RobotThoughts

The Instruction Manual For Life

Rich — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:24:59 +0000

I am quite a fan of this little video.

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Kid Acting

Rich — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:25:39 +0000

So I left Veronica and a friend alone with the video camera rolling:

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Grease - Summer Nights Lego Stop Motion Animation

Rich — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:49:07 +0000

This is for my wife, probably only she would understand:

Then again, maybe not

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The Killough Platform Explained

Rich — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 01:34:16 +0000

Over at TechnicBricks there is a fascinating post that does a great job of visually explaining the Killough Platform to the uninitiated. As you know I am a big fan of holonomic drive robots and if you are new to the concept, they do a great job of explaining the theory without over complicating the discussion.

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The Office Treadmill Desk

Rich — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:43:24 +0000

Ever since I saw the treadmill desk at Book of Joe, I have wanted to set my office up with a treadmill. In preparation for a big computer parts yard sale at my house, I decided after cleaning out my office that there was more than enough room to incorporate the treadmill. So here it is:

More pics after the jump.

Now we will see if I lose some weight.

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Computer Sentience

Rich — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:34:56 +0000

Computer sentience is so close now. Ten years until the singularity.

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A Hilarious Skittles Commercial

Rich — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:12:14 +0000

This commercial had me laughing all day.

“I met a man on the bus today. I shook his hand.
He’ll never see his family again.”

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FlickrFan and My Mac Desktop

Rich — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:30:34 +0000

One of the things I missed when I moved from Linux to Mac OSX was the ability to display Flickr photo feeds as the background of my monitor desktop. Dave Winer fixed part of the equation for me by setting up FlickrFan which allowed me to grab Flickr feeds and bring them to my computer. Assigning the pictures for use as a screen saver or archiving is trivial but what I really wanted was to have the pictures displayed as my desktop background while I worked. Here is how I did it:

Once you have setup the screen saver you want in the Mac System Preferences you need to create two small scripts. The first script called RunScreenSaver (or whatever you wish) contains this simple code.

#!/bin/bash /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app /Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &>/dev/null & echo $!

Make sure the /System/…/ScreenSaverEngine path is all one line above. Wordpress wants to break it apart for formatting reasons.

The second script called KillScreenSaver (or whatever you wish) contains this simple code.

#!/bin/bash killall ScreenSaverEngine

Be sure to make both script files executable by typing this in your terminal.app:

chmod a+x RunScreenSaver chmod a+x KillScreenSaver

Or you can simply download both scripts.

When you want the background running, run the first script by double clicking it in the finder and when you want to stop the background run the second script by double clicking it in the finder. Of course, you can also run each script from the terminal.app:

./RunScreenSaver ./KillScreenSaver

Update:

Dave Winer over at Scripting News did a quick video of this effect:

Click To Play

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iCARS, A Star Trek LCARS Summerboard Theme For The iTouch and iPhone

Rich — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:00:37 +0000

I created a Summerboard theme around the Star Trek LCARS interface. This theme is based on the original iPhone theme by Kevin Rohrman (kevin@themonsterjam.com).

The iCARS theme includes a wallpaper you can put in /Library/Wallpaper to set the lock screen. This theme requires that you load and order your applications very specifically. You must read the details after the jump or you will not get this theme to look like anything but a jumbled mess.

The First Screen

The Second Screen

The Third Screen

The iCARS theme requires that the following application be loaded and visible on your iPod Touch or iPhone:

Dock:

Music, Videos, Photos, Finder

Screen One:

Safari, Mail, Calendar, Contacts
YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather
Term-vt100, Apollo, Colloquy, Notes

Screen Two:

Preferences, SMBPrefs, Customize, SysInfo
Installer, Stumbler, Clock, Calculator
SSH, VNsea, PDFViewer, weDict

Screen Three:

Books, gpSPhone, NES, psx4all
RSS, Tetromino, iBLackjack, Sketches
iLevel, iPhysics, iTunes, ToDoList

Here are shots of the application ordering in Customize -> Icon Display Order -> Manual Reorder:

Finally, here is how you setup your prefs in Summerboard.

Download this theme below:

iCARS, A Star Trek LCARS Summerboard Theme For The iPod Touch and iPhone

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Somatic, A Summerboard Theme For The iTouch and iPhone

Rich — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:57:02 +0000

I created a Summerboard theme around David Lanham’s free Somatic Icon Set available at the Iconfactory. The Somatic Summerboard Theme can be downloaded and used on your iPod Touch or iPhone. There are 93 application icons in the theme plus 73 extra icons and 5 wallpapers:

Somatic Summerboard Theme for iPod Touch and iPhone

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