Posts By gg
Nike4All – Upload your Nike+ data to the official Nike+ website.
After a couple of days of hacking, I managed to get a way to upload the data from Nike+Ipod device to your Nikerunning account. No iTunes needed! That is quite cool considering that the Nike+ Ipod Sport kit has been out for a while (2006 according to wikipedia) and linux users had no way to sync their runs without iTunes. Until now.
Installation.
Simply download the python script from here. It’s a single file and all it requires is Python (was tested with 2.5 and 2.6 – should work also with 3.0). You can place the script wherever you want. It is suggested to save the script in /usr/bin so that you can run it without typing the path everytime.
GUI.
A graphical interface is also available, as Screenlet. Get it here.
First time run – pairing your data with your account.
1. If you don’t have one yet, create an account on the Nike+ website. You will be asked for an email address, password, personal details and, at the end, for a screenname. Just go throughout the entire registration. If you already have an account on the site, skip this step.
2. Make sure you are not logged in into your Nike+ account (hit logout).
3. Start nike4all issuing the following command:
gg@fly-home:$ nike4all.py -createAccount
Go to this URL and login whit username and password of the account you just created
Url to visit: http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/?token=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx&v=2
Press enter to continue only AFTER you login
4. After a few seconds you will be asked to visit a website: simply open that URL in your favourite browser and login using your credentials. Edit [28.02.11]: it seems Chrome may cause some troubles at this step. If it doesn’t work please use another browser; Firefox should do it.
5. After having done so, go back to the command line and hit Enter. The program will then say:
Congratulation, your status is now confirmed
The user <screenName> is now associated to the pin xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx
Your pin was successfully saved in the configuration file
To update new files connect the iPod and use the following command:
nike4all -sync
The configuration file is in your home folder and it is called
.nike+rc
the running files you will be syncing will also be backup in the same folder
~/nike+
you can change the backup folder by editing the configuration file with your favorite text editor.
Usage.
You should already know by now.
Other than regular syncing, you can also upload specific files. Start the program without parameters to get a help message.
Caveats and technicalia.
If you already have a Nike+ account, you can still use that one. You existing data will not be lost but you may experiencing problems syncing with iTunes again in the future because your PIN was changed. Your iTunes PIN is stored on your iPod, encrypted (probably with AES CBC 128 bit) in a plist file. Maintaining the same PIN for iTunes and nike4all would require finding that password.
Please, do not use the nikerunning website with any other device that is not an iPod or a sportband. The nikerunning website is a service for Nike customer only and nike4all shall be seen as a tool that allow linux users to use this wonderful service.
License and Credits.
As usual, thanks to python and thank to Ubuntu. Nike4all was developed using only free software and it is released under GPL. If you like the software, please consider donating using the button on the right side – money will go into a research fund (the Institute of garage science).
Bugs and history.
If you find a bug, please drop me an email.
08/15/2009 – first release v0.1
Update (July/2010)
Masatoshi Kanzaki has published a similar tool to upload Nike+ Sport band data from linux! Get it on his blog.
Update (October/2010)
I uploaded the sourcecode on googlecode. Feel free to contribute or fork.
100 lectures from 100 scientists
This is going to be a precious link for those who have a lot of time and are in search of inspiration right now: 100 lectures from 100 scientists. I believe virtually any lecture or seminar should be online these days. There’s so much crap videos in the internet, it’s about time to tip the balance, isn’t?
Waking Up To Sleep
Waking Up To Sleep is a complete conference on sleep held for The Science Network in February 2007. 
List of speakers includes:
Charles Czeisler, Luis De Lecea, David Dinges, Mark Eric Dyken, Ralph Greenspan, Daniel Kripke, Philip Low, Sara Mednick, Allan Pack, Satchin Panda, Terrence Sejnowski, Paul Shaw, Jerry Siegel, Robert Stickgold, Giulio Tononi, Roger Bingham.
All talks are available online, for a total of about 10 hours of high profile scientific sleep insights.
IDA and the media
Big big fuzz about IDA, today. See here for a rather sensationalistic article on SkyNews or here for one slightly more critical on BBC. I cannot really judge on the importance of the discovery itself; sure enough I can say that the words “missing link” mean nothing at all and I am glad that at least have been left out of the paper. No doubt, though, that IDA is being sold as “the missing link that is proving Darwin was right” — even the name, Darwiniun Masillae, seems to have been chosen for the very same reason.
Now, what really strikes me is the mediatic event that was created around this discovery. Big fanfare presentation in NYC, with opening words of the city Major; a book, scheduled to appear on amazon on the same day; BBC documentary; a website dedicated with videos, interviews and everything else. Is this appropriate? Not sure.
This is what the authors say about the mediatic event:
The scientific publication of Ida has been carefully timed so that the film, book and website can be launched at the same time. The scientists see this as a new way of presenting science for the 21st century, where a major scientific find becomes available to everyone, wherever they are in the world at the same time. Ida connects to us all, and we can all share in understanding her.
As Jørn Hurum explains, ‘I really like the idea that it’s now possible for people to look at the website or to see the film or read the book at the same time as the scientists read the scientific paper. You can get many different levels of understanding, but you get out the important messages in different ways at the same time. Humans are not special – we’re related deep in time to more primitive mammals. And the best way to tell this story is Ida, and this, I hope, will be the message that will come out.’
The explanation is plausible after all: times are changing and why not use new means for communicating Science? At least authors are pretty coherent: kudos to them, for instance for having picked PLoS ONE for publishing their paper and for advocating OA. From the PLoS Blog:
We asked Dr Hurum about the factors that influenced his decision to publish the article in PLoS ONE.
“Choosing PLoS ONE as the venue for publication was easy,” he explained. “First of all the journal is Open Access. I am paid by the taxpayers of Norway to do research and outreach from The Natural History Museum in Oslo. Why should a large publishing group then own my research and sell it in pay per view or expensive subscriptions to interested people around the world? I feel this is not moral when they have not supported my research at all but wants to make money on my several years of work without any compensation.”
“Secondly PLoS ONE’s lack of restrictions on the length of manuscripts and the number of figures attracted us; we wanted to publish a full anatomical description with lots of illustrations. In other journals this would have been impossible or the page charges would have been enormous.”
“Thirdly, PLoS ONE is the quickest way to publish a large work in the world!”
I still have to decide on whether this was a bit too much. We all know regular media tend to shoot pretty high every time but seems this time is a bit different.
Edit: when the news hits the google doodle you know it is a big deal.
WolframAlpha (only the screencast for now)
Here, an impressive demo of what it promises to be the next big thing on the Internet. Wolfram Alpha is been created by [[Stephen Wolfram]], creator of [[Mathematica]] and it is supposed to become available starting from May 2010. It seems like it could be an amazing example of data mining technology and could prove very useful for bridging technical knowledge to every day curiosities.
And here, a review of a first public demo run.
EDIT [2009/05/17]. Seems the service is online starting from yesterday. You can calculate things like Normality of 37%HCl or your exact age in seconds.
What I Think About When I Think About Manuscripts – I, Editor – Henry Gee’s blog on Nature Network
Perhaps what I am getting at is that scientific papers tend to be static. The best literature – of any kind – has a beginning, a middle and an end, in which the protagonists undertake some kind of journey, whether geographical or spiritual, and are changed by their experiences. In scientific papers, the results often give us no clue to the back story – the reason why the researchers were studying this system or that, and the tale of chances and mistakes and serendipity that led them to that point. The only readable parts tend to be the introduction, in which literature is summarized (a classic case of telling but not showing) and the discussion (in which the new result is integrated into what is already known).
via What I Think About When I Think About Manuscripts – I, Editor – Henry Gee’s blog on Nature Network.
GPG Key
I decided time had come to get a [[Pretty_Good_Privacy|PGP key]].
Here is my public ID:
1024D/DE8D92BF
This is my fingerprint:
6BA6 61B1 A198 8DDF 50BF 7F2A DE7F 773B DE8D 92BF
And from here you can download my public key.
Additional notes:
Quick notes for GPG syntax (here)
Creating SSH keys (here)
Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
This is kind of old (goes back to 2005/7) but fascinating. This guy got 6 atomic clock. He left 3 at home and he took the other three to a weekend outing on Mt. Rainier (~1500 meters above) – along with his three kids, of course. All this to test one of most famous Einstein’s postulates. Here’s the link.. Don’t miss the family pictures section.