Ricci Adams' Journal

Awaiting the Ricci-locator 5000

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:45:59 -0700

For the past few months, my car stereo has been acting up. When the inside LCD lost a line of pixels, I shrugged. When it lost all lines of pixels, I frowned. When all buttons stopped working, I soldered, sweated, and then finally shopped.

I almost bought a $250 Pioneer iPod-compatible receiver at Fry's. Fortunately, when I went to ask for the unit, the salesperson told me that the store closed 20 minutes prior and that I should vacate the premise. I say "fortunately" because, that night, I discovered the JVC KD-NX5000.

At first, the $999 price tag seemed a bit steep. However, I was swooned by the GPS capability and overall great reviews of the product. Since I was considering a separate car GPS unit anyway (around $500), the price seemed fair.

Curiously, in a rare anti-Ricci moment, I decided to shop around to find the best price. A few hours later, I stumbled upon this bargain at Overstock.com. Stacked with an 8% off coupon, I ended up getting the unit for $690.

Horror struck a few hours later: upon reading the online installation manual, I realized that I would need to locate the Vehicle Speed Sensor wire in my car and attach it to the GPS receiver in order to obtain accurate navigational assistance. For car audio gurus, this is probably an easy task. For me, this is probably a good way to electrocute myself.

Nevertheless, I decided to instigate the Great VSS Search. Armed with my ALLDATA®diy.com account and my swiss army knife, I set off into the bleak wilderness that is the apartment parking garage. As usual, getting the dashboard off was the tricky part (As usual, I was a complete wimp and didn't apply enough force). Once that was complete, I moseyed on over to the Driver Information Display region. On a higher-end Pontiac 2000 Grand Prix, this area would host a Trip Computer, which means it would need a VSS wire. My hope was that the cable would be there even though the unit was not. Alas, a stripped screw stymied my advance. Defeated, I decided to move on.

The next stop was the Body Control Module, which is located under the driver's side fuse box. Due to the cramped nature of the area, I decided to only use the BCM's VSS wire as a last resort.

Finally, I decided to check the wiring behind the dashboard information panel (the speedometer needs a VSS wire in order to calculate speed). Success! Not only was the VSS wire easy to locate, there is plenty of room to make the splice and hook in my own cable for the GPS unit.

Unfortunately, the sun was starting to plummet over the western mountains. I decided to call it a night and splice the wire tomorrow.

Some pictures of the wire:

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Worms!

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:25:46 -0800

Worms Leaderboard

That's right, #1 in the world. (Granted, the game just came out an hour ago. By this time tomorrow, I will have fallen to rank #314,159)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Jamba Hacking

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:09:49 -0700

Last month, I discovered the wonders of Odwalla, a juice company which minimizes processed sugar in their juices.

Since then, I have had a hard time enjoying my weekend traditional: Jamba Juice's Matcha Green Tea Blast. I love the taste, but there is a lot of sugar due to the sorbet and yogurt.

In an effort to reduce my processed sugar intake, I began to try Jamba's All Fruit Smoothies:

Strawberry Whirl

Too much banana! Bad Banana! Evil Banana!

Mega Mango

I like the flavor, but a have a unexplainable issue with mangoes. They taste great, but thinking about them makes me cring. Perhaps it's something to do with the texture of a raw mango? Maybe a large mango abused me as a child?

Grape Escape

Mmmmmmmmm! (This surprised me, as it has peaches, which I normally do not like.)

Raspberry Rainbow

Another great flavor. Not too much banana, and tends to taste like whatever fruit you are thinking about at the moment.

What I really wanted; however, was an all-fruit smoothie made with açaí juice. Since none existed, I decided to hack my own:

Açaí Arsekicker

1) Start with a Grape Escape

2) No grape juice, sub açaí juice

3) No peaches, sub raspberries

4) Add a few banana slices for sweetness

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Tablet Love

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 19:25:53 -0700

One of my favorite pastimes involves reading books in beds. Unfortunately, since I prefer to lay on my stomach, reading on a laptop is extremely bad for my neck. I usually have to curve my head up in order to see the screen. While this is possible, my body usually aches the next day.

In college, tired of buying heavy books only to finish them a week later, I resorted to online tutorials and a laser printer. Although it worked well for bed-reading, the solution was messy due to hundreds of printed pages per week. Thus began my quest for a digital alternative.

During my senior year, I purchased a Sony Clie handheld with a built-in PDF reader. I read a few e-books on it, but the low-resolution fonts hurt my eyes. I decided that, for a good experience, I would need at least 640x480 resolution. I returned the device a few days later.

A year later, I decided to convert an Apple iBook into tablet form. At the time, the screens in iBooks were 1024x768 resolution - plenty of real estate to display a PDF book. After several weeks of rewiring and construction, I ended up with a prototype. Unfortuately, without a touch screen, input suffered and I decided to return to normal books. I did learned one important lesson from this experiment, however - pixel density matters! Even though I could fit a book nicely in the 1024x768 resolution, the pixels were physically too big and the made the text hard to read.

A few days ago, I stumbled across the website for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It uses a build-in LCD at 800x480 resolution and over 200 dpi and can connect wireless (hence, I can read Safari Books Online on it).

I received the device yesterday and read my first book last night. Wow! I am impressed! Although the operating system and web browser are a bit slow, the screen is beautiful and renders my online books crisply. Overall, a nice device.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

The Core Page

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 18:39:51 -0700

As you may have noticed, ricciadams.com has been replaced by "Ricci Adams' Core Page."

"What exactly is a core page?", you might ask. It's basically a list of all blogs, social networking sites, projects, and other web pages which identify my presence on the Internet. It's similar to the "homepages" of yester-century; except, instead of displaying outward links to interests of the author, it focuses on inward links to the author's creations and other identities.

My core page's current features:

1) XFN values - Part of the XML Friends Network microformat is the "me" value, which basically says "This link points to a page which is part of my online identity." Hence, all of my links specify this value in their rel attribute. An XFN compatible web browser or search engine visiting ricciadams.com could determine that my MySpace page, Vox journal, and other links were also "me" (and display results as such to the viewer).

2) Weighted lists - Also known as tag clouds. I use the visual weight of each link to represent my activity for each link. Since I check MySpace and this journal almost every day, they are the boldest. Sites which I don't frequent often (such as 43 Places and orkut) are in smaller print.

3) Beta badge - It's a known fact that you can't be cool and Web 2.0 without the word "Beta" somewhere on your page. Thanks to Jens for the idea ;)

Potential features:

1) Feed aggregation - Some of the sites on my core page host Atom or RSS in addition to standard web pages. It would be neat to have the feed for ricciadams.com be a collection of all of these sub-feeds. Since Safari RSS supports the feeds: protocol, this should be simple to implement. Unfortuately, some of my favorite social networking sites still do not provide feeds.

2) More dynamic content - I would love to have my Tetris DS scores or current geographical location appear on the core page.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Long Live the Blog!

nobody@vox.com(Ricci) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 23:08:55 -0700

(Continued from The Blog is Dead)

So, why did I decide to move my journal to Vox? Three reasons:

1) Maintenence

Even though MovableType is a decent software package, it still requires initial setup and maintenence. I felt that I didn't use my old journal enough to justify keeping the system on my server. With Vox, I can sit back, post new entries, and live in complete oblivion to administrative tasks.

2) Identity

My old journal was only a fraction of my web identity; yet, it was the main attraction of my personal site. Links to frequently visited communities such as MySpace or LinkedIn were dwarfed by aging article bodies. Now, my Vox journal is simply another network and treated the same as the others.

3) Theme

My old journal was written during transitional period of my life - it revolved around the deep pondering which follows any major transition. I found that I was hesitant to make posts which scored less than 53.6 Deep Ponderment Points.

So, you ask, what will happen to ricciadams.com? I will discuss that in my next post...

Read and post comments | Send to a friend