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Retweet of chaosprime

2016 Jan 11, 7:41
As a native speaker of several dialects of computer, the idea this = natural language proficiency is horseshit. https://twitter.com/davidjrusek/status/686955968224034816 …
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Urban Speaker, A Remote Public Address Art Installation

2010 Oct 6, 2:31PermalinkCommentsart qrcode qr sign phone cellphone

speak-er

2009 Mar 22, 11:03'Speaker are high-quality multimedia speakers that plug directly into your computer or MP3 player. Their iconic shape put the "speak" in speakers. Set includes a left and right speaker and power adapter.'PermalinkCommentsspeaker purchase design shopping gadget comic

YouTube - HTML 5: Features you want desperately but still can't use

2008 Sep 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."PermalinkCommentshtml5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8

YouTube - Resonantie

2008 Jul 12, 12:33Rice on a speaker makes interesting patterns based on the tone played. Like the cornstarch subwoofer video earlier.PermalinkCommentsrice video youtube sound science via:swannman

Cory Doctorow on LIFT Videos || The presentations of the LIFT conference delivered to your desktop.

2008 Jan 2, 4:41Cory Doctorow the always entertaining and informative speaker talks on new business models, DRM, etc. FTA: "Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person. He speaks about "Digital Rights Management" at LIFT0PermalinkCommentsvideo cory-doctorow drm music piracy

Annoyances.org - Comment about 'Turn Off the PC-Speaker' (Windows XP Discussion Forum)

2007 Nov 12, 1:15How to turn off the PC speaker in Windows.PermalinkCommentsaudio tips howto pc-speaker sound windows beep setupnewcomputer

Get a Clue about David Weinberger: Author, Blogger, Speaker, Fellow, Twitterer, Commentator, Columnist and Willing 'Word Association' Player on Dishy Mix Podcast

2007 Aug 23, 9:03An interview with David Weinberger.PermalinkCommentsdavid-weinberger audio blog interview article

Second Life Translator

2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his Second Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this blog post I became aware of the llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests. I decided that I too could do something cool with this.

Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.

Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non US-ASCII character input worked.

In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation. Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.PermalinkCommentspersonal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest

Wiimote wiissues

2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my N-dimensional Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.

Anyway, I did a little research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my computers had one already. I used GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer. GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.

Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a comparison list of implementations and tried the ones that support javax.bluetooth. None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use that address.

And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...PermalinkCommentsjava bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote

'Talking' CCTV scolds offenders (BBC NEWS | UK | England)

2007 Apr 5, 11:45British cameras watching the public now have loudspeakers hooked up to scold people behaving inappropriately. What year is it?PermalinkCommentsparanoia government tv camera article bbc

Magnetic Finger: A Sixth Sense (bbum's weblog-o-mat - Blog Archive)

2007 Mar 28, 3:45Guy tapes small but intense magnet to his finger and 'feels' magnetic fields around speaker wires, lamps, etc.PermalinkCommentsmagnet sense harddrive hack finger sixth-sense
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