It would have been fun get a quick hack up and running today.

image from the museum.

From the leaflet: “Welcome as a patient to the Psychiatric Hospital”
About the Psychiatric Hospital

The highly regarded Copenhagen architect, Gotlieb Bindsboll, built the Jyske Asylum in the middle of the 19th Century. The inspiration for the building, with its crow step gables and many beautiful courtrooms, was taken from the typical Danish manor houses. Its position, with views over the Århus bay was in keeping with the contemporary view of the healing benefits of beauty. The hospital became known as a model institution for the treatment of the mentally ill, also on a European scale. The first part of the hospital was completed in 1852 and it was extended several times over the next fifty years.

The phone is from 1951 1955 and the “electronics” looks aged but in surprisingly good condition. My first plan for it were to gut it, and put a more modern telephone inside, so I could use it for voip. But when I saw that it were in good condition, I thought it would be a shame to kill it entirely.

So I wanted to see whether it would be possible to use it as it is.

For the voip connection i have a PAP2T linksys adaptor (pap), its quite simple to work with. Plug in power and ethernet cable and configure it with a voip service-provider. Initially I used a normal phone to make sure that i had a working setup, before trying to get the rotary phone to work. The normal phone were quite easy to setup and it “just works”.

For the rotary phone there is still some difficulties. But i have managed to get something to work, and I am working on the rest.

First of all i had to change to paps power output to maximum, else it wouldn’t ring the bells. I am still in the process of fiddling with settings for impedance and/or input gain. The problem is that the microphone volume is very low, and if I just turn the input gain up it turns up for the noise as well. It isn’t a problem for me as i have a crisp and clear sound, but apparently it’s a pain to whomever I am talking to. So something has to be done.

Then there is the dialing. A rotary phone dials by using pulse dialing, which in essence means that it disconnects/hangs up, in short intervals as a method of counting the numbers. But any modern voip-adaptor (at least a cheap one) can only function using DTMF. That’s were sending different tones means different numbers. Which basically means that it is enough to send the correct sequence of tones into the microphone in order to dial a number.

I had seen some applets for dialling they did work with the modern telephone, but the rotary phone with its microphone troubles had to get something more. I had success using “DTMF-dial” (from the ubuntu repositories), because it was possible to tweak the duration of tones and pauses.

Next step, as holding the phone to the PC-speaker every time i need to make a phone call, is not an option, were to make a midlet, that’s a mobile applet. A java program for the mobile. Using the mobile as a dialer may seem awkward, but it already holds all my contacts and the voip is a great deal cheaper. I have a midlet at the moment that is at the proof of concept stage. It can dial and I am able to take a number from my address-book dial it using DTMF. It still needs a bit of polishing, but its mostly cosmetic, maybe a list of recent calls would be a nice feature to implement.

soon to come:

• Nice pictures of the phone, and the electronics.
• Some software for DTMF dialing on the mobile and a bit about devolping a simple mobile application in netbeans.

Thay have a nice collection of different, and perhaps a little geeky toys. But the best part is there are several articles and videos documenting the toys, not only for the stuff they have in there shop but also from Tim’s huge collection of toys. I don’t know who Tim is, but he does a very nice and distinctly British job of presenting those nifty gadgets, and i am left thinking that it would be a great joy to be his grandchild.

And as can bee seen be the heading I have read Jacob Nielsen: “Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings”

I bought myself a new mobile, a Nokia 6300, it’s got all the bells and whistles. Hmm well at least those I could afford. I choose this mobile because it has : Java, mp3 -player, bluetooth and memorycard.

• specifications from nokia
• review from mobilereview.com

I must admit that i might be a bit of a nerd, so I just had to code something for it. And after “hello world” I found a small and some would say useless application to code.

FreeVibes

I must say I got inspired by vibelet and the article in wired ( Hold the Phone, It’s a Sex Toy ). As the title suggest, its well vibrating. I think that vibelet – though i haven’t seen their program, must be making quite an profit. Because getting a java-enabled phone to vibrate constantly, is quite easy.

So now its Time for FreeVibes, a free software version.

That’s the fancy splash screen	And when its in vibrating mode, this little duck is there. And now why a rubberduck ? ( answers )

If you want to try it out, here are the jar and jad files. Just put them on your java-enabled mobile phone. I have just tested it on my telephone, It should work on any new mobile (with java) :

Jad File
Jar File
Source code

Installation

1. Download the jar and jad file and place them on the phone in the same directory.
2. Run the applet
3. Have fun

Technicalities

Getting things to work with ubuntu feisty fawn.

I use SUNs java 6 and the wireless toolkit for the J2me.

Nokia has a nice area with information about coding for their phones (forum.nokia.com). But i didn’t have any success using their eclipse plugin and carbide.j seems to be a windows application. But eclipseME worked like a charm.

When setting up a device for EclipseME i had to make sure that it was MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1. It wasn’t the default and the Nokia 6300 can’t handle MIDP 2.1.

They code and design is inspired by Nokias tutorial on making MIDP 2.0 games.

The images I used are from the openclipart collection, hacked together with GiMP and Inkscape, and I use obexftp to transfer the files to the phone.

‘Pale blue dot’ on YouTubeFound this on youtube. Its great. It certainly puts things in perspective. Eventhough its the “harsh reality” its uplifting and beautiful. It spoken words from Carl Sagan, there seems to be several different versions with different images. I found this one to be particular good.

As a sidenote posting youtube clips on wordpress is a PITA, it seems that the editor is a bit to active.

Now theres no reason not to belive, they are out there!

Abductionlamp

I had been messing around with creating a platform for experimenting with extended rules for “life-like-automata”, and although the code seemed to work just allright. I was horrible slow at rendering, and I decided that the next step were to optimize the rendering / drawing.

Well one thing lead to another – and i decided to make a small applet, were the drawing routines were optimized. Using a bufferedImage and setting the pixels one by one. And then I found this cool algorithm, for 2d water (Link).

It simulates water rippling, by using to buffer arrays with heights, and using them to calculate the speed and hence the distribution of ripples. There are a nice description of the algorithm at the link mentioned above. The short story is that you get an heightmap, and are able to calculate the next iteration of heights using the last height map, then you switch the buffers and repeat the procedure. And in between you render the heightmap. Unfortunately I’m not familiar with any algorithms for shading an refraction, so i just draw the heights using a simple gradient.

But the effect is really nice anyway. I didn’t include the applet in this page, as it cpu-intensive. It iterates through every pixel at each iteration, and just keeps on iterating. the nice thing about it, is that the speed doesn’t depend on how many ripples / activity there is.

small
normal
large

ripple source code

photo by: Andre Forget

From inhabitat :

If you’ve gotta run the wheel, you might as well do it in bare feet. Many of us are so busy being good little hamsters that we never have face time with green space. A group of students from Dalhousie School of Architecture — David Gallaugher, Kevin James, and Jacob Jebailey — decided to remedy this problem with a street-ready grass-lined wheel….

(05-24) 14:40 PDT Kansas City, Mo. (AP) –

The little boy spotted the pretty pile of colored sand on the floor of the vast hall and couldn’t resist. Slipping under a protective rope, he danced all over the sand, ruining the carefully crafted picture.

Never mind that it was the creation of eight Tibetan monks who had spent two days cross-legged on the floor of Union Station, meticulously pouring the sand into an intricate design as an expression of their Buddhist faith.

Can’t help thinking that this must be very bad for the boys karma. The monks took it pretty well and I suspect that this is a great way to learn some of the core values of Buddhism, everything is suffering and attachment is the road to suffering. So if they did have any attachment to their creation the would have suffered.

link via boing boing