biphenyl.org

After getting my new bike, it was clearly project time. But what to do first? There are plenty of interesting things to do with a bike, but what cinched it was my light being stolen. I decided to mod my helmet by adding LEDs, so that I’m more visible to cars and other cyclists at night, and as a backup against light failure or misappropriation. (also, mental masturbation - LEDs make anything cooler) I followed Becky’s Instructable for the most part, with a few modifications of my own. The basic idea is to use conductive paint to draw traces for the circuit, then attach the LEDs, battery, and switch with conductive epoxy, and finally use regular epoxy and a clearcoat to weatherproof everything. The switch used is a magnetic reed switch, activated by a magnet tethered to the helmet’s strap anchors. Full photoset on my Flickr account.

I’ve been looking to buy a bike for some time, essentially since Adam bought one a little over a year ago. I like the idea of human-powered transportation - it’s wholly sustainable and it’s good exercise, too. I found this bike on Craigslist over the weekend - it was only used for about a year by the previous owner, and has just been sitting in his garage since. It’s in practically brand-new condition, and at $220 I got it for about half the cost of a new one. I dig it because it’s a hybrid, so it’s lightweight like a street bike, but has beefy enough tires and rims that I can ride it on unpaved areas like the many canal paths in Phoenix.

This last weekend was three days long, thanks to the observance of Veteran’s Day on Monday. When Rebecca reminded me of this the Tuesday before, I decided we absolutely had to get out of Phoenix for the weekend and take a trip somewhere. After some speed planning we ended up with Becky, Rebecca, Brandon and I driving to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon for two hikes - The Dry Lake Hills in Flagstaff and along the South Rim Trail in the Grand Canyon. Some photo highlights, taken by me and Becky.

All involved had an excellent time - it was great to get out of the city and enjoy some of Arizona’s beautiful scenery. (and local beers!)

Ever since I replaced my laptop with a MacBook in January of this year I’ve been impressed with Apple’s OS X - in fact I’ve moved over to using it entirely, having replaced my desktop with a Mac Pro in July. It has a very snazzy interface and overall good user experience, and underneath all that prettiness it’s running on BSD so I can hack away via terminal all I like. However, coming from a Linux background, I’ve found the color options for the default BSD ls command lacking. With the GNU ls, you have a very large degree of control over how things look by using the .dir_colors file in your home directory. With that in mind, I decided to replace the default ls using this simple method.

First, install XCode Tools, found on the original OS X disc. Alternatively, you can download it from Apple, though it’s about 1GB. There are a number of useful developer tools included, but what you really want is gcc, the GNU C Compiler. (If you do much programming, you’ve probably already installed this) The idea here is we’re simply going to compile the GNU ls and dircolors for our Mac. If you’ve used Linux much, you’ll recognize the steps exactly.

Next, download the newest version of coreutils from the GNU FTP. Pop open a terminal and make a temporary directory, then decompress the archive - for instance tar -xvjf coreutils-6.9.tar.bz2

Enter the directory created from decompressing coreutils. Now we’ll compile for our system. Simply run ./configure and then make when it’s done. If either configure or make gives you any guff, you probably just need a new version of XCode Tools/gcc.

Presuming that all went well, we’ve now got a new ls binary ready to go. To backup your old one (and its man pages) and replace it with the new, simply run:
sudo mv /bin/ls /bin/ls.bak
sudo cp src/ls /bin/ls
sudo cp src/dircolors /bin/dircolors
sudo mv /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bak
sudo cp man/ls.1 /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1
sudo cp man/dircolors.1 /usr/share/man/man1/dircolors.1

Don’t forget to trash the coreutils directory once you’re done with it.

Now all you need to do is run ls --color=auto to get colored output. I suggest adding the line alias ls='ls -hF --color=auto' to your .bash_profile file. This makes ls color-code output, as well as giving helpful symbols to indicate executable/directory/etc status and displaying file sizes in a human-readable format.

To get the full benefit of the color system, you’ll also want to create a .dir_colors file in your home directory, and have dircolors run when you start a shell. Add a line to your .bash_profile such as eval `dircolors`. You may download my .dir_colors and modify it if you like. With all that done, you can get pretty results like this:

After playing with one of these little fellows last weekend I resolved that I had to have one of my own - I can’t stand TVs in restaurants in particular, or ones that do nothing but play ads in stores. So I ordered up my own kit and assembled it per Limor’s instructions. A selection of the photos:

It had been about a year and a half since I’d had a chance to solder anything, which I realize now was far too long! Luckily, soldering seems to stick like bike riding - my joints were as clean and pretty as ever! Now just to test it out!

Operation Mindfuck is a wide-reaching decentralized conspiracy that extends to the highest levels of power in the world. Its purpose is to disrupt the reality grids that the general populace functions on, reminding people that there exist experiences and stimuli outside the confines of their everyday lives. As evidence of its popularity among even the powerful, I cite U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, particularly his Incredible Hulk tie.

For Halloween I joined friends making some LED Throwies (photoset - thanks Becky). We used them to make temporary improvements to a building and a sculpture:

I also spent a couple hours last weekend walking the new Tempe Marketplace shopping center with an accomplice, using one of Limor’s TV-B-Gone kits to disrupt the incredibly annoying TVs that seem to be in every store for no good reason. While the most satisfying was the one in the Cold Stone (also: delicious sorbet), the most impressive was the electronics section in the Target:

I’ve ordered one as well - the plan is to have two that cycle out of phase so as to turn off TVs twice as fast!

Overall, some of the best fun I’ve had in months!

New blog is up now - I’ve moved over to using a modified Wordpress since maintaining the codebase for my own was a bit more time than I wanted to put into it. Among other things I plan to document my increasing involvement in Operation Mindfuck.