Date: 2004-04-25 18:27:09
(Author: trav)
Link:
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/002994.php
Ritz Camera is selling the first disposable digital camera, interestingly branded the "Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera". It sounded interesting to me, so I picked one up for $11. It's a 1.3 megapixel camera (the photo to the left is a cropped example image of me grinning like an idiot) that runs on two AA batteries and can store up to 25 images. It even allows you to erase the last picture taken, and take it again if you wish, and has a 10-second self-timer. Once you have your 25 shots, you take it in for processing and you get your shots on a CD. I'm not sure how much this service costs, though.
If you remove the little sticker warning you not to do so, you have access to the I/O pins for the camera's internal memory. With the use of a USB cable cut from a dead mouse, some software for the camera's chipset, and a little bit of engineering, I was able to get the photos off it and onto Suw. With some proper persuasion, it can also be used as a web cam. Not a bad investment of ten bucks.
Comments:
"You make us soooooooooooo proud!? You are an intelligent young man!!!! Guess we'll buy you a bunch of those for graduation?!?!?! Love you!!!"
"Every mother thinks their kid is a genius. This difficulty of doing this was congruent to baking bread."
"From scratch?! that's hard! ;)"
"See? You're the prince. See what I mean?? "
(4 comments)
Date: 2004-04-07 01:05:12
(Author: trav)
Link:
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/002936.php
From the documentation of Neuralyst:
...we dont' know exactly what characteristics the neural network has determined are relevant (this is particularly important with small sample sets...where there will be fewer or no samples to contradict bad generalizations) and there is often no way to find out without experimenting with the neural network. Theoretically it should be possible to understand the model developed by the neural network through a detailed examination and understanding of the weights, but in practice these values and relationships are often too complex for this to be attempted.
This is where I think a lot of data mining software effort should be focused.
It's probably due to my inexperience, but more interesting to me than using neural nets to learn things so we don't have to, is the idea of using neural nets to learn things so they can
teach us what is important. Imagine the benefits this could reap for the communities of law enforcement, medicine, economics, etc... if we had a way to
easily analyze the weights of neural networks. By mining the weights, and producing an intuitive visualization, we could more effectively do research. The machine wouldn't HAVE to learn to generalize, it would just need to learn what's important, so we could more easily do the generalization ourselves.
Date: 2004-04-04 21:23:11
(Author: trav)
Link:
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/002931.php
My car was broken into. Again.
So now my other CD Player is gone, along with disc 3 of Biograph, which my parents gave me, a mix CD that Nic gave me, my one and only Nick Drake album, my one and only Nada Surf album, and the Kenickie album that took me two years to find.
The CD player I can deal with. Fine. Take it. Buy crack or something. But the mix that Nic made me? That's just being an asshole. Like you even know who Stereolab is anyway. And what kind of a car thief is going to appreciate Kenickie?
Comments:
"None but they could fence it on ebay. "
"I'm sorry....you'll just have to lock anything of value in your trunk. Period. Humans have no respect for others any more...sad but true. I HOPE I raised my children better than that. Nice to see you this weekend, even though it was short and sweet. We love you! "
"I did not know there was such a crime wave in Fargo. I feel terrible about that. Move to Texas, where you'll know the places not to park."
"That hurts! I had 60 CD's taken from my car once (CDs and inserts only in Case Logic cases). I now only put copies in my car. Oh, and the stock stereo will do just fine thankyouverymuch. One of the CD's that was taken went on Ebay for over $100 the last time I saw it there."
(4 comments)
Date: 2004-04-02 14:37:24
(Author: trav)
Link:
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/002926.php
There were some domain issues with kroh.net recently. If you're seeing this page, that means they're fixed.
Date: 2004-04-01 16:56:53
(Author: trav)
Link:
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/002924.php
According to MobileMag, Apple announced the PowerPod today. It's yet to be seen if this is an April Fool's joke, but I'm leaning that way. A cool concept, nonetheless.
Turns out it was in fact a fool. It's still a neat idea. Maybe someone could build one.
