The Journal of Thomas H. Chapin IV

What would you do if you had a billion dollars? I don’t know about you… but I would definitely develop a method to draw a smiley face on the moon. Call me crazy, but can you think of a better legacy to leave behind? Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Think about it. Future generations of mankind would look up in the sky at night, only to see a big smiling face. Wars would cease to exist! How could people even think about fighting with a giant smile in the sky?

Or maybe we could sell the moon one pixel at a time? Like the milliondollarhomepage.com site did?

Maybe we could use a high powered laser that would burn the dust and turn it black or something… *scratched his head*. What do you think?

Seriously though, what would you do if you walked outside one night and noticed a smiley face on the moon?

Wow. Last night was crazy. I posted my automatic windows login article up on digg.com, which is a news source with a cult-like following. Somehow my post made it to their front page and it was like a dam broke. Our server was getting nailed with like 20,000 visitors all at once. Needless to say, the server couldn’t handle the load and repeatedly overloaded and rebooted itself.

The article also somehow made it onto the del.ic.ous “popular” bookmarks.

Pretty funny.

Check out the screen shots:
Screenshot of Digg.com
Screenshot of Del.icio.us
Screenshot of Lifehack.org
Screenshot of Gear Live

What would you think if the government was recording live satellite video imagery of the entire USA, up close? What if a crime was committed but wasn’t discovered till later on? The government could literally rewind time and track the entire path of the escape vehicle, leading to the arrest of the perpetrator.

According to the wikipedia, the USA is approximately 3,718,711 square miles in size.

Using these numbers, if you were to take the USA and squeeze it into a flat, square shape,it would be approximately 1,928 miles in width and 1,928 miles in length.

If you were to photograph the USA at 431,309,824 pixels per square mile (approximately three times higher resolution than current internet satellite/aerial imagery gives you), then you would use 1,603,257,976,815,616 pixels to photograph the entire USA.

If we saved this image off without compression as a 2 bytes per pixel image, then the file size would be 3,206,515,953,631,232 bytes, or around 2,917 terabytes in size.

With a typical compression algorithm, you could theoretically get it down to around a third of that size… probably around 960 terabytes.

Now, let’s theoretically record this area at 30 frames per second. At first glance, you’re probably thinking, “whoa! 28,878 terabytes a second???”. But you have to remember that this would be video you’re dealing with. A good video compression algorithm would only record the differences between frames. And trust me, a TON of those pixels aren’t going to change noticeably in that small space of time. Pretty much all you’d be recording would be people and vehicles moving across the face of an otherwise static and unchanging image. So let’s just say that less than 1% of that square mileage would appear to have moved at all.

Which means you’d probably have less than 5 terabytes worth of image differences per frame. At this estimate, 1 second of video would only take up around 150 terabytes (not 28,878). This means that we could record the USA at 540,000 terabytes per hour. Assuming that we took a complete snapshot of the entire USA every single hour (960 terabytes), then 24 hours of the USA would take up around 12,678 petabytes.

This may sound like a completely absurd size, but it’s not so mind-numbing when you think about the new holographic data storage technologies that are being developed right now. Terabytes will be cheaper than megabytes are now.

What if they only recorded major cities for now, and they were to do it at only, say, 5 frames per second? Or even just one frame per second for starters? They could still track vehicles and do basic surveillance.

In the mean time, check out this massive 18,000×18,000 pixel image that was taken by the Hubble telescope!

If you don’t use any Windows XP login security, then you can skip this article. Otherwise, if you are like many Windows XP users who have to enter a password every time their computer sluggishly boots up, then read this!

Ok. Here’s the scenario:

You have to wait 2 minutes while your computer turns on. You have to sit in front of your computer during this whole time because once it finally gets to the login screen, you have to type in the password. The computer then crunches numbers for another 2 minutes while it loads a wide variety of programs (MSN messenger, your Norton Antivirus, your Microsoft Office shortcut bar, etc…). Finally, after like 5 minutes, you have access to your desktop.

How would you like your computer to load all those programs *before* you ever have to enter your password? You could press the button to power up your system and go get a cup of coffee. Five minutes later, you come to your desk and type in your password. BAM! Instantly dropped to the desktop! Your programs are already running and all systems are a go!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download Microsoft’s free TweakUI tool and install it.
2. Click your Start button, go to your Programs menu, and select Tweak UI from the “Powertoys for Windows XP” folder.
3. In the TweakUI window, double-click the “Logon” item in the left-hand column to expand it.
4. Click on the “Autologon” item underneath the “Logon” section.
5. Check the box that says “Log on automatically at system startup”
6. Click the “Set Password” button and enter in your windows login password
7. Click OK and close Tweak UI.
8. Download this .reg file and run it. When it asks you if you want to merge it with your registry, choose “Yes”.

   NOTE: If you feel queasy about merging a reg file with your registry, you can also add it by hand. Go to Start > Run and type in “regedit” and press OK. Browse to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run] and create a new String Value. Name it “Lock Computer on Startup“, and set the value to “rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation“

Presto! You’re done!

Now, when you boot up your computer, it will automatically log you in to your desktop and start up your programs. However, it will still secure your system, requiring you to enter your password to access it.

I just recently stumbled upon a nifty way to make my windows xp machine run a little bit faster. Check it out.

If you search your entire computer for temp files, you may be surprised to find hundreds of megabytes worth of data that has been sitting around since God knows when. Windows is supposed to automatically delete these, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Now… supposedly when you boot up your computer or internet explorer, Windows will scan through your temp files (looking for recently viewed web pages, etc). So if everything is cluttered up, things might run a little bit slow.

So the goal here is to delete all temp files before we shut down the system at the end of the day. This way, everything is fresh and clean, come next morning!

1. Open up a copy of notepad and paste in the following chunk of text:
   

   ---

   @echo off
   taskkill /F /FI “USERNAME ne SYSTEM” /FI “USERNAME ne LOCAL SERVICE” /FI “USERNAME ne NETWORK SERVICE” /FI “IMAGENAME ne explorer.exe” /FI “IMAGENAME ne cmd.exe” /FI “IMAGENAME ne taskkill.exe”
   RD /S /q “%HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\History”
   RD /S /q “%HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\Temp”
   RD /S /q “C:\temp”
   RD /S /q “C:\Windows\Temp”
   SHUTDOWN -s -t 01
   

   ---

2. Save the file off as “C:\shutdown.bat” (make sure you set the file type as “All Files”, *not* “Text Documents”)
3. Browse to your C:\ drive using windows explorer and right-click on the shutdown.bat file. Select the “Create Shortcut” option in the context menu.
4. Rename the shortcut file to “Clear Temp Files & Shut Down”.
5. Right-click on the shortcut and select “Properties” from the context menu.
6. When the properties window pops up, make sure you are on the “Shortcut” tab and click on the “Change Icon” button. If it gives you some kind of error about the file not containing any icons, ignore it and just click OK.
7. Where it says “Look for icons in this file:”, make sure that it says, “%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll”.
8. Select the red, square icon with the circle and a vertical line in the middle. This is the shutdown icon that you see when you click on your start button and select “Turn off your computer”.
9. Ok your way out of there back to your explorer window.
10. Drag the shortcut to your desktop.

Now, whenever you want to shut down your computer, just double-click the icon on your desktop!
Windows will clear your temp files after killing all your programs (it can’t clear temp files if programs are currently using them), and then it will proceed to shut down.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are using Windows XP Home, you may not have the taskkill.exe file, as it only comes with Windows XP Pro by default. Click here to download it and extract it to your C:\Windows\System32\ folder.

One of the things that I always aspired to be when I “grew up” was an inventor. As a child, I would take apart toasters, pencil sharpeners, lawn mowers, and generally anything I could get my hands on that was broken and had some sort of intruiging moving parts. However, while I have come up with a number of concepts of my own over the years, until now there was never any actual follow-through.

Scenario: I have a thermostat in my apartment that I want to control with a schedule. I want to be able to cool down the house at night, but warm it up in the morning so I don’t have such a hard time waking up and getting out of bed. In previous apartment complexes, I was able to use a standard 7 day, programmable thermostat (available from Walmart, Lowes, or your favorite home supply store for around $30-$75). However, the heating system in my apartment complex here in Phoenix uses an old system and is incompatible with virtually all the programmable thermostats out there. I was only able to find one programmable thermostat out there that would work with my apartment’s heating/cooling system, but it didn’t have some of the capabilities that I was looking for. So I am basically limited to manually moving the needle on my thermostat by hand if I want to change the temperature. No programmable scheduling allowed!

Solution: Using a small servo, a mini SSC II controller, and a serial interface to connect it all to my computer, I built a remote controlled thermostat module. The servo is mounted on the wall above the thermostat and a string is connected to the needle. Once I figured out how to send commands to the servo using my computer’s com port, I interfaced it with PHP page on my local web server. I then built a flash-based interface with a draggable temperature slider that would send the proper positioning values to the PHP page. The end result… a thermostat in my living room that can be physically controlled from anywhere in the world over the internet.

Click here to watch a demonstration video clip!
(12 megs in size. Windows Media Player required.)

I hope all of you have a wonderful new year.

Seems like just yesterday was 1990. I was six years old, and I remember thinking, “wow. I can’t believe we’re in the 90’s now”.

“Just because you have the right to free speech, does not mean you have the right to yodel”

In Dallas from the 20th through the 28th.

Fun stuff!

Late for work, I walked out of my apartment this morning only to behold a spectacle before my eyes. My rear passenger side car window was broken and glass was all over the place.

From what I can piece together, apparently someone tried to break into my car last night to see what kind of goodies I had inside. However, when they reached around to unlock the door from the inside, the car alarm must have gone off and scared them away.

I still have to call the cops and report it. Then I’ll have to deal with all the pain of getting the actual window replaced. ugh.

So last night my alarm clock was set for 6:00 AM, and, determined to wake up the next morning, I went to bed at 11:00 PM.

I woke up at 7:00.

On the plus side, I finally ate breakfast for the first time in like a month.

Oatmeal with honey and peach slices. 3 *whole* grams of fiber! Wow!

Wow. So I worked at the office for basically 12 hours today.

Our server’s hard drive crashed, losing all it’s data (months worth of work). One minute it was working fine, and the next, it was completely empty. No formatting or anything. It just all disappeared without explanation.

“Well, no problem. We made a backup a couple days ago!”

So we loaded the backup drive. Lo and behold, half the files were missing on it as well!

In desperation, I pulled up google and looked up disk recovery software. 3 hours later, in the midst of the plethora of useless junk out there I found a gem called “File Scavenger“. Within minutes, it somehow scanned the entire *empty*, *un-recoverable* hard drive and managed to extract every single file that had existed on it before. To top it off, it even found a bunch of long-forgotten, deleted files as well!

Needless to say, we learned our lesson. We immediately proceeded to the nearest Fry’s Electronics. $500 later, we had all the equipment needed to set up a redundant RAID data backup system and were back in business. Now we have two different 250 gig Serial ATA drives set up in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. If one of the drives fails (or even simply becomes unplugged from it’s cable), all the data will still be accessible by the network users. Awesome.

To top it off, we also have a third 250 gig drive. But this one is external. So we can make a mirror image of our data and take it home every night just in case our office burns down or the server gets stolen or something.

The way it should be done.

Here at my new apartment complex, all utilities are included in the rent. Water, trash, and yes… even electricity. And for this, they charge a premium.

However, it seems that the management has figured out a way to pull a fast one on it’s residents. You see, they control the gi-normous heat pump system and air conditioning system in the center of the complex. And when they deem that the temperature outside is cold enough, they’ll cut off the air conditioning. For everyone.

Now, this is all fine and dandy assuming you like sleeping in a 75-80 degree room. But I don’t. I like sleeping in a 68-70 degree room. Call me spoiled. But I know how I sleep best, and I’m paying for a climate controlled environment, dang it.

Luckily, I brought my window A/C unit along with me from Texas.

Ok, so my business partner, Chris Tingom, shot some photos of our office here in Phoenix. Check it out!

Ok. So I finally got all these boxes unpacked and items put in the right places. And today, I finished setting up my home theater system and hung all my pictures. Try hanging speakers on a concrete wall. Very tricky!

Let’s just say it involved a masonry drill bit…

I’ll try and take some pictures of everything this evening or tomorrow and I’ll post them up on here.

On a side note, I’m starting to get some of the area explored around my apartment. It’s amazing! There’s everything from fast food joints and a movie theater, to wal-mart and home depot less than a mile away. Directly across the road from my apartment building, there’s a mexican restaurant where the George Bush once ate at.

Last night I drove to the big movie theater about 5 miles away and watched Chicken Little in full 3D with the glasses and everything. It was really neat because it wasn’t the standard red/blue, cheapo, headache-inducing 3D movie. They used clear glasses. Must have something to do with polarized light filters or something. But yeah. Anyways.

It’s 1:15 AM, and as I write this, I am sitting on my couch in my new apartment. In the small space of time consisting of Sunday and Monday, I have managed to pack up all my belongings and travel almost 1,200 miles. To top it off, I also have unloaded the entire uhaul truck (with help from a few friends) into my apartment on the fourth floor. Yes. We even carried my gi-normous couch up four flights of stairs.

My back is not too happy right now.

I was hoping that I would be able to connect to the internet wirelessly here, bumming off of some neighbors or what not. Unfortunately, the apartment walls and ceilings consist entirely of concrete, a foot thick, crammed full with who knows how much re-bar. Suffice to say, just about any feasible signals are blocked. Yes, including my cell phone. If I stand in the middle of my apartment complex my phone has zero bars. Stupid thing.

Anyways, so I went out on my balcony with my trusty Linksys WRT54G wireless router (with upgraded firmware), and attempted to scour the landscape for a usable signal outside of the complex. I found a couple of weak signals, including one from a t-mobile hot spot at a starbucks a number of blocks away.

The signal was very faint, so I increased the power on the router to 200mw. Still not quite usable.

Using duct tape and a piece of plastic from a modular shelving unit, I proceeded to create a makeshift platform that stretched out past my balcony and away from the concrete walls by a foot or so. I then proceeded to place the wireless router out on the platform, now hanging precariously four stories above the ground.

Success!

So. Yeah. I’m surfing the web and writing in my journal using a starbucks far away. I’m not sure why, but this concept makes me humourously pleased. Too bad I have to hide my duct taped contraption from the sight of the road, come day time. Somehow I don’t think the apartment manager would find it to be parallel with the current decorum.

More will be written later… Probably after a couple of days once I start getting settled in.

I need sleep badly.

Uh oh. This is really bad.

Check it out. The department of homeland security has made the United States driver’s license database public. Now you can literally see a picture and find the address of almost anyone, simply by their name.

Stupid terrorists.

Look yourself up if you don’t believe me.
http://www.license.shorturl.com/

Well, it seems as if I will be moving to Phoenix, Arizona.

Chris Tingom (tornadodesign.com) and I have decided to partner up and do the web design thing.

While I was down there visiting, I went ahead and found an apartment and submitted an application. The apartment complex is less than a mile from the Tornado Design office, which is nice.

I will be getting a uhaul truck and moving out there at the end of this month. My buddy Edward is planning on going with me and will be driving my car behind me (although we’ll probably swap vehicles every time we get gas, just for variety’s sake). A 1,100 mile drive is nothing to sneeze at.

Who knows? We might even go check out the grand canyon while we’re at it.

So I’m flying to Arizona tomorrow morning.

Gonna go see my cousins Matthew and Rachel, as well as my long time friend, Chris Tingom.

Apparently American Airlines has stock in some sort of time travel company and it’s finally paying off. I’m leaving Dallas at 10:00 AM, and arriving in Phoenix at 10:30 AM. Nice.

I knew those engineers would finally figure it out.

So I ordered a laptop from ebay about a week ago, despite the fact that the seller said it had “a small scuff on the cover”. When it arrived yesterday, I ripped the box open and dug through the packaging materials in anticipation. I could finally surf the web from my couch!

Eagerly, I plugged in the laptop, flipped open the screen and tapped the power button. As the 8 pound beast purred to life, I pondered all the nifty things I would now be enabled to do. Surfing the web from a coffee shop? Yup. Surfing the web from my car? Yup. Surfing the web at the local gas station? Yup. (Seriously! They have wi-fi!).

A minute passed…

The screen was still blank.

Oh no.

“Well, maybe something’s just loose!”, I thought.

Feverishly, I unplugged the laptop, pulled the battery, hard drive, and memory stick. After that, I held down the power button for a full minute to drain any residual power from the remaining components.
Then, I put everything back exactly the way it was.

“Ok, maybe it’ll work now.”

Nope. Still not working.

“ACK!”

Two hours later, I get off the phone with HP’s tech support.

During the course of the call I discovered:
1. The person who owned the laptop before me purchased it only a few months ago in July.
2. My laptop was technically still under warranty and still has 200 days left!
3. I could purchase an extended two year warranty for *only* $249!
4. This extended warranty would cover everything, including accidental damage such as coffee spills or random drops from the roofs of 30 story buildings.
5. HP would have FedEx pick up my laptop on the morrow between 1 and 5 in the afternoon.
6. They would only take the laptop if I bubble wrapped it and boxed it up nicely first.
7. They will ship my laptop all the way to California, fix it, and ship it back to me by Wednesday of next week. All for free.
8. HP hires only Indian/Korean people.

So I purchased the warranty, raising my entire laptop cost to around $1,050. Considering that it’s a laptop with a 64 bit Athlon 3200 processor, 512 megs of RAM, 60 gig hard drive, DVD drive, CD burner, 15.4″ widescreen… I guess I came out ok. Sure, I could have bought it brand spanking new directly from HP for about that price. But I would have only ended up with a 1 year factory warranty that way. This way, I am totally protected against all damages.

Who knows? I might accidentally drop it one month before the extended warranty runs out, and HP would have no choice but to replace it with a comparable (read: better) model because two years from now, they probably won’t have any of these puppies still in stock.

So yeah.