GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

The physics of sound in our house lend well to Stacy being able to shout up to me from downstairs, but not so well for me shouting back downstairs.  It makes communication inefficient, and often times she's not exactly watching for messages on GChat either.  I don't like going halfway downstairs when I'm trying to hold very skinny wires in a special arrangement when poking around for defects in LEDgoes, much less just to get a Yes/No answer on a simple question. Recently, we picked up a Yamaha HTR-4065 stereo receiver for our living room.  Stacy was not happy with the sound quality of the original receiver, and hearing how the Yamaha can fill up the room while not vibrating every tiny appendage on your body with obnoxious bass, it was definitely money well-spent.  Hopefully it will add some more years to our natural hearing capability before we have to get hearing aids or whatever magical, mystical implant they develop by the time we're that old.  However, th...

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper was another project that had a lot of potential during its time, but would have required some startup capital (VC attention) and more care and nurturing in order to really get off the ground.  Now I feel like the guys at Quantopian are quite on the right track, but they too have recognized that designing an intuitive interface for stock options analysis will be difficult... plus there's just so much data!!!  Nevertheless, Dan Dunn at Quantopian seemed to like the interface I provided, but they're designing the interface I ultimately wanted to provide so I'm just going to let them finish it up. ;)  (Plus, they know a little more Python than I do, which seems a great programming language choice for this task.) The scalper was designed as a means to learn and study option decay in a graphical manner.  As weekly options were relatively new back in 2011, I decided those would be a great target because there's not a lot of data you nee...

Everyone has their favorite pricing game on The Price Is Right, whether it be Plinko, Lucky $even, Hole In One, Clock Game, or whatever the case may be.  Some may fancy retired games such as Hurdles (1976-83) or Super Ball!!! (1981-98).  Long-time producer Roger Dobkowitz once said "every pricing game is somebody's favorite," and with over 100 pricing games played over the show's long history, it's been sufficient to keep millions of viewers still watching loyally every morning. For as many memorable games as the show has, they have certainly had some, shall we say, "experiments" that did not go so well.  Some games were dull; others simply did not mesh well with the spirit of Price is Right (like Professor Price or Double Bullseye).  Still others have grown old (like Barker's Bargain Bar), were killed off due to inflation (like Walk of Fame), were plagued with mechanical issues (like Hurdles), or became too confusing for today's contestants to...

Does anyone care to venture a guess? To state the obvious, there are many LEDs, an ATmega chip, and there are the beginnings of a charlieplexed arrangement... It still has a long way to go, though!

I forgot to post here back in February that, once again, yours truly won yet another hackathon!  This time, I took the title of "Best M2M App" at the AT&T M2X Hackathon at the AT&T Foundry back on Feb. 22.  I'm splitting a $500 prize with my partner who provided a robot and programmed it to accept letters as serial inputs in order to drive it back, forth, left, right, stop, and do all sorts of things. The app is called SpeechPipe , and utilizes the text-to-speech function on your Android-powered device.  You can send the text to any Internet-connected or Bluetooth-connected device.  Thus, your Android can now be used as a microphone to take dictation for emails, Word documents, or controlling the screen if you have a program that will map certain commands to screen actions.  Of course, we also used it to control Jeff's Bluetooth-connected robot.  The implementation done for the Hackathon was written from scratch to use the MQTT protocol (the most...

I was requesting quotes from some Chinese suppliers for parts we need that they just don't make in the US.  Everyone knows the stories about why so much of the US manufacturing sector moved to China; they can build stuff much cheaper than we can.  They are known for being frugal.  Thus, I got a pretty good laugh when I saw this message from a supplier: 3)For the brightness, the type we quot you is for ultra brightness. We only send products with low brightness to india market. I think you understand their need is always with very low price and normal quality. There!  I didn't say it originally nor alter the text, I'm just passing it onto you verbatim as it appeared in my inbox.  Many cultures love to point out differences in other cultures, and it's not meant to be racist in a hurtful or derogatory way; many times, it's simply stating facts.  I think Americans go too far with what is defined as racist, and are too quick to censure someone simply for po...

Publicly-traded stocks and other equities often feature options, which are essentially derivatives of the motion of the underlying equity.  Stock options are also publicly-traded (unless you're at a company that still gives stock options as performance bonuses).  They allow individuals to reduce risk in their portfolio, or (infinitely more fun) to speculate on the movement of the underlying stock or equity.  There are two forms of options, and just like regular equities, two ways to play them.  In American-style markets, you are free to exercise options at any point prior to expiration.  I'll spare you a crash-course in options, since you can get the jist of how they work in many other places. However, many tutorials gloss over a glaringly obvious fact that must not be intuitive to many people, based on my personal experience.  It's also extremely simple:   It is never optimal to actually exercise a call early , unless the underlying stock is about t...