Tag: software

QR Codes: great, but then what?

I keep a long and ever-growing outline of blog topics I may someday write about. Most aren’t fully formed, but each at least once struck me as interesting at some point or another, so I figured they’re worth keeping around.1 (See one real example to right.)

  • <3 qr-codes
    • bridges the physical and the cyber
    • low-tech, lowest-common denominator
    • cam­er­a­phones in every pocket
    • makes a lot more sense than com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies, like that microsoft one with the dif­fer­ent col­ors that requires color print­ing, etc. this one I could, if so inclined, draw with a pencil
    • sadly, most of what I use this tech­nol­ogy for is curiously decod­ing barcodes I come across on the web

I add topics to my list pretty regularly, but what doesn’t happen very regularly is someone reading my mind and writing my post for me. Okay, it’s only happened once: about a week ago, and it was geeking out on QR Codes.

I’m a bit behind on my RSS reading, but when I just came across this boingboing post, I was quite pleased. In it, guest blogger Glenn Fleishman pretty much lays out the case for 2D barcodes — QR being the most popular, good/open-enough format — as a useful sort of link between the physical world and the digital one. It’s an idea I happen to have loved for a few years now, and with Internet-enabled cameraphones all over the place, one that has the potential2 to create some benefit to society on a large scale.

It should come as little surprise, then, that for as long as I’ve been aware of these codes, I’ve longed to find a use for the technology aside from the mundane let people scan your ad to go to your website, or send a URL from your computer to your phone. A handful of boingboing commenters pointed out a few real-world examples of ways they have used QR codes: labeling shared lab equipment or getting on the VIP list at Tokyo clubs. Interesting they are; world-changing they’re not.

Of course, there’s also the idea of providing richer information about wine than a simple bottle label could display, which I find a step above the others, and giving extra context to museum art, which I think gets us even closer.

Yet I still think QR Codes have even greater potential… but potential isn’t even half the battle.

  1. Yes, they’re basically brain crack.[↩]
  2. Naturally, the barrier to adoption is convincing the average person to bother solving for themselves a problem — easy URL/text/contact entry on their phone — they didn’t realize they had.[↩]

Uncommon Knowledge: Twitter @replies

I’ve been thinking lately, and I’m going to start a new series here on the blog, tentatively titled stuff I know and take for granted, but it’s stuff that a lot of people don’t know, you guys!

I may need to think of a better title.

I won’t, however, let that stop me.1 These are things that the world may or may not need to know, but should certainly have the chance to know.

Here’s my first one:

If you have a common name on Twitter, you probably get lots of errant ‘@replies’ because people don’t know how to use them.

A little background: if you use Twitter—and I won’t fault you if you don’t2—you’re probably aware that you can direct your post to another user by placing their unique Twitter user ID after an @ sign somewhere in your post. For example, if you wanted to tell me I’m great, you’d say something like:

I think that @everett is great!!

(@nobody Hey, thanks!)

…and then my Twitter software client would alert me that someone directed a post my way. These are usually called “replies” or “mentions” depending on the client you use. Simple stuff, right?

Note that it just so happens that my Twitter ID is “everett.” This is so because I registered my account in mid-2006, early enough that first-names were still unregistered, and thus, available as user IDs. Because I chose a common name for my ID and quite a few people out there know people named Everett and some of these people don’t know what they’re doing, I often get posts directed at me unintentionally.

I’ve gotten used to it. Here are some examples of places I was ‘mentioned’ by mistake.

Not the worst advice, but I can’t take the credit.

This never happened. Really.

Not sure where I was on the evening of August 19th, but I’m not sure where Elijah’s sense of entitlement comes from either.

This example is interesting. Thanks to Twitter, I’ve learned that there’s a chain of barbecue places in the Oakland area called Everett & Jones, which a lot of people like to go to. Mentions of E&J actually get mistakenly directed at me a lot… and from everything I’ve heard, it makes my must-try list if I’m ever in the Bay Area again. Thanks, Twitter!

  1. You could also say that I need to think of better ideas than this one, but I won’t let that stop me either.[↩]
  2. Despite all the hype, Twitter is totally non-essential, and you’re probably not missing that much if you don’t use it.[↩]

…I just want some snack cakes

I was playing some Scarface: The World Is Yours earlier this evening on my Wii and while the game is in many ways a series of missions that don’t vary all that much, a part of the game that is pretty consistently interesting is talking to random people on the streets. (What does that leave? A pretty standard 3D open world, drive-cars-shoot-people-deal-drugs rush rush affair that happens to take place in a Miami I don’t quite recognize.)

But like I was saying, the conversations.

I can’t remember what purpose this serves in the game, but you can have back-and-forth conversations with the seemingly hundreds of unique NPCs that line the streets of the game. Walk up to one, press A and Tony spits out a line, to which they respond with something that more-or-less makes sense. Press A and Tony replies with something mostly relevant to what they said. Do this back-and-forth exchange a few times and your “Conversation” count increases by one. (You can only converse with any given individual once, at which point talking to them consists of seemingly-random one-liners that seem to either propose sexual relations or bodily harm… or are just strings of Scarface-style expletives.)

So earlier, I (well, Tony) was visiting our local bank branch when I decided to talk to some of the people hanging around in the stairwell. We walked up to one African-American gentleman in an ugly sweater and the conversation basically began like this:

Tony: Miami is full of pussy, meng. You just need to be rich to get it.
Gentleman: Man, I don’t care about pussy. I just want some snack cakes.

I’m gonna let that one hang for a moment.

…

Okay, I fucking love this game.

The current state of the art in comment spam

Write, geek! gets a fair amount of spam replies. This surprised me at first, when it began happening almost immediately after the blog was set up and content was posted. I should have known better; there’s almost no cost to spammers in spamming even unpopular blogs, so why would they make an exception for mine?

I’m using the Akismet plugin for WordPress, so it’s not like any of these comments actually make it to my blog. In fact, I’d never even have to see them, if not for the fact that I regularly clean these comments out of my spam folder by hand. I do this partly to ensure that nothing legitimate gets filtered incorrectly (which happens sometimes) and partly because I like to sort of keep tabs on the current ‘state of the art’ in spamming.

The current state of the art in spamming is this: the comments are getting better. No longer are comments jam-packed with dozens of links commonplace (one particular default WordPress setting probably made those almost 100% ineffective), but they’ve been largely replaced with comments that masquerade as… actual comments!

The idea of noise disguised as signal is nothing new if you’ve used e-mail in the last 15 years, but that the noise is getting better (read: more difficult for humans to detect) is somewhat surprising. Of course, these comments are no match for a large, distributed system like Akismet, which all-knowingly sees what’s being posted to probably millions of blogs, but the well-disguised, largely pseudo-flattering comments are probably now designed to get human blog authors to click the “Not Spam” button, freeing them the comments the spam box so that they can do their SEO-based dirty work.

Of course, gentle readers, I’m far too smart to fall for that, but not so blinded by my hatred for spam to be unable to appreciate a well-crafted work of authorship, like this one I just found:

Spam that reads "Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!"

Sure, it’s not perfect, but someone out there put some modicum of thought into it, which is the least you could ask of the author of a work that’s going to be distributed on a massive scale.

Plus, it’s a lot better than this anti-gem I also just found:

Spam that reads "Why jesus allows this sort of thing to continue is a mystery"

Can you get more unintentionally self-referential than that? (No, you cannot… and yes, that was a challenge.)

How to transfer photos from a Game Boy Camera to a computer (in Linux)

A few days ago, I found a Flickr group thread that was practically begging for my input. It read something like “Hey Everett, you’re surprisingly enough not the only person out there with these two interests (one obscure and the other semi-so). Would you be willing to help out quite possibly the only other person in the world who cares about these things?”

Not only was I like, “Heck  yeah!,” but I decided that this was worthy of blogging, in case a third individual happens to develop these interests. (If this is you, welcome!)

So, in case you find yourself wanting to get crappy photos—a term I use most affectionately—like these:

off of one of these:

red Game Boy Camera

and you use Linux:

(I kid!)

…like I do, read on.

The hardware I’m using to download photos over USB is SmartBoy USB cartridge reader (which is made by these people). And there just so happens to be a great open-source program for facilitating this task using this device (or a similar cartridge reader): gbcflsh.

So what’s the problem? gbcflsh is only distributed as source, and the source fails to compile under recent releases of Ubuntu. I contacted the developers of gbcflsh, and one gave me some suggestions for fixing the source code. They have yet to publish the fixed source, so I’ll document how I got it to compile.

(If you don’t care about this, just grab the binary I made: gbcflsh 32-bit, md5sum: 85b185706c3d5fe45b7787787f8510bd; gbcflsh 64-bit, md5sum: 4326e08fcfb5be39004c290df2a71988)

  1. Download and extract the source code.
  2. Install the following packages:
    gcc 4.3.3, qt4-dev-tools, libftdi-dev
  3. Focus on the following files:
    src/Logic.cpp
    src/ReadFlashThread.cpp
    src/ReadRamThread.cpp
    src/WriteFlashThread.cpp
    src/WriteRamThread.cpp
  4. Add the following to the bottom of the #include section of each file:
    #include <cstdio>
  5. That’s it! Compile it like you already know how to do (which I won’t get into here).

gbcflshWhen you run gbcflsh (you’ll need to do so as root, by the way), it’ll look a little bit like what you see to the right. Select the visible options (USB, Auto, Ram: 128 KB) and click “Read RAM.”

If all goes well, you’ll end up with the contents of your camera’s RAM in the form of a .sav file. Great! The hard part is behind us, but we’re not quite done yet.

Next, you’ll need a program that will extract photos from the save file. I believe there are a few, but they all seem to be for Windows. Fortunately, the one I use works perfectly under Wine. gbcameradumpIt’s called GBCameraDump.exe, and it can currently be found here. Download it, run it via Wine and select the .sav file you got from gbcflsh. You’ll have something that looks like this screenshot (except hopefully with better photos).

I would also advise you to — if this sort of thing matters to you — check the order of the saved images. They’re likely to be out of order due to, it seems, the way Nintendo decided to handle the saving of images to the cartridge. (Also, you’re likely to find some photos you thought were deleted, which may come as a surprise.)

So there you have it: how to get photos off of this camera of the past, using the operating system of the (sigh) future.

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0

The old adage (which I think I made up) about spending more time geeking around with a WordPress installation than actually writing in the damned blog holds true, ladies and gentlemen.

I just finished upgrading this fine blog to the newly-stable WordPress 3.0.

In case you were wondering and/or sitting on the edge of your seats, I took great care to:

  1. Disable all of my plugins
  2. Dump a copy of my WordPress MySQL database using the aptly-titled mysqldump
  3. tar a copy of my WordPress directory
  4. Do the upgrade!
  5. Re-enable the plugins one-by-one, making sure each works (or at least doesn’t break anything)

While I know not everyone is so lucky, I’m glad to see that everything appears to work here, because I’d be deathly embarrassed if, you know, Google or Bing’s webcrawler came by and things weren’t looking up to my usual standards.

Fine wine games

There is a certain class of video game whose existence I’ve been slowly discovering over the last few years. Let’s call these fine wine games.

My idea of a fine wine game1 is one that is best experienced a bit at a time. You know, enjoyed in moderation. The kind you only pick up and play every once in a while… because it’s just that good.

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Why would you want to take it so slowly with something so great? Well, here’s other side of the coin: this sort of game also has an element of rarity, or scarcity to it. It’s not the sort of game that prints money, selling millions of copies, so the chances of a sequel being made aren’t very good.

So enjoy the game itself. Savor it as you go. Don’t cry because there won’t be a sequel; think of how lucky you are to play it in the first place! Wring every drop of enjoyment from the experience that you can.

Here are a few games you’ll find in my cask:

Zack & Wiki (Nintendo Wii) The original fine wine game in my book. Critically acclaimed; sold quite poorly. Chance of sequel? Slim-to-none. Thus, I decided that I’d only play Zack & Wiki sparingly.

With save dates as my basis, I’d estimate that I would pick it up every couple of months, play for a day or two (enough time to struggle through my current level feeling like the world’s biggest moron until finally feeling like the world’s greatest genius, which is what this game does to you). And then, back on the shelf it would go, to wait for the next time I’m in the mood for savory gaming greatness.

Thus, despite having bought this game in 2008, I only completed it this past weekend. $40 so very, very well spent.

Soul Bubbles (Nintendo DS) While I bought my copy from an Amazon Marketplace seller, this game was released in the U.S. as a Toys R Us-exclusive title. If this artificially limited its audience, that’s simply unfortunate, because this is a beautiful game… one that I tend to forget all about for months on end before rediscovering it anew every time.

I’ve been taking my time with Soul Bubbles, and have more than half of it (read: years of enjoyment) left to go!

Mother/EarthBound series (Nintendo NES/SNES/GBA) Enough has been written about this series of quirky, rather un-RPG-like RPGs, which have attracted a cult-like following. Thus, I’ll offer only this quick assessment: the fact that English-speaking gamers have the opportunity to play any of the three games should be enough to make a fan thank their lucky stars.

While it could be said that three games released over the course of fifteen years effectively nullifies any supposed rarity… hey, you know what? Fuck you. Nintendo translated Mother and then promptly shelved the English version, Mother 2 (EarthBound) received one stinker of a U.S. marketing campaign, and the English translation of Mother 3 had to be undertaken by a team of incredibly devoted fans.

Mother games in English are some mighty fine wine.

Cave Story (Windows, WiiWare, et al.) Cave Story is the work of one dedicated amateur over the course of five years… work that was simply given away for free as a Windows game, and later ported to a handful of popular platforms by fans.

I started Cave Story a few times over the years, but the lackluster Linux port kept putting me off of it; I knew I should wait for a good port to be available for a platform I use. The WiiWare version was released a few months back, and the rest is history. After years of anticipation, I swilled this one down in a decidedly non-fine-wine manner.

Whoops.

Whether games or other media, what do you consider to be your fine wine?

https://writegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/prints_money.gifpr
  1. Initially, the idea I had was that a game of this sort (it was Zack & Wiki that brought this to mind) would be enjoyable to play quite literally with a glass of wine, as this is the sort of game that would be best enjoyed at a relaxing pace, in a chill atmosphere. But last weekend, I instead started thinking of these games metaphorically; the game itself is the wine. I liked that thought, and knew I had to write this post.[↩]