President Barack Obama at Windham, NH (18 Aug 2012)

Yesterday I took these photos of the President Obama event in Windham, NH yesterday. They are all available under a the attribution Creative Commons license.

Full set of President Barack Obama at Windham, NH (18 Aug 2012)

Lunchtime hack

It started with my tweet this morning:


"I need a webcam on the downstairs coffee machine #firstworldproblems
https://twitter.com/MarcNo/status/227409428863926272

So I grabbed Son #1's old busted original droid, installed IP Webcam from the android market and put it in front of the coffee machine in the kitchen.



And then could see the coffee level. (hint: time to make more coffee)



With 6 kids in the house, there is no way that the hack will stay there more than a few minutes.

So I dug up a long extension cord and relocated the setup to the backyard and turned it into a "chicken cam".



Perfect.

HP Tablet running Android ICS

I picked up a 32GB HP Tablet from the firesale and have been running the stock WebOS.

In the last few weeks some of my kids have complained that the new gmail interface is no longer fully supported by the WebOS browser. Basically it won’t load unless you switch to the basic HTML version. And then you lose the gtalk chat capability – apparently the killer app for teen girls.

This morning I had one of the college kids install Android Ice Cream Sandwich (v4.0) on it. It went smoothly and works well with the exception of the camera and microphone. At the initial bootup, I connected the tablet to my google account and apps started to automatically download to it.

What is very nice is the install doesn’t overwrite the existing WebOS and can boot back to that if wanted.

The starting point for installing CyanogenMod here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-android-ice-cream-sandwich-hp-touchpad-minutes/

Raspberry Pi Show-n-Tell @ManchLUG

Tonight I brought my Raspberry Pi to the Manchester (NH) Linux Users Group for a show & tell session.

Here are my slides:

• OpenOffice format



• PDF Format

For the record, some of us were drinking Lindemans Framboise Lambic Beer in honor of the topic.

ThinkUp on Raspberry Pi

Tonight I installed the cool social networking monitoring tool ThikUp on my new Raspberry Pi with the lastest debian code drop.

1. Downloaded the new (11-Jun-2012) test Debian/Wheezy image as announced on http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=8071
   
   
2. Since I'm using a new 4GB MMC card and the image was built for 2GB, ran "sudo rasp_config" to resize the disk and bias memory toward SoC instead of the video card. Rebooted. Realized it didn't reboot, pull power and boot
   



3. 
   
   3) I run a a local apt-proxy to save bandwidth, so created /etc/apt/apt.conf that contains:
   
   Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.2.109:3142";
   



4. 
   
   4) Update the apt-cache:
   
   sudo apt-get update
   




5. Install useful bits:
   
   sudo apt-get install emacs screen mysql-server php5 php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql
   
   This installs ~61M of new packages and pulls in a suitable apache server.


6. 
   Now time to install thinkup:
   
sudo -i
cd /var/www/
unzip ~pi/thinkup_1.0.7.zip
chown -R www-data /var/www/thinkup/data/
sudo touch /var/www/thinkup/config.inc.php
sudo chown www-data /var/www/thinkup/config.inc.php

   




7. point a browser to http://192.168.2.120/thinkup/install



8. Since I didn't bother to setup outbound email, need to manually
   update the thinkup table. See
   http://thinkupapp.com/docs/troubleshoot/common/advanced/directdb.html
   
   mysql -u root -p
mysql> use thinkup;
mysql> select id,full_name, is_activated from tu_owners;
+----+-------------+--------------+
| id | full_name | is_activated |
+----+-------------+--------------+
| 1 | Marc Nozell | 0 |
+----+-------------+--------------+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> update tu_owners set is_activated=1 where id=1;
mysql> commit;
mysql> exit;

   
   



9. Point a browser to http://192.168.2.120/thinkup and setup
   connections to your favorite social media sites.

1940 US Census presentation @ Merrimack Public Library

This evening I gave a presentation on using the newly released 1940 US Census records for genealogy research. Twenty-one people attended and my slides are available here: 1940-US-Census-Marc-Nozell-29-May-2012.pdf

My most viewed photos on Flickr

The last blog post got me thinking of my popular photos on Flickr. Here are the top 10 most viewed photos:

1. John McCain (featured on http://news.yahoo.com/elections) 34,251 hits -- this photo spent a number of weeks linked to from Yahoo!'s 2008 election page. One of the two times I saw him in Merrimack. The colors are a bit washed out. For rare/unique photo ops I now shoot in RAW format...
   
   



2. New Hampshire Nudist Park 18,506 hits -- Yes chilly NH does have a nudist park. No I've never stopped in.
   
   
   
   



3. Are you ready for the Rapture? Jesus is coming on Oct 28, 1992(!) 15,635 hits
   
   
   



4. Gena O`Kelley (Mrs Chuck Norris) 13,620 hits -- I took the kids to see Chuck Norris and his wife when they were out traveling with Mike Huckabee. I'd say most people where there to see Chuck. He is surprisingly short in person. Also see comment wrt RAW format.
   
   
   
   



5. Barack Obama 12,071 hits -- one of my 'famous' photos. It is available under a liberal Attribution Creative Commons license and has been used on a number of website but also the cover of a now defunct hiphop magazine. Tineye.com says it knows of about 153 uses. Also used on Wikpedia: Barack_Obama_at_NH See note about shooting in RAW...
   
   
   
   



6. Gena O`Kelley 11,954 hits -- another Mrs Chuck Norris photo from the same event. Guess the Norris fanboys like to look at his wife.
   
   
   
   



7. Hillary Clinton in Hampton, NH 10,607 --- this is from one of her early 2008 primary events in NH. Did you ever notice her blue eyes? I really like this photo.
   
   
   
   



8. If you don't talk to your cat about catnip... Who Will? 8,420 -- funny sign seen at a daytrip to Portsmouth.
   
   
   



9. Shawn Johnson 7,205 -- not a particularly great shot but linked to from a woman's gymnastics web forum.
   
   
   
   



10. Senator Joe Biden & Nozell/Thomas family 6,212 -- at the time Vice President Biden was just a US Senator. As you may guess the event was in support of NH Governor John Lynch.