Spying on People With Guns

I’ve got this blog right here. No one reads it. No one writes it. But I do get bots posting spam, which turns into notification spam, and which I must moderate away. So I installed wp-spamfree! Here’s hoping it works.

I jumped through a lot of hoops to try to use my Roland V-Drums in place of the Rock Band drum controller, with unsatisfying results. Guitar Hero World Tour makes it awfully easy though - the controller has a MIDI IN port. If you plug it, it will play, but it can also be easily be improved upon. In a nutshell, I mapped other pads so they could also be used, and, more importantly, mapped both the rim and head of each pad so you don’t have to hit a particular part to trigger.

I assigned the pads as illustrated here:

The perhaps controversial and/or innovative idea was to reverse the crash cymbals from the more obvious left-right configuration. I did this because orange is used for crashes when the right hand is on the hi-hat, and yellow is when the right hand is riding the ride, and in real life, you’d use the crash closest to hand. I’m trying to get as close to playing the actual drum part as possible here.

Whether to assign the middle tom to blue or green is matter of preference, I suppose.

To program my drum module, a Roland TD-3, I chose a kit I didn’t mind scrambling the MIDI numbers on, then hit EDIT > CONTROL and arrowed to the note number setting. The settings are summarized here:

Note that you have to keep your foot off the hi-hat pedal. (Or unplug it.) (Or assign to note number 50 and always keep your foot on it.)

I don’t really get Twitter, or rather I only sort of do. I never got MySpace. I feel like I almost do now, but not quite. (Is it even still around?) I halfway get Facebook. I think email is great. Given all these facts you could probably calculate my exact age.

In any case, so that I can use Twitter without ever getting it, I thought my Google Talk status messages should feed into Twitter. They can and it’s easy.

1. In FriendFeed: [Share something] → [Import] → [Gmail/Google Talk]

2. In TwitterFeed (should the site happen to be up): [Create new twitter feed] using the URL http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user/USERNAME?format=rss Include the title only, do not include the link.

I’ve been playing with making alcohol-burning volcano-kettle-style cooksets out of aluminum drink cans.

>

I made a solo backpacking cookset that weighs in at just over an ounce. Its the lightest one that I know of.

I’ve been playing with different alcohol stoves (lightweight backpacking ones, that is). Building them, researching them, etc. My main goal is minimal fuel to boil one pint of water (using some lightweight cooking set). Boil time isn’t much of a concern for me.

The real competitor to alcohol stoves in terms of fuel weight are Esbit stoves; they’ll boil a pint using a 14 gram fuel tablet, and can probably be marginally lighter than an alcohol cookset. (The negatives are filthier burning and the cost of the fuel.) So it’s my goal to boil a pint with 14g of alcohol (by which I mean ethyl alcohol). Ethyl alcohol (aka ethanol) has a density of 0.789 g/cm³, so that’s about 0.63 fluid ounces by volume. Quite doable, I’m sure, but I haven’t done it yet.

That got me thinking about the theoretical limit for a 100% efficient cookset. (And let me say right off the bat that I am not a chemist of any sort.) Alcohol burns per the reaction

releasing −1409 kJ/mol. Once calorie is 4.184 J, and the molar mass of ethanol is 46.06844 g/mol, so that’s 7310 cal/g of ethanol burned.

Meanwhile, a pint of water is 472g. A calorie is (by definition) the energy need to raise one gram of H₂0 one degree Celsius. Let’s assume we’re at NIST standard temperature, or 20°C (68°F). At sea level, water boils at 100°C; higher up, boiling point goes down, but so does the starting temperature around dinner or breakfast time, broadly speaking, so we shouldn’t be too terribly far off from what might happen up in the mountains.

In any case, to raise 472g of water 80°C will take 37760 cal. A 100% efficient alcohol stove then would need 37760 cal / 7310 cal/g = 5.17g of alcohol fuel. The stove I’m looking for (which will burn 14g), then, would be 37% efficient. Stoves that consume 1 fluid oz of alcohol, or 23.3g (a fairly common case), are 22% efficient.

There you have it - if you can boil a pint of water with 1/4 fl oz of ethanol, you’ve got a hell of a stove on your hands that’s getting close to the theoretical maximum efficiency.

(One minor wrinkle in all this is that the water produced by the combustion is liquid. I suspect that that water is inevitably vaporized during combustion, so that might need to be subtracted out of the energy produced by the combustion. If so, the heat of vaporization of water is 0.65 kJ/mol. Each mole of alcohol burned produces three moles of liquid water, so the net energy produced my burning ethanol would be 1409 kJ/mol - 3 * 0.65 kJ/mol, or 1407 kJ/mol. It’s pretty much a non-issue.)

I’m off to the Olympics tomorrow for a 3-day (2 night) trip, my first solo. My goal is for an ultralight pack (<10lbs per certain rules), but I guess I missed it by 3 lbs. Here’s my comprehensive gear list (with weights), and here’s some thoughts about equipment choices that cohered for me.

The drum part for Tomorrow Never Knows (the Beatles’ song - not the imaginary James Bond movie of the same name) runs thus:

Rd |x---x---x---x---|
Sn |----o-----------|
Tm |----------oo----|
Bd |o-----o-o-------|
   |1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + |

Edit /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh (as root) to contain:

#!/bin/sh
LID_STATE=`cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state | awk '{print $2 }'`
AC_STATE=`cat /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC0/state | awk '{print $2 }'`

if [ $LID_STATE = "closed" ] && [ $AC_STATE = "off-line" ] ; then
        /etc/acpi/suspend2ram.sh
fi
exit 0

CookiePie is a Firefox extension that lets you give a browser tab its own set of cookies. This is cool if, like me, you want to log into two different webmail accounts at once. (People do share computers sometimes, after all). Until recently Gmail was the one site that CookiePie didn’t work with, which spoiled my fun, but they’ve since spruced it up and now it does.

Unfortunately their webserver isn’t configured to spout the correct Content-Type header to make the XPI install work, so I packaged up the link with the correct header so that you can install it easily via this huge link you’re reading. (My link sucks the extension right from their site so you’ll still get the latest greatest.)