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  • Eliot 12:06 pm on June 10, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: hack education, learn, time bank, uncollege   

    Hack Education With A Time Bank 

    Traditional education is rapidly changing.  The days of paying the highest price for the best education is gone.  The world is open and that doesn’t apply anymore.  Today I’m going to give you an educational hack that will allow you to learn anything.

    What is a time bank?

    A Time Bank is a community system where people can exchange their skills and services without money, usually with a focus on building relationships within the local community. Each member lists the skills and services that they have. For every hour they spend teaching, they gain a “banked” hour to spend learning. Time banks are an incredible pool of human capital that you can take advantage of for free. By using them, you learn new things, meet new people, and put yourself in the position of both learner and teacher.

    You can check out the whole article from Uncollege here.

    time bank

    So how is this an educational hack?

    What’s the shortest distance between two points?  A straight line.  Let’s say you always wanted to learn how to bake chocolate chip cookies.  You can learn through a very methodical method of building foundation and taking many steps that eventually get you there.  This way will teach you how to cook many things by the time you complete this process.  Most structured educational experiences function this way.  Traditional education wants to provide a well rounded experience.

    If you knew a person that bakes great chocolate chip cookies and convince them to show you how to make them you will learn it in no time.  That is why this is a hack.  There are communities of people willing to exchange skills.  Traditional learning can provide too much information for special cases like this.  For a modest investment of time, you can efficiently learn what you want faster.

    Communities of people… I don’t believe you?

    Yes, there are many groups dying to get more members.  New users increases the overall availability of skills.  This is great because a user of the time bank can learn more.  Check out this search (US only) if you still don’t believe me.

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  • Eliot 11:43 am on June 5, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: innovation, patent troll   

    I’m Not A Big Fan Of Patent Trolls 

    What is a patten troll?

    Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to manufacture or market the product. A related, less pejorative expression is non-practicing entity (NPE) which describes a patent owner who does not manufacture or use the patented invention.

    Source: Wikipedia

    patent-troll

    The gist is an inventor comes up with an idea, not to build the invention or a viable business around it, but to sit on it.  After someone else spends time building it and makes a business out of it, the inventor starts to scream, “Pay Me!” This is a terrible practice. The original inventor wants to get paid for little to no work.  That’s not a way to make money.  If you try that anywhere else, you will continue to have empty pockets.

    This morning I read an article from Business Insider titled, “11 Galling Stats About Patent Trolls That Will Make You Wonder Why America Has Put Up With Them For So Long.”

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-patent-trolls-hurt-the-economy-2013-6#ixzz2VLC8fydA

    In the States we really need to get a handle on this.  Patent trolls are flat out ridiculous and stifle innovation.  We deserve better.

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  • Eliot 11:49 am on April 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 3D Printing,   

    Homemade 3D Printed Stepper Motor 

    This is the power of 3D printing.  If you can dream about it, you can print it.  It can be something new or an existing product.  You just need your imagination and some time for it to print.  Check out this very cool video from Christopher Hawkins showing his work.  Please remember to dream big because you just might create something that solves real problems.

    Additional Resources

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    • best security camera system 3:07 am on April 21, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      As soon as motion has not been detected for a set period of time,
      the temperature can begin to decrease, saving you money and energy.
      It is essential that you are able to separate facts from myths so that you can make a more informed choice.
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    • Onmyphd 8:09 pm on May 2, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Awesome! Yes, 3D Printing is not just for making decorative objects.

  • Eliot 2:09 am on March 21, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    HOWTO: Creating A Raspberry Spy 

    When I first received the Raspberry Pi my mind raced with different possibilities. I saw people creating media centers and connecting sensors to the GPIO port.  Those are very cool projects but I came up with one of my own.  My idea was to create a surveillance center.  I don’t think this is a unique idea, but it was my idea.  I was passionate about it and made it happen.  Below is a list of components and software I used for this project.

    Hardware

    Here’s a picture of all of the components before I connected everything.

    raspberry-pi-1

    Raspberry PI Model B

    I picked this up from Amazon for $40.  There are places like AdaFruit that you can get it for $35, but I think the was a delay at the time so I didn’t go for the cheaper price point.  I have Amazon prime and used the free two day shipping option.



     

    Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000

    I had this lying around.  Most laptop have built in cameras.  I normally use it to capture movies for YouTube.  I think its available on Amazon for $70.  The quality for the price point isn’t bad.



     

    Motorola USB Power Supply

    I have a few Motorola phones, and I just used one of the supplies I had from an old phone.


     

     

    Wifi USB Dongle

    I ordered this from Amazon for $12.  It was worth it.  The dongle is pretty powerful.  My WiFi router is downstairs two floors down, and this little device has no problems sending and receiving data to it.


     

    The Assembled Unit

    Yes, I’m using Legos as a case.  I have a Lego wizard for a son.  He set me up with this slick enclosure in 10 minutes.

    raspberry-pi-2

    Software

    UVCCapture

    This is an open source package for capturing video.  I saw this tutorial.  It was exactly what I wanted to do.  There are many options for video capture.  You may get better mileage with a different package.

    Bash

    Bash is a linux shell that is my default shell on my Pi.  I have a bash script that runs every minute.  The script uses uvccapture to take a snap shot.

    Source code of capture.sh:

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    #!/bin/bash
 
APP=/usr/bin/uvccapture
FILE=/var/www/snap-$(date +%s).jpg
LOG_FILE=/var/log/capture.log
 
$APP -v -B128 -C40 -S40 -x960 -y720 -o$FILE
 
cp $FILE /var/www/snap.jpg

    Python

    UVCCapture doesn’t always work.  There are times that UVCCapture runs and an empty image is saved.  I wrote a small python script to clean up empty images.  This isn’t a huge problem, but I use it to remove blank images before I create time lapse footage.  You can see some of the footage I captured in this post.

    Source code of cleanup-cap.py:

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    import os
 
for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/var/www/', topdown=False):
for name in files:
f = os.path.join(root, name)
if os.path.getsize(f) == 628:
print('removing {0}'.format(f))
os.remove(f)

    Disclaimer

    I’m running my bash script under root’s crontab.  I did this out of convenience.  There is a better way of doing this.  However, since this is a personal pet project I kept things fast and fun.

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    • frank Tan 7:18 pm on April 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Great articles on your blog.Very enjoyable reading,thank you very much.

  • Eliot 1:39 pm on March 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    What are you going to do with the Raspberry Pi? 

    I saw this question posted on Quora today.  It spoke to me because I’m working on something very cool.  Before I get to that, this was the best response from Quora.

    Mark Harrison wrote:

    Home automation.

    At the price point (and they were released this morning in the UK), I can afford one per room, in a five bed house, for less than the price of a Mac Mini.

    Couple with a USB temperature sensor, and a USB relay, (and a bit of software that I will release under GPL) it’ll control my zone heating, with a web interface that provides not only an HTML gateway but an XML gateway to plug into whole-house stuff.

    Very cool indeed.  The Pi is definitely up to that task.  Now for my project.

    My Raspberry Spy

    Its a very simple home surveillance project with a snazzy name.  I connected my Pi to a USB camera, pointed it at a window in my house, and took a picture every minute.  This is a few days of screenshots assembled as a time lapse movie.

    Please forgive my early release.  I promise to publish the write up soon.  I will link it from this page.

     

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