Ridiculous Gifts: TV Remote

My father-in-law and I have, over the years, exchanged silly gifts. That's really all the lead-in there is. I actually started writing this thinking there'd be more to it than that, but no. Something silly, and if at all possible, entirely ridiculous.

This year for his birthday he'll be getting a new television remote that also doubles as a subtle commentary about his age:

This one's going down as one of my favorite projects to date. Not because of the cerebral Ha ha you're old here's an old-timey remote subtext, but because of how much harder it was to make than I'd imagined.

It took almost two months, during which my family made due with only half a kitchen.

The concept was very simple: rig new buttons to a universal remote, then decorate in a hilarious fashion. Contact-switch remotes, I discovered, do not lend themselves to any sort of rigging. After about a dozen failed attempts to connect leads to the board, I eventually:

• drilled a few dozen holes through the board with a pin vice and a .6mm bit
• inserted breadboard jumpers and potted the back with hot glue to hold them in place
• "soldered" the pins to the traces with silver epoxy

I am satisfied with the result, as both main criteria have been met: silly on the outside, completely ridiculous on the inside.

Traffic Camera Selfie

You won't have to watch too much television before you stumble across some official barking, "Pull up the traffic cameras, dammit! We need to find this guy." Then dozens of people start banging on keyboards until an entire wall is filled with live traffic video from across the city.

Part of what makes it nonsense is the fact that it really doesn't take so many people to dial up a video. You usually just click something. A single person sitting alone and in silence, however, would be horrible television. Much worse than some city's runaway budget after hiring all those people to do what the official could have done with a mouse.

The other part is the nonsense that's more in my lane: taking video from over there and showing it over here. That understanding led to an obsessive itch that flared up a while back:

I wanted to get a picture of myself from an actual traffic camera.

Step One: Find some traffic cameras.
Indiana's DOT has those. When you're zipping along the interstate and you see a CCTV dome, you may wonder if, six months from now, some FBI person will come along and zoom in on you and then exclaim, "Facial-rec confirms it. Let's get that bastard! Dammit!" Nope.

Step Two: Get some pictures.
The "nope" above is due to the fact that video is huge. First you have to move it, then you have to store it. Also, 99.999% of it is guaranteed to be completely uninteresting. INDOT tackles this puzzle by:

• only taking snapshots with the cameras (they snap a picture every few seconds)
• only storing a few minutes worth of snapshots
• aforementioned snapshots are also a bit wee (640x480px)

This, in turn, created a bit of a puzzle for me. I'll only get snapped while I'm on the interstate, and then will only have minutes before it's gone. Also, since the images are lacking in the pixel-depth that storytellers keep selling (zoom in, dammit!), I'll need to find a way to confirm that what I have is what I want.

Step Three: Collect.
Without going into too much depth about just how stupid I'm willing to be, I was able to remotely trigger a dump of the INDOT cache on a machine back in the office while recording GPS/environment data on my phone. And so:

This is me.

And this is my photographer.

Funny Story.

I've never told anyone this. Never will, either. So mum's the word, you.

About six months ago I was jumping between some Cisco routers and a Windows XP FTP server. I had several terminals for each going for days.

The Windows server was throwing errors when another system would try to delete a file by sending FTP commands directly. I got in and gave it a shot. No error, but the file remained. I couldn't remember what the 'force' flag was, so I asked:

> rm ?

It took several seconds of looking at the lack of a help file before I figured it out. Which means several terabytes of upcoming television programming got deleted. It was SO embarrassing.

Allow me to explain (and make the Cisco reference suddenly relevant):

In whatever Cisco's CLI is, if you want help on a command, you type it followed by a question mark:

> rm ?

That would tell you more about the command rm (as in 'remove,' aka delete). To get some help in a command line in Windows, you'd type this:

> rm /?

That forward slash is key. What I typed was was interpreted as "delete WHATEVER." And so it did.

(relax. I caught it before it deleted everything.)

Thank you, PBS. That was terrible.

Back in 2012 we got this thing from PBS with video in it. There was some ruckus made, but I didn't really care at the time. It got plugged in and turned on and there it sat. For the next few years I paid it no heed.
The gist of it is as such:

• We're a PBS station, so we often enjoy playing PBS shows. Makes good sense.
• The shows we get from PBS? Those get sent via satellite. Satellite plays the show, we record it, and play it back later. Easy!
• Hey! What if the shows got downloaded from the Internet instead of being recorded in real-time? That'd be pretty neat. No more worries about the ISS clipping a statellite or whatever it is that messes things up.

And so the PBS NGIS program was born. (Next-Generation-Something-Something. Google it.) About two racks worth of kit has been grinding away in our server room, quietly downloading stuff from PBS for the last three years. Meanwhile, we've still been recording everything in real-time like we did in the 70's. (NRT, or Non-Real-Time, is another name/component of the system. They branded the living hell out of it. Logos and acronyms all over the place.)

I stumbled across it while working on another project. It took me about 45 minutes to hate the interface provided by PBS. Silverlight?! Come on, guys. It took a week or two to learn how to talk to the servers directly, and then over a weekend I absorbed it into my own frontend.

The frontend in question is The Monolith, a story for another time as it's terrifyingly deep. This story, however, is about a deliberate lack of depth. Lets say you work here blasting TV-rays out to the masses. What's that, you say? A raccoon birthed a litter in the satellite dish last night and ruined a recording? Whatever shall you do?  I can name that tune in three clicks:

    

Even though PBS provides thousands of pages of (beautifully composed, logo-crazy) documentation, what's listed above is all anyone here will ever to do with it. In fact, it's the only thing we're able to do with it. That mountain of documentation has about a paragraph's worth of functionality that doesn't require a PBS administrator's account (note: creds are all stored in clear text).

Not to toot my own horn, but that Rendition list? If you want to see the show's title, you'll need to use mine. The PBS techs told me that anything other than P123456-789 to identify a program was something they were "working on." Now I just need some sweet logos.

Telephone Restoration

Now this was a silly minihobby:

A lovingly restored Kellogg/ITT 500 that I'd say was late 60's or very early 70's. My family made terrible fun of me as I sat and polished the housing over a weekend. I'm glad they'll never know just how long it took to make the dial card.