While it was up and barely responsive I noticed that there was a message about an operation being performed on the SD card, so I pulled it out and restarted. Droid worked just fine without the SD Card — no lag, all the apps were there, no crashes/reboots, etc.

Put the SD card back in, original problems happen. Phone is completely unusable.

Ok, I figure I’ll just back up the SD card and format it then use it again in my Droid. I removed the SD card and mounted it on my Mac in a USB adapter, drug the folder over, then watched as the number of files that needed to be copied slowly crept into the 10s of thousands.

Which, as you might guess, ain’t right.

After a little exploring, I discovered that /DCIM/Camera contained a directory /DCIM/Camera/Camera which had the exact same files as /DCIM/Camera. Including a subdirectory named “Camera”. Turtles all the way down means the SD card check probably was consuming all ram/cpu on the Droid and causing the crash/reboot.

Luckily the fix is simple — copy everything *except* the Camera sub directory to another file system, delete /DCIM, and re-use the card.

That being said, it’s 2010, why do we still have trivial inode errors in *nix filesystems? (I’m looking at you, Rubin. Seriously, wtf?)

So what sort of things to people do at hacker spaces? Well, whatever the members think would be a fun project. Say, for example, building and launching a high-altitude balloon or learning about fizzy drinks.

If you’re in Pittsburgh, and you’re looking for a studio space to hack on technology or take classes, haul yourself out to the next Hack PGH open house night or take a class, you won’t be sorry.

However, this is kinda cool, my Makerbeam kit finally showed up:

..and I’m already using it to make temporary brackets for stepper motors:

1. Before you start cycling here, and especially before you move here or look for a place to live, go over to BikePGH and read up on the city. Get their fine cycling map and your riding will go much more smoothly.
2. There’s a popular belief that Pittsburgh drivers are some of the most polite in the US. While this may be true, they also get into dangerous, passive-aggressive games of “no, you first” that block traffic and cause other people to do stupid things.
3. The Pittsburgh Left is as real and as dangerous as it seems.
4. If you see a motorist doing something rude or dangerous don’t assume they’re a jerk. It’s quite likely that they’re probably just incompetent, elderly, or both. The state driver’s exam is a joke — you just drive a bit in a parking lot — and there’s also no mandatory retest as you get older.
5. If elderly, incompetent drivers annoy you then avoid Squirrel Hill.
6. There’s a reason there are sharrows on one side and a bike lane on the other. Trust me.
7. If you’re in Oakland and almost collide with an oblivious college student, thank Pitt.
8. If you’re in the South Side and almost collide with an oblivious hipster, thank PBR.
9. Negley is not nearly as fun as you think it will be.
10. Yes, you broke 35mph without trying. We all have.
11. Cycling here has improved several orders of magnitude in the four years I’ve lived here. There are bike lanes, sharrows, a pro-bike org, and city support for cycling.
12. Tuesday night is Bacon Night at the Harris Grill.

It took me less than one minute to come up with some great ways to “monetize” Google Street View data by selling it to:

• local government code-enforcement units so they can issue fines for building without a permit
• repair/building contractors buying images of “all houses with old gutters” or “all houses with peeling paint”
• law enforcement agencies looking for pot growers (cf. electric bills triggering search warrants)
• security consultants / network security software firms selling fixes for things like unpatched software or open networks

You now have one minute to come up with other ideas, GO!

Since I’m interested in bigger things, so I’m looking into building bigger printers. (Anyone who wants to buy me a Stratasys can ask and I’ll give them the delivery address…) One option is to build a Mendel which has an envelope of 200mmx200mm. Another is to figure out how to put a print head on something really big, like a knee mill or a large CNC plasma table.

Here’s how I set it up: using Kapton tape, I attached a loop of nichrome wire to the underside of the platform. I also put the thermistor in an “average” spot away from the wire:

This connects using the A6 pin on the extruder, same as other boards, all of which are basically doing what Eberhard documented on his blog. For software, you’ll need to download and build the latest ReplicatorG and firmware from the makerbot github.

Technorati Tags: makerbot

Facebook has added a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-Facebook websites BY DEFAULT. You have to manually go and turn it off you don’t want Facebook to share your data with non-Facebook websites.

On top of that, Facebook will still let your friends share information about you on other sites unless you block the individual applications.

You can turn off the data sharing by Facebook within Facebook settings: Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites -> Instant Personalization -> Edit Setting

To block the Applications, you have to go to each and every Application within Facebook and individually block it:

Pandora: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=139475280761

Yelp: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=97534753161

docs.com: I haven’t found the app yet.

Admittedly, it would be very hard to get someone on the phone at Apple who would know what a device such as this one is. Apple, like most large companies, deliberately makes it difficult for consumers to reach (non-retail) employees. There is no lost prototype hotline.

True, there’s no “lost prototype hotline”, but it’s pretty easy to get ahold of Apple. I bet any one of these would have worked just fine:

• Walk into any Apple store and ask the manager how to get a lost prototype back to Cupertino.
• Post to twitter: “Hey Apple, I think I found a lost prototype. How do I return it to Cupertino?”
• Go to Apple’s website, click on the “Contact Us” link, scroll down to “Apple Public Relations”, dial the toll-free number and explain what you found.

It’s not rocket surgery, people.

Now stop for a second and think about this. Twitter won’t reveal my phone number, but they will let people search for me by my phone number.

So if I just search for all permutations of phone numbers for a given NPA (area code) and NXX (the first three digits of a phone number in the USA), I can make a list of twitter users in a given geographic area or at a specific business. NPA is often a geographically large area, but a given NPA/NXX pair can be very small — as small as a single company or small town.

Obviously you’d get caught trying to search for a bajillion contacts at once, but if I opened ~50 twitter accounts and added 10-20 numbers to each account per day, I could do 500-1000 lookups and cover a given NPA/NXX pair within a week or so.