Minh’s Notes

A hearty welcome to a good Midwestern friend of mine, self-styled “The Author” (especially in face-to-face conversation), who has followed me into the code-tourist trap apparently known as “Sam Clam’s disco”. You’ll love it here: it’s the most culturally and technologically advanced population center this side of the Asteroid Belt, judging solely by the number of iPhones in use at any given moment. (Honestly, Mars & co. aren’t much competition.)

You’ll probably appreciate these useful use-relative tips from a fellow Midwesterner who’s been stuck in these parts for the last few years:

1. The City and County of San Francisco holds a monopoly on all destinations in “the City”. Most of the other municipalities reduced their market share to a combined 5‰ after throwing their support behind the Raiders decades ago.
2. If someone asks what party you belong to, you’re in tricky waters: liberalism only extends roughly 50 miles from the corner of Jackson and Stockton in the City, near which point stands an X-rated fortune cookie factory. (Of course it’s relevant.) But beyond that, you’re in territory so red it makes those cheap plastic cups look downright green. Anyways, just say you’re with the Flat-Pluto Society, for if there’s one thing the locals love more than a partisan fight, it’s a lost cause.
3. Supposedly the cops here aren’t allowed to blame you for the enhanced framerate built into their standard-issue sunglasses.
4. Though this is Northern California, you’ll find plenty of SoCal expatriates who care deeply about definite articles. So to head off the 101 / the 101 controversy, just call it “Root 101”, nice and proper.
5. A visit to Costco requires a full day off work, just to navigate the crowds. Your manager may be able to provide you with a canned out-of-office response that consists of: “Costco run.”
6. Chipotle burritos don’t count as burritos. They aren’t served with habañeros from a kitchen on wheels for less than $5.
7. Snow is what you put in a cone, not what you toss into the street only to have Public Works shove right back onto your driveway.
8. Bookmark this page, so you know whether that shaking came from the rock a mile down or your neighbors a floor up.
9. Get a GPS, so you don’t accidentally get stuck in an infinite loop.
10. Cell phone reception is terrible, so ditch it and grab a landline. TV reception is fickle, so ditch it and read the newspaper. Local GPS data is poor, so ditch it and buy an atlas. Electricity is spotty some years, so ditch it and dig out your kerosene lamp instead.

Did I mention it’s the most technologically advanced population center this side of the Asteroid Belt?

At midnight, the majority of the world’s search engine users dumped Google in favor of Mountain View–based Topeka.

AVIM was ready. The little input method editor that could has supported Topeka since its first release nearly four years ago. It comes with full support for Topeka Docs, which is great news for those of you who edit corn yield estimates in Vietnamese.

An archival photograph of AVIM working its magic on Topeka’s front page Internet ages ago.

But enough about Topeka. AVIM excels at so much more. I always tout how it “lets you type so naturally you won’t even notice it”. As a user, you should never have to worry how a webpage was implemented in order to use it. That’s why AVIM works in every single part of every single application it supports. That’s why it automatically resolves conflicts with other IMEs and even pioneers support for Microsoft Silverlight.

Today, as the popular Web comic xkcd unveiled its state-of-the-art “unixkcd” interface, I couldn’t help but notice that AVIM continues to do the right thing. What’s more natural for a command-line interface than pure, unmodified VIQR?

But as a software developer, I can’t rest on the merits of releases past. There’s still plenty of room for innovation in the input method editing space. And while I can’t commit to anything specific yet, I will say that my new input method is rockin’.

So apparently spambots consider a blog abandoned after six months. At that point, they increase the flow of comment spam tenfold, hoping the blog’s owner is asleep at the keyboard and has kindly left the floodgates open.

What a refreshing nap. And what a wonderful way to return to the blogosphere: awaiting me were thousands of comments pending approval. As usual, there were plenty of entry-to-entry salesmen peddling See One Alice and other fine products. But the spambots have been getting increasingly desperate, burying their hyperlinks within gushing compliments. They hail the entries from my high school days as “good”, “great”, and “pretty great”, fully expecting to shove their way onto my blog with deafening courtesy. Moral of the story: never trust a robot to recognize good writing. Or to produce any.

I did get some old-fashioned, hand-typed feedback during my absence. A decidedly human commenter called me, to paraphrase orthographically, a “———kin virgin”, whatever that means. A thoughtful reader announced the obsolescence of some software I released years ago. But not to worry: soon, they too will be assimilated by the vast army of spambots roaming this blogosphere.

In six months, I’d forgotten what fun it is to drag my readers through hundreds of words of pointless drivel, seasoned generously with outbound hyperlinks. My sincere thanks to the spambots for reminding me.

After I introduced the HeadSprout back in April, several people asked me how I came up with the idea of a bike- and head-mounted digital television system. The best answer I could give was that a TV antenna and a bike helmet found themselves both in my field of vision at the same time.

The other day, I read a BBC Magazine article asking a teenager to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Feeling nostalgic as I always do, I went rummaging through a drawer at home and found my old Sony Watchman. Slightly before my time, portable TV gadgets were all the rage. At some point, my family purchased an FD-250 model, probably at Sears, and it became my favorite toy growing up.

The Watchman FD-250 has the size and weight of a small book, but the antenna extends well over a foot.

The Watchman was my poor-man’s introduction to DXing. Whenever my family took a summer road trip, I’d bring the device along with me and tune in to various stations along the way, collecting their call letters as we entered large metropolitan areas. On the way to New Orleans, I would pick up numerous Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Birmingham stations this way.

It still works, after you pop in a fresh battery or two. The first thing you notice is how much consumer electronics have changed within just twenty-odd years. Get it? Watchman, Walkman? You know, Walkman, predecessor to the CD player? Like large MP3 players? Um, before iPods?

The Watchman’s screen is angled downward and pincushioned inward. Shown here is some old movie on channel 38. Even if you watched it on a state-of-the-art digital TV, it’d still be in black-and-white, so no loss here.

This particular Watchman model had a black-and-white CRT display. Actually, to give the device a less awkward form factor, the screen is just a mirror, angled to reflect the image produced by the CRT tube (below the screen in the photos). The fact that the screen is black-and-white shouldn’t be that surprising: in the early 1990s, you could still find plenty of full-size, black-and-white TV sets at family-run electronics stores (another relic of that decade).

Since nearly all Cincinnati-area stations stopped broadcasting in analog sometime last month, the Watchman can only receive three stations: WLWT 5, the Cincinnati NBC affiliate; WKEF 22, the Dayton ABC affiliate; and WBQC 38, an independent station in Cincinnati that airs kung-fu movies and similar fare. As a low-power station, WBQC isn’t required to give up their analog signal yet, while the other two are airing nothing but DTV infomercials in a federally-mandated loop. The reception isn’t spectacular in any case – unidirectional VHF antennae never work well this far out from the city – but the Watchman was built for mobility, not kung-fu movies.

If I had the right cables, I could restore the Watchman to full working condition by hooking a converter box up to its A/V In jack. Then I could watch digital TV in glorious black-and-white, and it would be plenty more convenient than HeadSprout. But that’s a project for another day.

For the past three months, I along with five partners have toiled in stealth mode to build a disruptive product that will revolutionize media consumption as we know it, by synergizing television watching with bicycle riding. Leveraging unparalleled loyalties to both recreational activities, it is our intent to forge a new market based on mobile multimedia and capitalize upon emerging opportunities.

In short: we have developed the HeadSprout, the world’s first fully-integrated bike- and head-mounted digital television system.

Continue reading "Introducing the HeadSprout" »