6 years, no progress?

On the upside, real consumer implantable BCI may eventually be a real thing, thanks to Elon Musk's Neuralink. But both BCI and "smart glasses" still have a long way to go before meeting my needs.  

Current areas of focus: re-writing exocortex software around modern micro-service API design patterns, starting with newsfeeds and notes modules, which are the only ones I'm currently using regularly. Then I'll turn my attention to a mobile android app using the exocortex APIs.

Another year down.

In the past year I accomplished very little.  The biggest success was migrating my exocortex into AWS, first just to EC2 and most recently into VPC (about two monts ago.) While the VPC deployment is basic, it is secure and follows most best practices, except for high availability - to keep total costs down.

Progress on my software stack is virtually non-existent, although I have been working on my own file uploading software for archiving documents for use with my exocortex in the vein of "my life bits." This doesn't work yet, although the odds are good that another year will see me complete that part at least.

Thinking back on this project, which I started 9 years ago, it's easy to get frustrated with the painfully slow progress. However, even in its primative state, I do use my exocortex every day ( except for a four month period after I moved to Seattle) and have done so for many years. At this point, even though it may take decades longer, I still haven't given up on eventually achieving my goals. Will I succeed as soon or as easily as I naively first hoped? No, but my personal growth during the past 9 years inspires me to persevere.

I know not what the next 9 years will bring but as technology marches on, my dreams become less impossible every day.

Next steps

I received my Beagleboard xM from special computing and booted it up to gauge its performance, which I found to be adequate to my needs in my initial tests.

Over the next couple months I need to migrate my exocortex into "the cloud" and begin heavily customising the Linux environment on the Beagleboard.

Other tasks for the year will be to continue working on the software side of my exocortex and buying and building the remaining hardware components of my Ring-0 neural bridge.

It has been a long road to get to this point, which is itself only the very beginning. Too long, really. But the available technology is only now catching up to my goals. What has seemed like an impossible task for so long now looks more and more possible every passing day.

The waiting is almost over...

2012 will be the year! My new job has given me the expertise to move my exocortex into the cloud. At CES, a bunch of companies unveiled their plans for augmented reality HMDs that are actually usable and not just toys.

I've ordered a Beagleboard XM rev C, which will form the foundation of my neural bridge. While I wait to see how the new batch of HMDs to come out, I'll be refining the software stack on that and building out my exocortex.

Things are going to happen this year. The pieces are coming together.

More Progress

I've made yet more progress. Although nothing is yet to the "fully working" stage, I've gotten the basic chat user interface working on both the akgunkel.com website and my exocortex. I still have to get the two communicating, but I have figured out exactly how I am going to do it and am working on implementing the communication. I also have a pretty solid idea of how I'm going to interface everything with my chatbot AI and get IM-network connectivity. It's somewhat unconventional, but since all systems are going to use my exocortex's DB for data storage, I'm adding a few extra fields here and there that should allow me to use the DB for communication as well. I'm having to be a little creative to avoid race-conditions and the like, but I think it will work.

Still no good estimates of how long this is going to take. I need to heavily modify an AIML chat bot engine to get that to work, and for the IM-network connectivity I'm basically going to have to write my own client, although I hope using libpurple will spead that up.

My problems with dyndns also continue. This morning I created a backup IP logger script on akgunkel.com that I will use as a secondary system to track my IP. Using that, I should be able to update the address manually even by remote. Really, I should have had that setup ages ago, having only one method to update dns when I'm away from home was asking for trouble.

A New Website

I moved my web host to JaguarPC and got all my websites back up.

I am working on a new akgunkel.com. The new site will allow people to log in via facebook and then chat with "me" via my exocortex. I would also like to work on interactive search features (ala Knowledge Navigator) , but the first task is to get a basic AIML chatbot working.

I have no idea how long this is going to take but it has been on the to-do list for quite a while.

So far I figured out how to do the "log in via facebook" part (and got it working, minimally) and have started working on the communication interface between akgunkel.com and exocortex.akgunkel.com, which is in the early proof of concept stage, but progressing.

A few things that did get done

Looking over the posts of this blog, there were a few small things that weren't yet listed here:

In the spring of 2009 I bought a Scott-E-Vest to house my "neural bridge" wearable computer (which I still haven't built) and did some work testing it with wiring up a voice recorder and a bluetooth headset (for my phone) into it. I wore that vest daily for about a year, but only actually used the voice recorder a couple times. I did use the bluetooth all the time, though. My attempts at getting it wired up to record everything, including phone conversations, never quite worked. After a year of wearing the vest it was pretty beat up and ratty looking. I need a new vest, but stopped wearing the existing one in early 2010. I kind of miss it, it was very convenient with all of its pockets.

I did build a custom coat-rack thing to hold my vest in the Fall of 2010, so whenever I get back to working on the neural bridge, I'll be in better shape with that. The rack will make it much easier to work on the vest and string the necessary cables through its "Personal Area Network" cable spaces.

In April of 2010, I bought the 3G iPad when it was first available. I love this thing and use it with the web interface of my exocortex daily. Indeed, other than my lack of free time & energy, one thing slowing this project down is that my exocortex/ipad combo do a good chunk of what I need them to do. But I'm still not a multi-present omniscient being, so I really need to buckle down and get back to work.

On the positive side, my exocortex has proven to be remarkably low maintenance in the long term. This was one of my concerns going into this project, and the strengths of Linux have really shown in this area. I update the system software every couple months and other than that, it runs like a tank.

I bought a SIP to POTS bridge to use with Asterisk, which I was going to integrate into my exocortex but I have yet to actually get that working either. :-(

Last Fall, I did acquire a ~24U enclosed server rack and moved my exocortex and a few other machines intended to become part of the exocortex into it, including the machine I was going to run asterisk on. At least this keeps my exocortex systems locked up and safe.

So I guess I have done some things over the last couple years. Just not as much as I had hopped.

Not enough time...

There is never enough time.

No progress to note since January. I spent several months writing code for a work project instead of this project, which I actually care about more.

I don't know what's going to happen this year. If I did anything, it was a major organizing of my lab. Although other changes around the house negated all the benefits from that, it's now full of furniture that I can't throw away but I have no where else to keep it. :-(

All of my websites are in a state of total disarray. I'd like to get those fixed. My exocortex hasn't been updating it's dynamic DNS correctly for a good six months. I've made a couple half-hearted attempts at fixing that, but I've always been unable to spend more than an hour or so on the problem and more often than not it's just simpler to update it manually.

My most recent attempt was made on Friday, and it seemed to be working but now the internet is down at home so I don't know what's going on...

On the website front, I'd like to get the main akgunkel.com site back up in some form or another and maybe get spacenn.com refreshed a bit. Although, I'm not sure if spacenn is really worth the effort or not. Nomoredriving.org and the Utopia Foundation either need to get actual websites or I need to let the domains go.

I guess I just need to figure out how to make time.