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Welcome to my homepage. I became blind at birth from retinopathy of prematurity. I developed an early interest in computers and radio. I use Linux, MacOS, and iOS. I have an extra class amateur radio license. I practice Qigong daily. I consider myself a Taoist. I don't drink alcohol, eat meat, or gluten. It makes me feel optimal, and helps with migraines, which I also have to deal with. For the rest, you'll have to read my articles.
Cacao Drink
May 15, 2012Cacao rules! Chili powder gives this cacao drink a spicy flavor. I drink it every day.
In a saucepan, combine a tablespoon of cacao powder, a few shakes of cinnamon, a pinch of chili powder, a pinch of good quality salt, and 1-2 tbsps of honey. Add a mug’s worth of water. Some traditions say to heat the water to just above body temperature. Others say to boil the water. This makes the drink less bitter. Stir the drink with a whisk. Pour it in a mug and maybe a little almond milk to cool it. Perfect bliss!
Happy Hacker Hash Browns
May 15, 2012A number of friends have asked me for this recipe, so hear you go. I call these Happy Hacker Hash Browns because they go well with intense computer work, and you can have them any time of the day or night.
Start by heating water in a saucepan. It should cover the potatoes well. Meanwhile, peel and dice 1-2 potatoes per person. When the water boils, throw in the potatoes and let boil uncovered for 20 minutes.
Prepare a frying pan with olive oil, good quality salt, pepper, curry, and whatever other spices you like. Chop up three strips of vegetarian bacon per serving. Mince 2-3 cloves of garlic per serving.
When the potatoes finish boiling, strain out the water. Start the frying pan. Wait a minute and throw in half of the garlic. Stir it to make sure it doesn’t burn. Put in the vegetarian bacon. Stir it every 30 seconds or so. You want it to get crispy but not burn. Now put in the potatoes. Stir every minute or so for five minutes.
Turn off the burner. Add the juice of half a lemon per person and the rest of the garlic. A tablespoon of hempseed adds some good protein. Enjoy.
Echolocation Woodstock
May 08, 2012About six months ago I started learning about echolocation. With a simple tongue click, a blind person can see their surroundings. The brain learns to interpret the echoes caused by a sound close to its center. This activates the very same visual pathways a sighted person uses to see, but instead of using reflected light it uses reflected sound. Recently, retinal implants have allowed some people to gain limited vision. We can do all of that and more with our own natural abilities.
To many this sounds just too far out. As usual, the establishment has ignored this most profound development. In fact, only one organization, World Access for the Blind, teaches this illuminating procedure. As soon as I watched some of their videos and reviewed some of their course material I knew I had to meet these people.
I sent in an email and struck up a dialog. A guy named Justin got back to me and we started chatting. He suggested we go on Skype to have a relatively high quality chat. He showed me some basics and we became fast friends.
He first had me make a “shsh” sound while holding a plate in front of me. He then suggested working on my tongue click and gradually move to doing that instead. Once I got this most rudimentary understanding I just started doing it everywhere, especially around my awesome condo. We had some more Skype chats and he suggested comparing items, a plate and a pillow for example. This started making sense and I began to get a few images.
I knew I wanted to do an intensive session as soon as I learned they offered them. Now that I had a small taste I knew I had to do it for real. We scheduled a three-day session. It just felt like the right thing to do. I had always felt my mobility skills lacked some key component, but I could never articulate exactly what. You can’t express something if you’ve never had it. Now I knew that echolocation provided that missing skill. Some people felt skeptical, but I had already experienced something and could sense the potential.
Justin arrived on Monday night. My Mom and her husband offered to go to the airport. Good thing, because they delayed the flight, then we couldn’t find each other. Everything worked out and we headed back to my condo. My first paradigm shift would come quickly.
“Do you use sighted guide for the comfort, or because you always do?” All blind kids learn the correct sighted guide technique, gripping the upper arm of a sighted person to have them guide you. “I don’t know, I just do it.” I said. I had never even thought to question such a piece of blind orthodoxy. Not needing sighted guide? And yet the way seemed clear through echolocation. Of course! If you could see your guide you wouldn’t need to touch them. I realized that echolocation totally shifts the whole paradigm of current orientation and mobility instruction.
I want to make something else clear. When we had this discussion I never felt criticized. A lot of blind people have had a lot of bad experiences with mobility teachers. This did not feel that way. Haven’t you always wanted a cool mobility instructor?
Once we got settled in we got down to business. We went over the different types of clicks. The volume of the click controls its distance and the frequency controls its resolution. A louder click will let you bounce sound off of distant objects, while a quieter click will let you get more detail about a closer object. Once we went over the basics we could start our first panel exercise.
He asked me to get a plate. I got him a nice thick plate with apple blossoms on it to groove on, while I fetched some cacao and tobacco. He stood behind me on the stairs and held the plate in different angles and locations. Having someone else doing it as opposed to me holding it changed the experience. Now I really had to test my echolocation. And I did it! I quickly identified the nice big cool glassy plate!
He quickly graduated to something harder. My practicing had paid off. He took out his wallet and did the same thing. I could identify it, and knew it had a smaller rectangular or square shape and made of a softer material. Once I had done that he took a credit card out of his wallet, and sure enough I could do that too! I had already made good progress.
We walked around my loft and clicked at different places. I could hear the different walls. I could tell the difference between a cinderblock wall, a regular wall, and a window which goes from floor to ceiling like a wall. I could tell the difference between a wooden cabinet and the glass panel of the microwave which I never use. I then tried clicking to hear my loft, which extends above the main floor. That really took some effort, but I did begin to hear and see something. I could actually see the loft above me in three dimensions. I started to feel really amazed, but then I got a real shocker!
He told me to stand in front of the bottom of my stairs and look up them. I started to hear the hard material. I kept clicking. Gradually they began to come into focus, and I could actually see a three dimensional image of them extending upward and moving away from me. You have to understand I became blind at birth. I had never seen this kind of 3D view of things. Then while standing there and making clicking noises, my beautiful calico cat suddenly sprinted up them. I just happened to click at the right moment and I actually caught a glimpse of a puffy round thing moving up a flight of stairs! That did it!
i had enough for the night. My brain would not let me do more. Justin warned me it would screw up my sleep schedule, because it would put my brain in a hyperactive state. I told him not to worry about it. Indeed, I do feel a rise in serotonin. It feels, for lack of a better word, trippy. It reminds me of when I first used a color identifier. This feels even more profound, since it comes from within.
Echolocation represents much more than a mobility technique or a way to ride bikes. It changes neural pathways and neurotransmitter levels. It uplifts one’s emotional attitude. It completely overhauls the current paradigm. It causes a spiritual change, a crystallization of something new and wonderful, the finding of a lost light.
We’ve only just begun this echolocation Woodstock. Justin said that spontaneously and it makes a good title for this first entry. Now continue reading to find out what happened on our first day.
Access Unlimited
April 25, 2012I just appeared on the excellent show Access Unlimited, an award-winning show on KPFK in Las Angeles. I talked about my first experiences with computers, the first time I used an iPhone, and even text adventures. Jolie Mason, one of the show’s hosts, contacted me and we had a great chat. I knew we would have a great interview. Stella Violano from AppAdvice and Thomas Domville from Applevis also participated. I met Stella when she contact me to help her make her excellent list of apps for the blind, and her follow-up list of games for the blind. It felt good to get us all on the same program.
You can listen to it or download it. Enjoy!
How to Make MPD Work with AirPlay the Right Way
April 12, 2012Some time ago I detailed a simple hack for making MPD work with AirPlay. I considered it just that, a simple hack. I wanted something better even then, and my recent revelation that MP3 sucks just made it all the more necessary. I also hated having to use iTunes for my special music. So at last I now present the best way I’ve found to make MPD work with AirPlay on the Mac.</p>
This solution won’t suit everyone. The command line client works best, in other words you do things by typing commands instead of navigating through menus. They do make an unmaintained Mac client but I haven’t played with that yet. You can also get clients for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. It’ll also cost you $25. That said, it works beautifully.
First, you need to install MPD. If you haven’t already, install XCode and MacPorts. Once installed, go to the terminal and type “sudo port install mpd mpc”. Enter your administrator password and it will install the daemon and a command line utility called mpc which comes in handy if you need to debug this, which you will.
Now, create MPD’s configuration file. It comes with one in /opt/local/etc/mpd.conf, but I had to alter a few things. Either back that one up and overwrite it or just create a file called ~/.mpdconf. Put in the following contents:
</span>music_directory “~/Music”
playlist_directory “~/.mpd/playlists”
db_file “~/.mpd/database”
pid_file “~/.mpd/pid”
state_file “~/.mpd/state”
sticker_file “~/.mpd/sticker.sql”
port “6600”
auto_update “yes”
audio_output {
type “ao”
name “My Mac Device”
mixer_type “software”
}
Now create your user’s mpd directory by typing “mkdir ~/.mpd”. This should complete MPD’s setup.
This configuration file has some interesting features. It indexes your Music directory. Imagine iTunes without the mess of iTunes. It also uses the AO audio output. Once again xiph.org comes to the rescue with their cross-platform audio library. The default Mac audio output jittered.
You should test your setup at this point. Type “mpd” at a terminal prompt and the daemon should start. It will index your music the first time you run it. Type “mpc” to see the status. Hopefully you will see something like this:
Updating DB (#1) …
volume: 100% repeat: off random: off single: off consume: off
If it can’t connect then something went wrong. Check that you’ve done everything properly so far.
You may want to have a look at MPD’s and MPC’s manual pages. Just type “man mpd” for the daemon and “man mpc” for the client. You will want to learn the client’s commands. Feel free to try adding some music or a radio stream with “mpc add” and playing it with “mpc play”. “mpc stop” stops playback. To kill the MPD process, just type “mpd –kill”. You should do this before moving on.
Assuming that worked, we can now move on to getting it working with AirPlay. You will need to download and purchase AirFoil. This awesome little program will pipe any audio over AirPlay. As a bonus, it will select the audio output to use. I love it!
Once you get it going you will want to tell it to launch MPD. This part tripped me up. I emailed their excellent tech support and they suggested using option-click and selecting MPD’s process. This works, but unfortunately VoiceOver doesn’t handle option-clicking very well. I had to find another solution.
I decided I had to get AirFoil to run MPD. I tried launching MPD directly but it wouldn’t work. Then I got the idea to make a wrapper script to launch MPD. I whipped one up but that wouldn’t work either. It turns out I had to turn the shell script into an application bundle. Fortunately, this awesome little utility called Appify does just that.
I used that program to convert my shell script to an application bundle and it works like a charm. Simply download this file and unzip it into your /Applications directory. Now choose MPD Launcher from AirFoil and there you go!
If you’ve followed everything then you should having a working MPD setup streaming its audio over AirPlay and over your chosen sound card. What a bargain! This really does provide the best of both worlds for those who like the command line but who also want AirPlay. You can also get mPoD for the iPhone/iPod and mPaD for the iPad, which will let you control this awesome setup from your iDevice. This gives a truly luxurious touch. You just can’t lose!