Recently I had run across the megazoomer SIMBL plugin, and found that it could make a Terminal.app fullscreen! Something just wasn’t quite right about it though. The white text on the solid black background wanted to look as if I had booted in to single user mode, or started my computer with the verbose boot option on, but no font I could select seemed appropriate. So I began the hunt for the Mac OS X console font to use in Terminal.app in earnest. Eventually I found it, in the form of a C source file. All of the character bitmaps were described in an array in a file called “iso_font.c” in the XNU source. I went on an adventure to find appropriate software to make a font file, and eventually I found a rather dreadful tool called Font Forge, but it worked so I used it. I prepared my font in the BDF ASCII format with liberal application of TextWrangler’s grep based find & replace, as well as a Python script to massage it a bit more. After lots of messing with Font Forge and some tweaking of the metadata, I could export a TrueType bitmap representation of the original Mac OS X console font, which I have provided here. The font is free to use, according to comments in the file as well as the original APSL license, so I am providing it here freely as well under the same terms. Enjoy!

Note: The bitmap is 16pt; other sizes are not recommended.

Download Darwin ISO-Latin-1 Font (TrueType):

Darwin-ISO-Latin-1.zip.

Erik has released a fantastic new game billed as the following:

Oops! is a classic board game of skill, cunning, and regret. Battle against up to three highly intelligent computer opponents, or go head to head against real people in competitive network play. Taunt your enemies as you move swiftly around the board, knocking their pieces back to start on your way to glory and victory. Available exclusively for Mac OS X!

I highly recommend downloading today from the Oops! Product Page.

Just a quick test of the new iPhone Wordpress client. Seems to work. :)

I’m headed to Advanced Visual Interfaces ‘08 this summer in Naples, Italy to present the work Josh and I did on VCode + VData regarding video coding tools. I’m really proud, as it’s my first first-author!

You can download VCode and get more info about it on the Social website.

Enjoy!

Last fall I was contacted by Heiko Hansen (of HeHe) regarding using the EasyLase USB on the Mac. I must say I was quite intrigued when I found out that he was working on Nuage Vert, a visualization of energy usage in Helsinki. The project uses the cloud of emissions from the Salmisaari power plant as a canvas to demonstrate how much energy is in use by the city.

photo credit HeHe

The project is going on display February 22-29 in Helsinki. I encourage you to go check it out more in depth at www.nuagevert.org.

For the project, I ended up creating a Java wrapper for the libEasyLase driver for OS X. It is now possible to get laser output on the EasyLase USB from inside a Java app on the Mac. Please contact me if you’re interested using this.

I’ve finally put together an installer for the EasyLase USB driver for Mac OS X. I am making the driver available for download today, after more than a year of use internally with the LaserLine project as well as the Laser MacMAME and iTunes visualizer projects.

The build is Universal and has been tested on PPC and x86. The installer includes libftd2xx, a necessary library from FTDI. It is working well with libftd2xx version 0.1.3; Version 0.1.0 is the current released version, and I expect FTDI to update this soon.

Please let me know if you’re using this driver to access an EasyLase USB on the Mac, I am happy to help with usage and development of laser software on Mac OS X.

Download EasyLase USB Driver v1.0 (Universal) for Mac OS X:

libEasyLase.dmg.

Subjectivity is (fortunately?) no longer needed with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Leopard’s mail client dutifully warns senders of blank subject lines before sending mail. I am, for this reason, stopping active development. This built in feature will likely be more useful as it is there by default. So with this release, I’ve fixed up the installer a bit, this time a shell script instead of an AppleScript, and prevented it from trying to install on Leopard. A bit of a farewell for this piece of software–on to bigger and better things.

Download Subjectivity v1.0.1 (Universal) for Mac OS X 10.4:

Subjectivity.dmg.

And my web browser of choice is Safari 3.0 for Leopard. Unfortunately this makes viewing TIFF images of the Patent Office’s website an absolutely abysmal experience.

So today in CS421 I found GreaseKit, a Safari Plugin that allows one to run Greasemonkey-like scripts on web pages in Safari. So I wrote a userscript: usptofix.user.js to change the <embed> tag to the <img> tag, resulting in success.

(original left, modified right)

I simply scale the TIFF to the page width, and everything is okay.

Unfortunately, it crashes Safari half of the time I load this page; I’ve reported a bug against GreaseKit.

It is probably better to just use Google Patents, but at least I learned something.