damien stolarz blog

I’m happy to report that I’ve had an article published in Popular Science on installing a car PC, in the How 2.0 section!
If you like cars and new technology, I strongly recommend you read the current issue (May 2007), and not just because of my article With a readership of 7 million, I think we’ll see a lot more people putting PC’s in their cars.

Technorati Tags: car pc, carputer, cars, damienstolarz, emerging technology, in-car computing, infotainment, navigation, podcast, stolarz

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It’s taken me a while to get my workflow going, but I’m proud to be launching my weekly Emerging Media podcast. You’ll notice a new tab above (dps Podcast); you can click the link to add it to your iTunes or other podcast-downloader or just listen to it there.

For now I’ve put up an interview and a lecture, both on the subject of podcasting. I’m almost done editing some new content which I should be putting up in a couple of days.

My goal is to keep these podcasts very interesting and keep the data-density and value high - no half-hour of banter. I hate that.

Click here to go to the Damien Stolarz Emerging Media podcast

-d

Technorati Tags: business, emerging technology, lecture, podcast, stolarz

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Those who know me well know that my interest in hacking cars goes far earlier than CarBot / MP3Car /StreetDeck and now, The Walt Disney Company.

I’ve been tinkering with my beautiful Nash Ambassador for about a decade, and in that time it’s had an engine upgrade, conversion from 6V to 12V system, added power steering, and of course, had several screens including a VGA touchscreen and a car PC navigation system installed.
I’ll be driving my nash up to the Bay Area Maker Faire (in San Mateo) for May 19th and 20th. Over the last few days my Nash has had it’s carburetor rebuilt, it’s engine steam cleaned, all the hoses repaired, and I’ll be patching all the exhaust pipes in the next week.

Make sure you come too!

http://www.makerfaire.com/

Technorati Tags: car pc, carputer, cars, in-car computing, nash, nash ambassador, AMC, streetdeck, telematics

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When I first read this post, I thought it was going to be a lojack for stolen dogs.

Nope, it’s a system for tracking your “fleet” of dogs while hunting.

It can even tell you if your dog is “on point” , sitting, running, or “treeing” (standing up against the tree).

Garmin has an entire interactive, video/flash site to help you learn about the product. If you’ve hunted with dogs, you’ll probably find the site incredibly informative. If you haven’t hunted with dogs, you’ll probably find the site hilarious.

I just never thought there’d be a device with a dedicated button called “dog” on it.

Link

Technorati Tags: dogs, garmin, GPS, fleet management, telematics

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Creating New Map Overlays in StreetDeck

StreetDeck, the in-car computer navigation/infotainement software, uses the MapPoint engine for its built-in maps, and then can overlay the Microsoft Live Virtual Earth maps on top of those images. VE supplies several overlays – street images, satellite images, hybrid street name + satellite images. Using the “show extended virtual earth options” checkbox in StreetDeck, it is possible to show all these modes.

StreetDeck downloads these areas when it is connected (online) and caches the tiles, 256×256 square, corresponding to the zoom level and lat-long of a given area. These files are saved in the Documents & Settings->[current user]->StreetDeck->VirtualEarth folder.

There is a different folder for each type of map:

• Aerial
• Hybrid
• Road

Most online maps (Google Maps, Virtual Earth) are tessellated (broken into square tiles) based on a splitting algorithm, served up by a tile server.
The Virtual Earth approach is documented here: http://www.viavirtualearth.com/VVE/Articles/WorldWind.ashx

At each zoom level, there are 4x as many tiles to represent a map of the earth. Zoomed out completely, only 4 tiles represent earth, and each pixel represents over 70,000 meters. At further zoom levels, the distance represented by each pixel decreases. At a zoom level of 17 (the maximum supported by StreetDeck), each pixel represents about 1.19 meters, so that a car is approximately 6 pixels large.

Microsoft Research provides a tool for overlaying existing maps on to virtual earth for “mash ups” (combinations) called MapCruncher:

http://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher/

(source: http://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher/Gallery/)

The basic requirements are:

1) The map has to be to scale and geographically accurate. It cannot be a ‘schematic’ map

2) The map needs to be an overhead, 2D map for it to match up correctly.

The process to get these maps into StreetDeck is, is:

1) Export your high-resolution map as a vector file (WMF, for example) or as a high-resolution TIFF or jpeg.

2) Load it into the mapcruncher application

3) Using the mapcruncher tools, locate three or more points in common between the virtual earth maps and the overlaid map, so that the cruncher can figure out where the appropriate tile boundaries will go

4) Export the maps. This will create a new folder with thousands of small tile files. The files will be named with numbers corresponding to their zoom level (i.e. level 17 files will have 17-number names)

5) Choose which maps inside StreetDeck will be replaced: Aerial, Roads, etc.

6) Run StreetDeck and browse the area to be mapped, zooming in and out so that some maps are downloaded for each zoom level. Quit streetdeck.

7) In Documents & Settings->[current user]->StreetDeck->Road, for instance, there will be a number of folders named “17”, “16”, “15” etc.
Using a bulk renaming tool such as Jim Wilsher’s bulk rename http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php , pre-pend a letter ‘r’ before each file name. This is necessary because the tiles for Road are prepended with ‘r’.

9) Sort the files, by length, into each of the corresponding folders (i.e. files created by mapcruncher that have 17 numerals (plus the letter r) would go in the 17 folder, etc.

10) Re-run streetdeck; when browsing those areas, and zooming in and out, the tiles created by mapcruncher should be visible. Toggling the virtual earth feature in streetdeck will allow a comparison between the original files and the overlay.

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: car pc, carputer, cars, in-car computing, mappoint, mashup, navigation, puppy, streetdeck

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Even though we can all “rip” our own personally purchased CDs legally and put them on our digital media players for personal use, this has not not necessarily been the case for DVDs.
A high end “DVD Jukebox” product, Kaleidescape, has existed in the market since 2002, and has been in contest with the DVD Copy Control Association since 2004. Kaleidescape allows consumers to copy their own (but potentially, rented) DVDs to the server and allow random access to those DVDs.

As evidenced by the DVD Copy Control Association’s recent post on Managed Recording, the DVD CCA is not necessarily opposed to any copying of DVDs, but they want to have the digital rights management technology (the new preferred term is ‘content management’) in place to prevent unrestricted widespread copying like that which happened to CDs.

The basic technology of DVD extraction is quite straightforward: Each DVD disk simply has a folder called VIDEO_TS on it. If this folder is copied to the hard drive, then any DVD player software can play it (most have a menu option for opening a folder, instead of a DVD disk).

The difficulty of course is the copy protection on every commercial DVD, CSS (content scramble system). The user’s legal rights to copy their own purchased content notwithstanding, certain laws make it unclear whether it is lawful to use the common tools available to bypass this security. Nonetheless, just like YouTube or any other “how do they get away with that?” online technology, tools for ‘ripping’ dvds are easy to find and download. On the Mac, the hopefully named FairMount program uses the presumably lawful DVD CSS implementation inside the VLC Media Player. On the PC, dozens, if not hundreds of programs such as the free DVDFab allow the VIDEO_TS to be extracted.

Once the legal limbo of ‘dvd ripping’ has been exited, there are a variety of programs that will create a digital jukebox out of the extracted DVDs. Apple’s FrontRow, which comes with every modern Mac, can play back VIDEO_TS folders automatically with a program called DVD assist. The program My Movies achieves a similar effect with Windows Media Center PCs.

The new news is that Kaleidescape recently prevailed in the current round of debate, having it’s system declared fully compliant with the licensing agreement they signed and paid for with CCA.

This, of course, is only one step in the process. The decision will likely be appealed, and put the product in legal limbo again. And this decision clears no path for the aforementioned programs, none of which sought or obtained a CCA license. Their saving grace is that the ripping is separate from the “jukebox” engine, so the Jukebox applications themselves don’t appear to be doing anything unlawful.

EE Times just published a useful article with some of the history behind the Kaleidescope/CCA conflict. Read the article

Technorati Tags: drm, emerging technology, home theatre, infotainment, InternetTV, movies, video

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