Hacking a Summer Infant Baby Monitor

Quick post, mostly so that if I get back to this project I'll remember where I left off. Opened up an old Summer Infant Baby Monitor. The screen part had long since broken been disposed of, but I still had the camera/microphone piece.

The unit in two parts, that hinge on each other. The part in this picture contains the camera, microphone, and various LEDs - presumably infrared. The other part (pictured below) contains the power socket, switch, antenna, and a circuit that presumably deals with transmitting via RF.

Chromebook / Aw, Snap!

I've had my Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook now for 3 months. You can read about my experiences when it first arrived, and after the first month.

I use my Chromebook several hours a day 7 days a week. At home it is my primary computer. I probably only use my Windows laptop now twice a week at home, for quick things that my Chromebook cannot do (e.g. telnet'ing to a server or using a website that works in IE but not chrome).

I love my Chromebook, and intend to continue to use it. But after 3 months of telling everyone how much I love it, I've finally come to accept that I cannot in good conscience recommend one to anyone else.

Making Google Docs Forms send useful email notifications

Forms created in Google Docs can serve as Contact Forms on your web site. You can enable notifications to receive an email when the form is submitted. However, by default the email just tells you that the form was submitted without providing any of the content. Often it would be more useful if the email provided the values submitted in the form. Especially if you are receiving the email on a mobile device where Google Docs is not that easy to navigate.

Making a Google Form send the content of the form is actually quite straightforward. These are the steps that we will follow

1. Add an onFormSubmit script that sends the form values in an email
2. Add an On Form Submit trigger to run this function
3. Disable the default notification email
4. Test

The following example assumes you've created a form with just two fields. The first field for an email address, and the second field for a name.

Adding a Snow Effect on Blogger

As people start to think about booking holidays for the upcoming winter season we add a snow effect to our Beech Mountain Bliss Blog. Thanks to a script by Kurt Grigg this is simple. In Blogger, go to Layout and add an HTML/JavaScript gadget - I name it "Snow". Paste in the following.


<script src="http://snow-effect.googlecode.com/files/snow.js" type="text/javascript">
/***********************************************
* Snow Effect without images-by Kurt Grigg at http://www.btinternet.com/~kurt.grigg/javascript
* Script featured & available at Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/  
* Please keep this notice intact  
***********************************************/  
</script>


That's it. Save the gadget and view the Blog. You should see white dots drift down from the top.

Bidding Tic Tac Toe Winning Strategy?

At a recent leadership program I was introduced to a bidding version of naughts and crosses. It is a blind bidding variant of Gambling Tic Tac Toe created by Craig Huneke. Here are the rules

1. Both players start with $3 in coins
2. Both players write secret bids then reveal together
3. The winner places their winning bid on the square of their choice to mark their move
4. The winner now has less money to bid with. Repeat steps 2-3 until one player has a line of 3.

For example, the game might go as follows

1. Player 1 bids $0.75, and Player 2 bids $1
2. Player 2 wins, and places $1 (their bid) on the center square
3. Player 1 bids $1, and Player 2 bids $1.25
4. Player 2 wins so places $1.25 on one of the corner squares
5. Now Player 1 still has $3, but Player 2 is only left with $0.75
6. Player 1 can now bid $1 three times in a row, getting three squares in a row and winning

It seemed that there should be a winning strategy. Perhaps always playing a third of your remaining funds. I started filling pages of paper with games. It seemed that bidding a third of your funds, rounded to the nearest penny was a good strategy. So I decided to write a program that could play this variant of gambling tic tac toe. I would then teach it various strategies and let it play against itself ala Wargames (1983) but without the total global annihilation.