Penny Arcade Expo!

The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. - Homer Simpson

The internet has broken conferences. My friends have been going to PAX for countless years and I have never been able to attend because I've been otherwise indisposed (in Turkey, in England, in Korea, etc). For the first year I'm going to go and I am very excited about this.
Different sets of my friends have a habit of going to Anime Expo, Otacon and PAX. My budget doesn't let me go to all of things, especially taking Mrs. Chaos. So the idea is to figure out which of the conferences Mrs.Chaos likes the most and just go to that one. A couple of years ago we took her to Anime Expo in Los Angeles and I think she had an okay time. The biggest challenge for her to deal with was the complete and utter indecisiveness of my friends. So we would be walking around unsure where to eat and everyone would confirm they were hungry, but no one would want to make a decision or express a preference, "Yeah I'm hungry. I could eat anywhere." "How about this place? It's British Pub style food." Of course, my friends express displeasure in a place through very passive means so when they respond with "Yeah, I guess that's okay" no one is quite sure if they don't want to eat there or are really indifferent and this causes long delays in any kind of decision making. Beyond that, Anime Expo just ain't what it used to be. The basic pass doesn't get you what it used, and all of the concerts and special events charge extra. So what's free? The video rooms - which used to be how we discovered shows, but now we've basically seen everything they're showing. It just doesn't work out. Anime Expo got checked off the list and we're probably not going back. We'll see.
This year we are trying out Penny Arcade! The internet broke PAX registration. It was pretty impressive as we were all waiting for it to go live, no one knowing when it would happen. The moment it went live we all started messaging each other and trying to register. A couple people were able to register, but then they took down the site because it couldn't handle the mad rush of people. It went back up the next week, and we repeated the activity of messaging each other and registering. Amazingly, tickets sold out in about 4-6 hours during the middle of the work day. More amazing? All six of us managed to get through and get tickets during that time.
I've never been to PAX before and I am super excited about going. I also have extremely high hopes that Mrs. Chaos is going to have a fantastic time. The only problem is she will be the only lady this year, but maybe having an entourage of six handsome gentlemen opening doors for her will make her feel like royalty and then she can convince all the other ladies to come in future years. Really what is PAX? Just watching cool people do cool things all day and then playing board games and CCG until 4am in the morning. Perfect!
 

iPad Printing

Gene Roddenberry always talked about how amazing humans were, because we could do amazing things when we worked together. He was right. - Wil Wheaton

My experiment to replace my home laptop with my iPad is not going all that well. I find myself constantly reaching for my real computer for all sorts of needs. Even writing this, what I really wanted to was super-impose the two images to create a single image. How? What photo editing software on my iPad should I use? I tried doing it in iPhoto, but that's not really the point of iPhoto. So in the end I shrugged my shoulders, cropped it and just left it as two separate photos.

Earlier this week I was using the iPad around the house and made a purchase (or some such) online and got back a confirmation and though, "I would really like to save that." I took a screen capture (power+home) and so I have an image of it. Not that great a solution, is it? Still I know that there is this AirPrint thing and that I can print to specific HP printers. So I started wondering if it was possible to AirPrint to a PDF printer on my home server.
The answer is that there is a trivial way for $19.95 using an app called Printopia. It runs as a service on a computer and will share all printers as AirPrinters and includes a "Print to PDF" feature. Still, $19.95 sure does seem like a lot of money. A little more research and I cobbled together a pretty simple solution that I am quite happy with.

1. Install "PDF Writer for Mac" which gives you a virtual Printer that prints PDFs
2. Share your printer by restrict the sharing to whatever account is your primary one
3. Install "AirPrint Activator" and all of your shared printers magically become AirPrint destinations
4. The sweet spot! Make you the folder you print to automatically sync via dropbox: ln -s /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/jordan "~/Dropbox/iOS Printer"

So now what do I have? When I'm on my home WiFi I can print from my iPad to either my actual printer or to a PDF printer that ends up putting a PDF in dropbox which is then available on my iPad. BAM! Now the question becomes can I setup a VPN at home so I can do this while not here?

Hello Chrismutt My Old Friend

What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us? - Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey)

I was going to write up a comment about how annoying the world is when automation keeps people from talking to solve simple problems, but as I was scanning through my list of things that jotted down to write about I noticed that they are almost all negative and I thought "I am not a negative person!  I am a very happy person who loves the world.  Why are all my notes here negative griping about the kids these days!"  Then I saw a picture of Travel Mutt and my heart melted a little bit.
A lot of people have a childhood stuffed animal or blanket that they grew to love.  I had a childhood stuffed dragon named "Sneezy" I think I got when I was born.  It was sometime very early.  Sneezy had a long neck and long tail and as a baby I took to twisting the head and twisting the tail.  Slowly this caused the joints to loose all their padding so that his head and tail just limply dropped.  I probably would have eventually squeezed the stuffing out of him, but my mother took him away from me with the intent to get him re-stuffed.
For many years after I lost Sneezy to the closet, I went without having a stuffed animal.    I did have a pile of blankets of similar make that I slept with.  I had a very important functional reason to sleep with them.  I am a stomach sleeper and if you sleep on your stomach with a pillow your neck has to be at the most ridiculous ninety degree angle.  I haven't discussed this in length with other stomach sleepers, but I assume we all have various techniques to solve it.  At that young age I found that by cramming the blanket under me it caused my body to be at about a thirty-degree angle with the bed and then my next only had to rotate about sixty degrees and the problem was solved.  The problem was solved for a time.
I kept growing.  As I grew the little kid blanket stayed the same size and it kept reducing the angle I was sleeping at.
When I was around twelve years old my mother gave me a stuffed animal named "Chrismutt" which I think was the free gift from Target for spending more than $50.  It was a throw away gift, except he was the PERFECT size for propping up my body while I slept.  Out went all the childhood blankets and in moved the mutt.
I took him to college with me.  How else could I sleep?  My sophomore year at college I went to the Goodwill store with some friends to find outfits to wear to a "sixties" dance.  There at Goodwill, in perfect condition, was another Chrismutt!  He was smaller than mine and instead of having Chistmas mittens around his neck he had a Christmas scarf, but I flipped out.  I assume he was the version you would have gotten for spending $25 at Target or some such.  My friends didn't share the same enthusiasm and I said, "oh just you wait !"  When we got back to school I showed my roommate (high school friend) and he appropriately flipped out.  He was deemed Christmutt Junior for the time.
Later in life I got a job and started to travel and I found that Christmutt Jr. was much easier to pack and take with me on the road, and so we put in the formal paperwork to change is name to "Travelmutt".  Really he was more like a little brother the Christmutt than a child, so I think we made the right decision as a family.
You might be wondering if I still snuggle up with and adorable twenty year old stuffed bear or his little brother.  The short answer is not really.  They were both very happily replaced by my wife.  Though when I travel out of town, Travelmutt still comes with me, and on the rare occasions when Mrs.Chaos is off I promote Chrismutt from his honorable place next to the bed to once again join me.

Monthly Fees

You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model - Randall Stephenson

I have to admin that I'm impressed in all sorts of ways with ATT.  I bought my very first phone from ATT Wireless which became Cingular which became ATT.  I held that original "ATT Wireless" SIM all the way through my iPhone 3G.  It mildly confused Apple geniuses at one point when I went in for repair and they told me they thought I had a knock-off SIM card.  No - sorry, it's just really old school.
As an old-school iPhone owner I am blessed grandfathered into the $30/unlimited plan.  I run about 2GB/month, so my only other option would be the $30/3GB plan which obviously makes no sense.  Even Mrs.Chaos is grandmothered in to her $25/2GB plan.  At her previous job she had no WiFi, and needed all that data.  Now that she is WiFi at home and WiFi at school she's running pretty low data rates.
ATT just rolled out the new "family data plans" which I quickly went to review.  Family data you say?  That sounds like a fabulous.  Since we jointly use about 3GB's of data, perhaps we can save as much as 50% on this?  So what is the cost of family data for our family?  We have to get the 4GB plan which is $70 + $40 for each smartphone.  Total cost to us?  $150/month.  I'm having a really difficult time understanding how this could be a less expensive option for anyone.  Can someone help me out here?
If you had five smartphones on 5GBs.  Old plan $250/month - new plan doing a shared 6GB is $265/month.  So if you have five devices and want to cut your bandwidth from 25GB/month to 6GB/month you can pay an extra $15?  I feel like I'm missing something... and yet... I've run all the calculators on the ATT site and it agrees with me.

Robots on Mars

I hope that another part of the legacy will be that the mission has been a source of inspiration for young people, encouraging them to pursue careers in science and engineering and technology. - Steve Squyres

In January 2004, I was in Europe with my brother for a couple of weeks and I was complete mesmerized by CNN International as it reported on Spirit on Opportunity. We were in Greece and there was all that great history to see, but it seemed difficult to impress upon people that we had put ROBOTS ON MARS.

Now, less than a decade later, it seems almost pedestrian to PUT A ROBOT ON MARS! How did the world learn about the success of the landing? The Curiosity rover tweeted it, complete with internet meme and hashtag: @MarsCuriosity "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL"

I have to admit it makes me sad how much focus we have on robotic exploration over human exploration. As much as we NASA is trying to anthropomorphize our little space explorer it is not going to have the childlike sense of awe and wonder that Neil and Buzz did. At this rate it will not be long before there isn't anyone alive who has actually been to the move. I want my tax dollars going to research that will invest technology to let me fly in space. Get with it!

Coughing on Podcasts

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn. - Alan J. Perlis

Though great effort I've achieved a working relationship with the Apple Podcast app. My old system of working with Podcasts remains slightly better than the new way I have to interact with them, but I drink the Apple Kool-Aid, even when I need to choke it down. That's what Apple aims for, right? A slightly worse user experience?
When I first installed Podcast and just let it go to town importing all my postcasts, subscribing and autodownloading it completely broke background sync services. The first consequence of that was my device could not download anything. Any download would get put in the background sync queue and never download. Podcasts wouldn't download. Apps wouldn't download. WiFi Sync never activated either. The worst part was the sync services would never let the phone go to sleepy mode. So the battery would die after about 6 hours. It took a while to correlate all this crazy behavior with the install of the Podcast app.
I wiped and restored the entire phone. I subscribed to all my podcasts on my computer and sync'ed them to my phone. Same issue. I turned off the auto-download feature for all of them. No fix. I wiped and restored the entire phone. I subscribed to all my podcasts on the phone. Same issue. I disabled auto-download feature. SUCCESS!
So there you have it. Pretty simple really. Just wipe your device and restore. Then subscribe to all your podcasts directly on the device by DO NOT turn on the auto-download feature. Now all you have to do is go into Podcasts every day or so for it to show you what new shows you have to download and you must download them.
There are still a couple problems. If you don't turn on autodownload you can't turn on auto delete. So Podcast will sync all your podcasts to your computer and keep old copies of everything you've listened to. You have to go in manually to delete them. The other interesting thing is that really old episodes (3-6 months old) will randomly show up in the list as new and unplayed. So those need to get deleted.