Category Archives: Non-Technical

Hack-A-Day: Hack-A-Chat

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It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

Today’s project is Hack-A-Chat. (demo, source). It’s a free web chat for anyone that goes to the website.

Check out the link above to try out the live demo.

So far, not much easier. Another 8-hour day. I was hoping to do something with WebRTC today, but I didn’t get to it.

Hack-A-Day: Hack-A-Blog

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It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

Today’s project is the Hack-A-Blog. (demo, source).

Check out the link above to try out the live demo. I’m proud of getting this one done in time. I think the next days will be easier, as I figured some things out already.

e-ink “laptop”

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I’ve been prototyping an e-ink laptop.

a wooden box with a keyboard inside and an e-ink screen mounted to it
a closed wooden box with a keyboard visible through a hole in the front
Closed “laptop”

I’m not the first, there have been many other such devices before. I came up with the idea independently, but the specifics are heavily inspired by the Ultimate Writer by NinjaTrappeur in 2018. Similar to him, my use case is typing without distractions, and reading books. E-ink displays are quite slow to update, so I don’t think it can serve as a general purpose computer. Here’s a video of it in action. It operates at one frame per second.

The electronics are not fully done. They need better secured, and I’m going to redo the cabling and power back.

an e-ink screen reading "hello world"
I broke a screen over-tightening a nut. That said, I like this look pretty well! If the lid was thicker, I know how to avoid screws on the other side, too.
a e-ink screen loose on a desk, covered in garbage
Early screen progress. I got something to display, but not what I wanted.
a mechanical keyboard in a box
I found a really nice, cheap mechanical keyboard on ebay. The main downside is that it’s heavy–730g. It also consumes heavy amounts of power, even when not in use. I have a nearly identical keyboard that doesn’t, which I’ll use for v2.
a homemade battery pack with four red lithium-ion batteries
I made my own lithium-ion battery pack. It works well, but it doesn’t quite fit so I’m going to redo it with one less cell. It also needs an on/off switch and a right angle USB cable.
a close-up of a raspberry pi in a box
The prototype is powered by a Raspberry Pi 3. The final version will use a microcontroller to save power. The Pi Zero can also be swapped in with no changes, and uses a third of the power. But it’s noticeably slower and takes 30 seconds to boot. For prototyping I’m using the Pi 3 for now.

I’m not the best woodworker, but I’m slowly learning. Here are pictures of case and lid action.

back view of a box with hinges
Hinged lid. The screen is on the bottom of the lid.
back view of a wooden stop, closed
A wooden stop on each side
back view of a wooden stop, open
Wooden stop with lid open. It hits the bottom, bringing the lid/screen to a rest at vertical.
picture of a latch, open
Latches on the side
close-up of a hinge in cracked plywood
Don’t put hinges sideways into plywood. But if you do, drill big pilot holes. Out of six screw, one cracked a little.

On the software end, shout outs to:

  • the creator of the ultimate-writer software, NinjaTrappeur, who has been encouraging (and explained the right way to rewrite the stack, if you wanted to today).
  • Ben Krasnow, who made a video about how to hack partial refresh on an e-ink display.

There’s a few things I’d like to polish still–even as a prototype this isn’t fully done.

  • The raspberry pi and battery pack are currently sitting loose. They need secured, especially since they can fall out the open front.
  • The software has some major problems. It doesn’t support Control-C, etc in linux, a must, and it doesn’t update the screen at boot until you press a key, which would be nice to fix.
  • There’s no power switch. Right now you have to unplug it manually.
  • I’d like to add a carrying handle.
  • I’d like to tuck away the electronics behind a panel. They’re ugly.
  • The wood looks rough in a few places. I want to hide some splintered wood, screw holes, etc.
  • The USB cables have too much stress on them. I need to make a little more room in the wood, and use a right-angled connector in one place.

There’s also no default software, but that’s a feature. A prototype is for figuring out how I want the interface to work, and what I want it to do.

Parts list

  • 7.5 inch e-ink screen from Waveshare (not particularly good) – $60
  • Raspberry Pi 3 (Pi Zero, etc also work with no changes) – $35 (but unavailable)
  • microsd card – $7
  • Plywood and boards, wood glue – $15
  • Plexiglass (to cover screen) – $10
  • Bolts, washers, and nuts to secure it. – $5
  • Circular window latch x2 – $8 (or use $10 smaller version)
  • Hinge x2 – $2
  • Total: $142

Power budget (at 5V):

  • Keyboard: 500mW. Other USB keyboards use zero to within my measurement abilities.
  • Screen: 0-250mW when updating. Hard to measure.
  • Pi 3: 2000mW. I have the wifi chip enabled (the default) but I’m not actively connected to wifi.
  • Pi Zero W: 650mW

A real-life test showed 5-6 hour battery life. Theory says (13Wh/battery * 4 batteries / 2.7 watts)=20 hours battery life. I’m investigating the discrepancy. In theory, swapping for a Pi Zero W and a better keyboard would give 72-hour battery life.

Timelog Analysis

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I write down everything I do. Yesterday, I wrote a quick-and-dirty analysis program to get some stats on common habits.

The full results are here: drive floss food read sleep teeth tv wake walk youtube. Of course, what I write down doesn’t perfectly match what I do, so most of the absolute stats are vastly wrong. Comparative ones are still interesting.

Here’s some results:

  • The data say I’m a night owl. I go to sleep 0.9 times a day on average. 2am-4am is most common. I wake up at 11am-12pm.
  • I brush my teeth 0.18 times a day, on average, but 0.36 times in 2021. Surely that’s not right!? I have flossed 25 times since 2018. I’m going be honest… that one probably is about right, yikes.
  • I watch 30% more youtube on Tuesday than Saturday, but only 4% more television. I watch most TV between 9pm and 1am. Youtube is pretty spread out. I watch tv 0.7 times a day, buy youtube 1.9 times a day.
  • I read 1.1 times a day, usually before midnight.
  • I eat 3.5 times a day on average. This includes 796 days where I didn’t record eating. Omitting those, I eat 6.5 times a day.

I’ll leave you with this poor man’s graph of driving frequency over time. See the pandemic hit?

{'2018-01': 'x',
 '2018-02': '',
 '2018-03': 'x',
 '2018-04': 'xxx',
 '2018-05': '',
 '2018-06': '',
 '2018-07': 'x',
 '2018-08': '',
 '2018-09': '',
 '2018-10': 'x',
 '2018-11': 'xx',
 '2018-12': 'xx',
 '2019-01': 'x',
 '2019-02': '',
 '2019-03': 'xxxxxxx',
 '2019-04': 'x',
 '2019-05': '',
 '2019-06': 'x',
 '2019-07': 'x',
 '2019-08': 'xx',
 '2019-09': '',
 '2019-10': 'xxxxx',
 '2019-11': 'xxxxxxxxx',
 '2019-12': 'xxxxxx',
 '2020-01': 'xxxxxxxxx',
 '2020-02': 'xxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2020-03': 'xxxxxxx',
 '2020-04': 'xxxxx',
 '2020-05': 'xx',
 '2020-06': '',
 '2020-07': '',
 '2020-08': '',
 '2020-09': '',
 '2020-10': 'x',
 '2020-11': 'xxxxxx',
 '2020-12': 'x',
 '2021-01': 'xx',
 '2021-02': 'xxx',
 '2021-03': 'xxxxxxxxx',
 '2021-04': '',
 '2021-05': 'xxxxxxxx',
 '2021-06': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2021-07': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2021-08': 'xxxxx',
 '2021-09': 'xxxxxxx',
 '2021-10': 'xxxx',
 '2021-11': 'xxxxxx',
 '2021-12': 'xxxxxxxx',
 '2022-01': 'xxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-02': 'xxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-03': 'xxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-04': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-05': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-06': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-07': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-08': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
 '2022-09': 'xxxxxxx'}

20 minute interruptions

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Very, very early in my self-improvement journey, I tried adding a 20 minute timer to my life. Every 20 minutes of my waking life, it went off. I’d explicitly say to myself what it was I was doing (“Watching TV” or “Talking to Fred”). It’s important to have a verbal or written note of what you’re doing.

I added a specific prompt at one point: “What am I doing, and why?”. I don’t think goals are how I think about things today, but it’s how I tried to think back then (goal factoring). Today I might ask, “What am I doing, and do I want to be doing it? Do I want to be doing it this way?”

The basic 20-minute check-in process was very helpful to me. Some benefits:

  • Ding! What am I doing? It gave me an awareness of time. How long do things last? Our subjective sense of time doesn’t always match. For example, doing my daily chores takes about 20 minutes. A typical conversation with a friend takes 60-120 minutes for me. But the chores feel way longer to me!
  • What am I doing, and do I want to be doing it? Interrupting default activities (a type of inertia). Watching TV until I get bored of it takes me 2-10 hours, if I don’t have a timer. Having a timer interrupt me let me say “well, maybe this will be the last episode, then.” It’s easy to get into a low-energy state for leisure activities where you don’t notice the passage of time. And it’s important to note, I don’t have any rules. I can keep watching TV all night if I want to. This helps me avoid doing it out of pure inertia. (It also really keyed me in that TV does not really “recharge” my batteries. Other relaxation is better.)
  • Do I want to be doing it, or doing it this way? Interrupting bad approaches (a type of inertia). Sometimes, I get stubborn. I’ll keep trying to solve a problem in one way, for way too long. Having a regular interruption keys me into how long I’ve been doing that. I’ll notice I should maybe try a different approach or a work-around. Or give up.
  • Ding! Providing a check-in. I’ll just take stock, and say “hey, am I really having fun? is this even useful?”. Sometimes I’m just doing something dumb. Or sometimes I forget to have fun or take a break for too long. This is my reminder to check in with my strategic system; my emotions; my body.

problem-log.txt

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One of the more useful things I did was to start logging all my technical problems. Whenever I hit a problem, I write an entry in problem-log.txt. Here’s an example

2022-08-02
Q: Why isn't the printer working? [ SOLVED ]
A: sudo cupsenable HL-2270DW

// This isn't in the problem log, but the issue is that CUPS will silently disable the printer if it thinks there's an issue. This can happen if you pull a USB cord mid-print.

I write the date, the question, and the answer. Later, when I have a tough or annoying problem, I try to grep problem-log.txt. I’ll add a note if I solve a problem using the log, too.

This was an interesting project to look at 5 years later. I didn’t see benefits until 1-2 years later. It does not help me think through a problem. It’s hard to remember to do. But, over time it’s built up and become invaluable to me. I hit a tricky problem, and I can’t immediately find an answer on the web. I find out it’s in problem-log.txt. And, someone’s written it exactly with my hardware (and sometimes even my folder names) correctly in there. Cool!

Here’s another example:

2018-10-21
Q: How do I connect to the small yellow router?

Not every problem gets solved. Oh well.

Scan Organizer

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I scan each and every piece of paper that passes through my hands. All my old to-do lists, bills people send me in the mail, the manual for my microwave, everything. I have a lot of scans.

scan-organizer is a tool I wrote to help me neatly organize and label everything, and make it searchable. It’s designed for going through a huge backlog by hand over the course of weeks, and then dumping a new set of raw scans in whenever afterwards. I have a specific processing pipeline discussed below. However if you have even a little programming skill, I’ve designed this to be modified to suit your own workflow.

Input and output

The input is some raw scans. They could be handwritten notes, printed computer documents, photos, or whatever.

A movie ticket stub

The final product is that for each file like ticket.jpg, we end up with ticket.txt. This has metadata about the file (tags, category, notes) and a transcription of any text in the image, to make it searchable with grep & co.

---
category: movie tickets
filename: seven psychopaths ticket.jpg
tags:
- cleaned
- categorized
- named
- hand_transcribe
- transcribed
- verified
---
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood
SEVEN PSYCHOPAT
R
Sun Oct 28 1
7:15 PM
Adult $10.50
00504-3102812185308

Rialto Cinemas Gift Cards
Perfect For Movie Lovers!

Here are some screenshots of the process. Apologizies if they’re a little big! I just took actual screenshots.

At any point I can exit the program, and all progress is saved. I have 6000 photos in the backlog–this isn’t going to be a one-session thing for me! Also, everything has keyboard shortcuts, which I prefer.

Phase 1: Rotating and Cropping

Phase 1: Rotating and Cropping

First, I clean up the images. Crop them, rotate them if they’re not facing the right way. I can rotate images with keyboard shortcuts, although there are also buttons at the bottom. Once I’m done, I press a button, and scan-organizer advanced to the next un-cleaned photo.

Phase 2: Sorting into folders

Phase 2: Sorting into folders

Next, I sort things into folders, or “categories”. As I browse folders, I can preview what’s already in that folder.

Phase 3: Renaming Images

Phase 3: Renaming images

Renaming images comes next. For convenience, I can browse existing images in the folder, to help name everything in a standard way.

Phase 4: Tagging images

Phase 4: Tagging images

I tag my images with the type of text. They might be handwritten. Or they might be printed computer documents. You can imagine extending the process with other types of tagging for your use case.

Not yet done: OCR

Printed documents are run through OCR. This isn’t actually done yet, but it will be easy to plug in. I will probably use tesseract.

Phase 5: Transcribing by hand

Phase 5a: Transcribing by Hand

I write up all my handwritten documents. I have not found any useful handwriting recognition software. I just do it all by hand.

The point of scan-organizer is to filter based on tags. So only images I’ve marked as needing hand transcription are shown in this phase.

Phase 6: Verification

 At the end of the whole process, I verify that each image looks good, and is correctly tagged and transcribed.

Storage Prices 2022-07

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I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), microsd/sd, USB sticks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).

Here are the 2022-07 results: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2022-07.sc.txt

2020-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2020-01.sc.txt
2019-07: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2019-07.sc.txt
2018-10: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2018-10.sc.txt
2018-06: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-06.sc.txt
2018-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-01.sc.txt

Useful conclusions:

  • Used or refurbished items were excluded. Multi-packs (5 USB sticks) were excluded except for optical media. Seagate drives were excluded, because they are infamous for having a high failure rate and bad returns process.
  • Per TB, the cheapest options are:
    • Tape media (LTO-8) at $4.74/TB, but I recommend against it. Tape drives are expensive ($3300 for LTO-8 new), giving a breakeven with HDDs at 350-400TB. Also, the world is down to only one tape drive manufacturer, so you could end up screwed in the future.
    • 3.5″ internal spinning hard drives, at $13.75/TB. Currently the best option is 4TB drives.
    • 3.5″ external spinning hard drives, at $17.00/TB. Currently the best is 18TB WD drives. If you want internal drives, you can buy external ones and open them up, although it voids your warranty.
    • 2.5″ external spinning hard drives, at $24.50/TB. 4-5TB is best.
    • Blu-ray disks, at $23.16: 25GB is cheapest, then 50GB ($32.38/TB), then 100GB ($54.72/TB).
  • Be very careful buying internal hard drives online, and try to use a first-party seller. There are a lot of fake sellers and sellers who don’t actually provide a warranty. This is new in the last few years.

Changes since the last survey 2 years ago:

  • Amazon’s search got much worse again. More sponsored listings, still refurbished drives.
  • Sketchy third-party sellers are showing up on Amazon, and other vendors. At this point the problem is people not getting what they order, or getting it but without a promised warranty. I tried to filter out such Amazon sellers. I had trouble, even though I do the survey by hand. At this point it would be hard to safely buy an internal hard drive on Amazon.
  • Spinning drives: Prices have not significantly dropped or risen for spinning hard drives, since 2020.
  • Spinning drives: 18TB and 20TB 3.5″ hard drives became available
  • SSDs: 8TB is available (in both 2.5 inch and M.2 formats)
  • SSDs: Prices dropped by about half, per TB. The cheapest overall drives dropped about 30%.
  • USB: 2TB dropped back off the market, and appears unavailable.
  • USB: On the lower end, USB prices rose almost 2X. On the higher end, they dropped.
  • MicroSD/SD: Prices dropped
  • MicroSD/SD: A new player entered the cheap-end flash market, TEAMGROUP. Based on reading reviews, they make real drives, and sell them cheaper than they were available before. Complaints of buffer issues or problems with sustained write speeds are common.
  • MicroSD/SD: It’s no longer possible to buy slow microsd/sd cards, which is good. Basically everything is class 10 and above.
  • MicroSD/SD: Combine microsd and sd to show price comparison
  • Optical: Mostly optical prices did not change. 100GB Blu-Ray dropped by 60-70%. Archival Blu-Ray, too.
  • Tape: LTO-9 is available.
  • Tape: The cost of LTO-8 tape dropped 50%, which makes it the cheapest option.
  • Tape: This is not new, but there is still only one tape drive manufacturer (HP) since around the introduction of LTO-8.

youtube-autodl

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I just wrote the first pass at youtube-autodl, a tool for automatically downloading youtube videos. It’s inspired by Popcorn Time, a similar program I never ended up using, for automatically pirating the latest video from a TV series coming out.

You explain what you want to download, where you want to download it to, and how to name videoes. youtube-autodl takes care of the rest, including de-duplication and downloading things ones.

The easiest way to understand it is to take a look at the example config file, which is my actual config file.

Personally, I find youtube is pushing “watch this related” video and main-page feeds more and more, to the point where they actually succeed with me. I don’t want to accidentally waste time, so I wanted a way to avoid visiting youtube.com. This is my solution.