Now, I’ve been working with the Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop and Illustrator) for over a decade now, and some of the claims by other “experts” I am quite offended they choose to label themselves as “experts”. I’ll leave the other points of interest (smudges in various boxes, “African” vs. “Negro” as race, etc.) for others, but I can speak to the graphic qualities. Let’s break it down:

There are layers in the PDF! It must be altered, since if it were just scanned, it would be a single, flat image!

First of all, there is a terminology/vocabulary issue here; there are no layers in the PDF; to prove this, open the PDF in either Acrobat Reader (free; you can get it yourself here), and take a look at the “Layers” toolbar:

There's no true "layers" in the PDF

The Layers palette is empty! The PDF has no true layers in it. Period.

Okay, so there’s no layers, but what about the separate pieces in Illustrator?

Okay, yes, so it’s semantics, but it’s been bugging me that people have been calling them “layers” when they’re not. What they are are separate “pieces” in the document that Acrobat Reader doesn’t view as Layers, but Illustrator can be made to do so. So what happens when you open the PDF in Illustrator; you get an object that is bound by a Clipping Path. The clipping path is used by the PDF format to define the printable area of the document. In Illustrator we can safely remove it since Illustrator has an “artboard” that defines what gets printed (if we were to print it from Illustrator). So, Illustrator can remove the clipping path (”Releasing” the contents), which shows the internal pieces of the document. So what created those pieces?

Let’s assume for a moment that the document is genuine and not manipulated in Photoshop/Illustrator to add/remove anything. What created the separate pieces?

Here’s my solution: Thinking through how this document was probably made, it probably went something like this: A staffer at the Hawaii hospital was told to go make a copy of the bound book page with President Obama’s birth certificate on it. They laid that bound book on a photocopier and printed out a copy of the page. For security reasons, this paper has a watermark on it (the green hashing in the background of the final image). Because the original certificate probably doesn’t have the security hashing, the photocopier printed just the black image it perceived onto the already-patterned paper, which is why the hash pattern doesn’t curve at the left edge of the certificate like the lines on the certificate do. The certificate is also a lot smaller than a letter sized piece of paper, so there’s a decent border of green hash pattern all the way around the certificate.

The staffer takes it to their superior, who verifies that the copy looks like the original (Alvin T. Onaka, Ph.D stamped and signed the document on April 25th, in the unused bottom margin of the document). So now the staffer has a printed document that was pre-printed with a green security pattern, then was printed with the certificate from the bound book, and has a real signature from Dr. Onaka on it.

Now to deliver this document to President Obama: President Obama sent one a personal lawyer to Hawaii to pick up the certificate, so it’s likely that this printed document that contains the real, original signature of the State Registrar, Dr. Onaka was handed over and flown back to Washington D.C. But how to disperse this document to the country?

So, President Obama probably handed off the original document to a White House staffer and told them to scan the document and put it online. On hand for the staffer to scan the document is probably a modern office copy machine that also does scanning to PDF. And here’s where the kicker comes in… Modern copier/scanners are getting smarter by the day, and often try to “help” you make the best scan possible. One such feature is the option to “enhance text characters”.

Like this Epson GT-20000: “The Epson Scan software included with the GT-20000 offers new text enhancement features that sharpen text characters, and enhance recognition when scanning documents.”

Or this Pixma wireless printer/scanner: “Remove backgrounds and sharpen text before sending scanned documents with Auto Document Fix.”

Or this Kodak i1840: “Easy brightness, contrast and color controls to adjust tones, sharpen text and optimize photos”

In all these cases, note that the scanner is sharpening text, not just sharpening the overall image. So, the scanner is attempting to determine which parts of the document are text and which are not (since if you are scanning an old yearbook photo of your great-aunt Midred, you want the text of her name under the photo to be sharpened, but not the photo itself, since that would ruin the appearance of the scanned photograph).

I propose that the hypothetical White House staffer left some sort of “auto enhance text” feature enabled when they scanned the document in, and the scanner attempted to determine what was text and what was not, and if it was text, it pulled it to a separate layer, grouped close-by text bits together, and sharpened the edges. The PDF has metadata inside it that claims it was created on April 27th, two days after the April 25th stamp on the document itself. Having the document created in Washington, two days after the document was signed makes sense in this scenario.

But then why were some characters missed or grouped with different letters? Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Here’s an enlargement of the “Birthplace of Father” box. The “K” in “Kenya” was not sharpened and separated from the background, while the rest of the word was. In this case, the “K” is overlapping the vertical line at the edge of the box, which likely fooled the image processor into thinking it was not a letter, and so treated it like an image.

Here’s the word “None” from the “Type of occupation outside home during pregnancy” box. In Illustrator, the “Non” at the beginning of the word is separate text grouping from the “e”; why would that be when they’re so close together? The answer is in the color; due to the green hash pattern in the background, the “Non” overlaps one of the horizontal green bars, while the “e” is in the gap between it and the next hash pattern. When scanned, the image processor averaged the color, and as a result the “Non” is a dark green rather than true black, and so it’s assumed to be a different grouping (written in a green pen rather than a black?).

This enlargement may not look like much, but to me it’s pretty convincing proof that an automated process made these separations of text from the background, and not an artist trying to cover something up. There’s two pieces that Illustrator identifies when the PDF is broken apart that don’t appear to be text at all. This is one of the two, near the top of the page, and there’s one more between the date stamp and the certificate. Some people have conjectured that these two pieces were “Sample selections” used to recreate the security pattern where text was removed from the image. This seems to imply they think that the blue bounding box is selecting part of the green background pattern. It is not. There is image data inside the bounding box, but when first broken apart, this “text” grouping is colored white (so it looks like there’s nothing there on first glance). I’ve changed that to black so it’s easier to see. It is a sharpened bit of color that looks very similar to the sharp, jagged edges of the other pieces of text in this document. So everything that’s black in the enlargement above, some process thought was white text and pulled it off of the background. Clearly, this is not text, and I propose that this is an artifact of the text-enhancement process making a mistake and proving it’s an automated process and not being guided intentionally by a human. If a human designer was trying to sharpen all text on the document, there’s no chance they’d flag this as “text” and enhance it. If this piece was placed here by a conspiracy supporter, trying to hide evidence by drawing white over the top of something incriminating, what incriminating details would be so small and scattered in just two areas that would merit covering up?

Metadata Details:

There’s a few more bits of evidence (or lack thereof) to indicate that this document was not edited in Photoshop or Illustrator prior to being released. In Acrobat Reader, you can find some metadata about the document, incuding when it was created (April 27th), and what program created it (Preview, running on a Mac running OS 10.6.7). “Preview” is a simple image viewing application on the Mac platform, which (incidentally) has the means to capture images from a scanner, and the ability to save PDFs.This metadata cannot be edited once it’s part of the document, even with the full version of Acrobat (which is what I have it open in in the screenshot above). If this image were doctored in Photoshop and then exported as a PDF (”forgetting” to flatten the “layers”), the “PDF Producer” field would clearly list Photoshop, and it doesn’t.

Conclusion:

So, applying Occam’s Razor, what is more likely: that a White House staffer hit an “Easy Scan” button that included some text enhancements that got foiled by the security pattern and fact that letters ran into line elements? Or that the two-day gap between stamping and creation of the PDF was spent by a graphic artist painstakingly separating some of the text from the background so text could be changed? I’m going with the former.

After the careful application of some string, her thumb has a diameter of 2.5 in, which would translate to 23 sts. That’s close enough to the original 24 that I’ll just go with that. Turns out no adjustment needed!

So, the 63rd row of this glove (the right one) will start with the beginning of the thumb gusset, and knit stitch across the palm (42 sts; half the stitches), ending 11 of the ribs. The next two sts would be purled, if the ribbing pattern were to continue. Turning that and the last purl channel into knitted stitches leaves only 9 purl channels on the back of the glove. Continuing how the cabling pattern tapers off, the two purl channels outside the given diagram would end with the 24th row of the pattern. Given that my 63rd row is the 2nd row of the cabling pattern, I’ll reset my count to match that of the cabling pattern. Since I’m increasing the thumb gusset at the same time, and the pattern calls for increases every third row, I’ll increase on rows 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, and 26. Then I’ll knit two more rows around, before moving the 19 increased stitches to a holding yarn.

These gloves will have a rolled/folded over cuff, so I’ve got a long length of k2 p2 ribbing to do as the cuff; will probably end up around 70 rows before starting the palm of the glove. Upon consultation with my wife, she asked for 62 rows of the cuff, since she adores the number 4, and 6-2=4.

I’ve looked at the SeV “Technology-Enabled clothing” lines, but those more seem to be a way to organize your techno-clutter and make having multiple devices for multiple things be not an issue, while I’d like to see one, integrated system to do what I need.

So, I’ve been toying with a setup for a while, and thought I’d get it out in print to flesh it out:

Rather than design a vest or other outerwear that would fit a computer inside it, I’ve picked up a messenger bag at a recent conference my company hosted, which I’ll work into the vessel. I’d rather not have it be an actual piece of clothing, since then wearing it every day gives the appearance you’re wearing the same clothes every day, and I both don’t want to seem that socially awkward, and don’t want to make the design out of e-Ink to be able to change its appearance continually. So my goal is to turn this bag into a laptop. Not a laptop bag (for carrying a laptop), but a bag laptop (a bag that is a laptop. You follow?).

To power this mobile device, I’d create a power system in the bag, which would likely get power from the sun (like this bag modification), or could plug into AC power to charge. That linked bag modification is for a setup that doesn’t store the power coming off the solar panel; it only goes into a device if it’s plugged into one, and is only enough power to charge a cell phone or iPod. Instead, I’d likely set up something like a Tekkeon MP3450 battery inside the bag, which would gather the power continually and in turn power the wearable machine. I know that the solar panel wouldn’t have enough surface area on the bag to provide enough power to run a laptop (the example given is a 5-6V solar cell, while laptop AC adapters use 12V to charge the laptop). The Tekkeon battery doesn’t give specs on how much charge it actually holds, though from the accessory cables for the SUNLINQ solar system, the Tekkeon could be trickle-charged on a lesser voltage and store the charge.

Then, for the device itself, there would be a nano-ITX-based computer hidden in one of the pockets. Most of the cases for nano-ITX motherboards assume that if you’re opting for the 12×12cm footprint size, you’d rather go up in dimension rather than out, so the cases put optical drives and hard drives on top of the motherboard, adding thickness. For sliding into a bag, I’d want it to be laid out as flat as possible, so I’d have to make a custom enclosure with a 2.5″ hard drive sitting next to the 12×12cm board, to fit best in the bag. Add to this a USB Bluetooth dongle and a Bluetooth FrogPad for input, and a monocular display unit (like the M920 for a display. Then install a non-power-hungry OS on the system (Xubuntu would be a likely choice, as it uses Xfce as a desktop environment, which is tailored for speed and lightness.

The couple of downsides that still need to be overcome is wiring for the power system: I don’t know how to wire up a circuit that safely routes incoming voltages from a solar panel and from an AC transformer safely (though it looks like the Tekkeon model does that automatically, as it has different input sockets for the solar panel charging and the AC charging), but I’m guessing there are plans out there somewhere if I were to attempt my own generic battery setup, rather than something more expensive like the Tekkeon.

The cost of the monocular display units are still quite expensive (the M920 model going for a whole laptop could cost), though they get more expensive if they’re set up with VGA inputs designed for laptop display. Models that only have S-Video input may be less expensive (and perhaps there are grayscale displays rather than color?), and many of the nano-ITX boards have S-Video or composite outputs directly. Also, some of the head-mounted display systems have their own battery pack. The M920 can run off of USB power (5V), so could plug into the nano-ITX motherboard and pull power there, but others would likely have to be hacked to not use AA or AAA battery packs.

The Tekkeon statistics for the MP3450 say that it only powers a laptop for 3.5 hours, where ideally, this mobile device would have enough power to last throughout the day (10 hours) in the field. If I were literally out in the field, hopefully with the solar panel bolstering, if not compensating for the drain caused by the nano-ITX device, the battery life would be prolonged to last a full day. The MP3450 can be expanded to have a second battery spinal-tapped into it, doubling its capacity, so likely I’d start with a 3450, and add on the extra battery pack if it seems it was needed.

The final hurdle would be an operational one: the FrogPad is designed to be a keyboard replacement, but not a mouse replacement. If a good set of keyboard commands were set up to launch applications, move between applications, and set focus to various fields on the screen, that would be sufficient, or if Xfce has something equivilant to the Windows “MouseKeys”, where you can move the mouse with your arrow keys (designed for the physically handicapped, but useful if you don’t have a mouse, as well). I’d likely stow a USB mouse in the bag for the times I would be sitting down to be able to get more fine-grained control.

So that’s my plan. I don’t have the funding, nor all the pieces yet, but I’ve at least got all my links in one place here in this post now. Probably a first step is to get a FrogPad for use with my standard desktop to see if I like it enough to continue using it on a mobile system. Then outfitting the messenger bag with the solar power system, such that it could keep my smaller electronics charged, and test out that system, before launching into the computer melded into the bag.

We had a big snowstorm here that glazed most of the trees to a pretty white shine.

I wanted to create a USB-bootable rescue device to be able to rescue my home Windows and Linux boxes should they need it, but also to be a living Linux desktop, such that I could reboot into it and have my own full OS, for the situations when just having your own portable apps isn’t enough. After a brief foray into the Information Superhighway, I found PenDrive Linux, who collects various tutorials on installing a working Linux install on a USB flash drive. Basically, a lot of Linux distros have LiveCDs that are modified versions of the distro to automatically log in as a generic user, and load a basic desktop. They also have the capability to have a writable partition indicated (a casper-rw partition/file; haven’t found any good tutorials on what ‘casper’ is…), and it can write files to it, enabling users to configure the desktop, even though it’s burnt onto a CD, which is no longer modifiable. Since USB drives are now bigger than a CD, and are write-able after receiving the distro install, the basic concept is to set up a LiveCD and a casper-rw partition on the one USB flash drive, enabling you to boot, modify installed files, and save user configurations.

There’s a few variations on the theme of how to actually set up the two needed pieces (Linux and casper-rw), but in the end, I chose the method that also enabled me to share the drive’s contents with a Windows box (gleaning information on the process from here and here): My 1 GB USB drive is formatted into two partitions; the first being 750 MB and is formatted as FAT32 (partition type “Win95/32“, “mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n kubuntu” filesystem), and holds a Kubuntu LiveCD image, and the second is the remaining 250 MB and is a Linux partition (partition type “Linux“, “mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -L casper-rw” filesystem) used for housing the casper-rw information. I chose Kubuntu because I like blue better than I like red, and it came with QtParted already installed, which is great for rescue missions. The first partition isn’t Linux formatted, so that Windows is able to see the drive and read/write files on it. So, if I had to do a rescue mission of recovering some small data bits from an un-bootable Windows machine, I could boot it into Kubuntu off the USB drive, mount the NTFS Windows partition, copy the files to the USB drive, then take the USB drive to another Windows machine and get the files off directly, rather than having to mess with FTP, SAMBA, or whatnot.

Adding the instructions from here on how to make the USB drive bootable worked just fine, and now I’ve got my own Ku”boot”u rescue drive/desktop. Now I’ve just got to make myself a good ‘Ku”boot”u’ desktop pattern for it…

I’ve started on this quest with one of the ultimate swords in the game, the Masamune, wielded by Auron in FFX. Done in the appearance of the ’standard’ resolution portions of the game. I’m now working on learning Qavimator to have the sword pose itself on the avatar’s shoulder as Auron is. I’ll hopefully follow that with a full Auron avatar, including battle poses from the game. I also took a look at the FFX-2 characters as options. The noticeable difference for characters that existed in both FFX and FFX-2, when they moved over to FFX-2, they lost a lot of clothing. But, the benefit of that is, reproducing tight-fitting clothing is the easiest mod for the game (which is why there are so many lingerie salespeople out there). Rikku’s bows down her arm would be fun to create, and making half a skirt for Yuna rather than a full dress would be easier to accomplish.

Updates and screenshots here as I progress!

Well, we met with a mortgage consultant we were recommended to from church, got our approximate value range, and went house-hunting with a local First Weber Realtor. It was on our second excursion house-hunting with her that we came across this MLS listing:

A 1,700 square foot, split/tri-level home in southwest Madison. And situated at the bottom of our price range! It was an 18 year old home, but with a recently replaced roof, new carpet, new stove, refrigerator, and clothes washer, it had been kept in impeccable condition. We put an offer on the house that day, and the current owners accepted gratefully.

We had an inspection of the home, during which we measured out the upstairs living room for how to arrange our furniture, and I enjoyed the gas stove in the lower level.

The backyard opens up to a drainage canal lined by city land, so it looks longer than it is. It’s flanked by lilacs on one side and mature pines on the other (though we heard the story of how one of them lost their crown a few years back due to an adventuresome youth who attempted to climb it during a youth group party).

We also found that in addition to the bird feeders, there were a few prime spots for bird nesting around the property.

We heartily thanked our home inspector, since the inspection paid for itself by finding that the current furnace had a cracked heating exchanger and needed to be replaced.

One thing we had to do promptly after getting our offer accepted, before even the closing, was to get permission to transplant some bulbs from our current apartment to the new yard before the ground froze over. Katrina had several irises that she split from the ones that adorned her childhood home, and has tended them through our apartment living. The weekend we chose was nearly our last chance to do so, as snow was predicted, though only cold rain came down, the snows weren’t that far behind it.

And then that blessed day was upon us. The day that we turned over an amazing amount of money in exchange for a key (we couldn’t even move in yet, since the current owners needed to rent from us for a week and a half to give time for their new home to finish being built). We got the final word what the closing costs were going to be, but in the process of getting the cashier’s check, we got a call that the amount had changed, and we were lucky enough to be able to void the transaction and correct it there, rather than having to get in line again and re-depositing the first check and getting a new one. Here’s Katrina and I with that life-changing check:

And me remembering exactly just how much money we were turning over today:

But the final walk through of the house went without a hitch (that “Sold” sign is because of us!):

And then after a few hours of legalese, we were officially homeowners (with two first housewarming gifts from mortgage agent and relater)! Now, for the big move-in coming up December 15!