Archive for the ‘Compute’ Category

Wiimote and Darwiinremote to Control Powerbook Volume

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

For a long time, but without success, I tried to get my Wiimote to work as a volume control for my Powerbook G4. The problem with the free software Darwiinremote always was that mapping the volume keys to Wiimote doesn’t seem possible.

That problem is partially solved now. The free software PTHVolume lets you define any other shortcut which can then be mapped to Wiimote using Darwiinremote.

Still, it’s not perfect. PTHVolume misses a customisable shortcut for the option-shift-volume combination which under 10.5 Leopard controls the volume in smaller increments. And, but that’s only an aesthetic issue, you can’t hide the PTHVolume icon from the menu bar as you can do with the normal volume icon.

Anyway, find PTHVolume here, and Darwiinremote here.

Quicksilver for OS X

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Quicksilver for Mac OS X is a launcher very much based on keyboard input.

It works by bringing up an alt-tab-style menu via a definable hotkey combination and a search algorithm for finding items matching your input, which works almost instantly. Define which parts of your system are searched, so it’s fine to just serve for starting applications.

You can get much deeper into it, though. Do not only display applications, but any objects. Do not just launch, but use any other action in an application or on an object. Query an online dictionary for input text. Email a paper to your friend. Do it all with just a few keystrokes.

You can find the freely distributed software here.

Dan Dickinson’s blog presents a lovely introduction to using the code.

Morgan Packard live in Cologne

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

flyer morgan packard

Podcast on Robotics and AI

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL Switzerland provides the series Talking Robots.

Here you will find all the big names chattering away on your favourite topic in HRI, Robotics, and AI.

Good bye old and crappy cousin girls (what remains is some info on camera-based motion tracking)

Monday, March 24th, 2008

This is a better way of doing it, just like I am better at doing it all by now I guess (still need some hope tho … ^^). Anyway, one part of the old site shall be kept, as I really like the look. Credit for processing the background image goes to Aleks.

Basically, it’s three pages with some basic info on camara-based motion tracking. It’s still useful (though some links are dead by now), and can be found here.

Fix a broken Spotlight on external hard drive

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Recently, my OS X Leopard system ceased showing to me all the important files on my external hard drive in a spotlight search. A general Spotlight reset did not help, as it only reindexed the system hard drive.

Luckily, you can manually rebuild the index via terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/[Drive Name]

Here is links to the Apple manual pages for
mdutil and mdimport

By mdimport you can manually add information on new files and directories to your Spotlight index.