Tag Archives: Programming

There has been a lot written about setting your mac to automatically capture images from its built in camera. Unfortunately a lot of this is written for OS 10.4 and is partially irrelevant in 10.5 and 10.6. Commands running without a user context that access the isight produce errors that the device can’t be accessed. In 10.5 you need to run whichever command you use to capture images from the isight using a real user. This means that you cannot run the command as a cronjob or from a shell prompt easily. You CAN do this by following the directions on this site using launchctl bsexec and the PID of the login window.

http://tompohl.com/2010/01/23/howto-track-your-mac/

My implementation requireds running the capture every 10 minutes between 11 and midnight and is only triggered by time. My solution after the break:

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Rapid Prototyping of Push based proximity applications.

While Apple has made available the Push API’s on iPhone OS 3.0, it still takes a while to develop for your particular solution. Additionally, the Bluetooth API’s are available for OS X, but again, takes some figuring out. Thankfully, there exists an open source solution to detect proximity to a Mac by a registered bluetooth device. Proximity allows for one bluetooth device to be detected by a computer and then can run an applescript. Applescript can send a message to Growl and growl has a plugin called Prowl that sends the message over the Push API to your iphone. Click on through for the applescript to communicate with Growl

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Today I was looking into some OSC signal apps for the iPhone. I ran across a lot of partial information and no real good examples. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. I really wanted to use a program called touchOSC with Quartz Composer. I put together a quartz composition displaying a teapot that I can move with my iphone and change the colors with. The program requires touchOSC on the iphone, OSCulator, and quartz composer. I have posted my demo files at http://idisk.mac.com/peterp100-Public?view=web goto the quartz composer Tutorials. The files are touchOSC osculator example.oscd and touchOSC receiver example.qtz

Google docs provides a great way to create forms. The output gets saved into a google spreadsheet. Perfect for sign up lists or getting a list of interested people in a certain project. I’ll be using this for my workshop signups in the future !!!

Official Site

Date: Saturday Dec 6th, 2008

Time: 12pm – 10pm

Location: Almer/Blank

Address: 525 Venezia Avenue

Highlights:

* The top studios set up shop on one street for one day so YOU can have some face time

* Quick presentations throughout the day so you can hear what these hiring companies are looking for

* Five amazing speakers

* Job stock – see below

* Budding Talent – see below

* A crazy street party you don’t want to miss!

I love my Eye-Fi card. It’s 2GB and all my photo’s get uploaded automatically when I get home. All I do is turn on my camera and there are all my pictures uploaded onto my computer !!! This isn’t the reason I purchased this however. The first thing I thought when I heard about this card is “Great, now I can take pictures at our Interactive Media 2008 thesis show and put up a real time slideshow of the events”…

Unfortunately, no slideshow apps work this way. When you run a slideshow in Picasa web, or flicker, or any web photo sharing site, it loads the data once, and then repeats. So if you are uploading new pictures, they don’t get into the slideshow. Turns out iPhoto works the same way as do all other applications I tried this with.

My Solution after the break:

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Wouldn’t it be nice to able to restart you OS X machine into Windows without having to set the startup disk in the Bootcamp system preferences? I have some lab machines that auto login as a non-administrative account, so how can a user restart into windows? Sure, they could hold down the Option key at startup, but our systems are controlled via VNC, and have not direct keyboard or mouse input. My Applescript and sudo file solution after the break:

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Epson projectors can be controlled via a web interface which uses a simple api to execute commands. Understanding this allows us to implement a system to send commands via the network directly to the projector, bypassing the web interface. Curl is a standard unix command used for getting web pages, or just sending an http request in our case. The trick to controlling the epson projectors is that the ref-url in the header of the http request must be the IP of the projector, or else the projector will not accept the command. Luckily, curl provides this functionality. So here it is:

curl -e http://projector-IP –header ‘Authorization: Basic username:password-hash’ http://projector-IP/cgi-bin/sender.exe?KEY=command-code > /dev/null 2>$1 &

Portions specific to each projector are Italicized. For access to the ZML projectors please contact me. A few command-codes are below.

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I have been reading recently about many tricks and strategies people are using to run a iTunes library from multiple computers. I have been doing this for some time and haven’t seen my approach described anywhere, so I thought I’d share.

Assumptions:

You don’t need iTunes running on multiple machines at same time, only access to a central library from multiple computers.

The Setup:

Let’s start with a simple example of two computers. One will be the music server, and one a workstation.

The music server, in my case, is a mac connected to my plasma television and stereo system in the living room. It also has two 500GB el cheapo firewire drives connected and setup in a mirrored raid configuration. The iTunes library resides on the raid.

The workstation is, in my case, a final cut pro editing station in my bedroom. I want to use this computer to organize my music, as well as purchase music from the iTunes store and burn CD’s to my iTunes library.

My Solution:

On my workstation I have created two applescripts to be posted soon. The first applescript mounts my iTunes library from the Music Server via AFP, it then instructs my Music Server to exit iTunes, then launches iTunes on my FCP editing, and finally launches the second script.

The second script stays open with an “on idle” event, continually getting the process list and if iTunes is not part of that process list, it activates iTunes on the Music Server.

You can download the scripts at http://idisk.mac.com/peterp100-Public . Goto the iTunes Scripts folder.

Now the real fun begins. Download the ZML Panorama Quartz, the Words demo, or the Cube demo, to display a Panorama instantly in the ZML. Words and Cube demo’s have animation while ZML Panorama displays a still Panorama.

Quartz Visualizer Settings

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