maebmij’s blog

Various hardware ideas floating around in my head at the moment:

• Robotic webcam. I already have a static webcam, giving a dim and blurry view from the top of my SGI’s monitor, but the viewer isn’t really there. It’s like TV. Slow, boring TV. I want people to be able to look around. Currently in my possession: One stepper motor. That gives me an axis to play with, which is probably enough for fun. I also have (from previous experiments in this area) an opto-isolator chip which I could use for connecting my dodgy home circuitry to the parallel (?) port relatively cleanly. I do have an RS232 driver chip as well, but I feel that would make things a lot harder, as I don’t have the digital electronics knowledge to decode different signals into directions. I’d prefer simply to be able to send stepper motor pulses on the appropriate lines. We shall see…
• ‘Air text’ – an idea that showed up on various tech blogs a few weeks ago: you swipe a wand through the air and it writes text by accurately firing bright LEDs like a dot matrix printer. I figure this would be a nice thing to play with.

Not much achieved today: Back at uni and doing work for the department. I got yesterday’s mp3fix working on the Mac – basically installing the mp3lib library through Fink and then learning how to tell gcc to look in /sw/include, where fink puts its libs (I wrote that up as a unix hint, too). That’s gone into the makefile on the mac, but I don’t know how to generalise it so it’ll compile on both mac and linux – configure maybe? sounds too complicated.

I also started playing with XCode to build the front end, but discovered I’d completely forgotten how to drive it – so tomorrow’s task is to do the xcode tutorial again.

So, today produced a command-line linux/posix ID3 tag fixer, called mp3fix – source code here. It’s quite neat, but it’s not what I really want, as described in the last entry. That means today I produced the backend code. Tomorrow: Aqua interface!

I love iTunes. I find it gives me a much better way of accessing and arranging my music than what I used to use – a combination of xmms and a file browser. For those without iTunes, might I recommend trying rhythmbox, which is free software and has similar functionality.

When I want to give copies of some of my mp3s to people, iTunes lets me drag them out of the window and into the finder. But there’s a problem:



iTunes doesn’t label the mp3s the way a human would. Since many of my friends don’t use iTunes and so will care about the filename of the song rather than just the id3 tag, this isn’t good enough.
So, the mini-project: a gui, aqua program to change the filenames of mp3s according to a pattern set by the user – something like “artist – trackname.mp3″ or “artist – tracknum – trackname.mp3″.

I’ll post again to show how it’s going!

This system is basically videoconferencing looking at a common screen `between’ the participants. It’s done using the nice pervasive alpha blending built into MacOS X – leading to various people crowing that it won’t be in Windows until Longhorn.

Link (via Gizmodo)

So, I avoided having one of these for a long time. But I used one a bit while doing my honours project, and I quite liked the idea of having somewhere central to record ideas, plans, and progress. So here it is!