Thanks to this hint and Sony-Ericsson’s HID tool (warning: very buggy), I was able to bang together a quick and dirty iTunes Bluetooth remote control (for the Bt-enabled Z520a): ds-iTunes.hid. Send this to your phone (Bluetooth OBEX will do) and it ought to be usable immediately. The UI is passable but reasonably blurry and ugly; this is what you get for creating it entirely in Interface Builder with Unicode dingbats for button icons, and then scaling it down to fit the phone’s display. (Like I said, Q&D.)
I haven’t tried the keystrokes on iTunes for Windows, so some of them might not translate quite right. You’ll have to try it and let me know. Tag: hacks
Thanks to this hint and Sony-Ericsson’s HID tool (warning: very buggy), I was able to bang together a quick and dirty iTunes Bluetooth remote control (for the Bt-enabled Z520a): ds-iTunes.hid. Send this to your phone (Bluetooth OBEX will do) and it ought to be usable immediately. The UI is passable but reasonably blurry and ugly; this is what you get for creating it entirely in Interface Builder with Unicode dingbats for button icons, and then scaling it down to fit the phone’s display. (Like I said, Q&D.)
I haven’t tried the keystrokes on iTunes for Windows, so some of them might not translate quite right. You’ll have to try it and let me know. This article (and ensuing thread) about lightweight Sparklines in Ruby reminded me that I’d intended to write a super-lightweight PNG library (for those times when you want a quick and dirty Web graphic and don’t have a proper graphics toolkit handy).
I don’t really speak Ruby yet (any more than I do Japanese…konban wa, watashi wa dsandler), so here’s minipng.py. Requires: Python 2.x, and nothing else. Currently supported: 8bpp RGB, with optional single-color transparency (tRNS). Sample code:
# should result in a black smiley face on yellow background
from minipng import MiniPNG, Color
mp = MiniPNG(9, 6, Color.YELLOW)
for pt in [(2,1), (6,1), (1,3), (7,3), (2,4), (3,4), (4,4), (5,4), (6,4)]:
mp.plot(pt, Color.BLACK)
pngdata = mp.to_png()
I’ll probably add grayscale, gray+alpha, and RGBA soon (next time I’m bored and near a computer). ![[ :) ]](/soft/python/minipng_reference.png "Result of the sample code above.")
The most ingenious ideas seem obvious after the fact: Apple is using the new iMac’s display to illuminate the subject when snapping pictures in the new PhotoBooth app.
Damn that’s clever. Instead of integrating a flash into the new iMac, they said “hey, the screen is a flash!” So, before it takes your picture it flashes the screen white. How about that.
Note: this is not the first time that the full illuminative potential of the iMac has been realized.
Update 10/23: Manuel writes:
The first piece of software I recall using the monitor as a lamp was “Quaid Analyzer” in the eighties. Given that it was using mainly for some midnight hacking (it was a monitor for tracing any DOS/BIOS calls, single stepping thru any code, etc) the UI had a “light bulb” option just in case you needed to check some hardcopy docs in the middle of the night.
Here’s the Rice Fall 2005 academic calendar as an iCalendar file: 2005-Fall.ics. The script is live; it scrapes the HTML every time you request it, so don’t (often). [Actually, I should put a cache in there, before RiceInfo starts blocking dsandler.org.]
The URL can be munged to work with other terms; for example, 2006-Spring.ics. I haven’t tested it beyond the next two semesters, though, so I make no sweeping guarantees about the script’s robustness.
(This hack ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would, because of the sloppy input data. To the Rice Registrar: if you’re interested in providing iCal files for Rice students, get in touch.)
Independent hacker David Weekly, author of the currently-hot PBWiki (”start a new wiki, as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich”), offers impractical but deeply fulfilling advice: The Intellectual Property Wage Slave,
or:
Why You Should Quit Your Job. Here’s some more good advice: Get your smartest hacker friends together, and you’re bound to come up with something.
