Cool

Robins and cryptochrome

I was sitting in my chair and I saw a robin out the window and I wondered whether it could see me (as in how far can robin’s see).  I of course googled it.  But, I got sidetracked and found a Discovery article explaining that robins can see the earth’s EM field.  According to the article the effect is due to the right eye, left half of the brain and a molecule called cryptochrome (best name for such a molecule, in my opinion).  The article discusses an experiment that shows that the birds can’t orient correctly if their vision in the right is obscured.  Of course this didn’t answer my original question, but it is much cooler.

This reminds me of Gary from Alphas (“respect the badge!”).

Chocolatey (package manager)

Chocolatey is a package manager for windows.  This is something that I think all windows users should consider getting.  Even if you don’t use the command line there is a GUI to interact with it https://chocolatey.org/packages/ChocolateyGUI.  You can add new packages to chocolatey.org and take advantage of their automatic packages to make it so if you update the package the users that have it installed will automatically be updated.  Awesome.  So, if I ever have to manage a bunch of computers I think this is the first thing I’ll install on all the windows machines.

Would be nice to have program that would connect to all of the chocolatey computers and ask them for the packages that chocolatey is managing and also request that particular packages be installed on those machines.  This would make chocolatey perfect.

https://puppetlabs.com/ does that!  And its open source http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-open-source (at least for the non-enterprise version).  However, there are a bunch of alternatives http://alternativeto.net/software/puppet/.  Which is cool.  Might be a better/easier/free alternative.

Codebox

I found out about https://www.codebox.io/.  It is an online ide and it supports a ton of langs (including java).  It is open source, so you don’t have to use their services.  It also has desktop apps so you can work outside your browser.  The ide is customizable and you can make custom plugins etc.  Sounds awesome considering it is a two person company (a frontend and a backend dev).  I should see about setting it up.  I’ll probably try it out on their servers and if I really like it I’ll see about setting it up on my server.

fun autonomous vehicle ideas

Would be cool in the future with autonomous cars we will be able to have events where instead of having stations in a building that you walk to you would be in cars.  And whenever you switched you would change cars.

 

Bathroom car!  Would be too cool to have an autonomous bus/car that just drove around the city and people could request it and you would be able to go to the bathroom in it.  It could connect to the back of your car and you could walk into it.  Sensors would be able to monitor when you needed to go to the bathroom so that those vehicles could be positioned appropriately.

 

Warblr

This is totally awesome!!  One of my ideas is becoming an app soon.  They just started and are trying to get funding through kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1190241008/warblr-an-app-that-recognises-birds-from-their-son?ref=nav_search.  They seem to have a lot of media support and there app seems to work!  Totally awesome.

Fast Company did an article about it http://www.fastcoexist.com/3037817/fund-this/the-original-tweeting-this-app-is-like-shazam-for-bird-songs.

https://drewsblog.herokuapp.com/?p=1741 my original post on my idea which essentially Warblr.  So, cool.  Can’t wait to try it out.  I’ll have to follow this and see how they do.

Adaptive Appartment

Totally awesome http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036734/this-micro-apartment-transforms-when-you-push-a-button-to-give-you-more-space.  In some of my really old note books I drew and described my “dream” house with fold/slide/pop out furniture, games, beds, walls etc.  I never thought of it actually being developed.  Their target market is for apartments in cities with cramped living conditions.  Which is perfect!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFq15IHQ1Uc — youtube video of a demo.

One of the concerns I had identified was the fragility with a system like this.  If  one of the hinges breaks I wouldn’t be able to get my bead out.  Also, I had assumed it would all be done at a press of a button and we could program different configurations.  Problem was what if the power went out.

Still I think it is a clever concept that I hope gets popular even in standard size houses.

Accident Notification System

So, a friend of mine was just in a really bad car collision (not with another car thankfully).  He was taken to a hospital and was unconscious and had fractured his skull.  It took about 6 hours until his family was notified!  It was on the website of our local newspaper like within the hour of the crash.  I googled it and it seems like others have experienced the same thing where the emergency contacts aren’t called for hours after the collision.

So, my idea is that we could connect a raspberry pi to a bluetooth OBD-II adapter.  Then when the OBD signals that the airbag is deployed the raspberry pi would notify a smartphone to call 911 and any emergency contacts.  However, I did a little googling and found that getting whether the airbag has been deployed would be different for each manufacturer and is proprietary so there is no easy way to get it!  I guess that is why OnStar has got basically a monopoly on providing services like this.

So, I was also thinking that airbags would probably not be the only system affected when in a crash that would cause the airbags to deploy.  Would be interesting to collect data from the OBD to find out what other things are indicators…

So, this idea seems worthy of a kickstarter for Procyon :).  Also, I’ve seen most of the better kickstarters have cool youtube videos.  The guy who was in the accident has a degree in film and has made commercials so maybe we could get him involved.  Would be fun to get into autonomous vehicles eventually.  This might be a good start.

However, back in 2010 someone tried doing this sort of thing only based on the smart phone’s ability to measure Gs by the accelerometer.  Pretty cool.  However, it seems like they had troubles with false positives.  http://mobilware.org/2010/presentations/Car%20Accidents.pdf  But, since then, they haven’t done anything to continue the work.  They did have a neat idea where they would also broadcast location of wreck to a map service so that people could route around it.

EDIT: Well I found someone that offers this as a service http://my-911.com/.  They make you purchase the dongle and then they offer their software as a service that you subscribe to.  They don’t seem to have a big market.  I think that if we could sell it to taxi/limo companies.  Then passengers could provide emergency contact info.  And if the user has the app they would be able to just get into any car and it would be able to interface with the bluetooth device automatically.

EDIT 2: Well I no longer think we should even work on this.  It has been done and done well by https://www.automatic.com/.  It is just about how I would have done it too.  They have a built in accelerometer in the dongle that attaches to the OBD port, so they don’t have to figure out how to know if the air bag has been deployed.  Also, they have really good support so that it isn’t just your phone automatically calling they have a nice protocol set up.  I emailed them and told them about Procyon and an idea I had while I was looking at their site that I think we could provide and a broken link I found on their site.  Cool if they respond.