My 4th grade daughter was recently given the customary elementary school egg drop project. I was out of town for the week leading up to the event which meant I couldn't help her with the design, so we took a separate but collaborative approach. She designed a solution on her own, and when I got back into town (the day before the event), I designed my own solution. The plan was to take the best ideas from each design and combine them into one.
The rules of the challenge were as follows:
No parachutes, streamers, or balloons.
No bubble wrap or Styrofoam.
No food products (other than the egg, of course).
Each project had to have an easily accessible door so the teacher could load the egg.
The entire project couldn't be more than 1.5 pounds (including the egg).
My daughter went with an empty peanut butter jar lined with foam squares:
I went with a plastic food container suspended by rubber bands inside of a 6" x 6" box:
Both seemed to be sound concepts, so we combined them into one:
It turns out the box we used wasn't deep enough and the rubber bands weren't quite secure so the egg broke when dropped off the roof of the school. So the next iteration used a 12" x 12" box, popsicle sticks to hold the rubber bands in place (on the outside of the box), and velcro to keep the lid closed:
Both her project and mine were thoroughly tested, and both were a success. We celebrated with a lunch of scrambled eggs:
I've become a bit of a keyboard geek (proof here and here), so when I re-watched TRON: Legacy recently and saw Sam use that very cool blue-green virtual keyboard, I decided I had to try it for myself. I built one using two iPads and discovered it's much more difficult to use than it looked in the movie. Below is an explanation of the project as well as my conclusions.
Today we watched the Space Shuttle Discovery land at Dulles Airport on the back of a 747 for its final flight. It made two passes overhead, and I was well positioned for both.
Update (4/26/2012): I got a good look at Enterprise at Dulles airport today. It's all loaded up and ready to leave for its new home in New York.
Update (4/9/2012): I went to visit Discovery in her final resting place this morning. Absolutely magnificent.
I recently put together a demo of a very simple, yet very convincing, phishing attack targeting mobile Safari:
It works by first checking the user agent and determining what kind of device the request is being made on. If the device isn't an iPhone, the user is simply forwarded to PayPal.com and will never know the difference. But if the request is made from an iPhone, the user gets the special phishing login screen which does the following:
Shows an image of Safari's location bar at the top which implies that the user is on PayPal.com.
Scrolls the actual location bar off the screen quickly enough that very few people will notice it.
Since this attack targets mobile devices, it's pretty safe to assume that many (probably most) users won't be paying very close attention, and will likely not notice the actual location bar being hidden. The effect is so fast that even users who do notice probably won't think anything of it.
I really like that mobile Safari lets you hide the location bar in order to have more pixels for actual content, but perhaps there's a way to tweak the design in such a way as to make malicious applications of this feature less feasible.
I've been playing with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview since it was released, and have gotten very familiar with it. While I find Metro to be a pleasure to interact with, I'm convinced that Microsoft is about to make a mistake with Windows 8. In short, I have a feeling that Windows 8 is about to become the new Vista.
Over the weekend, I put together a prototype e-book reader to demonstrate two features that I think would make the digital book reading experience much better. If you've made the leap to digital books, I'd love to get your thoughts on the video above. And if you like the ideas, please help spread the word.
The picture above is one of my home workstations where I think I've finally gotten the right keyboard/pointer configuration. Here's what you're looking at:
The black keyboard on the bottom is a Filco Majestouch mechanical keyboard with MX Cherry Brown switches (review with video here). This is what I use for most of my typing. The Alt and Windows keys have been swapped and Alt and Command remapped in software to make it more Mac friendly.
The keyboard above it is an Apple bluetooth keyboard. I use it for typing when I'm in virtual meetings in order to keep the noise down (it's very quiet while the mechanical keyboard is way too loud for meetings), and for its media keys (volume up, volume down, and mute). (If you want media keys on your non-Apple keyboard, see this post by Grant Skinner.)
The mouse is an Apple Magic Mouse. Mice are very personal objects which people feel strongly about, so I'm not going to claim that it's the best. In fact, I have a few Logitech mice which are equally good if not better. But I enjoy the accuracy and the gestures of the Magic Mouse enough that I've stuck with it. (In my opinion, this is the first mouse Apple has ever made that's usable.)
The phone is a Galaxy Nexus. I usually have my iPhone 4S beside it, but I used it to take the photo. I rely on them for notifications. Rather than having alerts pop up on my monitor all the time and distract me, I use my phones for email, calendar, and text notifications. (I have two phones because I do mobile development — and because I love them both.)
I have an Energizer family sized battery charger off to the side to keep the keyboard and pointing devices powered. I find I'm swapping out batteries about every two weeks.
I have two other workstations: one for Windows, and one at the office. They're both different just to mix things up a bit, so maybe I'll get pictures of them at some point, as well.
Some friends of mine and I are experimenting with what it's like to use a mobile device (in this case, a Galaxy Nexus) as a desktop computer. With the addition of a bluetooth keyboard, multi-touch trackpad, and a monitor, I found that the experience is surprisingly good.
I don't demo all that many applications in the video for fear of inadvertently showing sensitive data, but I think I show enough that you can get an idea for how close we already are to this type of computing model. In fact, I think if you were to set up a workspace like this for someone who didn't have "professional" needs (such as writing code or video editing), and/or someone who didn't have a lot of preconceptions about how a computer should work, they would be perfectly happy with the experience. I was able to do all of the following with relative ease:
Browse the internet.
Read news.
Manage my calendar, tasks, contacts, etc.
Read and write email almost as easily as I can on my desktop.
Listen to music and podcasts.
Chat on IM.
Edit documents.
Do some light photo editing (in the default gallery application).
Participate in social networks (Google+, Twitter, and Facebook).
Watch videos on YouTube and Netflix.
In other words, I was able to do most of what many people do with desktop computers on a daily basis. Of course, there were a few key things I wasn't able to do such as:
Write code. I'm sure it's possible, but definitely not practical, and probably not something I would enjoy.
Advanced editing of things like photos and video.
Advanced file management. With this kind of computing model, you definitely want to keep as much data in the cloud as possible since the file system is generally de-emphasized on mobile devices.
Keep in mind that I'm using a stock Android device with whatever capabilities are already in the OS. If you're willing to go as far as installing Linux on your phone, you can do far more than this. Additionally, operating systems will likely have much better support for this kind of model in the future — in particular, Windows 8 with Metro.
I'm really curious about whether this kind of interaction represents the future of computing. Are we moving toward a model where we use multiple computers and mobile devices with all our data in the cloud, or in five to ten years, are we all just going to use our phones for most of our computing needs? I'm guessing it's going to be somewhere in the middle (as these things tend to be), but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Update: I've been getting a lot of questions about the cables I used to make this work. Here's all you need to know:
For the display, I used a Samsung MHL to HDMI adapter (along with an HDMI cable, obviously). If you want to do audio through your monitor, make sure your HDMI cable supports audio.
For a USB keyboard and mouse, you'll need a micro USB host mode OTG cable, and a powered USB hub. (I used a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so this isn't in the video.)
For audio (if you don't have speakers in your monitor), I just used a standard 3.5mm audio cable from the phone to my computer speakers.
Thanks to Matt Pandina for helping to get this working.
I found the massive Lego Imperial Shuttle on sale several months ago, and finally had the time to put it together this afternoon. At 2,503 pieces, it's a sizable model with very good detail. It can be displayed in one of two ways: on its stand with its wings down, or on its landing gear with its wings folded up. In my opinion, it makes an excellent companion to the Death Star II and the Millennium Falcon.
Unlike the Millennium Falcon (which took the better part of two days to assemble -- a total of about 14 hours), my friends and I were able to build the Imperial Shuttle in only about four hours. The piece count is high, but nothing about the assembly is particularly challenging.
Below is a record of our progress throughout the afternoon.
Christian Cantrell is a Product Manager for Adobe. He loves books, movies, writing fiction, and the occasional video game. He can be reached at his first name, dot, his last name at gmail, or you can follow him either on Google+ or Twitter.
