Making a recumbent bike "desk" with off-the-shelf parts for under $400. Is it possible? I'm finding out.

I've needed to get back in shape for a while, but I'm working full time, then add 3-4 hours a day for day-care pickups, dinner prep, baths, bed time stories, etc. Then add another 60-90 minutes after the kids are off to bed that I have to be at home because the wife's still at work. The only way to get to the gym is to go at 10 p.m. or 4:30 a.m. The rest of my day is mostly booked.

But I'm sitting at my home office's desk right now, writing a blog post. I'll be sitting at it tomorrow, working on my novel. And I'll be sitting at it next month, working on learning Flash and programming a game. So why not get in some exercise while I'm sitting at my desk?

I could do a treadmill desk but they run pretty expensive, in the neighborhood of 2-4k. Additionally, the point of an exercise desk is that you exercise slowly enough that you can still concentrate on work, but you end up putting in more time because you do it for a few hours.

So, because it was cheaper, lower impact, and it looked more comfortable for putting in hours per day, I picked a recumbent bike. But when I went looking for an office solution, there was nothing. There were some hobbyists and a cheap upright bike with a desk. There were some stand alone pedaling thingamajobbers that go under your desk, but there were no solutions with completely "off-the-shelf" products that guaranteed I would not be bumping my knees whenI pedaled or having to sit too far back from my desk to reach the keyboard.

I started looking for something that I could fit over or around a recumbent bike, adjust to accomodate the movement of my legs, and maybe tilt up a bit in back and down in front to make it more friendly.

If you've ever been in the hospital, you've seen those long, thin tables for the hospital beds. They're sort of shaped like a big U on its side, so the wheeled base slides under the bed, the table slides over the bed, and the "bottom" of the U is adjustable so the table can be at the right height. I figured a table like that, coming in from the side, with adjustable height, would possibly create the right work environment.

Imagine my surprise when I found there are laptop caddy tables that offer a single support at the side, or at least off-center.

I ordered the Schwinn A20 recumbent bike from Amazon for $248.99 and the Windsor laptop stand for $89.99.

And here's how they look together...
  

It all works together nicely, but just works. Having it in a comfortable position puts both the side pole and the under-table support within an inch or two of being hit by my knee/leg. I was, however, able to do a nice 2 miles on it in a test run during the set-up without hitting anything and comfortably typing away. When I needed to do something sort of precise, I found myself slowing down my bicycling so I could concentrate on what I was doing with my hands, but overall it worked very nicely.

Two things that will take some fine-tuning to cure. The first one is that I have everything angled so I get the reflection of the office window on my glossy screen. Turning/positioning the whole shebang better should handle that. The second was that the table is slightly wobbly on carpet. Sliding a board under the bike and putting the table on the solid surface helped immensely with the wobbling.

Now the question will be whether I can use this consistently and knock down the miles and calories while I use my laptop, and whether I can actually work at it well, not just answer e-mails, facebook, and watch videos.

I'll post again in a couple of weeks to let you know.

Most of you know what JavaScript is. It's a programming language that allows you to do client-side tasks in the browser (programs you embed in a web page that are run by the user's browser, rather than on the web server). Fewer might know about WebKit.

WebKit is an engine for powering a web browser. When Apple went to create Safari, they borrowed and built upon an open source engine called KHTML which was created by the KDE project. Over the years, it's stayed open, stayed free, tried to stay ahead of the technological curve, and by many opinions, is less bloated and burdened with legacy code than the open source engine that powers Firefox.

And it's spread. Webkit powers Safari on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and the upcoming iPad. It powers much of the new Google Chrome browser and the Google Chrome OS. WebKit powers the built-in browsers on Android and the Palm Pre. It also underpins multiple cross-platform application frameworks, including Adobe Air and Appcelerator Titanium. I haven't spent a lot of time researching it, but it seems that Blackberry's going WebKit for it's main browser and you can get a WebKit browser for your Windows Mobile phone.

Basically, you get the broadest range of targetable systems not with Flash, not with Java, but by targeting development to WebKit.

Most of your smartphone users will go with the built in browser. Even if they downloaded something else, it's hard or impossible to delete the built-in browser in many phones, so they'll have it. If you want to make sure your desktop/laptop users are running a WebKit browser, just package up the front page of your web application in Adobe Air or Titanium Appcelerator and the framework's runtime will bundle your app around a runtime that gives you all that WebKit functionality.

With client-side databases, "offline" mode (web scripts can determine when the browser is offline and continue to offer various services), some pretty cool JavaScript libraries for user interface animation and 2-D gaming, HTML5's native handling of video and audio, and the ever-expanding functionality of the Canvas element, applications will continue to migrate to the browser. As more browsers offer a standardized option for user scripts (3rd party scripts that run after a page loads... with the user's permission), even more ways to blur the line between desktop and web app enter the picture.

Don't get me wrong. You're not going to see the whole computing experience handled inside the browser. For some computationally intensive tasks like video compression and 3-D gaming, you just need the pure, throaty roar of compiled code running natively on the platform you're using. But where pure speed, power, and access to various hardware devices isn't needed, you're going to find enterprising souls creating online competition for your favorite desktop apps, and it's all going to be handled in your browser by its built-in functionality.

After a week of trying to figure out the best way to structure my latest secret project, I've decided to target WebKit, because with a combination of a WebKit-based framework for the desktop and WebKit powering the default browsers on a huge portion of the smartphone universe, it's going to give my project the broadest possible reach.

On Wednesday, they twittered: "Pretty darn cool software for anyone wanting to ensure credit is given to your content that is copied http://tcr1.tynt.com/." I went over to the site and discovered the beta version of a funky little javascript tool called Tracer. I just got approved for the beta and installed it here on Brainhandles.

I'll quote their technical FAQ here...

Q. What user actions does Tracer measure?
A. Tracer is designed to measure user engagement in a completely new way. Currently, Tracer measures when a user:
1. Copies text
2. Copies an image
3. Highlights content while reading

Read more: "FAQ - Technical topics « Tynt Blog" - http://blog.tynt.com/?page_id=130#ixzz09f8QfCOp

Notice that "Read More" line at the bottom of the quote. That wasn't on the page. That was added by the Tracer script when I highlighted and copied if from their FAQ. Now, in general, it's really very easy for someone to just delete that line when they paste your content to something, but it also sort of acts as a reminder that they should credit the source and gives them a direct link for doing it.

Overall, though, I'm really interested to see what kind of stats they generate and how those stats break down. Understanding what bits are being highlighted and/or copied on my pages is an interesting insight as to how people are engaging with my content. Are all the highlight/copy actions going to be the bits of PHP code I post occasionally, or am I going to be finding people copying favorite quotes from the novel I've been publishing here?

If you've got a blog and you host it yourself (installing their code in the footer.php file within WordPress was a buh-reeze), you might want to consider signing up for their beta and trying it for yourself.

A friend of my sister just sent one out this morning. It has a nice inspirational message about how money can buy a house, but not a home, can buy sex but not love, etc. Then it says:

One man, got his first copy of the proverb in 1953 and asked his secretary to make him 20 copies. Nine hours later he won $99 million in the lottery in his country.

Of course, if you do some research into the history of gambling, such a result is highly unlikely. In most countries that had lotteries at that time, $99 million would be stupendous. In 1954, Italian lottery revenue was $45 million. In 1955, Australians spent a grand total of $62 million on lottery tickets for the year. Adjusted for inflation, that $99 million dollar jackpot would be worth $759 million in 2007. This claim is most likely a lie.

But here's where it becomes evil.

An employee of his received the same card, but did not forward it. A few days later he lost his job. After that, he changed his mind, sent it and became rich.

In 1967, another man got the proverb; he laughed about it and discarded it. A few days later his son got sick. The man looked for the note, made 20 copies, and sent them. Nine days later, he got good news: his son was safe and sound.

What kind of "good luck" threatens to harm your children?

Basically, you're not sending people good luck. You're sending them bad luck that they must pass on to others to avoid. And if they do what the evil letter tells them, they will be rewarded.

If you pass on chain letters, you're a tool of evil. And you don't want to be a tool, do you?

From: "Microsoft Award Promo" <06826134d@polyu.edu.hk>
To: undisclosed-recipients

This is to inform you that you have won $2.5 Million USD in the
quarterly promo of the Microsoft Award Promo.Your email address was
attached to the winning number.Contact the Claims Agent right away his
email address is: marysmithclaimagent@gmail.com Regards, Steven Smith.

Now there are a number of red flags here:

• the nonsense address it was sent from, supposedly at some educational institution in Hong Kong.
• that it's to "undisclosed recipients," meaning it was bulk mailed to multiple people who each presumably won this $2.5 million prize.
• the reply address isn't at Microsoft.com, but at a free mail service.

But what's the biggest sign this is bogus? Gmail.com is owned by Google, considered by Microsoft to be one of its greatest competitors. This would be like someone telling you that you won the Coca Cola sweepstakes and to reply to an e-mail address at Pepsi.

Not sure who to consider a bigger dummy, the brain-dead criminal who spammed this out or anyone who falls for it.

We got a portable air conditioner a while back, and when it gets this hot, we trundle it out to cool down our bedroom. Because my wife wasn't feeling well, I experimented with putting it up on a table and blowing it out over the bed, so she could lay down and cool off. We have a fairly tall bed (top of the mattress is at the bottom of my ribcage and I'm 6' tall), so when it was on top of the table, the cold air vent was just a little higher than the top of the mattress.

It worked within reason and seemed to be more effective on cooling the room overall than when it's on the floor, but the vent wouldn't blow straight out. It blew slightly upward. And due to logistical issues, the AC unit couldn't be right at the foot of the bed. Thus the cold air was blown upward above the bed, not providing much more direct relief from the heat than how it cooled the room.

At bed time, we were both hot, and though the AC's thermostat read that the room was at 75, I was still sweating when I laid on the bed. I came up with the idea of attaching a spare bedsheet over the AC unit and extending that to the bed. The cold air would be trapped by the sheet and blow out from under it, getting cool air directly onto the bed where it was most needed.

It worked beautifully. We could put our feet under the sheet and cool them down, which helps cool the body, and then the cool air flowed up up our bodies. After a minute or two of cold air washing over her, my wife turned to me and asked if she'd recently told me how much she loved me. I was too busy chilling my man parts to reply. If you're a man who hasn't known the joy of a sustained blast of cool air washing over your man parts on a hot day, let me highly recommend it. Cool man parts are happy man parts.

I believe my wife felt the same way about her newly cooled lady parts, which is why she was reminded of how much she loves me. Ahhhh, cool man parts and the love of a good woman. Is there anything better?

Of course, this state could not be sustained. With cold air, "too much of a good thing" is a very real concept. But in that brief period of joy, brought to us by my improvised Wind Tunnel of Love, we could forget it was "bite someone's head off" hot outside and just enjoy life for a moment.

If you've read my blog assiduously, all three of you, you know we enjoy BBC America and some of its sci-fi and comedy offerings. Anyhoo, we were watching "That Mitchell and Webb Look" (it's no "Little Britain", but it'll do) and they were doing a sketch where two Nazi SS officers were discussing whether or not they were "the baddies."

They're on the Russian front, and as an aside in the conversation, one of them says: "If there's anything we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat, it's that Soviet agriculture is in dire need of mechanization." My wife and I busted up.

We are such geeks.

So, originally the plan had been to do 8 separate art pieces for my wife for our anniversary (which was today), then combine them all into one big piece and print and frame it for her. Eight is still the eventual goal, but the number I could get done by the anniversary was three, and I printed and framed two pieces separately instead of combining them all.

The first piece I printed was the "We Are Ladies" homage to "Little Britain". It turned out very nicely.

The second piece was a new one which combined six public domain images from NASA with one of our wedding photos (the wedding photo is not public domain).

One of the ways my wife impressed me on our first date was that she knew many of the various forms Zeus had taken to seduce mortal women in Greek mythology. Meeting a woman as beautiful and smart as her who also was into Greek mythology... be still my heart... No, really. I've been a mythology buff since I was 9.

But that just turned out to be a symptom of her deep-rooted sci-fi geekery. She and I watch "Doctor Who" and "Heroes" together (and "Eureka" and "The 4400" and "Torchwood"), plus we bring home sci-fi books and trade them. Part of our anniversary celebration the last two years (last year and this year) is to just go geek out at a book store.

So sometimes I call her "my sci-fi bride," and that was the theme I decided to use for the art piece.

The landscape at the bottom is a detail from a Mars Rover image from within Victoria crater, chopped off at the skyline. The background is a detail from a larger photo of a stellar spire in the Eagle Nebula. The planet in the upper left is Venus, radar imaged and color coded for elevation. The woman is, of course, my wife. And the space craft range from a space tug to a satellite to the ISS.

I framed it with a gold colored wood frame, with the gold really picking up colors from Venus nicely, and it's now hanging in our upstairs hallway. She liked it very much.

Her art project for me... The Luggage from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It was TOO cool.

READ ALL THE INSTALLMENTS: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [here]

Before you go thinking Moniker is shady, almost all domain registrars, including GoDaddy and Network Solutions, offer a "private registration" service where they or a subsidiary register the domain for you, but in their name, so your personal or business information doesn't have to be part of the domain registration record. In some cases this is a very legitimate thing. In most cases, it isn't, but it's a way for the registrars to make more money.

So, while they didn't have the red flag of being in Russia, they did have the red flags of the domain being barely a week old and being set up so the real owner is kept secret.

Here's the graphic.

Following that, they had this text...

To unsubscribe please go here
or send mail to:
19800 MacArthur Blvd., Ste. 300,
Irvine, CA 92612

To no longer receive Advertisements from us Click here to unsubscribe, or write: List Administrator 110 W. 9th St #311 Wilmington, DE 19801

That's one of the problems with crooks. They have no thought for quality control. They didn't think that conflicting unsubscription instructions might be a dead giveaway that they were full of crap. They also didn't bother to copy edit their graphic. The plural of guru is not "guru's". There's no apostrophe needed.

The two addresses they provide... Normally such addresses are bull. They're real, but pulled from a directory and the scammer has no actual presence there. The one in Newport Beach is an office building with a temporary office suite rentals service. The one in Wilmington is a UPS store with wi-fi service. Now I know legitimate businesses that use temporary office suite rentals and UPS stores, so those aren't red flags in and of themselves. But when you combine their anonymizing power with the anonymous domain registration, it's just another red flag. Do you really want to do business with someone who is hiding their identity from you?

I didn't click on their link for two reasons. They may be trying to use the site to infect people with spyware and viruses. I didn't want them to get encouraged to do more scam spamming by getting a click through on their bogus ad.

Once again... no legitimate business needs average joes to cash checks for it. Nobody's going to give you something for nothing. If it seems to be too good to be true, investigate it until it screams before you even consider saying yes.

Best of luck to you all.

CONFIRMATION OF YOUR EMAIL REF NUMBER
You have won USD850,000.00 in BELGISCHE LOTTERY Email Sweepstakes Progam Corporation, held on the 5th of MARCH. 2008.in Belgium.We write to officially notify you of this award and to advise you to contact the processing office immediately for the Claim.
Contact person,MR.JOE VAN HAEZEBROUK.
TEL:[removed]
E-mail:[removed]
WINNING INFORMATION'S
Reference No (14-23-16-40-48),
Lucky No 15-24-44-17-27-33
Batch No 3-12-30-8-42-10
Ticket No 28-20-15-19-21
Remember,all winning must be claimed not later than 4th of April, 2008
Sincerely,
Mrs.Helenna Debecker.

Even more silly is the fact that these people send these notices from free e-mail accounts or from addresses where the domain (like viola.fr for this one or big-web.us for the South African Lottery one I posted earlier) has absolutely nothing to do with the lottery they claim to represent.

Sadly, they wouldn't keep doing it if there weren't people who fell for it. I mean the big red flag is the sudden e-mail that you won a lottery you never entered. But if you need more proof it's a scam, notifications from e-mail addresses not affiliated with that lottery (if it even exists) are another red flag.

Be on your guard. No one is offering something for nothing.

Over the next couple of months, they'll be fixing up bugs, heading toward a new "stable" release, which will provide all those cool new features with a lot fewer worries about crashing. While Inkscape doesn't have some import/export filters that I sort of need, I LOVE drawing in Inkscape, a lot more so than Adobe Illustrator. It's got professional quality tools and its more fun to use. So a new release with more cool tools rocks.

Thanks Inkscape people!!!

"Content wants to be free" makes as much sense as "content wants to be a fireman" or "music is a Republican."

When you say "content wants to be free," you actually mean, "I don't want to pay for content" or "I believe in creating free content to share with others because it's a social good" (though 98% of people are in the first camp and a very noble 2% are in the second camp). Regardless, you're talking about your own desires, but projecting them on an inanimate object the way a three-year-old does.

"Content wants to be free... and my teddy bear wants a chocolate chip cookie... and my shirt wants a hug."

Free content is a good thing and I support free content projects like the Open Clipart Library (I've given money, time, code, and some artwork I created or owned), but let's stop talking like three-year-olds, please.

Roy Diga
Roy Vincent Diga
or Roy V. Diga

Well, there will be now (once Google indexes this page), and maybe, just maybe, if he's out there and Googles himself, he'll stumble upon this page and e-mail me.

"We've established what kind of girl you are," he replies. "Now we're just haggling over the price."

When it comes to a lot of the more vocal proponents of abolishing copyright, that punch line applies.

The problem with a large part of the anti-copyright crowd is that they don't understand or won't admit what copyright entails as a concept. That is the right of the creator of a work to exert some control over how it's used, who can copy and distribute it, and a right to have their authorship acknowledged.

These members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright without any sense of the ironic fact that the GPL can't exist without copyright. They're proposing a solution while simultaneously advocating the destruction of the thing that makes their solution workable. While the GPL is less restrictive than other licensing methods, it's a license and it does impose some restrictions on or conditions for use of the work. It is a method of controlling your work. But without copyright, the GPL could not be enforced.

Without copyright, the creator would have no power to dictate any licensing terms, even the GPL's licensing terms. Their work would go into the public domain and anyone anywhere could use it in any way they wanted. Drop the argument of whether or not profit motive drives creation sufficiently enough that it needs to be retained. Let's look at what happens if the GPL is unenforceable.

You create some cool open source app. Then some megacorporation comes along, removes all your claims of credit, adds 10% more code, compiles it, and distributes the executable binary locked up in DRM. Under the GPL, you could retain your own lawyer or appeal to the FSF to sue them and force them to open up their application. But without copyright enabling you to dictate licensing terms such as the GPL, you have no legal recourse. They get away with it and the worst they suffer is some bad publicity... maybe.

Would that theft of your work act as a disincentive to creating more works? Would you say to yourself, "why bother slaving away to create this when some megacorporation can just steal it, put their name on it, and lock it up in DRM"? Perhaps you would. Perhaps you wouldn't. But some people would and that would take more creators out of the market and lower the quantity and quality of content that's available.

Those who hold up the GPL, Creative Commons, or any licensing option other than the public domain as an alternative to copyright are expressing a preference for allowing creators to exert some control, however small, over how their work is used and distributed. But if you abolish copyright, you take away even that small element of control.

Now we can argue until we're blue in the face over the details of what copyright should allow and should not. The extension of copyright terms, the constant chipping away at the doctrine of Fair Use, the evils of DRM... these can all be cited as things that are wrong with current copyright law and things that need to be abolished. But that's reforming copyright, not abolishing it. It's surgery on the patient, not euthanasia.

If you support the GPL, support an author's right to dictate any terms regarding how their work is used, then you support the concept of copyright even if you don't support the current law and practice of copyright. Then the argument becomes not whether copyright should be abolished, but what form it should take. In short, we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price.

Is it just me or is this a non-story? In this PC World story on the topic, they say it's proof that mobile browsing is growing. But look at the percentages... 0.3% and 0.2%. That means out of 1,000 web pages accessed in Ukraine, 3 were accessed by the Opera mobile phone browser. Zero point three percent isn't significant. It's a rounding error.

But more importantly, it's beaten Safari! That's like saying toddlers prefer broccoli to caviar.

And remember, this isn't in one of the major European economies where Macs can compete with commodity PCs. It's in Ukraine! I've got nothing against Ukraine. It's the motherland my family fled as fast as they could 100 years ago. But we've been fleeing from one country to the next ever since the diaspora. I recently found out that my last name actually might have Turkish roots (so it's not Americanized Russian, but an Americanization of the Russianization of the name we picked up before fleeing north from Turkey). But I digress...

One of the characteristics of Macs that people criticize is their price. And it's not like the economy in Ukraine is such that Macs would be flying off the shelves. But even those Ukranians who have gone the Mac route have a range of alternatives to Safari: Firefox, Camino, Opera's non-mobile version... Many Americans I know who have Macs prefer Firefox. I'm not saying that Safari's bad. It gets the job done. But the only people I know who would fervently claim it the best browser on Earth are defenders of the one true faith, one nation under Jobs, with hipness and Kool Aid for all.

So is the fact that Opera's mobile browser is getting 50% more use than Safari in Ukraine statistically significant? When that 50% margin represents 1 out of every 1,000 web page views... in Ukraine... not really.