In a new wrinkle on security concerns about e-voting, a Diebold voting machine key is copied from a photo on the Diebold website [via Boing Boing]. According to this article, the keys for all of the voting machines are the same, are very simple, and a detailed photo was available online until this story came out. Once one has a key, the machine is open to sabatoge, including code insertion to transparently modify election results. The availability of the photo is almost an example of seemingly trivial information being potentially compromising in the wrong hands, except it doesn’t seem that tricky to realize that you probably ought not put a close up photo of a key, or really any security device, on the internet. Even if you can’t make a copy based on the photo, you’ll learn a lot about what it will likely take to pick the lock. A company under so much scrutiny for their security really ought to know better.
So proud!
Nothing – nothing! – that I could have to post tonight could trump how proud I am of my students right now. I’ve been teaching an electronic design and robotics course, and they have been building line-following robots working up from resistors and transistors and comparators and motors, and with the big competition tomorrow, they look amazing. I was thrilled when the prototyped circuits worked as designed, but these guys have been pusing to get their prototypes actually on the ground and following paths. Today I’ve seen them tackle figure-eights, divergent paths, and complicated looping patterns. I can’t wait for the official competition tomorrow – I think it’s going to be incredibly exciting.
Wish you could be building robots with us? Wish you were building a killer ninja robot? Play around with Robot Rage, where you build yourself a virtual “battlebot” and steer it through battles. You won’t have as much fun as we are, but it’s still pretty cool….
Gravity Games
Two fun gravity games just came my way… Via Clicked there is Cosmic Crush, in which you are a little planet wandering the universe, eating smaller bodies to grow up into a big planet. It’s fun once you get into it, but a bit dull to start. Less boring, but a little more frustrating, is Spaced Penguin! [via T] in which you shoot a penguin towards its spaceship in the presence of various gravitational bodies and other less astronomically accurate phenomenon. Spaced Penguin has been around for a while, but I haven’t seen its new cousin, Doom Funnel Chasers! before – it seems to be the exact same thing, but different….
It probably has better penmanship than me…
Today in class I talked a little about what makes something a robot, or an androiod, or a cyborg, but I didn’t bring up the notion of an automaton. This article has a really nice description of Jaquet-Droz’s writing automaton, including video [via Clicked]. The article points ot that the automaton is really closer to being a precursor of the computer than a precursor of the robot, because it can change what message it writes out based on a “program” on a wheel. Though, the “program” is not truly a program, as it does not change the essential functioning of the automaton, but simply
a specification of how to perform its one very limited behavior. Certainly, there is no true autonomy, despite the name.
If you’re looking for a classic automaton story, you should read through the Wikipedia article about the mechanical Turk hoax from the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. It’s a pretty amazing story of people’s willingness to believe that machines are capable of more than they really are based on some minimal plausible evidence.
Press your luck
I have relatively little to add to this hilarious post from defective yeti about the stupidity of Deal or No Deal except to agree that the show is idiotic, relying on the mathematical ignorance of its contestants and audience. It really makes me crazy that people think “the banker” actually makes decisions about what to offer based on a personal assessment of the contestant, when it is clearly a selection of an amount from an error range around the mathematical expectation of what the contestant might win. Yeti’s proposed game show might be more entertaining – I’m trying to brainstorm who would be a good host. Anna Kournikova? Martha Stewart (who would never do it, but who would be hilarious to watch if she did)?
Something done, Something new
WIth a major project done, the temptation hits to pick up too many new things to fill the fake void in one’s schedule. I’m working on finishing off a variation of the Cheesy Love sweater with a more argyle style pattern across the front in pastel cotton. But I also spent the afternoon browsing through my latest issue of Craft and somehow only just realized that like the sister publication Make, Craft has a weblog with great links to projects and patterns. I’ve been trawling through the archives and the following were the standouts, some of them particularly geeky….
- Knit an iPod case out of cassette tape – wonderful and cute!
- Knit Atari Breakout and Apple Logo socks – sadly labelled “TechGuy Socks”
- Knit a donut
- Star Wars fairisle patterns for sweaters, or whatever else you like
- Make the Enterprise out of an old 3.5 inch floppy
- Knit mittens with pockets for RFID cards, designed for subway passes
- Repurpose cool tshirts into cute panties
- sew the Dana wrap skirt from the neat Fitz Patterns which provides free downloadable sewing patterns
Not everything they link is a crafty pattern. I found this guide to using a spreadsheet and Gantt chart to plan a large dinner there.
In unrelated news, D asks me to share Poke the Penguin in honor of Penguin Awareness Day…
4D screenshots!
As part of putting together a document about the courses I have been teaching, I decided I wanted to be able to share some screen capture video. I’ve done next to nothing with that sort of software, so I solicited recommendations and two people pointed me in the direction of Camtasia Studio. They have a 30 day demo version which, from the little that I tried, seems to give you access to a fairly complete version. I didn’t use the audio or webcam functions, but it looks like it would be really easy to combine annotation from one of those sources over a screen capture video. The screen captures themselves looked really good – mine are only a bit jerky and it looked like I could have tweaked the settings to make them even smoother if I hadn’t minded the file sizes growing even more. I’ve also done very little video editing in the past, but the built in tools, whle probably not as sophisticated as some of the stuff out there, seemed to be fairly robust. I really only scratched the surface with the software because I had a very targeted task I was trying to accomplish, but if you have any reason to want to create a video demo of something on your computer, particularly with commentary, I’d definitely recommend trying this software out.
If only…..
So very, very busy right now, so I will just leave you with the following – a classic from Usenet that has particular appeal to me this week: MAKE.TENURE.FAST
Geeky stuff to keep you warm
I’m getting down to the wire on a few projects, so here is some random fun to get you through the middle of the week….
I’m a huge Stephenson fan, so I’m excited that
More fun from the Make Blog: if you know how to wire up an LED without exploding it, you can do this Embarassingly Easy Case Mod. I have a feeling some of my readers will enjoy the radio-controlled potato gun. Finally, I must make myself this Tetris Tote Bag.
And, I must remember to tell my students about the Butterfly Amicus 3000 – a ping pong playing robot.
Boolean Quilt
In class tomorrow we are going to talk about 5 variable Karnaugh maps, having just done 2-4 variable Karnaugh maps. I’m partial to the 5-variable versions pictured at that link with the diagonal lines to indicate the top versus bottom of the map. Working through some examples for my lecture notes today, I noticed that they look an awful lot like quilt patterns, like these traditional Nine-patch Blocks. I am now determined to design a quilt based around a five-variable boolean expression – I envision blue fabrics for true, white for false, and maybe yellow for don’t cares. I just need to chose a good boolean expression, now. I’m thinking of looking for a good quote with an interesting logical structure that I can translate into an expression and go from there….