Archive - Dec 2010
December 26th
The Face of God
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/26/2010 - 12:41The snow has begun to fall and often, I would be excited about an impeding large storm. I am getting the weather alerts and various advisories. Kim is doing her shopping and Fiona will soon be going to her grandparents’ house. She will have a great time riding out the storm with them. Yet I remain blue. Some of it may be the sadness at the passing of my aunt. Some of it may be reflections about the homeless.
Last Tuesday, I went to two memorial services for homeless people that died during 2010. They were touching services and I think about those who will struggle through the storm without a home. I pray they may find shelter and warmth.
At the first service, the minister talked about how since we are created in God’s image, that means homeless people are too, and we need to remember that as we treat them with care and dignity. She spoke about seeing the face of God in homeless people.
The second service echoed this idea, and took it even further. It was at the Episcopal church in Middletown, CT. When it came time to greet one another, a ritual where Episcopalians shake one another’s hands and say ‘Peace’, the minister talked about a Bishop that had visited from Africa. He had decried the sterile manner in which the peace was passed. In his church, he said, instead of saying “Peace”, they say, “I love the face of God that I see in you today.” Wow!
So, we greeted each other that way, or at least some of us did. For the homeless person who is invisible to too many of us, it must be quite an experience to have someone look them in their eyes and talk about love and the face of God. I hope both the homeless and who currently have homes were blessed by such exchanges.
For me, I had a slightly different experience. Behind me was a man from the American Legion. I had overheard him speaking about gathering food at The Legion that he was going to bring to a local food pantry. He had asked the executive director of the food pantry, who was next to him at church about a good time to bring the food over.
I turned towards him and he greeted me “Hello”.
I used the words the minister had suggested and told him I loved the face of God that I saw in him that day. He looked a little uneasy and shrugged it off. Yet his words about finding time to bring food to the homeless echoed the voice of God whether or not he chose to acknowledge it.
Next to him, the executive director of the food pantry beamed. It seemed as if he has spent much of his life seeing the face of God in those around him, both in the homeless people that come to receive food, as well as in the faces of guys from the American Legion dropping off food. He seemed happy, perhaps even relieved, that people could name and join in on this wonderful vision that he is privileged to see so often, but perhaps does not look often enough in the mirror to see it there too.
December 25th
Geeky Christmas Notes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/25/2010 - 22:30There were several technology gifts at the Hynes household this Christmas, and being the old guard geek that I am, I was interested in seeing what I could do with them.
I received an HP 7 inch digital picture frame. No great hacking things there. Simply load some sort of memory device with pictures on it and let the frame show the pictures. I pulled the SD card out of my Canon SD 1000 stuck it in the digital picture frame and there were the whales from last summer’s trip to Cape Cod. I tried hooking up the Canon SD 1000 directly, but the frame wouldn’t read it. I tried my Nokia N900 with the same results. However, the old Motorola Razr that my wife uses worked nicely as a source of pictures.
I was thinking that I would need to go out and get an SD card to use for the frame, but it also supports USB memory sticks, and I have a bunch of them kicking around from various tradeshows. So, I’ve done a quick load of some of the pictures that I had on my hard drive onto a memory stick and that is nicely configured.
The older girls got Nooks for their big presents. I helped them do a little configuration. One site I found that was really interesting is NookFeed. This sites allows you to take your Google Reader feeds and download them as books you can read on your Nook. Very nice. Mairead was happy to see some of her favorite web comics show up in her Nook. She also stuck a MicroSD card she had with music on it in the Nook. All of her music showed up. Unfortunately, it was in one very long list without any easy navigation. We also loaded an audio book for here.
The Nook is an Android based machine, and I kicked around ‘rooting’ them. The idea would be to see if a better audio file interface for the nooks could be found, as well as other tools to make them more usable.
There is an interesting approach, described in this post which utilizes hacking your local DNS to point to a site with a rooted update for the Nook. Much of the description about how to do this is based people using Windows machines with limited capabilities. In my case, I’m running an Ubuntu server in my home network, so I can hack DNS pretty easily. This page goes into how to reconfigure DNS. I’ve been meaning to clean up DNS and set up an internal zone for a while, so I kicked this around a little bit, but haven’t gone all the way to setting things up to be able to root the Nook. Maybe later.
My youngest daughter got a Nintendo DSi. I’ve kicked around getting DSLinux available for it, but read about problems people had with DSLinux and the DSi. I figure I’ll save that. My daughter probably isn’t as interested in DSLinux on her DSi.
What she is more interested in is playing with the camera and the music. The DSi has a slot for an SD card, so I took my SD card out of my Canon SD 1000 and put it in the DSi. The Canon shoots at a much higher resolution. The DSi only seems to support 640x480. However, with the SD card in the DSi, Fiona could take some pictures which were stored on the SD card. With that, I can load the pictures up to sites like Facebook or Flickr.
I looked around for ways to upload directly from the DSi to an online site, since it has Wifi. There was a reference to some Facebook connectivity, but that isn’t really a good option. So, we’ll juggle SD cards for uploading for the time being.
The other thing that I explored a little bit was loading music onto the DSi. Unfortunately, I don’t have a nice way of mounting the SD card on my computer. I do have a little device somewhere around for doing it, but I can’t find it right now. The Canon SD 1000 uses PTP as its USB connectivity, so I can load the gphotofs package on Ubuntu to access the photos, but I can’t write back to the device.
However, I can write to a microSD card in my wife’s Razr, and I have an adapter to fit the microSD card into a full SD card. So, I tried copying files from my computer to the microSD card and from there onto the DSi. The microSD card had a few files in M4A format. The DSi played these nicely. However, it doesn’t play MP3 files nicely. I was told that it will play aac files as well, but I didn’t have any luck.
I did check around a little see if I could find a nice way to convert an MP3 file to an AAC file. This article provided a good simple way to do it, assuming you have ffmpeg running on your linux box in a way that supports AAC. Unfortunately, the standard configuration of ffmpeg doesn’t do that. So, I tried some of the options in this article. Unfortunately, I could not get any of the prepackaged versions of ffmpeg to convert to aac. So, I went about and followed these instructions to get the latest version of ffmpeg running. Once this was done, it was easy to convert from mp3 to aac.
Essentially, I ran this command
ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k output.aac
This produced an aac file that I could play with ffplay, but I couldn’t get it to play on the Razr or the DSi. I tried putting it in an M4A envelope with this command
ffmpeg -i output.aac -vn -acodec copy output2.m4a
Like the aac file, the m4a file plays with ffplay, but not on the DSi.
With that, I’ve played enough with the technology on Christmas day. I’m going to post this as is and head off to bed soon. Merry Christmas everyone.
December 24th
Facebook and Identity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/24/2010 - 10:50How do you see yourself? How do others see you? How would you like others to see you? There are not new questions brought in by Facebook and the Internet, however the way we approach them may be changing as a result of the Internet.
I started thinking about this when a new member joined a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists that I read. Besides the welcomes and as part of the good natured joking, the new member was asked how we knew who the new member really was. I piled on saying that we can’t really be sure about who some one is until we’ve checked their Facebook page.
There are many older members of the mailing list who are not on Facebook and responded with comments like “I guess one can’t be sure of who I am or whether I truly exist because I am not on Facebook.” The discussion waxed philosophical and folks pondered not whether a person exists, but where they exist. One person asked if people exist in the group’s mind or the mind of individuals in a group. This lead to the great sentiment about people existing in the hearts of those that love them.
All of this resonates closely to me as I glance at the book “Samuel Mendelsson: A Man Who Must Not Be Forgotten” sitting next to my computer. It is the story of a man who died during The Holocaust and was given to me by his great granddaughter, a noted therapist on the list whose friendship I have come to cherish. Samuel Mendelsson, as far as I know, does not exist on Facebook. He exists in different books and in the hearts of those that loved him.
The same applies to my Aunt Susie who passed away last week. Yesterday was her funeral and I had been asked to read my blog post reflecting on her life. I learned about her death from her grandchildren on Facebook. Susie never had a Facebook page, but she is memorialized on Facebook and in the hearts of many.
Yet it is not only in memorials that we exist in Facebook. The new member responded “You gave me great awareness and questions about how I show up to the world on face book. needless to say I thank you for the chance to take a closer look at me. FB Revisions are pending.” Another friend of mine is a young high school teacher, the kind that all the students worship and want to be friends with. I heard him speak once about how he handles Facebook friend requests from some of these students. He reads over the student’s Facebook pages very closely. If he finds inappropriate behavior, he highlights it to the student explaining that he would like being friends with the student on Facebook, but he can’t because of the inappropriate behavior. It might jeopardize both the student and his own career. Many students have cleaned up their profiles as a result of this and thought more about how they wish to be perceived by others and how they present themselves online.
The discussion brought out another new member of the list who works with adolescents who suffer from eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and body image concerns. It made me stop and wonder how these adolescents portray themselves online. How do they view themselves? How do others view them? How do they wish to be viewed? The same old questions in a new format.
It would seem as if this could lead nicely into other topics, like cyber-bullying. Another topic that it might lead nicely into are the cartoon images many Pinay mommy bloggers have of themselves online. They don’t look Philippino. One Pinay mommy blogger wrote an interesting blog post about why skin whitening lotions are so popular there. How do these Pinay mommies view themselves? How do others view them? How do they wish to be viewed? Yet another version of the same set of questions.
I don’t have any great insights to offer. Perhaps some of my friends will have that to share. Yet these seem like important questions to be thinking about.
December 23rd
Another Day Passes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/23/2010 - 20:36Today, I woke early, scanned a few blogs, read a few emails, even got a chance to fire off an email in a great discussion, and then it was on to a long, hard day. First, there was the two hour drive to my aunt’s funeral. Between the funeral, the burial, and the lunch, that took up much of the day. Then, a two hour drive back to Connecticut for my father-in-law’s birthday party and a small Christmas party for some of the extended family that gathered.
At home, one of the feather pillows was chewed to bits by the puppy who was probably a bit bored and upset that much of the day passed without playmates for him. Feathers everywhere.
Now, a brief chance to read some more emails and write a brief blog post. Tomorrow, there will be preparations for Christmas. The house needs to be cleaned. The goose will go in the oven. Fiona will be in the pageant. So, I shall head off to bed soon without any of the blog posts that are percolating in my head actually making it online. We’ll see how much writing I can get done tomorrow or Saturday.
December 22nd
