The Daily ACK

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Crowdfunding the recovery of a lost spacecraft
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This post was original published on the MAKE Blog

The ISEE-3 spacecraft

The hackers behind the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project have moved on to a different challenge. Not content with images, this time they want to recover a whole spacecraft.

The ISEE-3 probe was launched in 1978. After completing it’s original mission—it was the first spacecraft ever to enter a halo orbit at one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points—studying the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, it was repurposed—leaving its halo orbit—it was sent on its way to intercept Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, and then Comet Halley in 1986 as part of the Halley Armada. Afterwards, left in a heliocentric orbit, it was then used for investigations of coronal mass ejections until 1997 when it was decommissioned by NASA.

However after the Comet Halley encounter in the 80′s the ISEE-3 was intentionally left in an orbit that would—eventually—bring the 35 year old spacecraft home, and if Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing have their way, it’ll return to a warm welcome from its creators.

They’ve set up a crowdfunding effort to cover the costs of getting back in contact with the spacecraft, and ordering it to fire its thrusters one last time to put it into Earth orbit. The intricate trajectory necessary to make that happen—including a flyby of the Moon at an altitude of less than 50 km—has already been calculated by Robert Farquhar, the original mission design specialist from ISEE-3′s Halley encounter.

Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission – a mission it began in 1978.

If successful ISEE-3 will spend its retirement as a platform for citizen science, with smartphone apps—and a twitter feed—giving students direct access to the instruments onboard the ageing spacecraft.

The instrumentation carried by the ISEE-3 spacecraft.

While the spacecraft carries no imaging cameras, 12 of the probes 13 onboard instruments were still working back in 1999—the last time NASA contacted the spacecraft—and it’d be a powerful tool in the hands of educators allowing amateurs and students access to instrumentation to measure plasma, high-energy particles and the magnetic fields in Earth orbit.

This is a great opportunity to put what is still world class instrumentation into the hands of the community. But orbital dynamics means that there’s only one chance to do so, and contact must be reestablished with the probe in late May or early June to ensure that the burn into Earth orbit happens during the correct window—and there are just 24 days left to find the money to do it.

Sunday, January 05, 2014

The Board Room Hour
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Back in October last year I was out in New York for the Hardware Innovation Workshop and Maker Faire New York where I took part in a panel discussion along with Massimo Banzi and Jason Kridner—and chaired by MAKE's Dale Dougherty—on what's in store for micro-controllers, and what the next generation of board could bring.

The Board Room Hour from Maker Faire

Hacking the CES Scavenger Hunt
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This post was originally publish on the MAKE Blog and co-authored with Sandeep Mistry.

It has just been announced that at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will feature a promotional scavenger hunt based around Apple's iBeacon technology. What if you could win the hunt, without ever having to go to CES?

What if you could win the hunt, without ever having to go to CES?

Quietly introduced by Apple at WWDC last year, iBeacon is a technology that allows you to add real world context to smart phone applications. Based around Bluetooth LE—part of the new Bluetooth 4.0 standard—it’s a way to provide basic indoor navigation and proximity detection. As we talked about when we reverse engineered the Estimote beacons, there are three properties of an iBeacon that work together to create the beacon’s identity. These are:

UUID — This is a property which is unique to each company, in most use cases the same UUID would be given to all beacons deployed by a company (or group).
Major — The property that you use to specify a related set of beacons, e.g. in a retail setting all the beacons in one store would share the same Major value.
Minor — The property that you use to specify a particular beacon in a location.

The scavenger hunt is therefore a hunt for a number of beacons that will probably all share the same UUID and Major numbers, but will have different Minor numbers. Effectively, we're looking for a set of beacons. However wandering the hallways at CES hoping to get into the—approximate 100 foot range—of all of the iBeacons they've scattered across the show floor sounds like a lot of work. CES has teamed up with Radius Networks who are providing the iBeacon hardware, and Marc Wallace—CEO and cofounder of Radius Networks—has this to say about the hunt,

This is one of the coolest proximity-aware apps we have worked on. This is also one of the first, tangible applications that leverages iBeacon technology. And it is a great example of how iBeacon technology is not just about advertising as it is about bringing new and innovative solutions to the marketplace. We are very excited to be a part of it.

Since they're using hardware from Radius Networks we can't just assume—as we could with the Estimote hardware—that we know the UUID of the beacons. However the identities of the beacons—all of the beacons—are somewhere where we can easily get our hands on them, the CES mobile app. Sure enough looking at the CES Android application—it's fairly easy just to download the APK without having to install—there are some hints there for us and using a decompiler it was fairly easy to find the details of the target beacons.

The Minor numbers of the nine target beacons in the code of the CES mobile application.

The iBeacon UUID we're looking for is 842AF9C4-08F51-1E39-282F-23C91AEC05E, while the Major number—interestingly not actually needed and just ignored by the Android application—is 65000, while the nine beacons scattered throughout the CES venue have Minor numbers from 65001 to 65009.

The completed scavenger hunt—all nine beacons.

An almost completed scavenger hunt—with eight of the nine beacons already "found."

Since we now know the identities of the beacons, it's trivial to finish the scavenger hunt without ever going to CES as it's actually fairly simple to build your own iBeacon hardware and "fake" the app into thinking you've found the beacons. To do that you can either use a Raspberry Pi, or a Bluetooth LE board like the Red Bear Labs BLE Mini board—Radius Networks, the people supplying the hardware to CES, is even selling a "iBeacon Development Kit" which would work just fine for our purposes.

At which point—now you have your own iBeacon hardware—you can just go ahead and set the UUID, Major and Minor numbers of your beacon to each of the CES scavenger hunt beacon identities in turn, and then bring your beacon into range of your cell phone running which should be running the CES mobile app. Once you've shown the app all of the beacons, you'll have "finished" the scavenger hunt and can claim your prize. Of course doing that isn't legal. It's called fraud and will probably land you in serious trouble.

Of course it could be worse. If they are using Estimote hardware it'd be easy for someone to make the hunt impossible to complete. Because as we've shown, anyone with the Estimote SDK can modify the UUID, Major and Minor number of the Estimote beacons in the field. Which would have meant that the beacons deployed across the CES floor didn't work for the scavenger hunt anymore.

We talked about both of the ability to configure "fake" beacons, and the ability to disable beacon in the field—in our discussion of our reverse engineering of the Estimote iBeacon hardware. However, we didn't think we'd see something like this quite as soon.

The Snapchat Leak
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This was first published on the O'Reilly Radar

The number of Snapchat users by area code.

The number of Snapchat users by geographic location. Users are predominately located in New York, San Francisco and the surrounding greater New York and Bay Areas.

While the site crumbled quickly under the weight of so many people trying to get to the leaked data—and has now been suspended—there isn't really such a thing as putting the genie back in the bottle on the Internet. Just before Christmas the Australian based Gibson Security published a report highlighting two exploits in the Snapchat API claiming that hackers could easily gain access to users’ personal data. Snapchat dismissed the report, responding that,

Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way.

Adding that they had various "safeguards" in place to make it difficult to do that. However it seems likely that—despite being explicitly mentioned in the initial report four months previously—none of these safeguards included rate limiting requests to their server, because someone seems to have taken them up on their offer.

Data Release

Earlier today the creators of the now defunct SnapchatDB site released 4.6 million records—both as an SQL dump and as a CSV file. With an estimated 8 million users (May, 2013) of the app this represents around half the Snapchat user base. Each record consists of a Snapchat user name, a geographical location for the user, and partially anonymised phone number—the last two digits of the phone number having been obscured. While Gibson Security's find_friends exploit has been patched by Snapchat, minor variations on the exploit are reported to still function, and if this data did come from the exploit—or a minor variation on it—uncovered by Gibson, then the dataset published by SnapchatDB is only part of the data the hackers now hold. In addition to the data already released they would have the full phone number of each user, and as well as the user name they should also have the—perhaps more revealing—screen name.

Data Analysis

Taking an initial look at the data, there are no international numbers in the leaked database. All entries are US numbers, with the bulk of the users from—as you might expect—the greater New York, San Francisco and Bay areas. However I'd assume that the absence of international numbers is an indication of laziness rather than due to any technical limitation. For US based hackers it would be easy to iterate rapidly through the fairly predictable US number space, while "foreign" numbers formats might present more of a challenge when writing a script to exploit the hole in Snapchat's security. Only 76 of the 322 area codes in the United States appear in the leaked database, alongside another two Canadian area codes, mapping to 67 discrete geographic locations—although not all the area codes and locations match suggesting that perhaps the locations aren't derived directly from the area code data. Despite some initial scepticism about the provenance of the data I've confirmed that this is a real data set. A quick trawl through the data has got multiple hits amongst my own friend group, including some I didn't know were on Snapchat—sorry guys. Since the last two digits were obscured in the leaked dataset the partial phone number string might—and frequently does—generate multiple matches amongst the 4.6 million records against a comparison number. I compared the several hundred US phone numbers amongst my own contacts against the database—you might want to do that yourself—and generated several spurious hits where the returned user names didn't really seem to map in any way to my contact. That said, as I already mentioned, I found several of my own friends amongst the leaked records, although I only knew it was them for sure because I knew both their phone number and typical choices of user names.

Conclusions

As it stands therefore this data release is not—yet—critical, although it is certainly concerning, and for some individuals it might well be unfortunate. However if the SnapchatDB creators choose to release their full dataset things might well get a lot more interesting. If the full data set was released to the public, or obtained by a malicious third party, then the username, geographic location, phone number, and screen name—which might, for a lot of people, be their actual full name—would be available. This eventuality would be bad enough. However taking this data and cross-correlating it with another large corpus of data, say from Twitter or Gravatar, by trying to find matching user or real names on those services—people tend to reuse usernames on multiple services after all—you might end up with a much larger aggregated data set including email addresses, photographs, and personal information. While there would be enough false positives—if matching solely against user names—that you'd have a interesting data cleaning task afterwards, it wouldn't be impossible. Possibly not even that difficult. I'm not interested in doing that correlation myself. But others will.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Trouble with Things
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At the tail end of last month I was out in Portland at OSCON where I gave an Ignite talk on the trouble with things...

Friday, June 28, 2013

The Makers of Things
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This post was first published in Make magazine

The Society isn’t like any other engineering society. It’s a community united by a passion for making things and testing ideas. Their unparalleled devotion to their craft is evidence of a universal truth that’s relevant to us all; we learn only by doing.

There’s something about Britain, it’s the land of God’s own hobbyists. But not only that, if there are more than two people in the country that are interested in a topic, they will feel almost compelled to for a club or society, and since this is Britain the club might well have been around since the early 1800′s or earlier. The bylaws will be arcane, and the committee structure labyrinth. It will inevitably serve tea and biscuits during meetings, rarely coffee. Because that’s how we do things over here.

Mike Kapp lives in a peaceful cul-desac, quietly shaping his house into a system of his invention. Cat-flaps, clocks and ghostly machines are the fruits of a lifetime of problem solving and inquiry. His experience holds a lesson for us all: curiosity is the key to craftsmanship.

The Makers of Things is a short film collection by Anne Hollowday. It documents the work and workshops of the Society for Model and Experimental Engineers, a sprawling organisation with members scattered all over the world. While today we hacker spaces, maker spaces and fab labs, back in the 1800′s they had the learned society.

In the flickering light of a cinema Mike Chrisp watched a gentle Ealing comedy that would change his life. Now the linchpin of a world-renowned group of hobbyists and tinkerers, he builds models of the machines that inspired him all those years ago.

Founded in 1898 by Percival Marshall, the Society seems to be almost a template, a model if you will, of one of these British institutions. Many were founded with royal patronage, and many still exist today. The Society has survived two world wars as well as the introduction of technologies that were not even be dreamed about when it was formed.

The world is full of of people that are making stuff in ways that were impossible a few years ago. There’s always going to be that mixture of people that think if you don’t make your own castings and machine them with files, cold chisels and hammers—you’re not doing it properly, and the other half that think the right way to do it is to use a laser—and increasingly things like three-dimensional printing, are coming along, and changing the way everybody works.

Norman Billingham’s workshop has been pulled up around him over a lifetime. Chippings, clippings and filings fill a garage used to transform lumps of wood into beautiful pens and functional furniture. Although a scientist by training, Norman is the first to admit he’s always been a maker of things.

Filmed almost entirely in the garage workshops of the members of the Society, the series of films evokes an atmosphere that’s possibly uniquely British, and it transports me back to my childhood. I can almost smell the wood shavings in the last of the four films.

If I had to live without it I could, but it’s something that’s been a part of me for a very long time. I’ve always been someone who makes things. That’s what I do, it’s always been a hobby. I’m a scientist by training—professionally—life’s work. But I’ve always been a maker of things.

As well as the film series, Anne also created a newspaper. It houses the extra stories and excerpts from the interviews that didn’t make it into the films, not because they weren’t fascinating, but because they needed a different medium to express them; as an accompaniment to the film series it acts almost like a projectionist’s commentary, or a more traditional programme you’d get at a theatre.

Interviews with Model and Experimental Engineers

…some of the longer stories that my characters shared with me about specific points of their lives, or particular machines and methods didn’t make it into the films which I was pretty sad about. These were stories about machines invented under a veil of secrecy in the Soviet Union that someone had managed to build a version of, insight into a childhood with homemade toys and the reason why someone had spent their life building a particular type of locomotive. Tiny fragments of these tales made their way into the films but not in a way that did their stories justice.

I recently talked to Anne about her series of films, the newspaper, the story she was trying to tell, and the reaction to the piece both by the Society and others.

How did you get involved with the members of the Society?

I was on a bus going past Alexandra Palace in January 2012 and saw crowds of people streaming up the hill. It was more people than I’d ever seen going to Ally Pally before and a really diverse bunch of people – old, young, families etc, so I knew I had to find out what was going on. I looked it up online that night and turned out it was the London Model Engineering Exhibition. So I knew I had to go and see what was attracting such a huge bunch of people.

The next day was the last of the three-day event and it was super busy again. We wandered round people selling tools, some trade stalls selling spare parts and sheets of copper, and saw almost every engineering society in the South East showing off their wares. I’d taken my camera along and a sound kit so I did a few interviews just capturing some of the conversations I was having with people. But then we turned a corner and met SMEE. They were all wearing blue work coats – every member of the society has one – and were standing up beside their creations proudly showing them off, answering questions and roping people in to make a pulley tool on a small lathe they had.

Why did you decide to spend a year following them around, what made their story interesting to you?

A short film from the interviews of that day.

On that day, a lot of other people’s creations were incredible displays of ingenuity but you weren’t allowed to touch them. SMEE didn’t really mind about all that. They encouraged everyone to pick stuff up, see how it was made and just generally be inquisitive. I knew then that this was a fascinating bunch of people that I wanted to know more about.

I made a short film from the interviews I shot on the day–it’s not a proper documentary, more a sort of film sketch as a tool for exploring some of the conversations I had and grouping them into themes. But that definitely made me want to capture this field in more detail.

Can you see any parallels between them, and today’s hacker and maker spaces?

Definitely. In a way, SMEE are like a hackspace – they have a workshop and a headquarters building where they meet regularly. I guess the difference is that having been around over a hundred years means they have a few more traditions and are more traditionally organised than a hack space – they have a council and a Chairman for example. But the sentiment is the same. They’re a community united by a passion for making things. When I’ve been at SMEE on their workshop evenings, there’s one guy who travels over 2 hours each way just to use the workshop for an hour or two surrounded by fellow members. That fascinates me. I kept asking him why he bothered, why he didn’t use his workshop at home. And all he said was, it’s just not the same.

SMEE are really into CNC machining and are interested in 3D printing and other modern techniques too. In the Society film, Norman himself recognises that although there’ll always be people who think if you don’t make everything yourself with files and hammers you’re not doing it right, there’s another set of people who think that 3D printing is the future and CNC machines mean they can be more ambitious with their projects. And I think that’s what I love most about SMEE. They’re not preoccupied with nostalgia, they just happen to have a really rich heritage. What they do is make things.

Do you think the current films reflect the Society as a whole, or did you focus on a single thread of their story?

When I started out, I wanted to make just one film and I began filming and finding people to focus on with that in mind. But as time went on I realised that one film wouldn’t capture the essence of what makes these people who they are. One film would have skipped over little moments like the way Norman sees a ripple pattern in a piece of wood and the way Mike assembles all the little bits of his rail motor. For me, these bits are really important. It’s the power of film to show not just tell. And it reflects the texture of making things, the sounds and the look and the feel of materials. So, if anything, that was the way I approached the collection but it wasn’t really intentional, it just sort of ended up that those were the things that rose to the surface.

There are four films—an introduction to the Society, the Problem Solver, the Model Engineer and the Woodworker. Will there be more?

I did want to make sure I had a sufficient variety of approaches to craft but that wasn’t hard to find at SMEE. I think woodworking, model engineering and experimental engineering reflect a broad range of the types of craft SMEE members engage in but by no means all of them. SMEE have almost 500 members all over the world so I’d love to continue making more.

What do you think the message of the series is, what story were you trying to tell with the films?

If anything, it’s that we’re all makers of things. Sounds a bit cliched but the title The Makers of Things just came from something Norman said. He said that even when he was 14 and had a shed in his parents’ garden he made sawdust. I like the idea that whatever your discipline, your chosen material or intention, you can make stuff.

What do the members of the Society think of your series? Have they commented?

Several of them have seen them and have told me they really liked them. I think for them they’ve never really had the chance to see a real outside perspective on what they do. So I’m very pleased they see them as a genuine reflection of their hobby and the characters involved. I’m doing a talk at their next monthly meeting and will be showing the films to the full Society then.

What other reactions to the series have you had? Have any surprised you?

I’m been really chuffed by the reaction online and from family/friends at a screening I had last weekend. Everyone has said they liked the intimacy of the films, that they actually feel they’ve been offered a glimpse into people’s lives. Making stuff is a very personal thing and usually what we see of how other people approach it is a nicely composed photo of their desk all neat and tidy which is not how real life works. People have said they like that the collection feels very real and meaningful. What the people in the film are sharing is a lifetime of making and all the detail, emotion and hard work that comes with that. I’m really pleased people have picked up on that.

Switching gears then, what equipment did you use to shot the series?

The whole series was shot on a Canon EOS 7D with a range of prime lenses, with external radio mics for interviews.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Leaving the ivory tower
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I've been planning to leave academia for some time, but kept on putting it off. Unlike the U.S. where tenure is a thing pursued vigorously by the great and the good, here in the U.K. at least it has long gone to dust. But my job was as permanent as they get, and actually left me a lot of time to do a lot of other things outside it that interested me...

Looking out over the Pacific

However recently I took a look around and discovered that everything that was getting me up in the morning had nothing to do with my day job, and everything to do with what I was doing outside it. That just isn't any way to live. So, I've just pushed the big red switch. I now have a long rope and will be using it to leave the ivory tower real soon, my last day here at the University of Exeter is later this week, Thursday the 4th of April.

I was originally planning to take a couple of months off to look around, mainly because I'm in the fortunate position that I can do that, and such opportunities shouldn't be wasted. However some Tesla-driving individuals said "Yes!" and I've now working on something that's going to swallow my life for the next couple of months.

However, I'm not complaining, it's just the sort of getting out of bed project that I'm quitting academia to do in the first place. You'll be hearing more about it shortly, just as soon as I can talk about it...

In the short to medium term I'm planning on staying freelance, and doing consulting, contracting, writing or anything else that'll pay the bills and keep the wolves from the door. Although I'm not opposed to the idea of joining a (large) company, I've just spent thirteen years working for someone else, it'll be nice to work for myself for a while. Or at least be nearer the top of the tree, as you can generally see the rest of the forest much better from there. That said, it doesn't mean I'm not open to offers; they'd just have to be interesting offers.

So, while I've got a large number of things that might come off; I'm interested in work. Preferably work of substance, but beggars can't be choosers.

I've done a number of (some quite infamous) things with iOS, and have a lot of experience on the app side of things. I have done a number of things that are now generally being lumped into the "Big Data" camp. While I'm not a Hadoop and NoSQL guy, I've done some interesting work with machine learning and agent architectures, mostly to do with distributed sensor networks. I'm a hardware guy, or at least I'm an Arduino guy, and have done a number of other things to do with that increasingly ubiquitous hardware platform.

I like playing with mobile platforms, hardware, software, sensors, 3D printers and data visualisation. Or preferably all of the above at the same time, a good example of this is the work on the Data Sensing Lab I've been doing for O'Reilly.

Basically I'm an emerging technology guy. If it's new and a lot of people know nothing about it, I probably know something or am learning about it right now. Then I generally write a book about it and move on to the next emerging technology. I like being on the cutting edge. It's interesting out here. Oh yes, I also helped discover the most distant astronomical object yet found; a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. However I'm not so sure that's a useful skill outside of the ivory tower.

In summary then; I write, I code, I speak and am always willing to offer advice on things I know about.

Update: It has just been pointed out to me that I foresaw my own exit from academia some seven or eight years ago, back when I was still having fun in my day job, "...so what happens when I stop having fun? I'll probably have to sit down and make enough license plates so I don't have to worry about that stuff again."

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Distributed Network Data
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My latest book, my first not talking about iOS and writing code for the iPhone and iPad, just went to press. It's called Distributed Network Data and it's hardware hacking for Data Scientists. It's the book of the +Data Sensing Lab and arrives just in time for this year's +O'Reilly Strata in Santa Clara, which starts tomorrow.

This book is intended for data scientists who want to learn how to work with external hardware. It assumes some basic computing and programming knowledge, but no real expert knowledge is assumed. From there the book walks you through build your own distributed sensor network to collect, analyse, and visualise real-time data about our environment.

If you're a data scientist, or a visualisation person, interested in getting started with hardware and collecting your own data, this is the book for you. You can use the code AUTHD to get 40% off print books, 50% on ebooks and videos when you buy the book directly from O'Reilly.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Making money faster than you can type
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The 3Doodler is a 3D printer, but it's a pen. This takes 3D printing and turns it on its head...

In fact the 3Doodler rejects quite a lot of what most people would consider necessary for it to be called a 3D printer. There is no three axis control, there is in fact no software, you can't download a design and print an object, it strips 3D printing back to basics.

What there is, what it allows you to do, is make things. This is the history of printing going in reverse, it's as if Gutenberg's press was invented first, and then somebody came along afterwards and invented the fountain pen.

While it looks simple they've obviously overcome some serious technological difficulties to get it working. One of the things that's hard to do on 3D printers, at least hard to do well, is unsupported structures.

As anyone that owns a 3D printer will tell you, the cooling time for the plastic as it leaves the print head is crucial to allow you to print unsupported structures. Too hot and it doesn't work, the structure sags and runs, too cold and it just plain doesn't work at all. From their videos they seem to have cracked the problem, building a free standing structure seems to be easy and well within the capabilities of the pen.

It also takes 3mm ABS and PLA as its “ink,” the same stuff used by most hobbyist 3D printers. I've got spools of this stuff hanging around my house which I use in my own printer. But unlike my printer, which cost just under a thousand dollars, the 3Doodler costs just $75.

It doesn't have the same capabilities, but that's the difference between a printing press and a pen. It has different capabilities, ones a "normal" 3D printer doesn't have. It's not a cheap alternative, it's a different thing entirely.

I'm currently watching the 3Doodler climb towards their first million dollars on Kickstarter, and I when I say their first million I mean that, they have over 30 days to go on their campaign which has today has gone viral and made them the best part of that million. This is the next Pebble. The next Kickstarter success story.

They've tapped into a previously untappable market; people that wanted a 3D printer but couldn't afford one, and people that see the obvious potential of a fountain pen over a printing press, for both art and engineering.

The guys behind the 3Doodler made $60,000 dollars while I wrote this post, my hat is off to them. Because it's not often someone comes up with an idea this good.

I'm going to be writing a series of posts on hardware startups for the Radar over the course of the next few months, and rest assured I'll come back to the 3Doodler. But not until they can type faster than they can make money.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

The black rectangle won't last as long as the beige box
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It looks like putting #Linux on #Microsoft's new #Surface is going to be an up hill struggle. I was actually expecting that...

The era of the commodity beige box is coming to an end, and the days of the general purpose computer are almost over. Most people never needed or wanted a general purpose computer, and they're going to be happy with more limited devices optimised for a single, or a few, purposes. So long as those devices just work.

As a scientist I've benefited from being able to take mass produced PCs and be able to put them on desks very cheaply. The amount of compute power we've had access to as a result meant that money that would otherwise have been spent on expensive high end workstations could be spent elsewhere.

Those of us that need general purpose computing; designers, developers, scientists, are going to have to go out and buy increasingly expensive niche machines, effectively old-fashioned workstations. High end computing platforms that the general population just don't need on their desk or in their pocket.

The fact you can't install #Linux on the new #Surface is just the start of what is going to be an increasingly obvious trend. It's just a symptom. The things that are open and the things that are closed are changing. Time to wake up and realise that. Being able to install #Linux on your PC isn't important any more.

I think a lot of the web and mobile people are making the same mistake today that Nokia made five years ago, Nokia was all about the hardware and wasn't watching the software hard enough...

Today people are all about the software and aren't watching the hardware hard enough. Today's mobile phone, the black rectangle with, at most, a single button is a transition device. Don't get too comfortable with it, and don't stop thinking about innovation. Because the black rectangle won't last as long as the beige box.

Sunday, February 03, 2013

Predicting a Singularity
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I think a lot about the future, and because of that I've gained somewhat of a reputation for making good predictions. This is a characteristic I share with prophets, messiahs and other ne'er-do-wells. I'm not entirely sure what to think about that.

However one of the problems with making predictions about the future, the main problem, is that it's actually not that hard to predict what'll happen next year. Although for some reason this doesn't really seem to help many of the major analysts whose job it is to make such forecasts. Conversely it's also not that hard to make a prediction for the far future, as "…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."¹ Why is this a problem? Well if it's easy to make those predictions, making predictions in the sweet spot, both far enough ahead to be ahead to get you ahead of your competition, and close enough that you'll still be around to do something about it is actually almost impossible.

But how far in the future is the sweet spot? The strange thing is that this actually changes, a century ago it was twenty years, or even thirty, but twenty or thirty years ago it was just ten years. Today it's probably five, or less. The rate of technological progress is accelerating, and with it the amount of change we'll experience during our lives is also changing. The time it takes for new technologies to emerge, become mainstream, become dated and then obsolete is falling almost exponentially.

For someone like me, whose career more or less relies on being on, and being seen to be on, the bleeding edge, this is painfully evident. If I'm asked "Have you heard about…?" and I have to answer "No?" you'll generally see a look of pain cross my face, something sort of like constipation, don't worry, it's just my career flashing before my eyes...

At this point having angered both business analysts and science fiction writers I'm going to make a small admission, both professions have the right of it because "...the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."²

While the pace of change has accelerated, it's hard to see how that can be sustained as the size of the install base of existing legacy technology widens. So far we seem to have sustained that pace of change by trickle down economics, the older technology spreads out, and newer technology is dropped in, eagerly seized by early adopters like myself willing to pay the premium, and experience the inevitable problems that come with all new technology, at least until the bugs are shaken out.

Despite that I'm forced to point out that if you extrapolate the current rate of technological progress the view that some sort of technological singularity must almost be inevitable is hard to argue against. Unless of course there is some sort of major catastrophe, something to set us back.

Major catastrophes that could knock us back aren't hard to spot: a global pandemic, climate change, ecological disaster, super volcanoes, mega-tsunami, overpopulation, asteroid impact, a nearby supernovae and of course worldwide thermonuclear war are all favourites. The threat of some of these seems to be fading, but some seem more likely today than ever. There are others, many others, too numerous and depressing to list here.

They're also wildcards, because sometimes the things that should set us back push us forward. It's certainly arguable that two major world wars, so close together, were a major causal factor in the acceleration of the pace of change that is part of our lives today.

Depending on the current news cycle I can swing violently; between a horribly over optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of the rise of trans-humanism, and a view bleak in pessimism, in the inevitability of the abandonment of technology and a slow slide towards narrowing horizons and the eventual extinction of the human race. Doomed as a species that turned its back on space and by having its world view limited to just that, a single world with all the disasters and catastrophes that can result.

Despite this, I'll continue to try and make predictions in the sweet spot, it's fun to be proved right, and sometimes even more fun to be proved wrong.

¹ Arthur C. Clarke
² William Gibson

Saturday, February 02, 2013

You don't have to be awesome all the time...
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In her post talking about the public-ness of mourning after the death of Aaron Swartz, Danah Boyd writes "...we’ve created communities connected around ideas and actions, relishing individualistic productivity for collective good. But we haven’t created openings for people to be weak and voice their struggles and demons."

Geek culture is, at least in theory, a meritocracy, and you are measured by your accomplishments. But that means the best of us, those whose work is held up as shining examples, suffer from Impostor Syndrome. Sometimes cripplingly so, even when they are accomplishing awesome things. Because awesome things sometimes look a lot less awesome from the inside, when you know the limitations, flaws and problems with what you've built and shared with the community.

But worse than that, it means when you have your moment of weakness (and we all do), and for a while cannot contribute, cannot accomplish the day-to-day awesomeness that qualifies you as a member of good standing of the community, things can look very bleak. Because we expect the most from those of us that deliver the most, and even the great and the good can fall sometimes, and need support.

We've built a culture where it's hard to acknowledge that you don't know something, because knowing things is intricately linked with the doing of awesome things — which in turn is linked to our stature with our peers.

For someone like me, whose career more or less relies on being on, and being seen to be on, the bleeding edge, this is painfully evident. If I'm asked "Have you heard about…?" and I have to answer "No?" you'll generally see a look of pain cross my face, something sort of like constipation, don't worry, it's just my career flashing before my eyes…

I have no solutions to offer, only the sure and certain knowledge, which I give freely to other geeks, that you are not alone. That the great and the good amongst us suffer as well. That it's okay to be weak and not know the answer to a question. That it's okay to rest and take from others for a while. We'll still be here when you get back, and we'll still remember how awesome you are. You don't have to live your life on Internet time.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Goodbye Aaron
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I heard this morning that Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. He was just twenty six. That's far too young by anyone's measure.

It's unclear how much the pressures of the unreasonably harsh federal prosecution for the JSTOR incident might have weighed on him, because it's been clear that he was depressed for some years. Like many of us that suffer from bouts of depression he had good weeks, and bad weeks. But the legal mess he was in can hardly have been a light weight to bear.

We've had several well known people in the community commit suicide over the last couple of years, and it's jarring. From the outside they look like the best of us, the brightest, sometimes with the most to lose. From the inside it can look much bleaker.

People in our community grew up geeks, many grew up friendless and carry that burden into adulthood. They have real trouble reaching out when they need help; to the friends they're not sure they really have, to the family they often regard as having not been there for them when they were at school. As a result the community is littered with people that suffer depression, that struggle every day with it, and with Impostor Syndrome. No matter how accomplished people look on the outside, and despite past records that should make those accomplishments as evident to them as it is to the rest of us, they suffer. Often in silence.

I didn't know Aaron well, we had exchanged a few words on a couple of occasions, but I should have had a chance to fix that. He was twenty six and he was at the start of things, not the end.

If you feel like you can't go on, if you feel like it's too much to bear the weight of your life alone. Please, don't do this, please reach out to your friends, your family, to strangers if you must. If you can't face your friends with the news that you hate your life. Because there is always someone that's going to miss you. Always.

Goodbye Aaron.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The inevitability of smart dust
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This post was first published on the O'Reilly Radar.

I've put forward my opinion that desktop computing is dead on more than one occasion, and been soundly put in my place as a result almost every time. "Of course desktop computing isn't dead — look at the analogy you're drawing between the so called death of the mainframe and the death of the desktop. Mainframes aren't dead, there are still plenty of them around!"

Well, yes, that's arguable. But most people, everyday people, don't know that. It doesn't matter if the paradigm survives if it's not culturally acknowledged. Mainframe computing lives on, buried behind the scenes, backstage. As a platform it performs well, in its own niche. No doubt desktop computing is destined to live on, but similarly behind the scenes, and it's already fading into the background.

The desktop will increasingly belong to niche users. Developers need them, at least for now and for the foreseeable future. But despite the prevalent view in Silicon Valley, the world does not consist of developers. Designers need screen real estate, but buttons and the entire desktop paradigm are a hack; I can foresee the day when the computing designers use will not even vaguely resemble today's desktop machines.

For the rest of the world? Computing will almost inevitably diffuse out into our environment. Today's mobile devices are transition devices, artifacts of our stage of technology progress. They too will eventually fade into their own niche. Replacement technologies, or rather user interfaces, like Google's Project Glass are already on the horizon, and that's just the beginning.

People never wanted computers; they wanted what computers could do for them. Almost inevitably the amount computers can do for us on their own, behind our backs, is increasing. But to do that, they need data, and to get data they need sensors. So the diffusion of general purpose computing out into our environment is inevitable.

Everyday objects are already becoming smarter. But in 10 years' time, every piece of clothing you own, every piece of jewelry, and every thing you carry with you will be measuring, weighing and calculating. In 10 years, the world — your world — will be full of sensors.

The sensors you carry with you may well generate more data every second, both for you and about you, than previous generations did about themselves during the course of their entire lives. We will be surrounded by a cloud of data. While the phrase "data exhaust" has already entered the lexicon, we're still essentially at the banging-the-rocks-together stage. You haven't seen anything yet ...

The end point of this evolution is already clear: it's called smart dust. General purpose computing, sensors, and wireless networking, all bundled up in millimeter-scale sensor motes drifting in the air currents, flecks of computing power, settling on your skin, ingested, will be monitoring you inside and out, sensing and reporting — both for you and about you.

Almost inevitably the amount of data that this sort of technology will generate will vastly exceed anything that can be filtered, and distilled, into a remote database. The phrase "data exhaust" will no longer be a figure of speech; it'll be a literal statement. Your data will exist in a cloud, a halo of devices, tasked to provide you with sensor and computing support as you walk along, calculating constantly, consulting with each other, predicting, anticipating your needs. You'll be surrounded by a web of distributed sensors and computing.

Makes desktop computing look sort of dull, doesn't it?

Sunday, January 06, 2013

The fifth horseman never gets invited to the good parties
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This article was originally posted on Google+.

Yesterday +MG Siegler argued on +TechCrunch that Samsung is the fifth horseman of technology, filling in for the ailing Microsoft, when the four horsemen: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google go riding.

I have to disagree with the underlying assumptions. We're at yet another tipping point in technology. A few years ago we moved from the beige box to the black rectangle, but the black rectangle won't be with us for as long as the beige box.

That black rectangle, the ubiquitous form factor of today's smart phone, is a transition device and it's going to disappear quickly as the speed of technological change is accelerating rapidly. Of the four horsemen only Google seems to be working on alternatives with +Project Glass. It's possible the others, including Samsung, have working hardware, but the successor to today's smart phone is going to be all about context and user interaction.

I've stood up in front of audiences before and argued that our smart phones have our lives on them, the next generation of mobile technology is going to stand between us and our lives and add context. It's hard to do that without a lot of information about the user.

It's also going to be a big leap for the horsemen to make. Despite getting into hardware recently Amazon is about selling content, Facebook has never done hardware and I don't think have this sort of paradigm shift in their corporate bones, Apple has, but without Steve Jobs I don't think they'll have the guts to kill the iPhone and innovate. Samsung, the fifth horsemen that never gets invited to the good parties, is a box shifter. They know hardware, but they don't know design, and they don't know anything about their end users. Their customers are other companies, like Amazon, not you and me, the eventual consumers.

So out of all of them Google seems to be the only one positioned to move forward, and it'll be a big leap for them even so. The developer release of +Project Glass later this year is going to be crucial. If I had the money to lose making a wager, I'd wager that it'll be some startup you or I haven't heard of yet that makes the leap to the next ubiquitous form factor.

Either way, it's going to be an interesting year...

Friday, December 28, 2012

The rise of the personal space program
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This article was originally posted on Google+.

Just over a year ago now, the first ever project I backed on Kickstarter was Kicksat. A project to put a swarm of small nano-satellites in orbit. The size of a couple of postage stamps each satellite has solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a micro-controller along with memory and sensors.

Today in the mail my souvenir satellite arrived, it's just 3.5 cm square. It's an engineering prototype, presumably one that failed verification, and it doesn't have it's solar cells attached, but otherwise its just like the ones that'll be flown into orbit.

An engineering sample of a flight ready Sprite nano-satellite.

At it's heart is a +Texas Instruments CC430F5137. It's a whole system on a chip based around an MSP430 CPU, a 16-bit RISC ulta-low power micro-controller, along with an onboard RF transceiver operating in the sub-1GHz bands, a real-time clock and an integrated temperature sensor.

As well as the big solder pads at the top of the board for the solar cell there are a number of unpopulated pads on the board, including space for some through hole components, so there is certainly room for more sensors to be added on the board itself, and the MSP430 has the capacity to handle them.

However the satellite is going to be entirely reliant on the solar cell for power, there is no battery back up on the board, and the satellite will only be able to operate on the Sun-ward side of its orbit. That means power is the limiting factor. The CC4305137 has good brown-out reset capability, probably one of the reasons it was chosen, however you have to wonder how much more can be crammed onto the board and still reliably operate.

While it's might not seem much beyond a shrunken down Sputnik at that point, the Kicksat is ground breaking. In just fifty-five years we've advance from the point where it takes the might of one of the world's only super powers to put something like this into orbit, to the point where several hundred of them can be put into orbit by a graduate student with some enthusiastic backers.

Despite the pessimism I often express at the way the space programme is going, this is something that gives me a lot of hope that we aren't going the wrong way. That we aren't starting a march towards the abandonment of technology and a slow fall towards an age of declining possibilities and narrowing horizons.

Kicksat, the CubeSat designed to carry hundreds of these small Sprite nano-satellites aboard, is now on track for launch in the autumn of 2013 onboard the CRS-3/ELaNa-5 mission. This will be the third Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) flight to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a +SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. KickSat, along with 5 other CubeSats, will be hitching a ride as a secondary payload thanks to +NASA's ELaNa program.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Teardown of Wireless Sensor Tags
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The Wireless Sensor Tag is a smart tag system by CAO Gadgets.

The Wireless Sensor Tag
(Credit: CAO Gadgets)

The system is based around an Ethernet Tag Manager, a small box that connects directly to your home router and manages the all the associated tags. Basically it acts as a bridge between the wireless tags themselves and the Cloud backend which manages the tags.

The Tag Manager
(Credit: CAO Gadgets)

Each tag has motion and temperature sensors and can be configured to notify you via tweet, email, push notification, or via a URL callback (either to an Internet facing host or directly to an internal IP on your home network) when the tag is moved, or when the temperature goes out of a user defined range, or if the tag itself is moved out of range of the tag manager. Each tag also has a piezo electric buzzer and an LED which can be triggered using the same ruleset.

Ordering

I actually ordered my system back in August, only to be told that the sensor tags had not been CE certified, and they weren't quite prepared to do that just yet. I could either cancel my order, or wait until they had enough orders to that it would make "economic sense" for them to obtain CE marking at which point they'd ship me my order.

I have to admit I wasn't that impressed by that. If you're offering something for sale internationally then you should have the items in stock and you should be able to ship it out of the country. If they weren't prepared to ship into the EU, they shouldn't have processed my order, or billed my credit card.

They also seem to be having supply chain problems as their current stock is sold out and their store has a note on the front page saying that the lead time for a new order is currently one to one and half months between order placement to fulfilment.

However it looked like someone had put a lot of thought into this problem space, and despite the number of similar systems that are starting to appear, the system should be a neat solution. So I hung on, and I'm glad I did, as I I'm actually quite impressed with the build quality of the hardware and how it hangs together as a system...

Unboxing

My system arrived in a plain USPS box. Inside was the tag manager, an ethernet cable, a USB power adapter and cable, ten tags with velcro strips, and somewhat oddly, seven spare batteries.

The Wireless Sensor Tag System

Setting up the system is a fairly simple procedure. Plug the tag manager into your router and let it grab a DHCP address and announce itself to the mytaglist.com server. Theoretically the tags included in the tag manager in your shipment should come pre-associated, but at least for me this didn't seem to be the case, but that said associating them is no big deal. Pull the battery tab, and if you have a flashing LED that means the tag is unassociated, go to the web app and click on the button to add a new tag. The tag then shows up in the list on the web backend and you can go ahead and configure the triggers for that tag.

The Software

Unfortunately despite initial promise, I'm not finding the system amazingly reliable as yet. Tags that are within a few feet of the tag manager are being periodically being reported as "Out of Range" by the web interface. However it's possible that the hardware is fine and I'm just not understanding the software.

Update (12 Nov): Just got an email from the manufacturer saying that they've "fixed some bugs on the server" and these spurious "Out of Range" notifications shouldn't happen any more. It's a bit soon to tell one way or the other, but certainly I'm not seeing them at this point, so this might well be fixed now.

The web application used to manage the tags on your system

The web application is confusing, the interface basically looks like someone has exposed the backend database schema in software without much thought as to how the user is going to interact with it. At the moment the interesting hardware is being let down badly by the back end software, there should be preset options, e.g. "this tag is attached to a door", "this tag is attached to a moveable object", that would auto-configure the tag to common presets.

As it is there are numerous settings to go through for each and every tag, and most of these aren't well explained, and the buttons to set the options are not self explanatory or just flat out confusing.

I'm sure it makes sense to the programmer that built it, as they understand exactly how the system works and how the components interact, to the rest of us, at least initially, it's confusing.

I've been playing with the system for about an hour now and I still can't figure out how to get a tag to start bleeping when moved, and then keep on bleeping until manually reset. It's something you'd commonly want to do for a tag that's attached to something that might be stolen, and the system should be able to do it, but I can't figure it out. It's probably obvious once you know how, but...

They need to get a good UX person in, along with a designer, to overhaul the backend. That could make a big difference to the software and its usability for the average person. The system itself is really elegant, and easy to get up and working, the software to configure the tags is letting it down.

Another frustration for me is that the iOS app that allows you to monitor the tags, and receive push notifications to your phone when one of your triggers is tripped, is only available in the US App Store. The ability to get push notifications was one of the major reasons for me to buy this system, so I'm hoping this is going to be resolved quickly. Again, if you're going to ship outside the US you need to make sure your system is ready to go there.

Update (12 Nov): The iOS app is now available in the UK store, which resolves one of my main problems with the system. Although unfortunately the software UX problems extend to the iOS application. It's comprehensive, but not easy to use.

The iOS Tag Manager application running on my iPhone 5

The Hardware

There is actually very little information about how the system hardware works, and I'm not in favour of "just magic", so I wanted to take a closer look at the board to try and figure out what's going on under the hood.

The rubberised enclosures are more-or-less indestructible and amazingly stretchy so they're fairly easy to take off, which is a good thing as you'll need to do that before pulling out the battery tab to activate the tag as they tend to break off if you try and do this with the enclosure still on...

Wireless Sensor Tag

The tag is powered by a single CR2032 button cell Lithium battery which they're claiming will last anywhere between two months and seven years depending on the sensitivity and polling interval you choose for the tag.

The onboard processor is a Microchip PIC16LF720 micro-controller, an interesting choice that draws about a fifth of the current than the Amtel ATmega micro-controllers used in the familiar Arduino boards. Wireless operations for the tags is provided by the Microchip MRF 49XA radio, which operates in the sub-GHz MHz ISM bands. While this can be changed, the tags ship and by default operate at 436 MHz. Unlike the US this is not an ISM band here in the UK, and although it is part of the amateur band, a license to operate is required and the primary user of the band is the MOD.

The choice of the sub-GHz ISM band is an interesting one, most competing products on the market use the 13MHz RFID bands, or more commonly the 2.4GZ band used by both Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Bluetooth LE devices. I'm guessing that they went with the sub-GHz bands to keep power usage to a minimum and extend the battery life of the tags themselves and provide a good range.

Motion sensing is provided by an Honeywell HMC5883L sensor, a three-axis magnetometer, again an interesting choice as most of the competitors are using linear accelerometers. I'm presuming they used a magnetometer to get good angular measurements, which is a perfect fit for one of the main uses cases for the tags; checking whether doors are open or closed.

Finally I'm guessing temperature measurements are provided by a fairly anonymous chip marked with "AXWB." While that's just a guess, the word "TEMP" is the silkscreen legend next to it, so it's probably a decent one. I haven't been able to track down the data sheet for this chip or the manufacturer, although the specifications page gives an operating range of -40°C to 85°C with an typical accuracy of ±1°C and a -2 to +4°C maximum deviation, with a sensor quantisation of around 1°C.

Developer SDK

The system isn't "open hardware" but that's just fine, not everything has to be open, people have to eat and keep a roof over their head and that takes money. However I was pleased to see that there is some developer documentation available for the web service API of the mytaglist.com backend server, along with the the source code for the management software I was complaining about earlier. The source code for the iOS and Android applications is also available if you email the company.

Update (12 Nov): I emailed the manufacturer and they want to know why I want the source code, and for me to sign an NDA before they release it to me, which wasn't exactly what I was expecting from the API documentation. I'm not sure what to think about that...

The system does crucially rely on a back end server provided by the manufacturer, but the FAQ tells us that if the tag manager can be flashed to point at a different server, and it's at least theoretically possible to run your own. The vendor then talks about licensing their own server side software, and promises that if their mytaglist.com server gets shut down that they'll release the code and allow you to update the tag manager to point at your own server. So I'm happy enough at that point.

Summary

Just as I thought when I initially placed my order, someone has thought long and hard about this problem space, and it really shows in the quality and flexibility of the hardware if not the software.

I'm fairly sure the software issues are going to get ironed out eventually, at least for me the existence of some sort of documentation would probably solve most of the problems I'm having. Although I do think that for the average user the interface needs a good UX expert and a redesign.

~~I also hope to have my hands on the iOS app so I can use the tags as I originally intended, and enable push messaging to my phone, as that'll vastly increase the utility of the system for me.~~

From poking around on the manufacturer's website it seems that there are probably more tag types coming, including current (for home energy monitoring?) and moisture (for detecting water leaks) sensor tags. I'll certainly go ahead and purchase those when they arrive.

Despite some of the criticism above, I am impressed with this system and would recommend it.

Update (23 Nov): My tags were suffering from spurious "out of range" and "reconnected" messages. So I have just sent all my tags back to CAO Gadgets for a firmware update.