Fighting with computers

My aging desktop computer is a 2011 iMac. When I bought it I loved the concept that would allow me a clean desktop. Truth be told and not iMac's fault, my desktop is almost always a mess despite de computer form factor. Since I upgraded it to Snow Leopard (mostly for the nee to use a newer version of Java) I have learned about some SMART error on the hard drive. Once I started to feel the pressure of certain application binaries not running because my system libraries were too old, I wanted to upgrade the system but I could not. OSX install would check the hard disk and it will refuse to upgrade if found defective. Whatever the problem my 1TB is suffering is not killing it for more than two years. And the iMac being the DIY-unfriendly that it is I keep delaying the hard disk replacing. A few months ago I found a spare USB hard disk at home and I used it to install Mavericks on it (yeah, I am not in a hurry to get next memory-hog upgrade). It all worked nicely while I keep on ...

The common approach I have used in the past for locating a tag on a given 2D shape has been to use the centroid location. For convex parts there is a very good solution. However, when the shape is not convex the centroid location may be outside of the shape surface. Whenever the tags are intended to identify a shape it might be a problem is the label falls outside of the shape, even more so when multiple shapes are packed together, as user may not be able to be sure which label belongs to which part. One idea of fixing that is to make sure the tag location is always inside the part, and for that purpose I have evolved through for different algorithms, trying to find the best result. Algorithm 1 If centroid is within the shape area, then just use that. When it is outside (concave shape) then an horizontal sweep is done in 10% increments, at the centroid height, looking for a spot within the shape area. If that is not found, then same approach is repeated with a vertical swe...

Sometimes I needed to check how heat was distributed on a surface. A cool but expensive way is to use a thermographic camera. I do not have one at hand. But an ongoing project uses thermochromic ink. That is an ink that becomes transparent once a temperature threshold is reached. It goes from a certain color to no color at all. So if you paint a piece of cloth and place it on a given surface you can do the measurement of temperature at each point. The following pictures show the heating process of a certain aluminium heated bed. My sample cloth was not large enough to cover the whole bet but you get the idea.  Heat sources start to show as whiter areas.   Now heat spreads a bit more.  Reaching the temperature threshold at many points For best results a glass on top would make sure the cloth is making contact with the whole surface evenly (top left corner was not having a good contact which explains the apparent colder temperature).