fouldsy.com

Pending a reference check from Greencroft, today I was hired as the new system analyst managing application systems for the school district, scheduled to start next week It was a fairly informal interview, but a great opportunity to meet the other guys within the technology support team, and I then spent an hour or so with personnel and the technology director to give me a few things to start thinking about working towards to try and hit the ground running on the first day (always easier said than done!).

The role will primarily focus on supporting all the servers across the district in their overall day to day running including backups, updates, and routine maintenace, with two other system analysts in web systems and networking systems maintaining their actual roles such as looking after the e-mail system, school information system, distance learning courses, etc. I’ll also be taking care of the end user support with regards to the FileMaker database systems, as well as the increased use of the school information systems. It will certainly be a very challenging though equally as rewarding role, and the district also hired a new itinerant site technician yesterday that will travel between some of the villages - a good sign they’re continuing to move forward and improve their support services.

I’ll work the next few days here in Tunt to finish off the project dismantling the basketball project as I hate leaving things unfinished, and it will also help with an extra bit of money to see us through as it would be the middle of October before the first pay check from the new role would appear. Living in Bethel won’t be cheap! Hopefully the district will get in touch to confirm all is sorted on the reference checks and I can start next week, and this weekend I might also try chatting with Carl here in the village as he flies into Bethel during the week too working for AVCP so might have some suggestions on getting housing sorted.

At the start of the week I put in an application for a system analyst position with the school district up in Bethel. It’s a little different than what I was doing at Greencroft before I moved out to the US, and in some ways a bit of a step up and away from the network management side of things, but looks like a great new challenge. This afternoon I got a call back from the technology director inviting me for an interview next Tuesday afternoon (meaning, of course, it will snow on Monday evening and I’ll be stuck in the village on weather hold ) which is pretty exciting and encouraging, so this weekend I guess I’m brushing up going through my notes from past courses and exams, as well as making sure my suit still fits… But, small world, although the director spent 40+ years in Australia before moving over to the US, he grew up in England and still has some family in Chester-le-Street, about 7-8 miles from Durham!

But, I was wanting to move away from Windows-based systems even whilst at Greencroft and the school district is pretty much all Mac-oriented, meaning Filemaker would be a little different for me for example, and quite a bit of the role seems to involve the back-end systems rather than installing a new printer cartridge or replacing a RAM module, which is nice. Would mean basing myself out of Bethel, which is mixed good + bad - would be nice to get out the village during the week when everyone is busy teaching anyways and would mean I could easily get fresh fruit + veg brought back in for Kat, but the cost of living in Bethel is pretty extreme with heat easily going to be $500 a month, even before $200 round-trip on the bush flights to get me in + out of Tunt. Depending on exactly what the position includes, might even be possible to work out some time basing myself out of the school here in Tunt during the winter when there *will* be weather holds between here and Bethel.

Still, it’s a great opportunity to get back into working at something I enjoy doing and something I can make a difference with, and the money is very attractive. Would offer enough to rent somewhere in Bethel for during the week and fly back pretty much every weekend and still leave me better off than working two jobs for the school here in Tunt. Not quite your normal commute to work, admittedly. I’ll have to see how the interview goes and exactly what the role would include, as well as how to work the traveling, but would certainly be an improvement from falling off ladders

The last couple of days I’ve been tinkering, mainly as it had been raining solid for pretty much a week. It did finally break this morning letting us glimpse sunshine + blue sky, and the temperature is up around 60F I was chatting with Carl Andrew yesterday and he told me that the elders always say if it’s a bad summer, it will be a mild fall (autumn). Here’s hoping, as the locals can’t remember such a poor summer - I don’t think we’ve gone more than a couple of days in the past 6 weeks without rain, and one of those spells was when it somehow got to 83F!

Anyway, the tinkering has been moving some of my back-end services onto the hosted Google Apps for Your Domain offerings. I’ve used them since the start of year on another site without problems, but fouldsy.com (and it’s associated e-mail, chat, documents, etc.) is my main focus, and it was getting a tad slow with a compressed local mail file over 500Mb, and way too many saved RSS articles to search through. Both mail + RSS have moved between multiple computers and apps for 3-4 years now and it was probably time for a clear out anyway, and since Gmail provides IMAP access, I could easily transfer out any e-mails from Mail straight into Gmail. Mass deletion has brought me down to only 40Mb in Gmail now I also imported all my RSS feeds into Reader, tagged a bunch of the old articles from Vienna in del.icio.us, and setup Fox Marks to sync all bookmarks between the different systems I use. All the mail functions got themselves up + running during Wednesday evening, but some e-mails from Europe still seem a little delayed as it’s taking a while for all the MX changes to propagate. Anyone getting e-mails bounced, try sending again, sorry.

But, it’s only a few days until we head into Anchorage now. We have our bush flights booked for Monday morning (for all that means!) and I already have the number for Domino’s on speed-dial for the Monday night My dad retired today (technically…) after 40 years of teaching today, even he can’t explain how he managed it, and they’re both excited to fly out to Vancouver on Monday too before heading up to Anchorage on Tuesday. So long as the weather stays like this rather than all the rain!

Robotics is something I’ve wanted to get into for years, pretty much since Robotwars appeared on TV and the idea of creating big machines with flames coming out the top that were designed to smash other machines sounded like fun I raced various forms of remote controlled cars on + off for a number of years, but that was mainly build the cars, then set them up from race to race. But, programming a microchip and building a robot to figure it’s way through an obstacle course or similar seems like a good challenge, and then there’s stuff like the RoboGames each year (along with smaller regional gatherings) which includes events for small sumo-bots or robosoccer (check the videos!).

Anyway, Parallax caught my attention a while ago with their Boe-Bot robotics kit based off a BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller and mine arrived today. It seems a pretty good introduction to robotics, and the BS2 chip can be used for a bunch of other things too. Parallax make all their books available on-line in PDF format, so also I’ve worked through some basics with using the BS2 chip outside of controlling the Boe-Bot. With a number of projects included with the kit and components to allow the robot to make it’s own decisions based on position, speed, contact with objects, etc. it should keep me entertained for a while. When I have the rest of the circuitry built up and programmed for something slightly more advanced than moving backwards, forwards, and rotating around itself I’ll post some photos or videos

Using it within OS X was a little harder than inserting the CD and installing the software as Parallex don’t produce their programming suite for OS X or Linux, but others have written apps available for free online which work great. For anyone trying to use the USB version under OS X, download the FTDI VCP drivers here and then install MacBS2 by Murat Konar which is the equivalent of the Parallex programming tool for Windows. For code requiring user input using DEBUGIN, goSerial from Furrysoft works great for displaying the output the same as Debug Terminal does, but also capturing your inputs and sending them to the BS2 chip which MacBS2 can’t do yet. Simply select your USB connection under the ‘Serial Port’ option in goSerial, and then choose ‘9600 bps’ for the connection speed and it should work just fine so long as you close down MacBS2 first otherwise you have both apps trying to connect to the same port concurrently.

Now that I can steal Kat’s camera (she’s asleep, will never know ), I can put together some shots of a ‘little’ project I’ve been working the past month or so…

As I spend quite a bit of time playing flight simulator on the PC, using the mouse to click buttons to change radio frequencies, control the GPS, or even just flick switches to turn on or off navigation lights doesn’t quite cut it compared to sitting in the cockpit of a real airplane. This realisation materialised long before I actually took the intro flight in the Cessna 152 last month There are people who literally spend thousands of dollars and hundreds (if not thousands) of hours rebuilding complete Boeing 737 or Airbus A319 flight decks which look amazing, though a little difficult to accomplish out here. Plus, you’re pretty much pigeon-ed into flying that one particular type of aircraft. The in-between are companies like GoFlight or SimKits which build + sell individual panel components to connect together allowing to utilise them as you see fit and for controlling any aircraft you wish to load up in flight simulator. Again, fantastic units, but still more than a little pricey at $110 plus shipping for a basic 8-button or switch panel.

Since I can’t complain about not having time to build something similar myself and being able to pick + choose the various electrical components myself from various suppliers online, I er, did:

It still needs a couple of sheets of balsa wood for the top parts of each panel which I’ll get in Anchorage next month, but everything is functional and otherwise complete. Some of the labels aren’t perfectly straight and I could do with adjusting some of the push buttons on the autopilot panel so they are all aligned, but it wasn’t built to score any style points! It runs off four USB to 20 button interface modules produced by Desktop Aviator which provide the core controls. These were a great find, even if the articles on flightsim.com which explain how to use toggle switches, push buttons and rocker switches were slightly biased in recommending them given the author of the articles is the founder of the Desktop Aviator But, I liked the way I could buy just one or two and add in functionality over time (which is exactly what I did to make sure I could do what I wanted to do with them in the first place before).

The first completed section was based just off rocker switches and push buttons. The rotary switches for the autopilot panel were added later:

The electronics behind were not all that complicated - the push buttons connect straight to the input pins on the USB interface controller, whereas the toggle or rocker switches require a simple circuit built around an optoisolator to generate a ‘pulse’ as the switch is flicked to allow the computer to recognise the input. The flightsim.com article and instructions on the Desktop Aviator website explain it all in detail and isn’t hard, just time consuming, as this part of the panel required 20 of these small circuits to be soldered. But, figuring on about a $1 for a rocker/toggle switch, $1 for the optoislator, and maybe another $1 total for a capacitor, two resistors and diode, factoring in the USB controller being $29 for 20 inputs, you’re still looking at less than $5 per input. The fantastic plastic panels at 75c each also from Steve at Desktop Aviator were great too as it meant I could drill them however I wanted to group the buttons and switches to my liking.

The radio panel was the main section I wanted to build, as all available solutions are either complicated, expensive, or both. Dual rotary push button switches aren’t easy to find and pricey when you can, and also require either a separate interface controller (usually the more expensive kind used in high-end simulators where you have 80+ inputs per controller) or meant you have to program your own microcontroller to interpret rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise. For the hardcore who won’t accept anything less, they’ll pay quite a price for these kind of inputs, but me, I’ll take a little less!

Taking a basic single-pole 12-position rotary switch (one of the most commonly available at about $2.50) and wiring up pins 1-5-9 and then 3-7-11, it creates the equivalent of a standard toggle switch. To switch between Mhz and Khz when adjusting radio frequencies, after connecting the output of the rotary switch to the standard pulse circuit, the output of this pulse circuit normally going straight to the USB interface controller instead connects to what would be the output of a SPDT toggle switch. The upper terminal can then connect to an input pin on the controller, and the lower terminal to another input pin. Now, when you flip the toggle switch, the rotary controller’s output is sends a different event to the PC. Here’s the circuit to explain a bit better (yes, pretty much just what’s on the Desktop Aviator site):

With the way the rotary switch is wired, you only get a pulse sent on every second ‘click’ as we have a break between our contacts. In practice, this actually works nicely, as with FSUPIC which is used to pass the controls to flight sim, it needs a 1/4 second pause (I believe) between inputs otherwise it won’t recognise it, so if you were rotating very quickly, it wouldn’t register anyways. If you had a rotary switch that had a slightly smoother contact point on the rear (as oppose to mine which has quite a large ball which makes a definitive click and clunk), you probably wouldn’t notice it really. Still, our drawback (for the moment…) is that rotating either clockwise or counter-clockwise, we can’t make a difference in whether we’re increasing or decreasing our radio frequency. This is where the more complicated solutions involving a dedicated microcontroller would read in a binary output from the rotary switch (if we wired up our other contacts in the same manner) to calculate what position the switch is being moved to/from and thus whether it’s going up or down. In contact with Desktop Aviator, they are actually producing a pre-programmed chip to do just this, but no word on pricing. Anyway, my simple solution is to use a modifier key within FSUIPC.

In FSUIPC, I mapped each rotary switch to send a key command rather than an action in flight simulator. For example, rotating the rotary switch for COM 1 will map to Ctrl-C by FSUIPC, and then you can set Ctrl-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE INC. Fairly straightfoward. Then, add another key mapping for Ctrl-Shift-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE DEC. Hold down shift whilst rotating the rotary switch and now the frequency will decrease. Technically, you can continue rotating the rotary switch clockwise and it will decrease so long as you’re holding down the Shift key but that’s no fun As I use the CH Yoke, the left rear button on the yoke is set as the Shift key, so I simply hold my finger down on the button whilst rotating the rotary switch counter-clockwise to decrease the frequency; release the button and turn clockwise to increase the frequency. Repeat this key-mapping process where Shift acts as the modifier key to decrease the frequency for the other COM and NAV functions, and with the toggle switch on both Mhz and Khz.

Sounds like a clunky process, but in practice it’s all pretty natural. When leaning over to adjust the radios, you’d keep your left hand on the yoke anyway, so it’s no problem to press you finger on the button at the rear of the yoke. Flicking between the Mhz and Khz positions is no harder than moving your fingers between the inner and outer knobs on a dual-rotary switch. I also put in two push buttons for each control - one to enable the COM or NAV channel and another to switch standby frequency. Really, the only thing missing is an LED screen showing the frequency and your adjustments, but that’s getting back into substantially increasing cost + complexity. With this setup, each rotary switch requires 2 inputs on the USB interface controller, plus one each for selecting the channel and standby frequency. To do both COM 1 + 2 and NAV 1 + 2, it works out to about $50 including the cost of the USB interface controller. A 3rd of the price of the GoFlight unit, though admitedly requiring a little more work to get going and not providing exact functionality of those in a real airplane by having. Still, for those on budget and with the time and patience to build the controls themselves, very worthwhile.

Other cool features I included was a GPS panel which happily recreates the Garmin GNS 430’s found in the EagleSoft Cirrus SR-22 and the default Garmin 500 model within FS2004. The rotary controls work in the same way as the radio controls. I also used another rotary switch to represent the ignition switch of a GA aircraft, and then a selection of buttons and a toggle switch for sending the transponder code and going between standby + on. There’s no direct controls available for FSUIPC to do things like IDENT but you won’t get that unless you fly online with something like VATSIM, with clients providing that functionality anyways.

Whilst building these avionics panels, I also came a lightweight, quick, and free voice recognition utility called Shoot which allows you to speak commands and have the computer respond. This is my way of ‘talking’ to ATC without $50 on VoxATC or similar. Again, it’s not going to perfectly replicate talking to ATC with the correct phrases, but in conjunction with Peter Wilding’s control set and adding in a bunch of other commands, I can say “Ready for taxi for north departure” even though all Shoot sends to flight sim is ‘4′ (or whatever) to select from the text-based prompt in the ATC window. Makes things a lot more realistic, and after a few flights of adding in commands on the fly (no pun intended!) as I came across a new ATC command to set, I very fairly have to just say the numbers to move through menus.

All in all, pretty happy with the setup now, as it certainly gives me a lot more to do when flying, and kept me entertained for a good while figuring out how to do it all and then building up the circuits and wiring the controls. An awful lot cheaper than buying pre-built modules, and let me build it exactly how I wanted, such as for the GPS panel. If you have no interest in flight sim, all this has probably made no sense, but will at least give you something to read to help you sleep! And if anyone is trying to do something similar, let me know in the comments to share your ideas + suggestions or if you have any problems.

Kat’s sat in Bethel waiting to fly out - I’ve already been to the airport at 9a.m this morning after being told she was on her way into the village only to find it was a plane full of freight Good ‘ol Yute Air.

But, since I haven’t been able to take any photos recently, thought I’d play with some instead. I don’t have the money for Photoshop (or the desire to get carted off to jail like about 50% of Photoshop users ) so have used GIMPshop, based off the open-source graphics manipulation program GIMP, for a number of years. I know, I know, feel free to poke fun at the name in the comments section! This first one is isolating certain colours or parts of a photo whilst having the rest a black & white image based on this Instructables tutorial. Since I haven’t take any photos with this in mind, this is more a proof-of-concept thing

The idea works well at least. Not sure what I could use it on, but gives me something to look out for when taking photos in the future. This next one is again just playing around with different ideas + effects from this Instructables tutorial. Not the kinda of thing you’d put in a photo gallery, but some useful effects playing with layer masks and such:

Just a couple of cool results. I’ve also been messing around with Picnik, an online photo editing suite, which I’ve used for a while to do some basic editing on photos from Flickr since the start of the year, but there’s some good effects you can add like retro 60’s styling and text effects. Haven’t got round to creating anything worth sharing yet

But, Kat just got home Got the call whilst writing this up, so nice to have her home. Mia hasn’t stopped spazzing out yet either! Kat’s pretty tired, but glad to be home, and thought it was cool how much things have changed in just 3 weeks - when she flew out everything was still brown and dirty from the ice break-up and now there’s green everywhere! Sure she’ll sleep most of the day, but the important thing is she brought Subway…

Kat should be at Reno airport about now waiting for her flight out to Phoenix before heading up to Anchorage. Hopefully will get back into Tunt first thing tomorrow morning, though bad weather the last couple of days has been delaying some of the bush flights (even more than usual…), which will be the last thing she’ll want after 5 hours hanging Anchorage airport in the dead of night!

Mia went swimming on Saturday which was the first time she’s gone all the way into the lakes doggy-paddling - usually she would just slowly creep in whilst still standing up and then scrabble back when the water got to her chest, but I had her chasing sticks up by the new airport and she ended up going right in after them and thought it was great once she realised she could swim

Today I got my rebate check through from XFX for the graphics card I bought a couple of months back - not going to complain, as usually they take forever to be processed, and the $30 rebate is about 1/3 off which is better than sales in most department stores! $65 for a 256Mb DDR3 GEForce 8600GT isn’t too shabby and has worked great.

Anyway, suppose I should go back to cleaning the house now the golf has finished…

Yesterday afternoon Nick, Dana and I went fishing up to the Gallic River where the locals ‘apparently’ go fishing. I say ‘apparently’, as we saw no fishing holes and could barely keep on the trail up there as it’s not widely used! We had the auger so cut a few holes within 5-10 minutes (damn sight easier than using an ice pick to break through existing holes!) and started fishing, but had about as much luck as fishing downriver from Tunt. It was a nice afternoon though, around 5F without much wind, and the ride was pretty cool through the soft snow and across bare tundra without following a trail. I’ll see if Dana had any good photos I can post. Some of Dana’s family are coming up here tomorrow so Nick wanted to check he could get out to the fishing holes and see if there were some holes already cut, but I don’t think I could find my way back there without getting lost as the wind covers the trail pretty quick

I got my PC up and running over the weekend too - genius that I am brought over a bunch of game CD’s and applications for photo + video editing, but not the driver CD for the system board, so that took a while to download them off the internet. My graphics card (256Mb ATI Radeon 9550) seems to have gone belly up though, probably with bouncing around on airplanes when I moved over here. Works fine just on the desktop, but get all sorts of tearing, streaking and artifacts on screen at low-level (such as BIOS or OS splash screen is loaded) and anytime it kicks into a game. Tried different drivers, flashing BIOS, etc. but simply putting in a basic 32Mb don’t-ask-me-to-do-3D card works without problems so it’s not the system board. Annoying as it would still run at 50-60fps, just can’t make out what the hell it’s trying to display on screen! But, Amazon have a $30 mail-in rebate on a GeForce 8600GT with 256Mb DDR3 bringing it down to $65 delivered which is daft considering they were $150 a few months ago, and will kick the pants off the 9550 I paid the same for a couple of years back. That’s PC technology though, especially graphics cards.

Since the photographs I’ve taken over the past few years have been well received and generated a lot of positive comments, I’ve started up a small side-business of sorts at http://www.iainfoulds.com with a collection of the some of the highest quality photos available for purchase.

All prints come presented on 5″x7″ premium photo paper with a gloss finish, mounted in a pure white mat frame and individually wrapped in a clear plastic display bag. If I do say so myself, the prints look very impressive - Kat has one in her classroom which is getting quite a bit of attention

Priced at only $10 per print (check local currency rates), they are attractively priced and available from the comfort of your own home. Shipping is free for all US customers, and international orders are only $10 (up to a maximum of 40 prints…) via Priority Air Mail. Given the exchange rate, most international orders are getting a right steal!

Browse the available galleries, or feel free to request a custom print of something not currently on there, and see if anything is appealing for yourself or as a gift - the “Yup’ik Life” collection of photographs from up here in Alaska are certainly unique!

US orders are ready to ship now, with International orders ready to go in a few days (feel free to order now so your prints can be shipped as soon as possible), and a replacement or money back guarantee is provided on all prints. More information on shipping + ordering is available here.

So, my PayPal account back in the UK is under review in-line with European money laundering regulations. First a hunting licence, then money laundering. Am on a roll this week!

Since I’ve been moving money back + forth between US + UK accounts the past year or so, I’ve hit some monetary limit they have in place before a review is required to prevent naughty going’s on. Is a bit weird, as it isn’t actually limiting me from doing anything as they detailed, since I was able to go ahead and withdraw the money I transfered in anyways There’s two verification steps you have to complete for the review - first, PayPal deposit two small amounts into your bank account and you report back what they were. I’ve already done that years ago, but PayPal want to give me another 7p… Second, they set up an automated phone call where you enter a provided security code, but, they let you change the number they call you on anyways. So if someone was fraudulently accessing my account, they could simply have changed the telephone number, requested the call, then entered the security code shown on screen…

Ah well, it’s the last payment going into my UK account as everything will be cleared up once the withdrawal is complete. As a 7 year PayPal customer, seems like as with most things they inconvenience the genuine users due to the actions of the few.