Previously I had a Fenix EO5 flashlight and Leatherman Squirt PS4 on my keychain. When Leah gave birth to the girls I gave her the flashlight and Leatherman for her diaper bag, and I bought myself a JETBeam BA10 and Leatherman Juice CS4 as replacement. They are obviously too big to be on the keychain so I carry them in my messenger bag for my daily commute. After listening to the podcast, I realized some important items are missing.

First, because of the increased number of items I want to carry with me, it is much easier and better organized if I store the items in a bag. I picked the Maxpedition E.D.C. Pocket Organizer and put my JETBeam and Leatherman on the left hand side. A spare battery is added for backup. A disposable lighter (I’m not a smoker but the ability to make fire is useful in any emergency) and a simple first-aid kit round out the left hand side of the organizer. On the right, I added the iPhone charger and cable so I will be able to keep my phone charged in an emergency. That plus a iPhone backup battery pack from MonoPrice and a face mask goes into the pocket. The face mask will help me through any dusty situation. Having the equipment in the Maxpedition mean I can just pick it up from my messenger bag and put it into the Timbuk2 Stork messenger/diaper bag when we go out during the weekends.

For the keychain, I added three items. First, a PocketToolX Brewzer. It is kind of mini-multitool in that it has a flat head screwdriver, a box opener, and a bottle opener. It is made of high-grade stainless steel and is TSA compliant. Then I have the LaCie iamakey USB flash drive. I can use it for carrying general files, but the feature I wanted it for is the built-in encryption software. This allows me to store scanned copies of our legal and travel documents (passports, driving license, greencards, etc.) on the flash drive securely. And since the software for decryption is on the drive, I can use it on any computer as I won’t need to download and install any software. Finally, the green tube is a glow ring. It is basically a plastic tube filled with a small amount of tritium gas (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen) which glows as it decay. Why is it useful? If I drop my keys while I was out in the dark, say while camping or a park, the glow ring will allow me to find it if it is within about 30 feet. It is not available for sale in the US and I purchased mine from Nite GlowRing in the UK.

I’ve also learnt a lot from the podcast about other items that I should include in the B.O.B. In addition to the B.O.B, I’m going to build a baby B.O.B. for the girls specifically and a mini B.O.B. for the car. All of these will be in future posts.

However, couple of minor details remains to be improved by Acura:

1. There is no way for me to change the temperature gauge from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Why? The Canadian version of TSX uses Celsius, so why not offer a configuration setting to switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius?
2. This is the first car I own that has seat memory and it has been so useful when I park in the city. The parking attendent always move the seat back and changes the mirror (to aid the tight parking no doubt). Before I always had to spend a few minutes in the GTI to adjust the seat, the mirror, etc. back to my settings. Now in the TSX, I just push a button and the seat moves back to my preferred position automatically. But not the mirrors. What? Surely that must be a mistake?

Acura, to their credit, has been pretty responsive when I voice my complain on Twitter. They even have someone phone me to follow up and promise my opinion is taken seriously. Would my complain change the next generation of TSX? Perhaps, or perhaps not. We’ll see in four years time when the car lease expires and it’s time for me to look for a replacement.

One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud.  But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.)

The studios don’t even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It’s all about protecting short-term profit.

via Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA « Steve Blank.

Contrast that with the type of RC cars one can purchase now. They are all ready assembled, ready to provide instant gratification for the impatient generation of children. The very few RC car kits that require assembly are the large, expensive, gas-powered buggy, which obviously not suitable for young children (I was around 13-14 years old when I assembled my first one). Likewise with electronic/computer. One purchase a game console or computer and all one need to do is connect the cables and press the power button. And it is not confined to children and toys. Large portion of the adult population stumble over assembling even simple furniture such as those from IKEA. Oh, how the adults blame the lack of instruction or tools as if skills should not be required to assemble anything!

So I was very happy to see that the spirit of building things ourselves is still very much alive at the World Maker Faire at NY Hall of Science. There were plenty of robots, lights, 3D printing, etc. I think the Maker Faire movement has gone up a notch since the release of Arduino which dramatically lowers the bar of building your own circuit boards. There was a whole tent devoted to Arduino and companies that provides additional add-on circuit boards. The other big thing in the fair is 3D printing, which also had its own tent. And the most encouraging thing is that the majority of people there are kids and teenagers. Not just a bunch of old geeks like myself.

Now I think I should subscribe to the MAKE magazine and build something!

More photos are on Flickr.

Star Wars Moleskines FTW!

Cover via Amazon

About 3 years ago, a colleague introduced me to a book called, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss. It documented Neil’s journey of preparing himself for emergency after 9/11. The journey he took was long, twisty, and extreme in some instances. I enjoyed the book a lot and learnt how much I didn’t know about the world of emergency preparation. More concrete ideas on what I need began to formed in my mind, but again I didn’t action any of them except purchasing the SOG AE-04 Aegis Tanto knife with serrated blade.

Then earlier this year Leah was pregnant, with twins! Nothing like becoming responsible for helpless babies to focus the mind. I started collecting emergency items in Evernote and planned to start purchasing them before the births so I’d be better prepared. Then the earthquake happened. Then hurricane Irene, in the same week. The earthquake didn’t worry me as much as the hurricane as the ground shook for a few seconds and that was it. Hurricane Irene, on the other hand, meant I had couple of days of getting prepare for it. Or rather, coming to realization that I’m not prepared for it as much as I could. We had plenty of bottled water. I had a small Leatherman Squirt PS4 multi-tools and a small LED flash light on my keychain. That was pretty much all we had in terms of gears. We did pack our bags with couple of days of clothing, some food, and ready our apartment for hurricane pretty quickly (all thanks to our frequent apartment moving in the last 10 years).

As I sat in our friend’s house in Princeton watching the weather news and waiting for the storm to arrive, I could not help but felt deeply unprepared. My tiny Leatherman is useful for everyday task but I wouldn’t bet my life on it to get me out of trouble. Likewise with the tiny LED flashlight. So on Sunday after we got back to our apartment from Princeton, I started placing orders for some of the kits that I’ve been researching for a while and started building up my “Go”/”Bugging Out” bag.

First up are proper-size tools. Leatherman Super Tool 300 is full-size multi-tool that has almost every tool one can imagine. It comes with a carrying holster so I can carry in on my belt. Even though there are both a knife and a saw in the Leatherman, they aren’t the same as a proper knife and I already have the SOG knife. This cut through things like butter (great for opening packages from Amazon, etc. By the way).

Next is lights. My Fenix E05 flashlight is great for lighting up dark corners when I crawl around the floor installing computer, etc. but won’t be bright enough for the outdoor. For that I got the JETBeam RRT-2 R5. With its 300 lumen output (compare with 27 lumen from the Fenix) I feel like Mulder & Scully. For general lighting, the Rayovac Sportsman Xtreme LED lantern was my pick. I heard about it from Andy Ihnatko during a MacBreak Weekly podcast who was without power from hurricane Irene. It uses regular D battery (unlike the JETBeam’s CR123 or 18650) and has plenty of lighting power (300 lumen). They are all fantastic lights and will serve me well but one common weak point is that they all need battery to work. That will be fine for short duration power cut (2-3 days, perhaps a little longer) but eventually they run of juice. To take care of that scenarios, chemical light sticks are my backup.

While I’m on the topic of electrical power, stocking up on spare batteries is good but when they run out, they are dead. I think the better option is rechargeable batteries so when the power is depleted, they can be recharged either from mains, or by other means (hand crank, solar, etc.). Since rechargeable batteries lose their charge faster than regular ones, a combination of spare, regular batteries and rechargeable ones will means there is always power for lights while topping up charges on the rechargeables. An additional item to consider is a solar charger. This will be my next item to research.

I was struck by how we don’t have a portable radio in the apartment, mainly because we only listen to the radio in the car nowadays. I am sure not going to sit in my car to listen for tornado warning! To keep the power load light, I choose the Etón ARCFR160R self-powered radio. It’s powered by a hand crank with a small solar panel on the top to charge up the internal battery. It also has a USB port on the side so can, potentially, charge a cell phone by the hand crank. I ain’t going to rely on that but it’s nice to know it is possible.

To carry all these equipment (and more) I need a bag. We had to use a regular backpack for the hurricane Irene evacuation but I’d prefer to have everything packed and ready to go. What better place to get a bag than 5.11 Tactical where I bought the RED 2400 Bag. It’s bright red, water-resistant, and built for medics daily use. (Though this is not strictly part of an emergency kit, my prefer pants during hurricane Irene weekend is the 5.11 Tactical Pants. It is made of very durable material and stitching. More importantly, it has lots of pockets to store gear.)

To round out the list of equipment filling the bag, I throw in some thermal blankets, a first-aid kit, 50 feet of paracord, and a bunch of Ziploc bags. Ziploc bags are for storing things that you don’t want to get wet such as legal documents, spare batteries, etc.

The bag content will be continuously evolving as I discover new requirements. Hopefully I won’t fall into the same trap the Neil Strauss found himself in!

Items on my research list:

• solar charger for batteries and cell phone
• better medical kits, like those offer by Tac Med Solutions
• another, lighter bag for the car

We started the morning with a safety briefing and some pointers on how to shot head-on shots and panning. We were divided into 3 groups and my group headed straight to Turn 2, 3, and 4 complex to practice what we’ve learnt so far. Our group instructor, Rick, made sure we each tried different positions, type of shots, and not stuck shooting one photos with different cars.

Before we started, one of the organizer suggested that we put on ear plugs due to the loud Ferrari engine. I was skeptical from my experience of a Formula 1 V8 engine driving pass me less than 30 feet in full throttle. That. Was. Loud. (Here is a video from 2008. It doesn’t do it full justice.) In contrast, these Ferrari F430 and F458 were quiet and did not need any ear protection at all!

As well as the modern Ferraris, there were also couple of vintage Alfa Romeo on the track (not at the same time, mind you). The open cockpit made for much more interesting composition and the slower speed meant panning shots were easier. Rick reminded me about the one-third composition rule and I tried to put the Alfa Romeo in either the left third or the right third of the frame.

For me, personally, my favorite was the F40 LM. The F40 was one of the first sport car model I made when I was a kid in Hong Kong. The Le Mans race tuned twin-turbo V8 somehow sounds louder and definitely better than the modern F458 and F430.

Just before lunch, Rick took us to the paddock and instructed us on how to photography the drivers and the mechanics. He showed us how to use off-camera flashes to ensure we did not blind the drivers just before they got into the car for practice! Other things he showed us include the type of stock photography we could take to improve the chance of being pay by teams or sponsors. That was interesting to me but not important, unlike some in the group who were striving to make motorsport photography their profession.

After lunch, it was more shooting at different part of the circuit. My critique session with Rick did not happen until the end of the day which was unfortunate as he pointed out a few obviously flaw in my compositions and techniques which I did not have a chance to remedy because I would not be there for the second day.

I really enjoy the workshop and met some great photographers. I seriously consider signing up for the next year if Lime Rock runs it again, probably for the full 2 days so I can take full advantage of the experience of the instructors.

You can see the rest of my photos on Flickr.

So now I’m in this state where my local repo has a number of commits that I need to push up. But I can’t because I don’t want to merge in all the accidental deletes. I need to remove/fix the deletion first before I can push. How do I do that? After a few minutes on Google, I got the general approach of using git rebase but nothing that points me to actual steps that I think will fix my problem. Then I turned to Twitter, posted a question, and waited while I did some more googling. Low and behold, I received tips from @XTZGZoReX on a possible approach and after I tried it out, it works perfectly!

Here is how:

1. Leave the existing local repo alone. You may want to reset it back to the pre-merge state by doing git reset --hard
2. Make a fresh clone of the repo from GitHub. Let’s call it repo2.
3. Perform an interactive rebase on repo2 and set the starting point to one commit before the one you want to nuke: git rebase -i
4. The interactive rebase will open up a text editor (vi if you haven’t changed the default configuration) with a list of all the commits starting from the commit you want to nuke to the latest.
5. Remove the line with the commit you want to nuke (‘dd’ keys in vi) and save the file (‘:wq’ in vi)
6. Git will now try to apply all the subsequent commits and roll forward to the latest state. In my case, I needed to manually add and remove some files on some of the commits. After each git add/remove, you need to tell git to continue the rebase: git rebase --continue
7. When all the commits are roll-forwarded by git, push it up to GitHub by doing a force push: git push -f
8. Now, switch back to your original repo and pull the latest from GitHub. Good chance that you will get merge conflicts. Resolve, commit, and push. And you are done!