10 years ago people feared robots, artificial intelligence, and in general automation. If you think about it when robotic assembly lines were first introduced thousands of American’s lost their jobs to these machines. They didn’t like them. The machines could work for hours without a break, they didn’t have a union, and basically were seen as slave workers who performed the same jobs that the American’s did but did it cheaper, faster, and better than any human could.

This was seen as magic to many people, in fact, I remember talking to an ex-miner whose job was replaced by an automatic excavator. He described the machine as though it was a beast. Without heart, not needing rest… relentlessly gnawing at the dirt he said.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from MAGIC.
– Arthur C. Clarke

These average workers didn’t understand that the machines made their lives easier; they didn’t want to train on how to use or repair them. They were happy doing the labor that they had been doing. Working for an honest pay. Hollywood saw this and decided to take advantage of it.

Movies like Terminator and War Games they showcased to the general public how bad computers could be. Even though it was all science fiction it still hit at a time when people could relate to it.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
–Omar N. Bradley

Now fast forward to 2002 when the world got it’s first look at the Roomba. A household robot that actually helped make lives easier for people. Just about everyone had a computer. Artificial intelligence was only heard about from brainiacs and skynet was the Internet. Hollywood still was trying to push out a new Terminator or Battlestar Galactica and there were still holdouts that had either retired or were going to school to retrain on how to use computers. America had come out of a labor country and into a new age where everyone had jobs that required more brainpower and less brute force. Robots are seen as helpers not the evil overlords / magical beast we thought they were.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
–Theodor Adorno

Now fast forward to the present. Technology and robotics are accepted. We have more illegal immigrants doing the “hard labor” jobs in this country than we have American’s and high school students are graduating with an associate’s degree. We are in debt up to our eyeballs and the average entrepreneur has to take out a huge loan to get a business of the ground because of the level and cost of technology involved in everyday life.

However, we now mass-produce everything the same across a thousand units. We work in micrometers for accuracy in machining and yet anything hand-made is deemed to be better quality. Machines help us in every way from vending machines to arthroscopic surgeries.

Social Media brings the internet to the last few holdouts and we are now living in a time deemed the “Internet of Things” or as the Terminator crowd would put it “SkyNet”… but hey computers are dumb, they require an operator, right? We are reaching a time when every segment of technology is advancing faster and faster because everyone has a basic knowledge set and can speak the same language and if they can’t they at least know how to use “the Google”.

So with everyone knowing about robots, computers, programming, and sharing information the next phase is the DIY (Do It YourSelf) phase. Robot parts are cheap; you can buy a kit, or build it from scratch. The latest innovations are no longer coming from corporations or investors but rather 15-30yr old’s who just built something cool and want to share it with the world. Anybody today can be an inventor. Robots are seen as essential and robotic innovation is seen as a personal challenge.

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
–Marshall McLuhan

Movies like WALL-E and Real Steal make robots emotional and cause us to be come attached. I would not be surprised if sometime before I die I have a Rosie the robot (Jetson’s) in my kitchen cooking breakfast, reminding me to brush my teeth, and kissing me on the cheek before I leave the house.

Just a random thought
David Bates

iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

You could have seen it first on Google +

1. +Google+ to Twitter: Takes the short title of the post and the url and post to Twitter.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/18784

2. +Google+ to FaceBook: Shares the URL of the post (FaceBook will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19024

3. +Google+ to Linked In: Shares the URL of the post (Linked In will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19023

4. +Google+ to WordPress Blog: Shares the full content of the G+ post with the tag "iftttb" in the body of a post on the blog (with pictures) You should edit the post in wordpress to your satisfaction.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19025
I hope you find these useful.
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

If This Then That is a set of webapi's that allows you to interlink accounts with actions. http://ifttt.com

Why I Use IFTTT
I use ifttt in order to broadcast my message from G+ to my other social accounts. Recently I have decided that G+ will be my platform of choice for originating my content but I have felt like I just abandoned my friends and family on facebook, twitter, my blog, and IN. I didn't want to do that so I have been posting things in several areas which ment I didn't get it right all the time and left several big gaping holes in content that I sent out to my friends. This is where ifttt came to the rescue.

How I Use IFTTT
The first step is to get an RSS feed of your Google + account. I use http://gplus-to-rss.appspot.com/ all you have to do is enter your G+ user id into a field and it pulls back an RSS feed of your latest post.

don't know how to get your G+ ID? http://ansonalex.com/google-plus/how-do-i-find-my-google-plus-user-id-google/

Next you can either use predefined recipes or create your own custom task.
I chose to create my own as I wanted full control of the message being delivered.

The four action I have are:

G+ to Twitter: This action takes an abbreviated portion of any post in my feed and shares it plus a link to the full post on twitter.

G+ to FaceBook: This action takes the URL of the latest post and simply adds the message "My Latest G+ Post" on it. This behaves just like sharing a link on FaceBook, it will fill in the short description and url.

G+ to Linked In: this works the same as the FaceBook feed but with Linked In

G+ to my Blog: This is probably the most tricky one. I use wordpress as the backend to http://dlbates.com/blog/ so I wanted any google plus content that I tag with iftttb to post to my blog. For this I told IFTTT to search through my RSS information and if it contains the tag then post the content to my blog with a custom title and tag.

One more thing to mention is that if you do this like I have done you may want to disconnect the interlinking you may have setup through twitter and linked in or you will have duplicate post.

Enjoy
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

yesterday was so nice outside we decided to let the kids burn off some steam. Daniel's friend Ayana (Yawny) decided to join in on the fun as well. I decided to snap a few photos while I was out there. It was good for me to get some fresh air as well since I have been cooped up in the house since last Friday.

Hope you enjoy your weekend!
David

You could have seen it first on Google +

Another one of my coworker’s whiteboards digitized. This one focuses on how QR codes are popping up everywhere. First it was restaurants and now they can be found in everything from grocery stores to hardware warehouses. Soon people will be placing QR codes on the backs of their cars instead of using long web addresses and maybe even panhandlers will now have Paypal accounts in order to collect their donations.

Smart phones and mobile computing sure have made our lives more connected.

This has become a great tradition now that we all have kids. Even our neighbor joined in on the fun. I truly enjoy just getting some time to hang out with them and teach the young ones how to carve up a pumpkin.

Sunday we decided to skip church since my mom was willing to watch the kids and allow me and the wife to have a date afternoon. It was a great time. Me and Jess never get to spend time away from the kids and although we love them to peices, having a moment to sit and enjoy a meal with your partner in life is a precious thing. However, you’ll probably laugh, we took our date at Chili’s and then went to Sam’s club to do the weeks grocery shopping

Enjoy the photos.

I love JQuery and I love JQuery UI even more but what I love most about the combination of the two is that they are cross browser compatible, delivered over a CDN network, and open source. This means that I can use anything I build on top of these two very powerful platforms in any website I wish, including the enterprise ones.

I was recently tasked with building a lightbox element that would allow me to showcase Vimeo videos (or any other content) in a cross browser CDN enabled way. At first I scoured the web looking for the best jquery lightbox plugin. I tried fancybox, shadowbox, thickbox, slimbox, facebox, other younameit-box plugins but they all either catered to one type of content, failed in the cross browser arena, or had unknown or grey licensing.

On day two of my growing frustration a friend of mine suggested I look at JQuery UI and specifically the Dialog method. So I did and was instantly hooked, and while it didn’t provide all of the functionality you need from a lightbox it came pretty darn close. So I began hacking away until I got down to a pretty comprehensive lightbox solution for video and then wrote a little helper function to populate the content area on the fly and set the title. What follows is how to do that:

Step one: includes

So first you need to include JQuery and JQuery UI within your page. The easiest way to do this is use Google’s CDN by placing the following two lines in your head.
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=" https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.js"></script>

You will also need to include a JQuery UI theme you can use the starter theme hosted on Google’s CDN too!

<link href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/themes/ui-darkness/jquery-ui.cs"
type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" />

Again that needs to be placed in your head.

Step two: create a div

We need to create a div that will not only hold our dialog but also most of the embed code for the video’s we will want to play.
I would suggest adding this code near the footer of the page since it will load an iframe.

<div id="videoPlayerDiv">
<iframe id="theVideo" src="" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>


Step three .dialog()

Now you need some JQuery magic on page load as well as creating the helper function
<script type="text/jscript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true, title: "RFMD Video", width: 664, resizable: false });
$("#videoPlayerDiv").bind("dialogclose", function (event, ui) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', '');
});

});
function SetVideo(source, title) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', source);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog("option", "title", title);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('open');
$('.ui-widget-overlay').click(function () { $('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('close'); });
};
</script>
This can go in your header or wherever you might have already put the $(document).ready clause.

Final step: Call your helper function

So now all you need to do is call the helper function and pass it the src url for the video and the title

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:SetVideo('http://player.vimeo.com/video/18888136?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=af0522"&autoplay=1', 'Courtesy Vimeo User 1024');return false;">Video</a>

You can prolly tell I use asp.net from the javascript surrounds and return false. If you don’t use .net you don’t need this.

Demo

Click to open demo

Back in May we bought an 08 Town and Country with very low miles and it was all decked out, power everything, navigation, leather… you get the idea. We lovd it and it was in our price range.
About a week after we brought it home we had non-stop problems with it. Check engine lights, tire pressure monitoring problems, doors jamming, seats jamming, and finally the sunroof started leaking. Since we had bought the car from Carmax I started to communicate to them through the store and twitter. They were so helpfull and after replacing the computer they said if you have any more trouble we’ll buy the car back from you and they did just that.

So last sunday me and the wife set out to find a car that will hold 6 ppl comfortably and within the same price range. I was looking to get all of those features back but since the wife is the one who drives it day in and out I decided it was best to just let her pick the car she liked and felt comfortable with. All in all we looked at about 7-10 cars, she liked some I liked others, and we settled on a 2011 Kia Sedona. It had very low miles, was brand new, but had very few features. So we bought it, added a DVD Player to it and now everybody is happy. Take a look at the pictures below.

Thank you CarMax you are truely a great dealership.

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