Lost in Colonisation

My corner of the apartment with Senna poster

Alex Hung — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:18:24 +0000

My corner of the apartment with Senna poster, a photo by alexhung on Flickr.

Filed under: Post Tagged: flickr, poster, senna

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

Alex Hung — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:25:33 +0000

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.

Filed under: Post Tagged: Digital video recorder, Film industry, innovation, movie, Movie studio, sopa, Videocassette recorder

(Some) Assembly Required

Alex Hung — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:04:25 +0000

One of my happiest memory from my childhood time in Hong Kong was “building” (more like assembling) my own radio-controlled buggy. I “built” two RC cars, starting with one (Tamiya Boomerang) that had less parts to assemble to ease me into the learning process, but also I think my parents wanted to make sure I could do it so not to waste money on the more expensive models from the get go. The second, more advanced, model (Kyosho Optima Mid Special) required almost every parts to be hand assembled. I greased up the front and back differentials (it was a four-wheel drive model) before attaching the belt and the front-end and back-end assemblies that connected them with the motor. I attached the suspension arms, tracking arms, hubs, drive shafts. I filled up the shock absorbers with oil and loaded it with springs. I soldered the wires that connected Novak speed controller to the motor and connected the radio receiver with servo that steered the car. I soldered my own battery pack from seven NiCad cells. Finally I painted the polycarbonate shell with my own choice of color and design. When it was finally ready, I could truly claim that I “build” that. I also made extensive modifications of my own afterward.

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.

Filed under: Post Tagged: 3d printing, arduino, hong kong, IKEA, maker faire, makezine, Radio-controlled car

Rebel or Imperial?

Alex Hung — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:45:44 +0000

Rebel or Imperial?, a photo by alexhung on Flickr.

Star Wars Moleskines FTW!

Filed under: Post

Preparing for emergency

Alex Hung — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:13:38 +0000

I was in Manhattan 10 years ago. I lived in mid-town and worked one building next to the World Trade Center 2. I watched it happened live on TV. It was the first time I felt I was not prepared at all to deal with an emergency. I did not have a plan. Any plans. Plan for evacuation, plan for communicating to families, plan for getting up-to-date news, plan for no electricity, plan for no water, plan for no food supply, plan for helping others with first aid, plan for, well you get the idea. That was the first time I realized I needed to be prepared for the next emergency, be it a terrorist attack, storm, or earthquake. Alas, life went back to normal and the preparation I’ve managed for the next 8 years were a few large bottles of waters under the kitchen sink.

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

Filed under: Post Tagged: Batteries, earthquake, Emergency, first aid, flashlight, Hurricane Irene, knife, leatherman, Neil Strauss, preparedness

Motorsport Photography Workshop at Lime Rock Park

Alex Hung — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 01:02:04 +0000

Two weeks ago I attended the Motorsport Photography Workshop at the Lime Rock Park. It was a 2-days workshop with professional instructors (Rick Dole, George Tiedemann and Robert Laberge) leading a class of around 40 students. I actually learnt of it last year but the date clashed with our weekend at the US Open Tennis. This year I signed up for the workshop the moment I received the email alert. I, however, did not sign up for the full 2-days course, only attending the first day. The workshop used the Ferrari Challenge weekend as the source of racing action to teach us how to take action photography, involving head-on shots, panning sideways, compositions, interacting with mechanics and drivers in the pit lane/paddock, etc.

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.

Filed under: Post Tagged: Alfa Romeo, F430, F458, ferrari, Ferrari Challenge, Formula One, Lime Rock Park, Motorsport, photography

Jersey City sunset

Alex Hung — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:43:30 +0000

Jersey City sunset, a photo by alexhung on Flickr.

Filed under: Post Tagged: flickr, jersey city, Lumix, LX5, Panasonic, Sunset

How to nuke a git commit on the remote repo

Alex Hung — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:10:08 +0000

Here is the situation I ran into this morning. I was happily writing code, periodically pulling changes from GitHub, like a good developer that I am. When I was finally ready to push, I received a merge from GitHub that deleted most of my Django project files. Turns out that one of the other developer on the team accidentally deleted those files and committed it locally. He didn’t push all the commits up to GitHub until just before I tried to push mine (hence I didn’t get any merges from him all morning).

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:

Leave the existing local repo alone. You may want to reset it back to the pre-merge state by doing git reset --hard
Make a fresh clone of the repo from GitHub. Let’s call it repo2.
Perform an interactive rebase on repo2 and set the starting point to one commit before the one you want to nuke: git rebase -i
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.
Remove the line with the commit you want to nuke (‘dd’ keys in vi) and save the file (‘:wq’ in vi)
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
When all the commits are roll-forwarded by git, push it up to GitHub by doing a force push: git push -f
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!

Filed under: Post Tagged: commit, django, git, github, rebase, twitter

Sparrow – Improvement from Mail.app?

Alex Hung — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:36:52 +0000

I finally have enough of Mail.app this week. Mainly because I’ve been spending more time using it constantly last couple of weeks and notice many small things that bug me. So I start looking for alternatives and ran into Sparrow in the Mac AppStore so I decided to give it try.

Disclaimer

I’m not a huge email person. I’m more a face-to-face or Twitter person. I don’t get many emails a day, nor I create many new emails. Partly because I use email for communication only and not for other purposes. I don’t use email as my repository of information, I use Evernote for that. And I don’t use email as a to-do list, I have Remember The Milk. I also apply “Inbox-zero” approach to my emails so they are either actioned pretty much straightaway or they are deleted/archived.

I’ve used Sparrow for only 2 days so my opinion may (and probably will) change in the future.

The Good

Sparrow basically puts Gmail on to my computer as native app, which I prefer. Even after all these years I still haven’t been able to make the mental leap of using a ‘web app’. (I guess I’ve just shown my age…)

One of the main failing of Mail.app is that it doesn’t work with Gmail’s Archive folder. So deleting emails in Mail.app moves the email to the Trash folder instead of “All Mail”. Sparrow supports the Archive folder out of the box, and can be toggled back to delete if you wish.

Sparrow, like many new OS X apps (Reeder, for example), have a narrow mode. This means I can arrange my desktop to have non-overlapping apps, occupying as much desktop space as possible without some area hidden behind another app. This is obviously a very personal thing as I know many people who has no issue with apps covering each other.

The Nice

Keyboard shortcut support is more explicit. You can navigate a lot of Mail.app using keyboard but a lot of the shortcuts are ‘hidden’ (i.e. OS X system default behavior) and require some discovery time. Sparrow shows the shortcuts in menu so learning them is easier (for me at least).

Ability to organize Gmail label is nice but not critical for me.

Menu bar icon and Growl support are nice. You can do the same with Mail.app with plugin.

The Meh

Facebook connection to customize contact’s picture. I don’t use Facebook so there.

Quick reply, like in Gmail. I never understand the need to quick reply. Email != IM.

The (Slightly) Bad

As far as I can tell, there is no way to change the message preview font or the number of line of text in the preview. Not a big deal but since Mail.app allows customization, it is a minus for Sparrow.

Also you can’t search from the Unified Inbox. Search is only available once you switch to the individual mailbox.

The Verdict

So is it worth the $9.99 from the Mac AppStore? I’m not so sure. $9.99 isn’t too much money for experimentation. The narrow view is the biggest selling point for my desktop layout OCD. But YMMV. The tight integration with Gmail is really nice.

Did I regret spending the $9.99? No. Would I recommend someone who is unhappy with Mail.app to switch to Sparrow? Probably not. It depends on what you want from a mail client that Mail.app doesn’t delivery, and how much email you deal with everyday.

At least with Sparrow, you won’t be at the mercy of Apple’s OS X delivery schedule.

Filed under: Post, Reviews Tagged: Email client, Evernote, Gmail, Remember The Milk, Sparrow

First full day with Windows Phone 7 and only that

Alex Hung — Sun, 15 May 2011 02:29:08 +0000

Despite Google Voice continual refusal to work with my AT&T pre-paid number, I decided that today will be a good day to try using my Windows Phone 7 exclusively for the day. My wife, Leah, is still in the UK and my parents who are visiting me here in NY will be with me all day. So no one in particular should be calling me, and I set the call forwarding on my iPhone to the LG.

Battery Life

I set out at 10AM with around 70% charge in the LG. By lunchtime, I knew things are not going to be good. I got the battery critically low warning around 1:45pm mark and I was expecting the phone to run out of juice before 3pm. Amazingly, it lasted till 3:30pm before it shut itself off. So that’s about 5.5 hours of usage with approximately 70% charge. Some quick maths will show you that if I have 100% charged battery at the beginning, it will only last around 8.5 hours in total. And how long I was out today? 12 hours, which even a child with basic maths skill can tell you is longer than 8.5.

Now, how much did I use my phone during that 5.5 hours? I checked Twitter, checked into Foursquare a few times, use the Bing map couple of times, took 2 pictures, read a few emails. Really, that was all. No phone calls. No text. I do have two emails accounts setup to check for new emails on interval. One at 15 minutes, another on 1 hour. All of these are extremely comparable to my day-to-day iPhone usage.

Someone tweeted me about Mango being better with battery life. I certainly hope so. My question is, how much improvement will it has? Percentages? Factors? Order of magnitude? Because to match my iPhone 4, the LG + WP7 combo must be at least 3-4X better using the battery.

So for the moment, I cannot use the LG as my day-to-day phone unless I know I can be within range of a charger every 4-5 hours.

Other weirdness/observations

Using my WP7 today as my sole phone, I noticed a few other things that escape me last week:

Most apps don’t ‘tombstone’ well. For example, both Birdsong and 4th & Mayor take you back to the first screen instead of the screen you were at when switching out the app. Look, I don’t care for full multi-tasking like the Android users do, but I do care that faux-multitasking works for me.
4th & Mayor decides to lose my Foursquare login and needed me to re-login. Not a big deal until I realized my password is generated by 1Password so I don’t even know what it is. So I had to go through steps of resetting password with Foursquare, then login from within 4th & Mayor. And because I need to set a password that I can remember, it is far weaker than the old one. Thanks very much for that.
Birdsong decided around lunch time to fail to post any tweets from me. No explanation apart from ‘Oopps, not working. Please trying again later.’ Ok, so is it because I hit Twitter’s rate limit? Or some other reasons?
The phone, also around lunch time, decided to not able to browse any URL at all. Rebooting the phone fixed it. Great.
Even though the setting for the camera button to wake the phone even in sleep is set to ‘On’, it didn’t work. Ever, at all. Fantastic.

Snarky comment: iPhone battery is non-replaceable. LG has a replaceable battery. Guess I do need a replaceable battery as I need a spare one to last my day!

Snarky comment #2: So the way Windows Phone 7 saves us from our phones is by… running out of battery before all the others smartphones and leave you with nothing to use.

Snarky comment #3: Microsoft and Windows Phone 7, thank you for making me unable to check into all these places I visited today on Foursquare, or unable to read tweets from my friends, or emailed my wife in the UK, or make notes in Evernote. I felt so connected and useful this afternoon, not.

Filed under: Post, Reviews Tagged: AT&T, Evernote, Google Voice, iphone, microsoft, twitter, Windows Phone 7