TikiCoffee!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Santa Monica, CA

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On Sunday, the government of Pakistan ordered ISPs to block access to YouTube in the country, for containing content that was offensive to Islam. (This occurred soon after videos exposing vote-rigging in the recent Pakistani election appeared on YouTube.)

In response to this order, Pakistan Telecom began advertising a hijacked route for YouTube, which caused all internet traffic to YouTube from around the world to be blocked for several hours. Here is a full writeup of how this happened.

I found this great Slashdot comment that explains how to use BGPlay to see an animation of Pakistan Telecom re-routed YouTube for the world.

Here is how the net looked during the hijack. The red dot on the left is YouTube, and the red dot on the right is Pakistan Telecom:

After YouTube announced new routes, traffic returned to normal for those outside Pakistan:

The animation is pretty neat! Also, Wikipedia has a good summary of the Border Gateway Protocol, which is the protocol that routers use to talk to each other.

Filed under: sucky companies, tronix | 0 Comments
Tagged: BGP , hijack , Pakistan , voterigging , youtube

I was inspired by peliom’s web-2.0 Japanese flashcards, so I made some Hindi flashcards this weekend. Or rather, I made an open-source framework for javascript-powered flashcards called TikiCards, and pre-populated it with vocabulary words from the awesome Door Into Hindi lessons that I’ve been working on. I’ll work on adding more words and more languages soon. The code is checked in here.

Unfortunately, Firefox on the Mac doesn’t ship with a Devanagari fonts, and it doesn’t use the OS X system font, so all the characters show up as question marks. And unlike peliom’s Japanese flashcards that work great on the iPhone, the Devanagari characters show up as square boxes on the iPhone. So if you want to use these for Hindi, use Safari on a Mac or FF on unix.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Filed under: code code | 4 Comments
Tagged: flashcards , hindi , opensource , TikiCards

I was watching this Google TechTalk that Yukihiro Matsumoto gave on Ruby and learned that Ruby 1.9 had block-level scope.. cool!

Apparently, block scope is some sort of thing with me:

• Javascript get block-level scope
• Mars and Venus, coding together forever

Filed under: all talk, no code | 0 Comments
Tagged: BlockScope , cupcake , Matz , ruby

These spherical videos are stunning! It’s like Motion-QTVR. (via)

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Tagged: flash , SphericalVideo

Bella is a 6mo old corgie that I’m puppysitting for the week. We went to the beach yesterday where she ran and ran and ran (doing the full speed ahead i’m so excited my ears are gonna BURST puppy gallop!) Then we visited raj, jess, bob, and zara. It was a great day! (except for the part where she peed on zara’s rug).

Filed under: cuuuuute | 1 Comment
Tagged: puppy

Dr. Alexander Shulin’s first laboratory notebook has been scanned and put online.

If you want higher resolution images, check out the JPEG 2000 files here.

Filed under: archive, books | 0 Comments
Tagged: 2CB , MDMA , pharmacology , shulgin

Background
Our water has gunk in it (possibly due to this construction). This gunk gets caught in our kitchen faucet’s aerator, and if we don’t clean it out, the water flow will stop completely. Here is what the gunk looks like:

So we decided it was time to install a water filter. The easiest way to filter drinking water is to use a Britta and Pur pitcher, but these don’t work for me. I use them for a bit, and then get tired of changing the expensive replacement filters every month.

The water filter industry has a standard size for under-sink adsorption filters: 9 3/4″. These filters are similar to but much larger than the standard Britta pitcher-style filter, and they only need to be changed every 4-12 months (depending on filter type). You can buy 9 3/4″ filters from several different manufacturers, which helps keep the prices down.

Choosing a Filter

Deciding what kind of filter you need should be easy. In theory, you can call your water utility (or check their website), find out what contaminants are in your water, and then check which filters are certified by the NSF to filter out those contaminants.

I did a bunch of research and found that SF tap water is generally safe to drink. It is disinfected with Chloramine and contains trace amounts of parasites, copper, and lead. The SF PUC monitors Cryptosporidium and Giardia levels every two weeks, and their 2006 Water Quality Report (published 6/07 PDF) shows that all measurable contaminants are below maximum contaminant levels.

Even after finding that SF water is safe for us to drink, I decided to get an activated carbon filter in addition to a sediment filter, because I’m worried that chemicals might enter into the water main during construction, just as visible sediment enters into the water main. Also, I decided that activated carbon was really cool (one gram has a surface area of 500 m² – 1500 m²)!

Choosing a 9 3/4″ Filter Housing

My first thought was to get an OmniFilter OT32 for $140. This unit has a double housing that can fit 2 9 3/4″ filters, and it comes with a string-wound sediment filter and an NSF-certified 0.5-micron enhanced carbon block filter.

After some digging, I found I get a cheaper 2-filter housing from Pentek Filtration. I bought a BFS-201 housing (PDF) from FiltersFast for $57. It’s seems well-built and looks like this:

Installing the Filter Housing

The recommended way of using under-sink filters is to install a second, low-flow-rate faucet to get the maximum effect from your filter. I didn’t want to do this, because I didn’t want to drill a new hole through our granite countertop, so I investigated splicing the filter into our cold water line.

If we only wanted to filter sediment, we could easily add the filter to cold water line, because sediment filters can handle 10 gallons per minute, and our faucet only had a 2gpm flow rate.

Unfortunately, activated carbon filters only work at reduced flow rates. If you only want to filter for what the NSF calls “Aesthetic Effects” (Standard 42), then you can buy a carbon filter that works at 2gpm. But if you want to filter for things like lead, mercury, VOCs, asbestos, MTBEs, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia (what the NSF calls “Health Effects”, or Standard 53), then you have to reduce to the flow rate to 0.5-0.6 gpm.

We decided that it was OK to reduce the flow rate of the cold water at the faucet, since we will still have the full hot water flow rate for washing, and the dishwasher cold supply is already split off. This means we don’t need to drill for a new faucet.

The Pentek filter housing has two 3/8″ female NPT water connections. Our cold water line has a 1/2″ IP straight thread on the faucet side and a 3/8″ compression fitting on the other. To splice the housing into the cold water line, we need to add two 3/8″ NPT to 3/8″ compression adapters to the filter housing, using teflon tape to ensure a good seal:

Choosing a Sediment Filter
Now comes the fun part! We get to choose some filters. Since these are a standard size, we can choose from a bunch of brands, and mix-and-match. Sediment filters are very inexpensive. They are usually made of wound string, last for 10-15,000 gallons, and cost under five bucks. I got the Pentek CW-MF from FiltersFast for $3.30. Looking at the spec sheet, I should have gotten the WP-5 for $5.60, since it has a 5 micron rating instead of a 30 micron rating. It might not matter, since the water will be flowing through a carbon filter anyway. This filter is mostly to lengthen the life of the carbon filter.

Choosing an Activated Carbon Filter
The OmniFilter CB3 seems pretty good. It costs $36 dollars and has NSF Standard 42 and Standard 53 ratings to reduce Asbestos, Atrazine, Cyst, Lead, Lindane, Mercury, and VOCs, as well as Chloramine and Chlorine.

I found Pentek CBR2-10R, which is basically the same thing as the OmniFilter CB3, but it lacks the NSF Standard 53 rating. However, it costs only $17 at FiltersFast, and I decided it was good enough for me. It also has a built-in 0.6gpm flow restrictor, which makes sure you get the full effect of the filter.

After installing everything, this is how it looks:

The water definitely tastes different; it has a slightly-metallic aftertaste, similar to distilled water. I’m interested to see how much stuff the sediment filter catches after 3 months.

Costs
This is my bill from FiltersFast:

Filter Housing BFS0-201 $56.99
Carbon Filter CBR2-10R $16.95
Sediment Filter CW-MF $3.30
Filter wrench SW-1a $2.70
Shipping $1.99
retailmenot.com coupon -$5.00
Total $76.93

I also had to buy two 3/8″ compression to 3/8″ MPT adapaters for $4.79 and a couple hoses from Cole Hardware, bringing the total up to a hundred bucks.

Filed under: food, san francisco | 0 Comments
Tagged: activated carbon , howto , water filter

DJ Timmii + VJ Science @ the RanCH, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

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Today I had to use VNC to debug a remote machine, but firewalls were blocking VNC ports.

After I failed to get my VNC client (Chicken of the VNC) to use a SOCKS proxy, I was able to use SSH port forwarding to get it working. On your local machine type:

ssh user@remotehost -L 5900/localhost/5900

This forwards port 5900 on localhost to port 5900 on the remotehost. Then in Chicken of the VNC, open a new connection to localhost. That’s it! EEZ!

It turned out that Xorg was eating all available memory and invoking the oom killer. Sigh.

I guess I could have figured this out without VNC, but I couldn’t reproduce the bug locally, so I watched as a remote user was working on the machine.

Filed under: archive | 0 Comments
Tagged: commandline , howto , ssh , vnc

pacman cupcakes, originally uploaded by hello naomi.

I wish I could say I made these but I didn’t . A genius named “hello naomi” on flickr did!

Filed under: food | 4 Comments
Tagged: cupcakes pacman

Sydney

Attribution cc photo by failquail orig set pool

Brisbane

Adelaide

Perth

London

By-NC photo by lawl orig

by-nc-sa photo by nic0 orig set

by-na-sa photo by gilberts orig set

Amsterdam

Manchester

Edinburgh

by-sa photos by strevo orig set

by-sa photos by strevo orig set moar

Dublin

Belfast

Brussels

Oslo

Attribution CC photo by say it with flowers orig

Boston

by-nc-sa photo by steve orig

Houston

Austin

Minneapolis

Milwaukee

St. Louis

Portland

By-SA photo by Hardlinejoe orig

San Francisco

LA:

By-nc-sa photo by Sean orig set

KC

San Diego

DC

Montreal

NYC

Santa Barbara

Detroit

Denver

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Tagged: chanology

SF bookmobile rollin’ through bernal heights!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

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Tiki Bling!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

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Buried, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

may

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Aryana made this mosaic for Awaken Cafe. Beautiful!

Filed under: inspiration | 1 Comment
Tagged: aryana , mandala , mosaic