Or books! I could have the top three books I was reading on me at all times, and just pull one out anywhere! I’ll never have to waste another minute of my life! What do you say, Professor McGonagall?

– Harry Potter in HPMOR

Now, I love the idea of e-ink ebook readers. Truly dearly love them, more than I love books, mostly because books take up space: too much space for my tastes. Textbooks, bah: for the few pages I can read in a day, I have to lug around this brick of a book. I do love textbooks, they have all sorts of goodies in them that just don’t show up anywhere else (like technical explorations of quantum mechanics!), but… their mass drags me down (ha! you see what I did there?).

So the fact that my mom is willing to lend me/outright give me her underutilized kindle is kind of a boon for me. Jeepers! A library in my (oversized) pocket! I’ve already put a number of books on it, and its e-ink screen makes me giddy every time I see it.

But the title of this post is “Nathan and the ebooks of terror”, so there’s something negative about my experience: namely, textbooks just don’t fit. “Nathan!” you might be thinking. “Stop pirating books! It’s bad for you!” But, go fetch yon open source math book, and ye shall find the provided pdf shows up with unreadable fonts. Sometimes you can just add a \usepackage{geometry} statement, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Or you can jack up the font size and use \larger, but that doesn’t always work. And then there are the books that don’t provide their source, or provide it in such a way that it’s frustrating to convert it to something the kindle will read (docbook format, I’m looking at you).

I think the best thing would have everything in HTML: it reflows, and it’s hand-editable by pretty much any technically inclined person. Then it’s only a short hop to convert it to whatever format you need, like mobi.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, and I foresee long battles with getting books into my kindle, because gosh darn it, I have a kindle and I’m going to use it.

In other news…

I only have a week of break left! Gosh, the panic hormones are coursing through my body at amazing speeds right now. So much to do, so little time… Like applying to a bunch of internships for the summer (no bumming around for me), doing some cutting for my Huxley (reprap), finishing some code, reading books, getting new books (including pushing them kicking and screaming onto the kInDlE), buying a bookbag (maybe), and figuring out how to make the world a better place. And I’m planning on getting distracted many times, since that seems to happen even when finals are breathing down my neck.

Also, I’ve noticed just how out of my depth I am at Columbia. It feels like I’m really noticing it this time, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be even more blown away by the end of this semester. There are insanely smart people at Columbia, and the only way I beat them is in non-insanity. Welp.

Too late for an End of Year Review now. Oh well, it’s not like I had much to say anyways (At least, stuff that I haven’t already said or won’t say at some point in time).

I whipped up an animation in too many weeks, tis on my youtube.

Now… time to apply to internships!

I swear I’ll be back in blogging shape soon. Until then… ta ta!

End of Semester Review

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that, I’ve been kind of… busy. And not the making-cool-stuff sort of busy, more of the oh-my-god-finals-are-coming-AHHHH-THEY’RE-ALREADY-HERE sort of busy. But now it’s over, and I’m essentially guaranteed all A’s and A minuses in the reported-to-the-registrar sort of way. That was somewhat surprising because I didn’t always get straight A’s at UPS, where the classes weren’t always trying to kill you; but at the same time it’s not surprising at all, because around 80% of the material was old hat to me.

So now that I have some time to actually think back and reflect on my time in New York, the foremost question is how everything panned out, versus how I thought it would pan out at the beginning of the year. But before that, perhaps a comparison and contrast:

• I went from living in a basement to living 7 stories above the street. There was a bit more light reaching my window (curse you, tall buildings that I am not in!) but the size of the window more than made this move a huge gain in the not-being-gollum sector.
• I went from living in a suburb-ish sort of area to a decidely urban area. UPS being in a suburban area really closes off the school and isolates it into its own sort of ecosystem, whereas Columbia being uptown of a huge urban center really… I’d say it doesn’t open up the campus, but boy is the ecosystem definitely more of a niche.
• I went from being a junior to being a junior. This is weird because you’re taking lower lever classes, but you’re *old*. You end up talking to freshmen, because they’re the only ones without established groups, and it’s striking how they seem so naive and young. Ahh, youth…
• I went from being on a first-name basis with several professors to “oh hello, do you remember my from that one class? I don’t have time to do research with you right now, and I’m going to be gone in a year. Opps, year gone, goodbye!” (I really, really hope this sort of thing doesn’t happen)
• I went from being a pasty recluse to being a pasty recluse.

Oh, well, I guess I’m out of easy things to snipe.

So how was I expecting New York to pan out? I was expecting… I’m not sure, anymore. A geek mecca? (Except that would have been obviously not probable, given the relative placements of MIT and Columbia) Now that I think about it, I just went without an agenda and decided to take whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know what New York was like; I based my 3/2 decision on who gave me more financial aid, not on which school would give me the better opportunities or whatever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; I only was vaguely expecting something big.

So I wasn’t expecting too much, but I had some ideas about the ‘geek mecca’ that I was looking for, and to an extent Columbia has delivered. I will note that the geeks at Columbia are more inclusive of the business side of things, which kind of threw me off: hell, we didn’t have enough geeks at UPS to even talk about doing startups.

It might be because I got involved with the geekiest-sounding group I could find on campus, and while some of the ADI goals are aligned with my own (CODE CODE CODE) some of the others are somewhat different (encourage entrepreneurship!) and the main goal of the ADI (geek herding!) is a nobel one that has to be done to do great things, but it’s… still grunt work (unlike CODE CODE CODE). So what I was trying to say is that since I’m involved with the ADI, I have no idea if my conclusion that Columbia geeks are more business oriented than geeks elsewhere is true or fallen prey to selection effects or not, which reminds me I need to actually do things with the IEEE group on campus, since I managed to miss almost every single meeting/event thrown by IEEE, and there are probably some hardware hackers lurking with them.

Like always, some professors are cool, and some other professors just don’t give a shit. I suppose this is standard for large research institutions, but it’s a definite paradigm shift from UPS, where most of the professors did give a shit about the students. I suppose that the one class where the professor was less than engaging could be explained by the fact it was held in the early evening, and covered some of the mind-numbing basics of the field [FOURIER TRANSFORMS AGAIN??? I MEAN WHEEE], but that’s no excuse for being inaccessible and having the difficulty of the midterms jump all over the place.

I realized (finally) that classes are somewhat of a waste of time: all the material covered, at least in these lower level courses, can be found in the book. However, I need motivation to do the studying, and there’s nothing like locking me in a room for an hour to raise motivation for studying. Also, I’m paying for something, and by golly I’ll be getting something out of it.

Being relatively far away from campus sucks. I used to be able to roll out of bed and get to class in 2 minutes, and now I have to actually plan out my mornings. Well, having structure isn’t a bad thing, but gosh darn it if convenience isn’t swell.

It’s depressing: I sat down and tried to play some piano on the last day of classes, and it’s all gone. My violin is going, too. Have to do something about that…

Out of steam, I’ll do a end-of-year post on New Years Eve or something.

Merry Newtonmas!

Botacon is a robotics conference being held in Brooklyn, happening right now. It consists of a bunch of talks by people from robotics, like some dudes from Makerbot and Make magazine, which I was planning on going to. I say planning, because I’m not in Brooklyn: instead, I’m in my dorm. It’s quite unfortunate: these cool things are happening in my backyard, and I don’t even go to them…

The reason I’m still in my dorm is that I finally screwed up my sleep schedule. Being something of an insomniac, I have been waking up at 9am for the last week or so: except for the last 2 days, it’s been working wonders on my sleep schedule. Waking up at a constant time, instead of whenever I have to wake up, has seemingly cured my insomnia. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not getting 7+ hours of sleep each night, so I’m always tired: that notion lends credence to the thought that without enough sleep, I have to crash sometime. And I think I crashed this morning, right through 9am to 12am.

Staying up to 3am did not help things. Why did I stay up to 3am? My laptop is… less than satisfactory. For the record, the color really does appear differently under different lighting conditions: I have a feeling my friends are going to take one look at it and say something along the lines of “WTH IT’S SILVER FOO WHACHA COMPLAIN’IN ABOUT”. Ah well. At this point, it’s the internals that have really stood out to me: the touchpad is not quite an unusable monstrosity once I got used to it, and removing the fingerprint reader drivers removes that particular annoyance.

Nay, I do believe that the main cause of my troubles is the i7, which I got on a whim after I discovered upgrading to an i7 cost the same as keeping the i5 due to a coupon. The i7 seems to be putting out prodigious amounts of heat, and conversely draining the battery at a prodigious rate. When I cold-boot my laptop, it takes about a minute before a very particular spot under the laptop becomes uncomfortably warm on my lap. Then, battery life takes a dive, and I’m left with about 3 hours of life, max. I spent much of last night trying to figure out if switching to an i5 would help on both counts, which seems like it should help.

At any rate, I should probably change out of my pajamas, and actually get stuff done today. Hopefully Botacon comes back for a botacon 1 next year…

Holy crap am I tired. Suffice it to say that learning to use a laser cutter was pretty awesome: I now have a chassis for my clock, and a broken key chain QR code. Seriously, bass wood will not hold up to hiding in your pocket for half a day.

First time at NYC Resistor, too. Very cool hackerspace, not sure if it’s bigger than A1L or Metrix. Oh well.

I would post a picture of that clock chassis, but wordpress is barfing on me and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I’m going to try and focus on homework, maybe go to sleep early for once. Going to sleep for 6 hours for 4 days in a row can’t be good… On the other hand, always waking up at 9AM seems to have cured my insomnia. Either that, or getting 6 hours of sleep means I’m always tired. Eh.

Oh hi. Since you’re reading this, you probably know that my old laptop died and refused to be resurrected without a bit of magical malarky involving increasingly higher sums of money. Being a good consumer, I decided I’d instead shell out for a bit better laptop, as my friend the lower-end Dell Inspiron was starting to grate at my edges: another budget laptop seemed to be just asking for more of the same. Of course, I didn’t go that much higher: I’m still a student, after all, and I’ll be a cheap bum at heart for a while yet. I sprung for the HP dm4, with a few modifications thrown in to make it palatable to my inner power user.

First impressions: damn, it is pink! I know, I should be above that, but my inner man-child was still unnerved by the unpacking. After seeing my friend’s HP, which was quite definitely silver, I thought those dm4-is-pink haters were just being silly. They aren’t; such a shade of light red can bring burly men to question their masculinity. Of course, being a refined gentleman instead of a burly man-ape means I don’t have to care. Maybe. OH GOD THE COLOR IT BURNS MY EYES

Second impressions: damn, this mouse pad really does suck! I thought the reviewers were being, I don’t know, whiny or something. Surely such a small problem is trivial, right? Especially when the reviewers still suggested the Envy 14 despite the problems with it. Nay, HP’s mouse pad really does suck. It doesn’t pick up gestures, which is one of its selling points (not for me), and the buttons are just not going to see very much use because some UX engineer decided it would be a fantastic idea to extend the capacitive-sensing area into the buttons. I can work around it, but such an integral part of the laptop shouldn’t even be noticeable.

Next impression: this keyboard feels weird. Not such a big problem, but while I’m airing my grievances, I might as well be thorough.

Fingerprint reader is somewhat annoying: I’m probably not going to use this. Disabling it is only 5 minutes away, but really, I don’t feel quite like doing it right now. I will have to do it, though, or the constant accidental swipes across it that pop up a setup wizard are going to drive me insane.

The i7 seems to run a bit hot, even when I’m not pushing it, and the 6GB of RAM is going to be very useful. I haven’t run very rigorous tests on the battery life, but it seems to be draining somewhat quicker than I was hoping (15% in 30 minutes, so a potential total of 3 hours. Not very long when I’m used to going for 6 hours between charges). Video card seems to be so-so so far: it couldn’t handle the stupid HP flash intro very well (a better approach would have been FUCK YOU, USER. YOU’LL LEARN TO USE A COMMAND LINE INTERFACE, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT. Really, that would’ve been the better approach here). Haven’t done any Blender work on it yet, so we’ll see how that goes. The switching mechanism between integrated and discrete graphics is less than perfect, although it seems that it could be solved by software update.

The screen is somewhat small: I guess grabbing snatches of work on 21″ monitors makes the 1366×768 resolution seem puny by comparison, but it still irks me that there’s no 1600×900 option for most sub-15″ laptops. Definitely shelling out for a higher-res screen in my next laptop iteration. 14″ seems like a good form factor, and the weight seems very reasonable (4.4lb).

The metal case is pretty cool, but that review that claimed it was ‘mostly encased in metal’ was wrong. Not that I’m complaining, since the plastic shell of my old laptop picked up all sorts of crap way too easily, which a semi-metal chassis should solve.

A number of my grievances are probably going to be solved tomorrow, when I will probably get the SSD that I ordered and do clean installs of everything, which means all the crappy software that comes with the laptop will be gone and I can install Ubuntu (good idea install Windows 7 and then Ubuntu).

All in all, it’s not an absolutely terrible laptop: I’m guessing most people would be fine with this laptop. I’m fine with it, too, for all it’s shortcomings (or maybe I just don’t want to go another day without my own computer?). I got some pretty nice internals for a pretty good deal (I essentially swapped out an i5 for an i7 for no increase in price), and I’m guessing that once I beat someone to death with this very light-red laptop, no one will question my sexual orientation. Maybe.

I just whipped up a quick flyer generator for the ADI. It kind of works-ish, definitely needs more work/documentation/a github repo, but it’s good enough for a minimal viable product.

Revision 2, the latest version, is over here.

Why’s it named lolhawk? Well, it makes flyers; the first flyer is arguably the Wright flyer, which was launched at Kitty Hawk; everyone knows kitties as lolcats, so if you spin everything around fast enough, you get lolhawk. Also, hawks are fliers, too ;P

EDIT: I still don’t have a computer to call my own, so that was especially painful to write. Ah well, put off homework for a bit, which lessens the net loss (or increases??! STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME WHE

EDIT 2: Fantastic, and now there’s a new HPMofR! I like to think it’s a reward for opening myself up to universal ridicule and scorn.

Without a computer to call my own.

I can do this.

Maybe.

So, I’ve been without a personal computer for 5 days now, with at least another 4 days ahead of me, minimum. For someone that thought he lived and died by his computing power, it’s been surprisingly bearable.

For a full accounting, my laptop’s video card fried, and it’s in the repair shop for at least a week. If that doesn’t work (I have a reasonable expectation that it should), then I’ll end up splurging and getting myself a good laptop: at least, not a lower end Dell. There are several shortcomings of my Inspiron 1545 that are annoying, like no numpad (for on the fly blender work), weird keyboard bevel material, weak screen/body joint, and no virtual machine support. So, even though I expect the repairs to work, I’m kind of hoping… they won’t?

Anyways, life without a personal computer. Between having a capable smartphone and plenty of University lab computers, life is pretty manageable. It’s not a big thing, but I managed to hack together a bunch of ADI stuff (custom QR codes, several flyers) without pretty much any of my usual resources. Made me feel badass. Ha.

However, the little things drag down on me. Not having the resources to do my homework on my computer is not so great: I can’t rip through lines of a math proof with LaTeX/Emacs and C-a C-k C-n C-y, and can’t change my intermediate results on the fly (have to erase them when you write it out. Unfortunate). It doesn’t seem like typing out your homework in LaTeX would be faster, but it at least feels like it is. For some reason, though, I finished all my homework early (even when just writing it out), and then lazed around for pretty much an entire day. Bah.

I can’t work on my pet projects the way I want to: for instance, there’s no place for me to pop open Eagle and start designing the clock PCBs I need. That’s annoying.

Wouldn’t want to be this way forever. Only for a few more days, hopefully.

Excuse the incomplete thoughts. Computer withdrawal, you know.

Hey! I wrote a tutorial over at HackCU, ADI’s tech blog for non-tech people. It’s about connecting to IRC. No blog post for a while, time to do homework.