The Long Cut

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Raspberry Pi is the Future of Open Computing

    About a month ago, I got my first Raspberry Pi 4.

    What is a Raspberry Pi? A Raspberry Pi is a small singe-board computer intended for education and for tinkering. For $35, you get a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM processor with 2GB RAM, 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 2x MicroHDMI ports for 2x 4k@60Hz displays, gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac wifi, and Bluetooth. It uses a standard USB-C PD charger as a power supply. All that’s missing is a case, a display cable, and a MicroSD card. Using official sources, another $28. It uses Raspberry Pi OS, a Linux distribution based on Debian.

    Raspberry Pi 4 Tech Specs

    When my laptop died, I started thinking about replacements and the opportunity to get something to tinker with. I wanted to see just how far low-power computers had come and try to have a fanless computer as my daily machine. If I needed to do “serious work” I could always use it to shell into my larger desktop or a cloud compute node, but I could enjoy pure silence as a default state.

    The little machine has exceeded all expectations. It only draws 15W max under load, my usage has been more like 6W. It’s so small, it disappears under my desk with 2 command strips.

    Having a small, low-cost, silent computer inspired thoughts of where else a little computer could go. One of the first targets was my astronomy hobby. A modified OS called Astroberry came preconfigured with all the drivers I needed to operate my new astrophotography telescope. I simply bought a second microSD card, flashed it with Astroberry, and within an hour had a full guiding and tracking setup with connections to both my home network and an automatic hotspot for remote control when I’m at a dark sky site.

    Raspberry Pi 4 (silver) mounted to the front of my new astrophotography telescope.

    Working with a new-to-me compute architecture (the RPi4’s ARMv8) and interacting with embedded controllers (the telescope’s PMC-8) has me reflecting on the last time I really got to play with hardware. In undergrad, we learned about embedded controllers with a TI MSP430 retrofitted onto a  “Goofy Giggles” toy. A lot of our exercises involved cross-platform compilation of C code from an x86 machine onto the MSP430. It was my first experience with compilation, assembly, and anything resembling electrical engineering. While my machine learning research is beyond abstract, having a foundation in the physical constraints of computation has been incredibly useful.

    The Goofy Giggles with MSP430 controller soldered on. (Geoffrey Brown and Bryce Himebaugh, 2004)

    More important than tinkering or thinking about embedded computing, the Raspberry Pi is a fundamentally democratic platform and that’s where my excitement about the platform is palpable. For many, the Pi could be someone’s first encounter with “free” computing – not in a price sense, but in the sense of freedoms. We live in a world of forced updates and subscription-based software licensing. Our smartphones and tablets drive a consumption-based model of computing. The “smarthome” is just paying money to allow Alexa, Google, and Siri eyes and ears in our most private spaces. Modern software and hardware force us to accept this compromise of privacy and ownership. The notion that we could actually own our software, and moreover, pull back the curtains to figure out how it works is largely lost.

    The Raspberry Pi is a different path. I took open hardware running open software and can now control a telescope plus 2 cameras, and do it all from anywhere in the world without ever worrying about my subscription expiring or APIs changing. This is absolutely the future we want, but it’s not the one we’ve been offered by the smarthome. I think the Pi can change this by making computing accessible again, just as the hobbyists found in the 70s and 80s, or how we found as students with “Goofy Giggles”. I’m excited to try as my primary compute platform.

  • Getting a Telescope: A Cautionary Tale

    It’s Christmas or your kiddo’s birthday. They open a telescope and want to take it outside right away. You’ve never used a telescope before, so:

    1. You get the automated GoTo system with an equatorial mount because you might want to take pictures some day. You take it outside and it tells you to line up the scope with Polaris. You find the star and get it centered in your polar scope by adjusting the latitude knob. Then you look in your telescope and don’t see anything. The lens caps are off, but you’ve never focused it before and Polaris is literally the only star in that area under your neighbor’s floodlight. No matter how much you turn the knob, you can’t see anything. You try to connect the mount to your phone, but then realize the motors need 8 C batteries, so you run to the store. When you get back, it’s gotten cold, so the kids are inside and this has become your “project” for the night. Eventually you get it pointed at the moon but the kids are mostly bored. It spends the rest of its life in the garage.

    2. You get a manual mount. You drop the telescope in the holes and swing it towards the moon. IT’S SO BRIGHT, but not focused at all. You twist the knobs and figure out where it is:

    Photograph of the moon taken with a cell phone camera at the eyepiece of an 8" Dobsonian telescope.
    The moon, taken with a cell phone at the eyepiece and a polarizing filter on a Dobsonian telescope.

    You can see individual craters! Amazing! You start to move the scope around to find Jupiter and just see so many stars! Even without finding the planet, you’ve figured out the focus and really just had no idea there were SO MANY stars.

    Also, despite “not being for astrophotography” took that picture of the moon with my 8″ Dobsonian scope and a cell phone held to the eyepiece. If you take more time with it, you’ll find the planets and maybe even catch the Orion Nebula:

    Photograph of the Orion Nebula, taken with a cell phone mounted to the eyepiece, 8 second exposure.
    The Orion Nebula, taken with my phone on a cell phone adapter attached to my 8″ Dobsonian telescope. An 8 second exposure.

    Astronomy can be attractive to exactly the kind of person that tinkers and values quality tools and obsesses over specs. This post is a reminder that the “best” system isn’t always the best for learning. Dip a toe in. If you like it, you can spend more and get fancy later. Don’t create barriers for yourself. There are a lot of skills to learn, and if you get a solid foundation, you’ll know what direction to take it.

    My first scope was an Apertura AD8. It’s about the same as any 8″ Dobsonian reflector telescope. It’s a common recommendation for beginning astronomers, and entirely manual. I am glad I listened to the overwhelming community advice to start with a manual mount and get as much aperture as you can afford, even more so after fighting my astrophotography setup for the past 2 weeks. I know how to diagnose the issues on my new setup because I have the orientation of learning things by hand for 6 months.

    When you’re starting a hobby, you want to make it easy. Point, look, wonder. If you have any questions, please reach out!

  • Creativity, Wanderlust, and the Frontier

    Context: I started a new Instagram photo blog project @exploringthefrontier. This is my intro…

    Art and identity are fundamentally linked. Turning 30 has been a constant reevaluation of my identity between finishing school, having a kid, and finding my home. It’s also a chance to be deliberate in what I nurture in myself, my son, and the world.

    Creativity is first: whether making music, taking photos, designing a program, or fixing the house, creativity is a way to find life. In 1945, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger answered the question “What is life?” with the notion of “negative entropy” – life is literally that which fights the universe’s natural inclination to decay. Creativity makes sense of the world, making order, fighting destruction.

    Wanderlust is second. It flows through my veins. My roots are in Kentucky, but at the same time both sides of my family have deep connections to living as expats. I was born half a world away, so wanderlust is not just a feeling, but a way of life – the eternal tension between roots and adventure.

    With wanderlust comes the pioneer search for home. I’m drawn to the frontier. Two years ago, I found my home in New Mexico. My adopted city of Albuquerque predates the Declaration of Independence by 70 years. The state capital predates the Mayflower by a decade. People have been living in the Rio Grande Valley for thousands of years. Before humans even existed, dinosaurs roamed what are now the badlands. Millions of years are recorded in our exposed canyon walls. And yet, we’ve barely been a state for 100 years. There are only 17 people per square mile. I delight in the contrast: people have always been here and yet no one is here. That’s the frontier – timeless and new at the same time.

    Artistically, there’s three components I’m exploring: subjects, equipment, and editing. I prefer landscape and astro-photography over human subjects. Taking shots of nature is just more … natural … to me and doesn’t seem as disruptive to “pause” the moment to ask people for a picture.

    As for equipment, I’ve been doing everything with a cell phone camera – even astrophotography! Phones are always at hand and while “the revolution will not be televised”, it sure is being streamed. Rapid advances in image processing and sensor manufacturing make it even more democratized – a camera in every pocket. Pushing the medium to its limits is really exciting.

    For editing, I’m learning Lightroom. From minimally invasive color rebalancing to editing out footprints with the healing brush, finding my personal style is going to be fun. Watching some NM photographers play with editing has been really inspiring and I’ve been thinking a lot about what is “real” – how many layers are there between collecting light on a sensor to what we finally see on the screen? How many of those are an “artistic” decision? Astro makes this even more poignant as we reveal what is hidden among the stars.

    Finally, the name “Exploring the Frontier” captures what I’ll be doing as I learn and create.

    I’d be delighted for comments and to meet new people! Thanks for reading!

  • HathiTrust Research Center

    For the 2016-18 academic years I was on fellowship or affiliated with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The work from that time was finally released in late 2018. A brief summary is below.

    Data Capsules

    HTRC Data Capsules are virtual machines provisioned for researchers at HathiTrust Member Insitutions that give access to the fulltext and OCR scans of both public domain and in-copyright texts. I launched two new features with much help from Yu Ma, Samitha Liyanage, Leena Unnikrishnan, Charitha Madurangi, and Eleanor Dickson Koehl.

    The first feature was the HTRC Workset Toolkit. This tool provides a command line interface (CLI) for interacting with and downloading volumes in the HathiTrust digital library. It also has tools for metadata management and collection management. The collection management tools are really great because a user can go from a collection URL to a list of volume IDs or record IDs for later download or metadata retrieval.

    The second feature was the addition of the InPhO Topic Explorer to the Data Capsule’s default software stack. This allows the Topic Explorer to train models on the raw fulltext of public domain and in-copyright texts, as oppposed to over the word counts exposed by the extracted features.

    One critical notion to the use of data capsules is that of non-consumptive research. In summary, research products cannot allow for reconstruction of the original text for human reading. Algorithmic analysis is considered a “transformative use” covered by fair use. These products can then be exported from a data capsule after review.

    Algorithms

    However, some analysis pipelines are guaranteed to produce valid non-consumptive products. These have been added to an HTRC Algorithmsportal for batch processing. I added the InPhO Topic Explorer to this tool.

    Extracted Features

    Finally, the coolest non-consumptive dataset is the HTRC Extracted Featrues Dataset which consists of word counts, part of speech tags, and more page-level details for 15.7 million public domain and in-copyright texts. The genius of the Extracted Features is that bag-of-words models (like topic models!) do not require anything more than word counts, so analyses can be performed on local computers, rather than a data capsule or other sandboxed environment.

    I did not create the extracted features dataset, but created a way to integrate it with the Topic Explorer. Now using the command topicexplorer init --htrc htrcids.txt, where htrcids.txt is a file with one HathiTrust Volume ID per file models can be built on the extracted features over any volumes.

  • InPhO for All: Why APIs Matter

    This month Colin Allen and I published “InPhO for All: Why APIs Matter” in the Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (JDHCS). It’s a short piece setting up the API development narrative for digital humanists. Abstract, citation, and paper link follow.

    The unique convergence of humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists in digital humanities projects highlights the collaborative opportunities such research entails. Unfortunately, the relatively limited human resources committed to many digital humanities projects have led to unwieldy initial implementations and underutilization of semantic web technology, creating a sea of isolated projects without integratable data. Furthermore, the use of standards for one particular purpose may not suit other kinds of scholarly activities, impeding collaboration in the digital humanities. By designing and utilizing an Application Platform Interface (API), projects can reduce these barriers, while simultaneously reducing internal support costs and easing the transition to new development teams. Our experience developing an API for the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) Project highlights these benefits.

    Jaimie Murdock and Colin Allen. InPhO for All: Why APIs Matter. In Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (JDHCS). Evanston, Illinois, 2011. [paper]