Reflections on Google Code Jam
Last weekend I competed in the qualification round of Google Code Jam. I went into it cold (i.e. not having read any of the previous problem sets), and found it a little harder than I expected. The first 2 questions were easy. The last 2 were easy in principle, but I found my implementation didn't scale well to the large data sets, given the limits involved. I still got well over the required score to get me into the next round.
My take-aways from the process are as follows:
Bug with streaming audio to Apple TV
So it appears that there is a occasionally a problem in streaming music to the Apple TV from the Mac. The symptom is that you can see the "Audio TV" device in your Sound -> Output window, but every time you try to select it, the selection reverts to the "Internal Speakers" line.
The easiest way to reset this, is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and switch off your Wifi Network, leave it off for a second, then switch it back on. When you reconnect to your wifi network you should be able to select the "Apple TV" device in your Sound/Output pane in the System Preferences.
Reflections on 2012
Reflections on 2012
2012 was a pretty good year for Helen and I. Probably the highlight of the year was going over to the Emmy Awards in New York. Helen was one of the people nominated for an award for her work on a TV documentary episode with Adam Savage "Curiosity - Can you live forever?". We had an absolute blast in New York.Restarting Fitbit on the Mac
I seem to have a problem with my Fitbit Ultra and my Mac Air running OS/X 10.8. What happens is the fitbit daemon doesn't seem to work properly if I suspend the notebook by closing the lid. After awakening, my Fitbit profile never seems to update with the latest data from the device. A solution to this problem is to restart the fitbit daemon. You can use launchctl to stop and restart the daemon, which should mean that your data then gets transferred from the device properly.
sudo launchctl stop com.fitbit.fitbitd
sudo launchctl start com.fitbit.fitbitd
A Do-It-Yourself Book Scanner
I found an instructable for a DIY book scanner. There seems to be a thriving online community based around building DIY book scanners as well. I have a lot of books I'd like to scan into electronic format. There's a startup called One Dollar Scan that will scan your books for a dollar. Unfortunately it's based in the US. It would cost me a fortune to send my books over there to be scanned. A DIY book scanner sounds like the ideal solution for me.
True Skin - Sci-Fi Short Film
My Evolving Media Setup
Working on the iPad
Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac
Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.
Continue reading “Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac”