Blog - Page 65

Yesterday I took my mother out to lunch at Thousand Cranes on the garden terrace of the New Otani hotel in Little Tokyo. I had the Tenshin Sampler ($22.50)which was basically kaiseki, a large assortment of small dishes each with unique flavors and ingredients. The first course was three delicious dishes, the first was two cubes of deliciously slimy mountain yam with a vinegar chili sauce that reminded me of kimchi brine along with some small orange eggs that were larger than flying fish or smelt roe, but much smaller than salmon roe, but just as fishy tasting and some shredded raddish of some type, possible daikon. The second dish was an unagi and shittake savory custard that came in a covered dish and included a spoon for easier dish to mouth transport. The content of the third plate totally escapes my mind and I didn't take a photograph of it, but I remember enjoying it.

When the main course came, I could tell my mom was jealous that she ordered the City Sampler($19.95) which didn't come with a first course, but when her tray of dishes came she was very pleased with her selection. My main course consisted of 6 dishes, not including the steamed rice and sauces. Clockwise from the top, the first dish was some type of fibrous tuber in a sweet soy sauce with two pieces of gooey okra on the side. The second dish was several thick slices of salmon and yellow tail sashimi with both daikon and western radish, seaweed, shizo leaf, lemon, wassabi and soy sauce. The third dish was a steaming hot bowl of miso soup with the customary tofu, seaweed and green onions. The fourth dish was a small sampling of daikon, cucumber and carrot pickles that were firm and mildly acetic. The fifth dish was an unusual twist on the conventional shrimp tempura obtained by covering the battered shrimp with crunch rice spheres before frying, along with typically prepared yam and enoki mushroom tempura, the sauce for which was enhanced with the optionally added cone of daikon radish and garlic. The sixth and final dish of the main course was a sizable portion of perfectly broiled yellowtail garnished with a crisp slice of lotus root, daikon and lemon atop a bed of tender sea vegetables flavored with bits of bonito.

The service was great and the desert of mango ice cream and a sugar cone cookie complimented the complimentary hot green tea served after the meal. The food was wonderful and I look forward to going back soon.

After lunch we toured the garden which Penelope and I are considering as a wedding venue. My mom took advantage of the open wireless access point and checked her email and I helped her with a few things on her PowerBook and then we walked down the stairs to Weller Court where she went book shopping and then we parted ways, she headed to Marukai and I to do some programming. [Photos are here]

One thing that ZDnet forgot to mention in their article on the odds of what will come at Macworld is the iSAN, which will be some kind of Fibre Channel switch that can turn the XRaid into a true SAN device. We were going to buy an XRaid and our contact at Apple told us to hold off for the SAN device that will be debuting at the upcoming MacWorld.

~~I've been saying this was going to happen for a while now, it just makes sense that Google would create its own operating system. I actually hadn't thought too much about a cheap computer, but I suppose that makes sense, too bad WalMart will be selling it.~~ Google just announced that they will be selling TV content via Google Video and also that they are offering the "Google Pack" that comes with Firefox, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Picasa, Google Earth, and Adobe Reader 7. No Google OS Yet.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24268-Macabre_Black_Eagle.html)

The RIAA has proven that the only way the music industry can survive is through suing its customers. In the case of the minuscule drum'n'bass music industry, it can only survive by suing its only customers, and the only customers drum'n'bass producers have are DJs.

The logical conclusion is to sue the DJs so that the drum'n'bass artists can get a slice of the fat pie that the djs are brining in through their highly lucrative mix tape / cd sales. i mean can you name a single dnb dj who isn't totally rich from exploiting the drum'n'bass producers they feature on their mixtapes? if it wasn't for the damn djs out there ruining the market the drum'n'bass producers would be selling thousands, nay millions of pressings of vinyl to your average jungle joe.

The Plame leak case opened up a can of worms that our country may never be able to control. Allowing the court to force reporters to reveal their sources in a case where the leaking of the actual information was a traitorous act may have been the right thing to do in that case, but the administration is going to use that as a reason to do the same thing, this time in their defense. In the current probes the whistle-blowers were doing our country a favor by letting the public know that Bush was spying on the American people without warrants and that they were running torture gulags throughout Europe. Hopefully the probes will go nowhere and the real crime committed by Bush and Co. will be their downfall.

Looks like the ACLU shares my opinion:

The following statement can be attributed to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law."

Although I am Jewish, my family has always celebrated both Chanukkah and Christmas, some times we only did Christmas. This year I am doing both, and I had a wonderful time with both my family and Penelope's family. On Christmas eve we went to my mom's house in Woodland Hills and had some Chanukkah ham, it was one of those special Kosher hams. Then on Christmas morning we went to Penelope's brother's house for breakfast and to open presents. After that we headed over to her Grandma's house to meet some of her cousins from Texas, and finally we went to my Aunt Jan and Uncle Van's house in Villa park, a city that is famous in Orange county for having neither churches nor bars. We both had a really great time and it was a great holiday.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24162-New_Furby_closeup.html)Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, if you haven't seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc's RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.

WARNING : If you take apart Furby it will never be the same once you put it back together, unless you are really good with a sewing needle.

I started by removing the feet which are fastened to Furby with a triangular security screw. The Boxer 62 piece security bit set that I bought at Fry's a few years back contained a triangular bit that was just slightly too large to fit the Furby foot screws, so I filed it down a tad and in it went. After taking off the feet, the clawed under-feet were exposed which were surrounded with little fur booties that just slid off with a little tug. Once I removed the under-feet I could see how the fur was attached to the skeleton.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24158-New_Furby_Robomonster.html)The fur is glued on in 2 places, which i cut with a sharp knife. The fur also has plastic tabs that go into the base of Furby, which can be pulled out with a little effort. Once you have the base of the fur free from Furby you will have to open up the back of his little fur suit, this back is lightly sewn with just a few stitches and opens easily once you free the first stitch, almost like it was made to come open easily.

After you have opened the back of the suit you can slide it over his head, you will have to snip the small threads at the tips of his ears to get it off over his head, don't snip the big white threads that loop through the plastic ear guides, this is used to track the location of the ears. You will also have to snip the thread on the tip of his mohawk support and the thread wrapped around his eyebrow mover.

Then comes the tricky part and that is the last screw that holds the plastic eye and mouth guides onto the center of the face, at first I tried just pushing a screwdriver right between his eyes and turning but I couldn't get a hold of the screw. Next I tried just twisting the whole thing, but this seemed like it was going to mess up the eyelashes. Finally I just pulled hard on it and it the plastic flexed and popped off the screw. Now Furby is hairless and looks like a cyborg version of Mr. Potato head, sans-bucket of parts.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24149-Furby_Exoskeleton.html)Furby's shell is closed by 6 screws and once they are removed you can open it up and see the goodies inside. After his shell is open, you will have to unwind the zig-zagging red and black wires, which I think are some kind of antenna to allow the Furby to communicate with its brethren. After you have released and unwound the wires you will need to cut the microphone, as there is no way to get it out of the shell without cutting it. Once you cut the wires in the middle, you will need to strip off the insulation so that the mic can pass through the grommet. The grommet has two sides, to get it out first pry out the outer grommet from the front of the shell and then push on the leads to drive the mic forward and out of the shell. You can then pull out the the rear grommet and use them together to protect the mic although it isn't really necessary.

After pulling the mic, I stripped the cut leads and removed the old leads from the motherboard, then I soldered the mic back on to the mic traces on the motherboard. I suppose this was the first actual hack. I then screwed back on the under-feet, stood Furby up, and switched it on. He worked fine and responded to my request to tell a joke.

I then removed the silicone mouth which was fastened by two screws to the face, once it was free from the face i had to clip two little silicone loops that attached to the beak and tongue, this will probably prevent the Furby from ever working the same again, although I suppose gluing would be possible.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24154-New_Furby_RSC_4128.html)The next step was to take a look at the motherboard. The motherboard is fastened to Furby with two screws, once you pull it off you will have to remove several snap in connectors, but to really get a good look at it I had to snip the feeding switch leads. Cutting the feeding switch wires was actually a good thing, because it makes feeding Furby much easier (just short the wires together). Here are pictures of the motherboard, the ROM/RAM daughter card and the transistor daughter card. The epoxy blob in the center of the MB is the RSC-4128, I am not yet sure what the other blob is.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24153-Furby_Motherboard__Note_Diagnostic_Port.html)The coolest thing I saw once I opened up Furby was that the board designers were nice enough to leave nice large pads for the RSC-4128 diagnostic interface, which hopefully should allow programming of the Furby. I am not sure, but I think the diagnostic port is a serial interface. I have ordered the development kit from Sensory Inc, and I'm sure this will help answer some of my questions. If I do end up being able to alter the programming / data on the Furby here are some things I plan on doing:

• Give Furby a more colorful vocabulary
• Teach Furby some tasteless jokes
• Change Furby's voice tone to be less cute and more evil
• Give Furby a funny accent and maybe a lisp and a twitch
• Hook up some of the unused I/O ports to control other things (the chips has 24 I/O ports with 10mA outputs)
• Expand Furby's memory
• Utilize the voice recording function of the RSC-4128
• Make Furby a voice controlled DTMF dialer
• Utilize the MIDI synth contained in the RSC-4128

Here is what I plan on doing even if I can change the code or data:

• Add nicer switches to the make the Skeletal Furby easier to
• Pet
• Feed
• Tickle
• Turn off
• LEDs that light up when Furby moves
• Volume control for the speaker
• Put the Furby head on a Robosapien body

Here are some relevant links:

• New Furby Hack photo gallery
• Sensory Inc Furby Press Release
• Sensory Inc RSC-4x Family Info
• RSC-4128 Data Sheet (497k PDF)
• Sensory Inc Dev Kit Order Form
• First Gen Furby Hack Site
• First Gen Furby Autopsy

So I am a sucker for robots and the new Furby looks pretty damn cool, so I ordered one, hey it only cost me $30. The new Furny has an off switch, and we all know you should never trust a robot without an off switch. It also responds to voice commands and has a whole bunch more motors and movement than the old Furby.

The furby also has 6 times more memory (512k) than its predecessor. It is powered by a Sensory RSC-4128 chip which is a "single-chip solution providing all hearing, talking and CPU functions". The Furby uses Sensory’s Quick Text to Speaker Independent™ (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which sounds like it will make hacking a very interesting possibility as it uses text instead of audio files for its speach, there is also a plethora of developer info on the Sensory Inc website, and you can download an IDE.

I am also going to try and get a dev kit. Did I mention it has an off switch? As soon as I get it I will be removing its fur and taking pictures of the process. I will also see what kind if IR fun I can have with it.

After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I can see this is going to be a totally hackable robot.

So I just joined the New Downtown list-serv, although I hate yahoo mailing lists, and I took a moment to look through their website, specifically the dining section which has to be the most incomplete and out of date directory of food in Downtown. For example, take a look at the Steakhouse section which only contains the Pacific Dining Car and the Japanese section which contains a total of 3 Japanese restaurants... maybe they don't consider Little Tokyo to be a part of Downtown LA, but I do and there are a hell of a lot more then 3 eateries there.

I don't think they are intentionally leaving stuff off, I just don't think the site has been updated for years, for instance there are no milestones in 2005 and the only thing on the calendar is the DLANC meetings (which I've been meaning to attend) so I guess I did get something out of the site. I wonder if they need help keeping the site current? I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask.