Category Archives: Technology Insights

Google’s Role in Social Distancing

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I thought this was interesting! Google is taking anonymized, aggregate data from Google Maps for public health officials to understand responses to social distancing guidance related to COVID-19.

Here is the data I pulled for the state of Minnesota. It looks like in general, 38% less people are travelling to work, 35% less people are travelling to grocery stores and pharmacies, and 58% less people are travelling to restaurants, cafes, and shopping centers. Rice County seems to be doing slightly worse at sheltering-in-place compared to the average in Minnesota, except in the travelling to work and parks categories.

Source: COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility)

The more you know!

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The more you know!

Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it?
Believe it or not, they get lighter. USB drives use Flash memory, which means the the ones and zeros of your data are stored on transistors. When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.

I’m a New Mac Owner!

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I never thought the time would come, but I have to announce I’m a brand new Mac owner! Mind you, it’s not a new Mac, but I am a new owner! 😂

No, it’s not 1987, it’s 2019… (An Apple IIgs prints a “Print Shop” sign in 2019)

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The sights and sounds of antique technology. I bought a new ribbon off of Amazon to see if that’s the only thing that was needed to bring this old ImageWriter II to life.

This is a fully operational Apple IIgs with a 5 1/4″ and 3 1/2″ floppy disk drive, color monitor, and ImageWriter II printer. The software running is “The Print Shop” by Broderbund.

Computerized Car Navigation in 1986

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It’s easy to take for granted modern car navigation systems. After all, the functionality is built into every modern Smartphone. However, back in 1986, before the GPS system even existed, a couple of yachtsman with an idea formed a company called Etak, which made it a goal to make a navigation system with street-level detail that could be installed in an automobile.

They succeeded. Instead of using satellites, they used “dead reckoning” which compares the car’s location to a fixed spot. A modern (at the time) IBM XT computer running at 4.77 MHz with 128 kilobytes of memory got stuffed in the vehicle’s trunk. An oscilloscope-style green CRT display with buttons was mounted up on the dash, a fluxgate compass was mounted on the back windshield to keep track of magnetic north, and a pair of hall-effect sensors were mounted to the non-driven wheels of the car to count off miles, and the difference in rotational speed between the wheels kept track of corners. Map data was loaded on cassette tapes which each held about 3 1/2 megabytes of information. Users switched tapes whenever they roamed into an area not covered by the current cassette.

The system was about $1,500 and could be installed by a company that did radio and speaker installation in cars. They sold about 5,000 of them. The Etak technology lived on to the modern Internet era, where its map data was used by companies such as MapQuest and TomTom. Etak also created the fixed-map viewpoint (you in the center, the map moves around you) which is still used in all modern navigation systems.

Here’s a video of this incredible system at work: https://youtu.be/CHCCjlSWbHE?t=863 You can also read more about this technology here: https://www.fastcompany.com/…/who-needs-gps-the…

High-Resolution LED Display Graphics

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Since the time these high-resolution LED displays were installed in the Nomeland Gymnasium at the High School, I’ve been spending much of my spare time designing graphics, sponsor advertising, and program workflow for the system. It has already been used successfully for several volleyball matches, 9th grade orientation, and now an all-staff District workshop. The variety of technology I get to work with is one reason I love my job and this field!

Like it or not, electric cars are the future.

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Anybody in their 30s or 40s now will definitely be living in a world where electric cars, charged by renewable energy such as solar or wind power, will be the majority of vehicles on the road. Major trucking companies have already put orders in for the Tesla Semi based on ROI for delivery in 2019. AND, they release an electric car that does an 8.9 second 1/4 mile with a 600 mile range at highway speeds.Gasoline and diesel engines will go the way of the steam engine in the next 30-40 years.

Digital Video Editor Certification is now Available!

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I am proud to announce that the Digital Video Editor Certification offered by Electronics Technicians Association, International (ETA) is now complete! I served as a Subject Matter Expert on this committee for the last half year, and we believe we have created a certification test that employers will value. The future job prospects for this field are expected to grow much faster than average, and median wages for a DVE were $30.18 an hour!

ETA is a US-based not-for-profit 501(c) 6 professional association which provides certifications in industries such as basic electronics, fiber optics and data cabling, renewable energy, information technology, photonics and precision optics, customer service, biomedical, avionics, wireless communications, radar, and smart home. ETA is also one of the 13 COLEMs (Commercial Operator License Examination Manager) for U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) testing. ETA works with technicians, educators, and military personnel. ETA also partners with companies such as Motorola Solutions to provide certification to their employees.

Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence and ALT Tags

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Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence, and ALT tags. #Engadget #alttags

I figured I would post something about this because I haven’t seen it discussed on any forum I am familiar with on the Internet.

Facebook reveals a little information about the information it collects from the pictures you post in the form of ALT tags. ALT tags are included in the raw HTML code of nearly every website you visit. They are primarily used to briefly describe a particular picture, image, or graphic for users that can’t view images, either because they are visually impaired, or their Web browser doesn’t support it.

By inspecting the HTML code of anyone’s Facebook profile, you can see some of what Facebook can recognize in your photos. Take for instance these examples on my own profile. In the first example on the thumbnail with my girlfriend and I in the car, Facebook believes it sees 2 people, smiling, sitting, outdoors, with sunglasses and a beard. This is amazingly accurate (it HAD been a few days since I shaved!) In the second example on the thumbnail of me jumping my four-wheeler at Jordan Supercross, Facebook believes it sees one or more people on a motorcycle outdoors. Again, not too shabby on Facebook’s part!
If you care to experiment a little, what other criteria can you find that Facebook’s AI can successfully identify? Share here!

The last T1 has been disconnected!

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Once the configuration was done, the only thing left to do was plug in the fiber! As you can see, a few Nerstrand Elementary School students happily helped out with this process. With a simple, positive “click” of the fiber-optic patch cable into the transceiver, Nerstrand completed their upgrade from the two trunked T-1 lines offering about 3Mbps of bandwidth, to the 10000Mbps of bandwidth now at their disposal. The speed is exciting, but even more exciting is the capacity this line will give the School for bringing in more devices and perhaps even having a one device per student option down the road. Thanks Amelia and Stefan!

Stealing 3D Models by Audio Recording a 3D Printer

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A bright professor at the University of California-Irvine discovered it’s possible to steal the design of a 3D model by simply doing an audio recording of the 3D printer printing it. Apparently, they have demonstrated a 90% accuracy of model reconstruction using this technique. Simply having an employee working at a manufacturing facility with a cell phone on them could invite the possibility of industrial espionage if they were to give such a recording to a competitor. Fascinating proof of concept!

1992 SouthLAN/MNWADA Joint Packet Radio Node Install at Faribault

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During much of 1991, the SouthLAN and MNWADA Packet Radio Clubs in Southern Minnesota planned and designed 3 high-speed packet radio nodes to be installed at Apple Valley, Faribault, and Dodge Center. The Faribault site, MNFBL:N0QVC-1, would have a 1200 baud user frequency on 145.01 MHz, a 9600 baud backbone towards Dodge Center on 430.95 MHz, and a 19.2 kilobaud backbone towards N0DAI-1 in Apple Valley on 430.55 MHz.

This was one of the first high-speed amateur wireless data communications services in the upper midwest, and passed hundreds of messages between the Twin Cities Metro area and Rochester, MN throughout the 90s and early 2000s. All locations used WA8BXN’s MSYS bulletin board system and G8BPQ nodes, with a combination of Kantronics Data Engines and D4-10 radios. The N0QVC-1 Johnson RSDL VHF radio is still used as an APRS node on 144.39 in the Faribault area at this location as of 2016.

The video is a glimpse of the antenna and TNC install at the Faribault location on May 23, 1992.

October 21, 2015

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Well, it’s here! Tomorrow is the day where everyone in “Back to the Future II” were driving flying cars, cruising on hoverboards, and wearing jeans with their pockets turned inside out. Our “present” future might not be quite as exciting, but hey, at least we have the Internet!

MisterHouse control for a Samsung Smart TV

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UntitledAnother piece of my home, now automated. With assistance from a thread on the Samygo forum, I created a module for the MisterHouse Home Automation System which allows it to control a network-connected Samsung Smart TV. For instance, when you leave the house for more than 10 minutes, it could turn the TV off for you. It could also switch the TV automatically to match your favorite show schedule, or switch to an HDMI input to monitor a surveillance camera if motion is detected on your property. It’s available right here for free:  https://gist.github.com/hollie/ed1fa39871e93e36e24e. It’s written in Perl so it’s cross-platform or can be adapted for other uses.

I’ve tested this with my Samsung UN40EH5300 and it works well. It should work on pretty much any Samsung TV that has an open port 55000. The code is based off of another Perl/HTML program from http://forum.samygo.tv/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1792 created from some Wireshark traces.

To use this code, you’ll have to modify a few things:

– Change the IP 192.168.2.155 below to your own TV’s IP Address.
– Change $myip to your MisterHouse server’s IP Address.
– Change $mymac to your MisterHouse server’s MAC Address.

The 9-year-old Programmer

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In response to the ZDNet article that Chad Elstad posted (you can read “The Mac’s 30th: What’s Your Story?” here: http://www.zdnet.com/the-macs-30th-whats-your-story…/ ). When I was 5 years old, I remember printing out computer programs on our Apple ][+ (Remember PR#1, LIST ?), and then trying to type them in to my Commodore PET computer. My first lesson in incompatibility! When I was 9 years old, I created a Baseball game in BASIC using lo-res Apple graphics (pictured below). I’m still a huge fan of the Apple ][ platform and I still have a working Apple ][gs that gets use from time to time…