Make any display a Tablet... for under 40 Dollars!!!

So yesterday, I was browsing around the web looking for Human Machine Interfaces, and I chanced upon Johnny Lee. The creator of a simple, yet powerful tool that allows you to use a Wii remote and a home-made IR pen, to create a tablet like (stylus sensitive) display out of any thing from a computer screen to a wall or any other surface that is capable of acting as a screen.

The hack is brilliant and Lee has gone a step ahead to build up a few crazy applications based on Wii's motion sensing technology.

Here's my video on how my Compaq CQ45 transformed into a tablet. After a preliminary run, I modified my IR stylus for more power and distance and started playing around with CAD. The experience is simply unlike anything I’ve used before. A little more development, and this could potentially change the way designers work.

My IR stylus allows more current flow through the LED (within tolerance limits), allowing me to perform, what I call a “grab” and “drop”. It lets me grab an object on screen and move it around from nearly a foot away. Almost felt like waving a magic wand!

Here’s a video I made while testing out my latest mod to Lee’s electronic whiteboard system.

This has already taken the world of electronic whiteboards and projection systems by storm. What's more, is that it costs you nothing but a remote and under a buck to make the IR Pen (if you can cook it up on your own, else commercial products are also available). Visit Johnny Lee's site for more info.

There is surely going to be a lot more “Wii” in my forthcoming projects!

Feeding password to sudo over command line

I'm sure all linux users (ubuntu) have had a day when the security features of the OS, just seemed a tad more annoying than ever before. Specially when you have to put your password into sudo for every menial task. Or perhaps all you wanted to do was install a package using apt-get and didn't care to press "Y" in front of every question that followed.

Here's something you can do to minimize user intervention after you press the enter key in order to execute a command. To feed your password to sudo, use the following construct:

user-laptop$ echo <password> | sudo -S apt-get install blogilo

Using the -S switch allows you to feed the password through a pipe using echo over the command line. In order to skip the crazy prompts for apt-get, use the following construct:

user-laptop$ sudo apt-get -y install blogilo

Here's something that combines the two:user-laptop$ echo <password> | sudo -S apt-get -y install blogilo

P.S.:

This is my first post using "Blogilo". Just moved to Kubuntu (KDE4 for ubuntu. Download the kubuntu-kde4-desktop package if you're on v10.04). Loving the new UI and the cool desktop effects. Konsole (the default terminal for KDE, sucks... no transparency!) has still miles to go before i leave gnome-terminal. Empathy and Gnome-terminal are the only GNOME apps that I'm still hung over. The rest is good. Desktop effects is really the area where KDE takes the cake. You can toggle between desktop effects based on your power options too. So if you're running on battery power, you may wanna keep these effects to the minimum, and turn them back on when you're plugged into a power socket. You can have as many desktop workspaces as you want, and toggle between them using a mouse or keyboard. Miss the simplicity of GNOME, but for now, KDE is gonna stay :D !!

Check out the video below, to get a glimpse of KDE has to offer. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

KDE 4.3 desktop effects

FireUploader - Mass Media Uploader for Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu for a long time and its evolution over time has been a thing of beauty. The latest version (10.04) is the best Ubuntu so far. It combines great look and feel with the stability and security of Linux. Canonical has worked hard at addressing the various issues and incompatibilities users around the world faced with the release of 9.10. I remember how I could never wake up from a hibernation as my keyboard and mouse would be rendered useless. Power consumption was another sore point, which has been improved in the latest release. Clearly, their proactive attitude has put Ubuntu on the path to becoming a household name among people who don't want to pay an exorbitant licensing fee, recover from system crashes or never be able to figure out which anti-virus to use for Big Brother's Windows.

The only drawback (arguably!), I feel, is the lack of support for non commercial applications. Windows, being the most popular operating system, is preferred by a major chunk of software developers and companies (specially based in Asia) as a target OS. Even companies like Google, who pioneered the integration of mankind and hyperspace, have now begun to turn their back on Ubuntu (Google video and voice!!!! SCREEEECH!!!). A lot of software and plugins for existing software, unfortunately never make it beyond Mac OS and Windows. Mass uploading of media onto various file sharing and microblogging sites is yet another grey area, with little to help the world's most popular free OS.

Uploading content to Facebook (pictures and videos) and Flickr was rather tideous. With Adobe's Flash Plugin adding insult to injury, one was restricted to using the basic uploading utilities which needed constant monitoring and were rather unsuccessful on many an occasion. I, personally, have faced so much trouble posting pictures onto Facebook using the basic uploader that I had given up taking pictures all together. While third party plugins were being released for Picasa, on Windows, allowing users to export their entire library or parts of it onto facebook and flickr, all I could do, was be patient or make unsuccessful attempts to "wine" these applications.

Alas, Mozilla stepped up with FireUploader. An add on that allows users on all platforms (windows or linux) to upload their media content onto a multitude of social networking and file sharing sites.

Its extremely easy to use and authorize. It's UI is simple and elegant and it has an upload manager that allows you to pause and resume your uploads as and when necessary. Here's what it looks like:


This add on, along with Download Helper and Yoonoo are among the most popular plugins for Firefox. I recommend users on Windows and Linux alike to give this a try. It definitely gets my vote!

Appellation - Smart renaming for your music files

A while back I had posted a little command line tool called "Appellation", that would essentially help you rename your music files from meaningless default names (e.g. track 1 etc.) to more appropriate ones with artist and song title in the filename (e.g. JayZ-Empire State of mind.mp3).

Here is the link to that post.

This may not seem all that useful, but greatly improves locatability and file system indexing, yielding to faster results during a search of your hard drive. It also creates a more visually appealing structure to your music and allows you to store all your music files in one big folder without worrying about organising it through a buch of sub folders.
I was sitting around with a little itch that I simply had to scratch. I had to create a simple GUI for this utility. God knows console applications can be speedy but look worse than a 500 pounder without his underpants.

As usual, the GUI is in PyQt4. So in order to run this application, you'll need to have this toolkit installed along with Python 2.6 or higher. This application should work on both Windows and Linux without much difficulty provided all the dependancies are met.

Here's a screenshot of what the application looks like:


You can go to my projects page to download the source code for this application (look for "appellation"). The application scans through an entire directory recursively, searching for music files and trying to extract the artist and song names from the ID3 tag present in the file. If the ID3 tag present is not the latest version, it may not be read properly. Backward compatibility with older versions of the tag are not supported. Perhaps that is something I can toss out in the next version of this application.

The UI is fairly simple. Select the directory to search for music files using the Browse button. Click 'Start Renaming Music Files' to start the search and renaming process. At any time if you feel like stopping the search, click the small button marked 'X' near the progress bar, both of which come alive when the search is commenced. The summary of operations is displayed in the text browser widget and a total count of failures and files parsed is also displayed.

Good app to kick off your appetite on PyQt4. Hope you enjoy the app!