201_0291.MOV, originally uploaded by metrixcreate.

My clock. It ticks.

Connecting an Apple II keyboard to a computer with USB is surprisingly easy with a Teensy board. The Apple II uses an ASCII keyboard, which means that rather than returning scan codes, it returns a 7-bit ASCII value. This also means you can’t read the state of modifier keys like shift or control independently. The Apple II keyboard in particular doesn’t even support lower-case letters (though I’ve made a bit of a hack for this). They even re-use a couple alpha keys for other characters, so shift-P makes @ and shift-N makes ^. Other late 70s/early 80s home computers like the TRS-80 had a really simple layout like the Apple II’s (though the TRS-80 had all four arrow keys but no Control key). I may have to try out adapting some other weird old home computers as USB keyboards — the C-64 seems like it would be a good shape/size for that.

Arduino (Teensyduino) code is available at https://github.com/afiler/keyduino.

Since Unicode “works” in most places on the internet these days (from webpages to Twitter to IRC in terminal sessions), I like to use all the characters that are available to me, when they make sense — like “99¢” or “-40°”. I decided go to Metrix and laser many of the characters accessible from Alt(Gr) into the keycaps on my MacBook Pro. The keyboard is backlit and lasering the key exposes the clear key underneath, so it turned out quite well. If I’m feeling like there still isn’t enough visual interference on my keyboard, I may decide to laser on the AltGr and Cyrillic characters too.

Duncan and I made tshirts with the “phone company” logo on them (no actual phone company has this logo, but it looks a lot like the logo of some random independent phone company in the 1970s.

They were screen printed, but with a plastic stencil instead of a photo-process “stencil”. I bought a book of polypropylene sheets from Dick Blick (“suitable for water color”, the cover says), and got the stencil cut on the laser cutter at Metrix. They can’t cut vinyl or other chlorine-containing compounds, as deadly chlorine gas will be produced (though in quantities that would probably be more damaging to the laser than to humans), but polypropylene works great.

http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc

This will give you an HTML version. If you’d like a different output type, insert that type’s extension in front of the URL. For a plain-text version instead, for example,

http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc.

PDF, HTML, text, CSV, XLS, and DOC output formats are supported on the relevant data types. I’ll soon be adding ImageMagick support to convert from zillions of image formats, and conversions to/from .SHP shapefiles, KML files and other geodata should also be supported soon.

Want to know what input document types are supported? Just try the link. If it works, then that document type is supported. If it doesn’t work, then that document type isn’t supported.

More finger feature suggestions are welcome!

I made a monitor stand out of black gas pipe and fittings, compression tees, and an adapter bracket.

The compression tees (as in pipe fittings, not clothing) were an awesome find. They have rubber gaskets inside that made a surprisingly tight connection once the end caps are screwed down.

The galvanized metal fitting is a bracket made for using metal pipes for things like mounting rails and chin-up bars. The holes are 38mm apart, as opposed to 100mm on the standard VESA mount, so I made an adapter bracket. I made the adapter out of 6mm birch on the laser cutter at Metrix Create:Space though it would be easy enough to make at home — but lasering’s just so easy! I even countersunk screw holes using the laser.

I’m really impressed with the stability of the stand. I had been worried I’d need to add clamps under the compression tees to make sure they wouldn’t slip, but it turns out they’re far more solid than expected.

If I ever go completely insane and decide I need more monitors, I’m thinking I could make an X-Y setup, with two vertical bars, on which horizontal bars could be mounted. Each row could still have its height adjusted, plus this would allow an up/down tilt on each monitor.

Total cost for this was about $70, $8 of which was for the (very optional) laser cutting.

The oddball switches are the ones that really interest me, and they’ll be the first ones to disappear from the network. I’ve been told that the TRW Vidar ITS-5 and the Mitel GX5000 switches may be gone from the North American network. To see what might be left, I decided to do some digging, and I’ve come up with a list of the telephone switches (minus remotes) still in use in the North American network. There’s undoubtedly some stale data in this database, and so for rare switches, I think the numbers listed are the upper boundary — the lower boundary may be as low as 0. The list also contains the mystery “Digital Switching System”. There seems to be an awfully large number of them for it to be the North Electric DSS-1, which became the ITT 1210 — maybe it just means “unknown digital switch”?

The picture above of the GTD-5 EAX was shamelessly stolen from the site of a GTD-5 consultant, the only place I could find a picture.

Top 10 Switches

The Whole List

Recently, Google Maps has started returning search results for townships (probably since Google’s change to being their own geodata provider). As I love tiny dots on the map and obscure entities, this got me excited. In some cases, the township name will even show up as a dot with a link to the township’s Wikipedia article. I think this only happens when the township also has a town with the same name inside it. Townships can be found by searching by whatever uniquely identifies them, e.g. Chilgren for Chilgren Township, Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, Laona, MN for Laona Township, Roseau County, MN, or Lincoln, Marshall, MN for Lincoln Township, Marshall County, Minnesota.

The data for these features is coming from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. I’ve put up a unique interface that combines that database with a few others, including databases of Canadian locations, zip codes, railroad stations, and telephone switch locations, at afiler.com/dots/. Want to see the list of every named place in Washington State? Or every place in the US and Canada named Springfield? Or even every place named Springfield in Georgia? The GNIS database lists 9 Springfields in Georgia, though only one is an incorporated city. The rest are so small, most don’t even get their name on Google Maps at any zoom level.

Dots lets you dig into extremely obscure place names, and this lets me dig up other secretly searchable Google Maps place names. Townships are called minor civil divisions by the US Census and some form of MCDs exist in 28 states. MCDs have some sort of official government function (though often small) — they include urbanized areas (cities, towns, villages, boroughs), townships, New England towns, parish governing authority districts (Louisiana), magisterial districts (Virginia and West Virginia), election districts/precincts (parts of Illinois, Maryland, and Nebraska), supervisors’ districts (Mississippi), and “catch all” entities, when nothing else applies (assessment districts, gores, grants, plantations, purchases, road districts, and unorganized territories). I’m still exploring what MCDs, other than townships and cites/towns/villages are searchable in Google Maps.

The other 22 states are divided into census county divisions instead of MCDs. These were created with the cooperation of the census and the state governments and may only be used for census tabulation or may also be used by county governments, for example, as electoral districts. MCDs are also are searchable in Google Maps. That means that you can find the census division of Early Winters in Okanogan County, Washington by searching for Early Winters, Okanogan, WA (or just Early Winters, WA, or even just Early Winters).

In Canada, Google Maps uses the census division as the county is in the US. Census divisions correspond to a county or county-like entity in most provinces where those exist. This includes BC (regional districts and municipalities), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (counties), Ontario (upper-tier municipalities: counties, districts, regional municipalities, cities) and Quebec (municipalités régionales de comté). Elsewhere, census divisions do not correspond to local government. Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, and the Northwest territories have named census divisions. Census divisions are simply numbered in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan (even though Alberta has some entities named “County”, they’re municipal districts and are treated like the rural municipalities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan). (Early in its history, Manitoba also had counties, though the names only persist in land records and in the name of the Dennis County Planning District. I was able to find the names and locations of counties from the 1880s in Manitoba statute books on Google Books, and used that to write up a Wikipedia article, a list of historic counties in Manitoba.)

Searching for Springfield, Canada will get Google Maps to display its most-expanded name (other times they’re shortened to City, Province or City, County, Province). Results include “Springfield, Division No. 12, MB” (the RM of Springfield, a local government unit, inside a nongovernmental census division), but also “Springfield, Woodstock, Carleton County, NB”, (a named place inside Woodstock Parish in Carleton County), and “Springfield, Swift Current No. 137, Division No. 8, SK” (a named place inside a rural municipality, inside a nongovernmental census divisions). The results from Google Maps appear mostly consistent with a search for Springfield at Statistics Canada.

For even more obscure geodata info, check out the Census’s list of county subdivision types, or their maps of MCDs and CCDs, by state. There’s also an even more obscure geographic subdivision not used by the census, the hundred, in Delaware. The hundred once also existed in the UK (where some Local Government Districts took the name of a hundred), and Australia (where they’re still used in land descriptions as as one of the cadastral divisions of Australia).

• The house in Ambrose
• Petrel, which consists of a sign
• De Sart, a spot in a field, with an abandoned house not far away