mmrobins.com

I’m finally trying to make the complete switch over to linux from windows. As much as I consider myself good with computers I’ve had too many problems getting things to work in the past to stick with any linux install. (more…)

I’ve almost got WordPress setup how I want it. (more…)

I just found out about a new online service called Audioscrobbler that keeps track of what music you listen to. Most music players do this now, but I think it’s much more interesting when you can view the data on the web. (more…)

• Listening To: Mike Doughty

I’ve been wanting some more features for my writing, like categorization, someplace to put extra pages like my resume, more security settings, and just being able to tinker with php. (more…)

• Watching: That 70's Show

biofeedback070705
Originally uploaded by mattandkim.

I’ve been playing The Journey to Wild Divine more and am fascinated by the biofeedback. I’m a very visual person so I was pleased to find a utility to graph what’s going on during the game. These graphs are of heart rate and galvanic skin response, or as the game calls it, skin conductance level (SCL). This is basically a measurement of how electricity travels across your skin and is a not very sophisticated, but cheap form of biofeedback. Apparently the game extracts more useful data out of your heart rate variability. The way I understand it, when you’re relaxed, your heart rate is more variable. I’m not sure how to read this very well on the graph however.

For the first part of this graph, I’m just sitting up and watching the reaction. At the point where the galvanic skin response line dips constantly lower, I lay down and begin to take deep breaths until the end of the graph. The galvanic skin response seems obvious to read in relation to my relaxation level, but it doesn’t seem nearly so obvious how the heart rate correlates.

Fun stuff that I’ll definitely be doing more research on. I’d really like to get a device that could measure brain waves as I’ve read quite a bit about the different states of brain activity (beta, alpha, theta, delta).

del.icio.us is a site that I’ve known about for a while, but haven’t tried it until now. It’s a social bookmarking site. My verdict is that it is cool, especially since I like organizing and categorizing things to death. It’s like Flickr for bookmarks. My del.icio.us site is http://del.icio.us. If anyone else sets one of these up let me know what your del.icio.us id is. We’ll see how much I actually make use of it.

After coming home from Kripalu I was reading a magazine on the plane and there was a cool ‘video game’ in an add. It’s called The Journey to Wild Divine, and is played using biofeedback sensors that measure your heart rate variability and skin conductance. It can measure how relaxed or tense you are, so it especially appealed to me after being at Kripalu. I’ve been playing it for a while now and it’s definitely very cool. The plot of the game is a little weird sometimes, but it’s extremely cool to see a video game react to your breathing and stress level. For example, there’s an elevator and if you flex your muscles and shout it goes up, while if you breath deeply and relax it goes down. One of the weirdest parts is a section where two people are involved, each person with a finger in the sensors, and it tells you to hold hands. If you let go of each other’s hands the game recognizes it and tells you. The gameplay is like Myst, with static predrawn scenes that have one or two interactive pieces you can click on. The music is nice and relaxing, but nothing I would listen to on my own. There’s definitely some hard parts too. Some of the challenges require you to be very relaxed, and it definitely takes some practice unless you’re already really good at meditation. Of course, it’s a bit expensive, and they want to sell you all sorts of expansions, but it’s novel enough that I can understand the price. It’s about time video games did something different like this.

Gabe has a computer that we’ve designated as the media server at our house to hold music, movies and other media files. I’ve always wanted to try to setup a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) to record TV, basically like a Tivo. I got a good deal on a Hauppauge Win-TV-250 TV tuner card and went about setting up the software. This proved more difficult than I thought. I always heard MythTV was cool so I downloaded Knoppmyth to try to get it running but didn’t have much luck. The TV signal didn’t come in and I don’t think there’s any way that it was gonna easily support the wireless internet card.

The server already had Windows XP on it, so I figured rather than trying to download a linux distro with good wireless support and then configuring MythTV I’d try finding some windows PVR software.

The first thing I tried was BeyondTV, which isn’t free but had a trial period. It worked great right out of the install, but it didn’t have a way to play music or other movies off the hard drive. You could configure the remote to control other programs like Winamp or Windows Media Player, but it wasn’t very slick.

So far I’ve settled on an open source piece of software for windows called Media Portal. So far it looks like it does almost everything I want well. It took a little while to get setup, but it looks like it’s under pretty heavy devolopment so I imagine it’s going to improve quickly. I think the hardest thing was getting the tv schedule using XMLTV, which you have to download and configure to use a Zap2it account. It seems a little buggy watching TV sometimes, but the music and movies interfaces are awesome.

I may still try to configure MythTV sometime on Fedora Core 4, but only if I find the time.

Communication on the internet is getting more interesting every day. I’m sure a lot of you have noticed that I’ve started using flickr for sharing photos, and yahoo recently acquired flickr. I’m excited to see how yahoo integrates flickr into their services, especially since I’ve been using yahoo mail for a long time. Just recently I’ve been using yahoo music engine, and I’ve been waiting to see yahoo’s new blog, 360. I was looking forward to centralizing most of my web communication in yahoo until I read this article about independence and privacy on the web. I’ve always liked the free web services out there like yahoo mail, blogger, friendster, myspace, etc, but now with so much free open source software out there, I feel like I shouldn’t tie myself to any one web service. I want to just get my own domain and host everything there: my blog, my photos, contacts, my calendar, IM lists. Problem with that is TIME! Who has the time for such things? If I had time to do all that I wanted creating my own web space wouldn’t even be one of the top three things. I guess the whole point of all this is that I’m hoping someone will create an open, all encompassing, flexible web place much like flickr but for everything. There’s plenty of open source projects out there trying to do something like this, but none of them seem nearly mature enough yet. The money just doesn’t seem to be in open source yet. Blah, okay, like I have time for this rant even.