The Willpower Trick

The Willpower Trick: People who can resist temptation don't have immaculate wills. Instead, they are able to intelligently steer clear of situations that trigger problematic desires. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains the science behind such willpower.

Make an Arduino-Controlled R/C Lawn Mower

Make an Arduino-Controlled R/C Lawn Mower:

Alabama-based maker J.D. Warren used to hate mowing his lawn, so he put his resourcefulness to work and came up with a solution, which he calls the Lawnbot400:

I started thinking, what if I could mow the grass from the back deck, or even the computer? To handle my 1-acre backyard’s hills, dips, and rocks, an R/C lawn mower would have to be very sturdy, be controllable from a good distance, and have enough battery power to last several hours. I built the Lawnbot400 to meet these criteria.

Basically, if you took the wheels and handlebar off any old gas-powered push mower, bolted it into a sturdy metal frame with 2 electric wheelchair motors, and added the electronics needed to make it move, you’d have the Lawnbot400. I control mine with a standard hobby R/C transmitter and receiver, but with just a few modifications it could be made autonomous.

J.D. shared his build instructions with us on the pages of MAKE Volume 22, the Remote Control issue. We recently shared his project on Make: Projects, where you can see the full how-to, materials list, full-sized images, and collaborate. Check it out. Even if you’re in deep freeze this time of year where you live, this is a fun project to get started in your garage while you’re waiting for your lawn to thaw.

How to Create "House Rules"(rerun)

How to Create "House Rules"(rerun):

Reform-Minded GOP Prosecutor Targeted by Police Unions, Her Own Party

Reform-Minded GOP Prosecutor Targeted by Police Unions, Her Own Party:

Harris County, Texas DA Pat Lykos was one of the prosecutors I praised in Reason last summer.

In 2008 Pat Lykos, a self-described Goldwater-Reagan Republican who supports the death penalty, was elected as chief law enforcement officer of Harris County, Texas, the county that has executed more people than any other, in a state that has executed more people than any other. In fact, under the leadership of former D.A. Johnny B. Holmes—a handlebar-mustached, lock-’em-up tough guy whom the Los Angeles Times once called “the killingest prosecutor” in the country—Harris County by itself sent more people to death row than the 49 states that aren’t Texas.

So Lykos would seem to be an unlikely criminal justice reformer. But upon taking office she set up her own team to review prior convictions for mistakes, similar to Craig Watkins’ unit in Dallas . . .

Lykos has initiated three exonerations so far. In 2010 the Innocence Project of Texas gave Lykos its Honesty and Integrity in Prosecution Award. The organization’s spokesman, Jeff Blackburn, told The Daily Beast earlier this year that “Harris County was the standard bearer of everything bad in criminal justice” until Lykos came along. Under her leadership, Blackburn said, the county “is becoming the single most powerful example of how to change this system and make it work right.”

Naturally, then, Lykos is now facing a challenge from her own party.

Pat Lykos promised in 2008 to change the culture at the Harris County District Attorney’s office, and she has.

The new direction has not pleased everyone. The first-term incumbent drew an opponent from her own party campaigning on a simple message: The office is going the wrong way.

Lykos argues she is a reformer with three years of improvements under her belt while Mike Anderson, a popular 30-year veteran of the courthouse, is trying to convince voters the machine used to be better run.

“A prosecutor needs to run that office,” said Anderson, who was an assistant Harris County district attorney for 16 years before spending 12 years as a felony criminal court judge.

“It’s an enormous undertaking for anybody,” Anderson said. “It would be very hard for anybody who has never been a prosecutor and never tried a case as a prosecutor to run that office.” . . .

Anderson has attacked Lykos for DIVERT, a program she created that allows the equivalent of deferred adjudication for first offense DWIs, and her “trace case” policy, which lessened penalties for possession of trace amounts of crack cocaine or crack pipes.

Lykos says the trace case policy has lowered the jail population by 1,000 inmates and freed up resources for more severe crimes. . . .

Sheryl Berg, a state Republican Executive Committee member in Senate district 11, said she supports Anderson.

“I said it’s time for new leadership,” Berg said. “And I said I thought he was the ideal candidate for that position.”

She also denied that a fight at the top of the ticket is bad for the party.

“Robust competition brings out the better candidate and brings out better voter turnout,” she said.

Valoree Swanson, another Republican Executive Committee member who is supporting Anderson, said Lykos needs to be replaced.

“She’s a moderate who is soft on crime and is rude to people who work under her,” Swanson said. “It really hurts her that she was never a prosecutor, a lot of her policies are bad policies.”

Lykos also recently received a vote of no confidence from the Houston police unions for the trace policy. Lykos has said pursuing felony charges for trace amounts is not only wasteful (she says she wants to prosecute cartels, not crack pipes), it’s problematic because there often isn’t enough of the drug for both the prosecution and the defense to test it. The cops of course hate the policy because arresting petty users is a hell of a lot easier than arresting major dealers. And when you don’t charge the users, they can’t pad their stats for those lucrative federal anti-drug grants (and, if Houston is similar to what we’ve seen in Atlanta and New York, for raises and promotions).

Lykos is not without her problems. Her office is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation over the accuracy of portable DUI breath test units. Lykos herself appears to be concerned about the problem, but her office is apparently continuing to process DUI cases based on the tests, anyway. But the intra-party anger seems to stem mostly from her efforts to change the culture in the Harris County DA’s office.

Nikon announces D4 DSLR camera: full-frame 16.2 MP sensor, 204,000 extended ISO, $6,000 price tag (update: hands-on!)

Nikon announces D4 DSLR camera: full-frame 16.2 MP sensor, 204,000 extended ISO, $6,000 price tag (update: hands-on!):

More than two years after the D3S began shipping and roughly a half-decade after we first got a peek at the D3, Nikon has finally announced the full-frame DSLR's long-awaited successor. As expected, the Nikon D4 boosts both megapixel rating (to 16.2) and extended ISO (204,800 at Hi-4), and includes a brand new full-frame FX-format sensor. Video capture also jumped from 720/24p to 1080/30p, but so did the camera's somewhat-out-of-reach price tag -- you'll be dropping $5,999.95 when the D4 hits stores in late February. You're clearly not spending all that hard-earned photo dough for nothing, though. There's also a 91k-pixel RGB 3D Color Matrix Meter III, compared to a 1,005-pixel meter in the D3S, enabling the camera to evaluate the color and brightness of a scene with much greater precision, yielding much more accurate results. And since the D4 reportedly offers phenomenal low-light performance, you'll probably be using it quite often in the dark -- letting you get good use out of the new back-lit controls.



Photographers can preview images using the 921k-dot 3.2-inch LCD, which offers a 170-degree viewing angle and ambient light sensor. HD video can be previewed on the display as well, or directly through the HDMI port, which also supports uncompressed 8-bit preview video output with optional overlay. Naturally, the D4 is fast. It can power on and be ready to shoot in approximately 0.012 seconds, and can capture 10 fps stills at full resolution with full auto focus and exposure. Willing to lock both AF and AE? The D4 goes to 11. A new 51-point AF system offers full cross-type focusing that's compatible with all Nikon lenses, even when paired with a teleconverter. The D4 includes two card slots with support for both UDMA-7 CF and the recently-announced XQD format, which brings write speeds of up to 125 MB/s -- enough to capture 105 consecutive RAW images at 10 fps. You'll find full details and specs on the D4 just past the break, along with an overview of Nikon's new AF-S NIKKOR 85mm f/1.8G FX-format lens, which is set to ship in March for $499.95.



Update: Our buddies over at Engadget Chinese just sent us a hands-on gallery and video, which you'll find right after the break. Stay tuned for fuller hands-on impressions and sample shots hitting these pages very soon.

Gallery: Nikon D4 Hands-on

Gallery: Nikon D4

Continue reading Nikon announces D4 DSLR camera: full-frame 16.2 MP sensor, 204,000 extended ISO, $6,000 price tag (update: hands-on!)

Nikon announces D4 DSLR camera: full-frame 16.2 MP sensor, 204,000 extended ISO, $6,000 price tag (update: hands-on!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed: pooling redundant disk space for all

Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed: pooling redundant disk space for all:

When Microsoft killed Windows Home Server's "Drive Extender" technology, we mourned its loss but held up hope that the company would persevere with the concept. The company has done just that with a new Windows 8 feature called Storage Spaces, described in a lengthy post to its Building Windows 8 blog.

With Storage Spaces, physical disks are grouped together into pools, and pools are then carved up into spaces, which are formatted with a regular filesystem and are used day-to-day just like regular disks.

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Livestreaming Journalists Want to Occupy the Skies With Cheap Drones

Livestreaming Journalists Want to Occupy the Skies With Cheap Drones:

Live streaming journalist Tim Pool shows off his modified drone, dubbed the Occucopter, intended to make aerial coverage available to citizen reporters. Photo: Sean Captain

It may not sound like much: A video blogger bought a toy helicopter.

But the blogger is 25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.

Along with “general assembly” and “99 percenters,” Occupy Wall Street has brought the phrase “live streaming” to the forefront. Rising-star reporters — known best by their Twitter and Ustream handles — such as Pool (timcast) in New York City and Spencer Mills (oakfosho) in Oakland are passionate, deeply embedded correspondents who provide live video reporting – sometimes lasting a dozen hours or more – of protests, general assemblies and other Occupy events. Instead of using a satellite truck, they broadcast live “TV” coverage from 3G- and 4G-equipped smartphones over video networks such as Ustream.com and Livestream.com.

They are real-life embodiments of of Jimmy Burns, of Anthony Lappé’s and Dan Goldman’s 2006 online graphic novel The Shooting War about a video blogger made famous for being first to cover a major news event (a terrorist attack at a Brooklyn Starbucks).

Having thoroughly figured out how to cover giant events from ground level, they are now exploring ultra-cheap alternatives to the hundreds of thousands of dollar news choppers used for aerial reporting of big events like protest marches and police clashes. In the process, the video bloggers are discovering both how far low-cost consumer technology has come and how much farther it needs to go.

Like the HD video cameras now included in the live-streamers’ cellphones, aerial surveillance drones have progressed from ultra-expensive professional gear to impulse-buy items. What was once in the Pentagon budget is now at Toys ‘R Us – in a simple form, at least.

“The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a 24-year-old programmer from Brooklyn who’s helping Pool hack together an airborne news network.

While he supports their aims, Shapiro says that he doesn’t identify with the Occupy protesters. He does, however, want to use technology to keep them safe.

“The way I got involved in this originally is from watching the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said, referring to the October 1 march and arrests of more than 700 Occupy demonstrators on the iconic span. “While I can’t be involved in stuff like that, I don’t want to see my friends being beaten up because they don’t have tactical knowledge of what’s going on.”

He started, but didn’t finish, building a website that pulls together the live feeds from traffic cameras that New York City makes available to the public.”It kind of turned from that to how do you expand the coverage, how do you get cameras all over the place, how to allow people to pull this off so they can be predictive of what’s going on instead of responsive to it,” he said.

This $300 AR Drone is sold as a toy, but it's also hackable.. Photo: Sean Captain

Like Pool, Shapiro saw the AR Drone as a good start for aerial surveillance. Each came to the same conclusion on his own, and they met when Pool posted a request on Twitter asking for help building a Web site.

Introduced in 2010, the one-pound styrofoam craft has four rotors and a plethora of sensors to keep it stable and navigable. In some ways, it resembles an iPhone, with accelerometers and a gyroscope to measure movement and location, for example. Parrot says that it can fly 50 feet high, up to 11 miles per hour and stay aloft for about 12 minutes on a charge.

Built-in Wi-Fi allows control from an iPhone or Android phone. The Wi-Fi also beams back moderate-resolution (640-by-480-pixel) video to the phone.

But the point of live-stream journalism is to broadcast from a smartphone not to it. What Pool and Shapiro thought would be a little software fix for that – using the company’s laptop software and a screen-capture program – turned into a nightmare.

In theory, Parrot encourages tinkerers with a software developers kit and sample programs for controlling the copter. But the one for Windows didn’t work at all, said Shapiro. The Linux program could pilot the craft but yielded crappy video. His efforts to fix the program got nowhere. “You need to be an experienced, serious Linux programmer to deal with this in any way, shape or form, and their [tech] support is terrible,” he said.

Sam Shapiro is partnering with Pool to build citizen run aerial news network. Photo: Sean Captain

Finally, Shapiro tracked down a European hobbyist group that had written its own software, called Javadrone, from scratch “and did a much better job of it.”

Pool first used the AR Drone, which he’s dubbed the Occucopter, in December to cover a New York City rally for immigrant rights, but he said that the video from that attempt was unusable. He also made a test-run at Occupy Albany. Pool expects his first coverage with the new software and high-quality video will be at the Occupy Congress action on January 17 in Washington, DC.” A live stream journalist out of California used an Occucopter to shoot http://youtu.be/kleXRRpx2Ac on December 19th. (But not without crashing and cussing.)

But the AR Done isn’t in his long-term plans due to its clear limitations. “You need perfect weather. It just doesn’t weigh enough,” said Shapiro. ”You need perfect weather. It just doesn’t weigh enough,” said Shapiro.

“I lost one in a tree in Albany. It’s still there,” said Pool. A mild wind nixed an outdoor demonstration for Wired. Instead, Pool and Shapiro flew it around the basement of a New York coworking center where Pool has a tiny office space. (See video.)

Still, the AR Drone is simple for people who aren’t hackers, and it’s cheap. “Right now it’s probably the best bet for the occupations,” said Pool. “They can go out and pick one up at the store, and we can email them the instructions.”

But Pool and Shapiro are already thinking bigger for their projects, and developing better tech to eventually provide to other live stream journalists.

“The most important thing is the zeppelin,” said Pool. Basically a big balloon, it will be able to lift a lot of gear with just a little power for the rotors that steer it. And the slow speed is a benefit: It holds the camera steady and won’t suddenly go out of control.

In fact, they are trying to build copters that work more like zeppelins.

“It doesn’t need to be doing aggressive dogfighting maneuvers,” said Shapiro. “All it needs to do is hover and take a proper picture.” Instead of relying on constant commands from the ground, the zeppelin and copter will dial in periodically for updates.

An example would be: ascend to an altitude of 40 feet, move to specific GPS coordinates, position the camera at a shot angle of 12 degrees down, face northwest, and pan back and forth 30 degrees at 12 degrees per second. It’s more like directing a camera operator than being a flyboy.

That mellow flight pace allows people to easily take turns with the craft –if they want to or if they need to.

“Even if one operator is compromised, another operator can spring right back up,” said Shapiro.

“There can be a chain of command,” added Pool. “People know what their number is. They can even get text alerts.”

In this case, “compromised” means getting nabbed by cops. That may not seem so far-fetched after a January 3 police raid and arrests – on vague charges — at OWS-focused live streaming organization Global Revolution in Brooklyn.

AR Drone can be piloted over WiFi using this 'cockpit' view.

Equipped with a 3G or 4G wireless card, a copter or zeppelin could take commands over the Internet, from anywhere. One idea they have is a Facebook page where approved pilots can send commands to the drones.

“You’d have to take down all of Facebook to take out every operator,” Shapiro said. (It resembles the decentralized security strategy that’s driving a separate project to build an independent, decentralized social network for the occupations.)

But even with small, slow-moving craft, Shapiro and Pool have to deal with the prospect of crashes, which is new, unknown territory for any news organization. Till now, drones have been used over empty disaster areas or in acts of war, where public safety isn’t much of a concern.

“OK, we’re going to be flying over a friendly crowd,” Shapiro said. “What happens if we lose control of it, and the propellers go smashing into the crowd?” Even though a balloon and a styrofoam helicopter are unlikely to be very dangerous, they are a legal liability. And the two men are planning for bigger craft.

Newscorp’s The Daily has been experimenting with Parrot and larger drones, and Shapiro hopes that will resolve some questions. “So they are going to be our legal benchmark for what we can do. They are going to the government to get all these rules locked down for citizen drone usage.”

All their plans for zeppelins and steadycam choppers go well beyond what a toy copter can do. But Pool and Shapiro have been surprised to find many other options.

At the high end is Polish company < a href=”http://www.robokopter.pl/”>RoboKopter. Its stunning video of clashing demonstrators in Warsaw in November prompted the New York Times to < proclaim “Drone Journalism Arrives.” Shaprio hasn’t gotten pricing from them, but he priced out a similar craft from a company called < a href="http://www.draganfly.com"/>Draganfly and got a quote close to $30,000

Pool and Shapiro are instead going with a product called ArduPilot made by DIY Drones. It’s based on the Arduino board – microcontroller that’s a mainstay for robot builders. ArduPilot is a version equipped specifically to control aircraft. They will have to modify the open-source software to support their camera-operator maneuvers. (Full disclosure: Wired Magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson is the co-founder of DIY Drones.)

Tim Pool, who has thousands of followers when he's livestreaming Occupy protests, has big plans to take over the skies. Photo: Sean Captain

Pool and Shapiro are using ArduPilot to build both an Occu-Eye zeppelin and a next-gen Occucopter that they hope to have aloft in about six weeks. The cost for two high-end models will be close to $2,000 – too much for most citizen journalists, but doable for Pool. Just during his live streaming of the Occupy Wall Street New Years protests, he picked up $1,990 in donations from viewers.

They also aim to “mass-produce” cheaper versions for about $350 that they will sell to citizen journalists at cost and help them setup and maintain. (It will be part of an entire kit for aerial and on-foot reporting that will cost about $600.)

Pool is already thinking well beyond that. “We want to start playing with EEG controllers,” he said. “They sell them in children’s stores.” He meant the $60 Mattel Mindflex, which uses a simple headset to roughly measure the level of brain activity. By concentrating, kids control a fan that keeps a plastic ball suspended in the air.

“There’s no reason we can’t translate up and down of the ball to up and down of the drone,” he said. Considering all the projects that a toy helicopter has kicked off for them, maybe a mind-controlled aircraft, a la Clint Eastwood’s 1980s flick Firefox, isn’t so far fetched.