing" design of the new HotSpaces website, but it was pretty self-promoting. I'm not saying I'm opposed to that. I like Fritz and his Pure and Shameless Tech Socials and a lot of people in the room had apparently never heard of them. But I started to get frustrated that all people seemed to care about is the placement of design elements on his (admittedly rough looking) landing page. Fritz even said "I only update my site every three to four months." It was another reminder of what a struggle companies are having with finding tech talent in Tampa and what a seller's market it is for developers.

I tried to catch a talk about the relaunch of We Are Tampa Bay but the room was packed beyond standing room only. We definitely need to watch their relaunch this week.

Then I went over to a Creative Think Tank / Brainstorming session with Nathan Schwagler. I had vaguely known Nathan through TEDx Tampa Bay but I didn't realize what his day job is. Nathan's session served a dual purpose. He showed a creative brainstorming session while at the same time collecting a lot of ideas for how to promote the Tampa Bay area to convention attendees. Nathan mentioned IDEO which reminded me of this video that I've used with the kids on our FIRST Tech Challenge team. I got to talk to Jeff Baird from Kngroo for a while. I'm a little nervous for them that Gowalla essentially pivoted right into their space, but Kngroo is targeting more of the small/local business market than Gowalla. I hope them the best.

I caught a session by Giovanni DiFeterici on digital painting. It was pretty fun to watch. I dabble in graphic design, drawing, Photoshop, painting, etc. mostly for fun and to help friends and non-profits. I got to catch up with him at the after party and talk digital art and drawing geek stuff for a while, which was cool. If anyone feels like they can't draw, they really should check out Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Even as someone that's had a few art classes, I still got a lot out of the book and Giovanni said he has all of his students use it. If you want to learn to draw digitally, you've got to start with a Wacom tablet, even if it's a smaller Bamboo.

I had to catch the session by Antony Francis on social media. It was encouraging to see that I already follow much of his advice on my handful of tiny side projects and non-profits, just not at the same scale that Head of Lettuce Media does. One thing I don't do is use interactive Twitter bots. I've seen plenty of Twitter accounts feeding RSS feeds to Twitter accounts - and admittedly do it myself - but I hadn't really considered going full-on interactive bot. I just thought it was too spammy and not that useful of a technique. But even an obvious bot on Twitter can still provide value to followers. That's an interesting idea that I'll have to consider.

Next was a talk on Node.js and socket.io by Jim Hoskins. It was a good talk and a great presenter but even thought I haven't done a project with it yet, I've already been through a few Node talks and played with it before so a 30 minute overview ultimately wasn't that interesting to me. I'll definitely have to check out Jim's content though. He did a great job.

My next session was one by Ryan Magin on affiliate marketing and SEO. We didn't get to see everything Ryan does, but I'm pretty sure that the basic idea behind what Ryan does is to target niche markets, throw up SEO-friendly Wordpress blogs to win a single search term, and funnel all that traffic to buying either an info product like an ebook or a product sold by a third party that pays affiliates for sending them sales. It wasn't a new concept to me, but clearly it was new to quite a few people in the audience.  He really hammered home the value when he mentioned that he made about $75k last year and was hoping to break six figures this year. Ryan credited Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Work Week for inspiration to get started. It was pretty fun to hear the questions from the audience. It was hard for them to understand that each individual blog has almost no value, but when you combine hundreds of blogs, that drives a lot of traffic. So that's why he only makes a few posts on a blog then moves on, doesn't care about the design, disables visitor comments, and doesn't even back up the blogs. During the talk, I tweeted a mention of Ed Dale's Challenge which is a decent, free introduction to internet marketing. The Challenge is a little more about testing niche markets before investing in developing and launching a full product but some of the same techniques apply.

Then I went over to see Joe Healy, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, show off the Kinect SDK. It was a two hour talk compressed into thirty minutes but he still covered an impressive amount of stuff. I don't think I've ever heard Joe talk that fast. He got me to "dance" for a Kinect demo, which partly made up for me telling him that I just ordered my first MacBook. I still need to keep it out of his sight though since it's not waterproof.

By then I was burned out and mostly caught up with a few people before heading out to the after party at The Roosevelt 2.0, a sort of flex space, art gallery, creative space, not sure what to call it, etc.

Overall, it was a pretty good event. I like some aspects of the chaos and free-formedness of the schedule but overall I think I'd rather have a schedule ahead of time to research speakers and plan my day. All the side conversations and people I met made me wish that I was in a spot that I was ready to act on my Moleskine full of startup ideas. Maybe next year?

KForce was awesome to host it and there are a lot of other people and companies that deserve thanks. I really should list them all here but they're all on the BarCamp Tampa Bay site.

Technocrati tags: tampa barcamp

Google Plus

I've been on Google+ for almost three weeks now. I've read a lot of people's reviews of it and haven't seen many people saying what I would say so I figured it's worth writing my own post about Google+ and what I think of it.

First I see a lot of people raving about Circles and how they change everything. I'm not sure I get it. Facebook has had user lists and a privacy setting on each status update for quite some time. I personally use a few lists on Facebook to share stuff with different sets of people. I have lists for people I know through Cub Scouts, people I know through church, people I went to high school with, people I work with, etc. Some of my Facebook friends are in multiple groups. So when I post something that would only interest one of those groups, I can filter my post so it's only visible to just that group. That's just like sharing to a circle on Google+. I can also share a post with everyone except a group of people, which is something Google+ lacks so far. Facebook does let you share a post with "friends of friends" and "everyone" so posts can be visible outside of your friends list, but there's no way for non-friends to see them unless they go to your particular Facebook profile. So Google+ clearly does a better job of sharing posts with the public (people outside of your network). Facebook's friend lists aren't that hard to manage, but the Google+ circles UI is a little nicer. It takes a little more work in Facebook to set the privacy / visibility of a status post than in Google+, but I think it's 6 clicks and typing the list name vs. 2 clicks and typing the  circle name so it's not a huge difference.

Twitter on the other hand has no outbound filtering at all. Except for making your entire Twitter stream private, you can't send a tweet to anyone except all of your followers (and anyone that finds it through searches). So for sending stuff to limited groups of people, Google+ clearly beats Twitter, but Twitter doesn't even try to handle that.

The inbound side is where Google+ really shows something different than Facebook. You can pick all of your circles at once or select individual circles to view posts from people in those circles. Unfortunately there's no way yet to pick more than one circle at a time or all circles except one or two. I swear Facebook used to have the ability to select friend lists to see updates from just friends on each list, but I can't find it in the current UI. So that's clearly a win for Google+.

Twitter though has a lot of flexibility on the inbound side. Even with the base Twitter web UI, you can set up many lists of Twitter users to organize different streams. You don't even have to follow the people that are on your lists. You also get the choice of making each list public or keeping it private. I have both. For example I have a public list of Tampa media people and media outlets. It's too much for me to follow regularly, but when something newsworthy is happening in the area, it's a great resource. I also keep a "catchup" private list of the Twitter accounts that I really want to keep up with. So whenever I don't have time to read my entire Twitter feed, I scan just my "catchup" list instead. (Lately that's all I usually get time for and I almost need to create an even shorter list for when I'm really short on time.) I also have some other special interest lists I can look at depending on my context. For example I have one for a bunch of work-related Twitter accounts and another for one with a bunch of scouting-related Twitter accounts. So in my mind Twitter gets a slight win over Google+ on the inbound side, mostly because you can publish lists publicly for others to use.

Second, I've seen people raving about how Google+ handles conversations a lot better than Twitter. I'm not sure. It is true that I get to see everyone's response to a post in Google+ but that's not always a good thing. With my friends and posts that get a few responses, it's great. When Scoble or Gina Trapani posts something and gets 200 responses, it's not so useful. There's sort of a up-voting because people can +1 a comment but there's no way yet to hide comments that haven't been up-voted. But on Twitter you don't automatically see responses to posts other people make. With most clients, you won't even see @responses from the person you're following unless you follow both people in the conversation. So I guess I'd say it handles conversations differently and lets you see more of them, but I'm not sure that it's a good thing. It seems almost identical to Facebook's conversations though. I guess the only big difference I can see compared to Facebook is that on Facebook, you can usually post on another person's (or page's) wall and start a new conversation. It sounds useful, but for highly followed people and pages, it's just a lot more noise.

Third, people are really liking the "hangout" video chat in Google+. I have to agree it looks pretty good and quite useful. We use video chat for work through Skype and WebEx so it's not very ground-breaking to me, but I certainly see the value. It does have all the problems with every other video chat, the biggest of which is that a lot of times people just aren't ready or willing to go on camera.

I really haven't been able to try Huddles which is a group messaging piece available from the mobile apps. That was a key prospective use for Twitter early on - text messaging among groups of friends rather than one-on-one. Twitter users moved on pretty quickly from that and today I doubt that very many tweets are delivered over SMS.

I've tried Sparks on Google+ but I don't really get them. It's a bit like a weak RSS reader or news alerts. Some of the topics I tried are filled with useless and irrelevant results but some of the big topics do OK. But I don't think they'll catch on at all in their current form.

I've seen more than a few people say that they're done with Facebook now that Google+ is here. I don't really see that happening for me. I currently have quite a split between people I know on Facebook vs. people I know on Twitter. On Twitter I follow a lot of people I don't even know, but out of the people I do know, they're mostly more technical than my average Facebook friend. So if I want to share some geeky link, it has to go on Twitter. I might stick it on Facebook but I can expect that 70% of my Facebook friends won't care. So far almost every person I interact with on Google+ is also fairly active on Twitter. So I don't see it really making much of a dent in Facebook. It could take some people away from Twitter though. I have noticed that essentially the same post on both Facebook and Google+ is currently getting more comments on Google+ but that's likely just the novelty factor. 

There are clearly some issues to resolve in Google+ and a lot of possibilities. Google is quite good at iterating quickly and isn't afraid to roll changes into a product, so this will be interesting to see Google+ change rapidly.

New Backup System

I've been struggling for a while with having a working backup system for our family. I mostly need to back up digital photos and video but also some things like MP3s, images of laptops, other documents, etc. I use Dropbox for backing up smaller things like documents, but photos and video are too big to be economical there. For quite a while, I used my Flickr account to back up photos, but it was becoming unmanageable. I looked at Mozy and Carbonite but there are a few downsides (other than price). It can take a long time to upload, especially for an initial backup. Then if you do ever need to recover 100 gigs of data, it can take an incredibly long time to download unless you just pay to have DVDs of your data sent to you. I figured I could do better on my own.

When I got my new camera, I moved to using a single Western Digital Elements 2 TB external drive for backups. I kept it off-site but needed to either bring it home to update or use another drive to bring any updates to it. It wasn't good to have such a disconnected backup.

For my new system, I wanted to rotate drives. One drive will always be offsite and the other will always be at home, ready to receive files. Every few weeks I'll swap the drives, which means that they'll both be offsite for a while, but since my original files I'm backing up are at home on the original drive, that's pretty low-risk.

I started with a Diablotek EN3525D Hard Drive Dock and a pair of 2 terabyte drives. I went with two different manufacturers - Seagate and Hitachi - to avoid the possibility of getting two drives from a single bad production run.

I had been using Microsoft SyncToy to run backups but had some struggles with it. You need a sync definition for each drive pair and you can't run two in parallel or sequence. I switched to using a Windows command-line tool robocopy. That lets me build my own scripts and decide whether I want to run a quick update of just some files or sync everything.

One concern I have is that if any files on my original disks get corrupted I will end up replicating those corrupted files to both backup drives. Similarly, if a file is deleted from my original disk, I'll replicate that delete. I'm considering adding a third backup drive that I only ever add files to (contribute) instead of mirroring deletes. Or maybe it's time to look at a Blu-Ray burner?

QR Codes

I've been seeing QR codes more and more. I might even stick some on the banners for our Cub Scout pack as we get ready for the Lutz 4th of July Parade. We definitely need some built out of LEGOs for our First LEGO League / Tech Challenge team.

I captured two of the more interesting uses of QR codes I've seen. One was at the Florida State Fair, in the Fish and Wildlife Commission exhibit (right). On each of their aquariums and displays, they posted a QR code to learn more about the display and topic it illustrated. I could see this working well in museums, providing audio/video about a piece or even different language translations of the notes.

The other was at Office Depot. Each of the cameras on the sales display had a QR code that linked to a YouTube video demonstration of the camera. Maybe someday we'll see displays like that have a QR code that will launch a video chat session with someone (working remotely) that can actually answer questions about the product.