So, the status of “LaserMAME” has always been kind of up in the air. Links to one associated site, NightLase laserMAME, are currently down. There was that excellent video that circulated the net under the filename lasermameNTSC.mpeg, but I don’t really even know who created that. I’ve played Asteroids in color on a Pangolin system, so I’m not sure if that was a complete clone or what–(ask me about that story sometime in person)–and finally, there has been some discussion on the LaserFreak and Pangolin Forums that seemed as if there was some question about who did the work and who has the rights to LaserMAME. I think a system was even commercialized and available for rental at some point.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in getting in to those politics. But one recent event got me–uhm…motivated–to enter the arena of playing classic vector games on a laser projector. It seems like a most natural thing to do and looks completely awesome. Even the high end graphics people at SIGGRAPH this year loved the ultimate saturation and archaic wireframe visuals generated by a laser projector playing vector games from ‘79 and the 80’s.

When Paul Debevec introduced the Electronic Theater showing we were fortunate enough to have at the NCSA building on November 8th, he excitedly highlighted the laser enabled MAME setup that they had installed when first showing these videos in San Diego. I was excited to hear this and even more pleased when he put up the photo of the renown laserists and others involved with getting the system working; Steve Heminover (who I’ve been lucky enough to meet), Matt Polak, and others.

I have an extreme amount of respect for the people involved here. They’re the world’s experts on laser display, and the production quality was fantastic, but I must admit through the whole video demo, I was thinking, “Hey, it can’t be that hard–everything is already in vector format. What’s the big deal.”

So last night after we got some ice cream at Cold Stone, despa and I got to coding. It took a good 2 or 3 hours to get MacMAME to compile. After that, in another couple of hours we hacked up a prototype of laserMAME using the EasyLaseUSB on Mac OS X. I know we’ve got the math wrong (we didn’t know the range of the x and y coords–and the documentation is temporarily unavailable on the MAME website), but we got Asteroids working with some display bugs.

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I think another couple of nights of hacking could make it really beautiful.

I apologize for the poor quality of the projection, images, and video, but I was so excited we got something working, I wanted to publish right away. I expect we’ll have much better results before, say, March 2008. More to come.

So, when I came home from WWDC this summer, excited about all the new technologies, I quickly got started on a Quick Look Plug-in for ILDA files. I was super excited I quickly got it working, but I couldn’t tell a soul due to that NDA thingy. : ( But Leopard is out now, so I can reveal it. It isn’t very stable now, mostly due to an out-of-date version of ILDAlib that it is using; but I’ve added it to the LaserLine source, so anybody with a free afternoon can debug it and add colors and things. The drawing code should be pretty much verbatim to that in ILDAInspector, but it needs error checking and stuff on loading the files. Further, the project should reference the shared code portion of the source tree, not it’s own copy of ILDAlib.

ILDA Quick Look Plug-in

I recently was informed that the Justin.tv dashboard widget isn’t working properly with the latest versions of the website. I’ll be taking a look at this soon and getting a patched version out. Doesn’t look like it will be too tricky. The new version will also be able to access all available streams.

Sorry about the inconvenience, but I was unaware of it’s problems for some time.

I here announce the release of Subjectivity 1.0. Subjectivity is a Mail.app plugin that helps prevent against accidentally sending e-mail messages from Mail.app that lack a subject line. It is pretty simple, but hopefully quite valuable.

This first version is written in PyObjC, following the guidance provided by the author of the of the Mail Attachment Scanner. It works well, but hopefully a future version implemented in Objective-C will reduce file size and add support for Mac OS X’s summarization services.

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Download Subjectivity v1.0 (Universal):

Subjectivity.dmg.

Today I was attempting to use my trusty WiebeTech Notebook DriveDock (NBDD) with an Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. I plugged it in as I usually do with my PowerBook, and everything seemed fine. I was able to open files stored on the drive without problem. After a while I started to save my work; and I found the activity light would illuminate and the system would hang! An icon would appear, but the resulting file was unreadable! This is a problem; I was virtually unable to write to the disk.

Immediately I thought I had a bad hard disk attached–but it worked fine on my PowerBook. No references in the system.log either. Fortunately I found a Firmware Updater for Oxford 911 based bridges over at FWDepot. After downloading and wading my way through the sketchy app, I found I was running version 3.8 of the Oxford 911 chip firmware. An update to 4.0 was successful; initial tests seem to confirm it is working on Intel based macs too!

So it seems there is an incompatibility between Intel based Macs and Oxford 911 bridges with firmware before version 4.0. I was unable to find this documented elsewhere; has everyone simply stopped using their hard disk enclosures from 2003?

Acclaim Lighting makes LED based lighting products. Some of their products include architectural lighting, high brightness fixtures utilizing Luxeon LEDs, and even lighting to cover a whole floor or wall. It all is controlled by DMX-512. Well–almost; the interesting fixture here is the X-Panel Frame. This device consists of 12 5×5 RGB LED arrays, arranged in a matrix. Due to the number of channels, it needs more than 512 channels so it supports “DMX-1000K,” a protocol I am completely unfamiliar with. Fortunately, if you limit yourself to 6 X-Panel modules, DMX-512 works just fine, and the display size is just a bit limited.

Now, of course I was unwilling to use the recommended software provided by Acclaim; it didn’t run on my platform of choice. Actually, I didn’t even have a copy of the stuff. Nor could I find a USB DMX-512 interface. But I did have an idea.

The power of Cocoa allowed me to whip up a little application for my Mac in about two evenings. It took about 2 more days to finish up all the features. But what exactly does it do? First I made the whole display blink, then added some chasing features, and did some automated fading. Simple stuff, but it was lots of fun. It made me want to do more; so I wrote a little function that would translate from normal cartesian coordinates+color to the DMX data, reflecting the physical orientation of the device. An NSImageWell later, and I could drag & drop photos and have them displayed on the LEDs. The resolution was low, and my scaling unoptimized , but video was the most fulfilling.

But fancy Cocoa programming does me no good without a way to physically control the device. Fortunately I happened to have my EasyLase USB interface handy. I wired up a level converter with some MAX-485 chips, according to the wiring diagram included in the manual. I had recently finished testing the DMX-512 portion of the EasyLase USB Driver for OS X, but this was the first time I used it with a real device : ). (if you need a copy, let me know)

Please excuse the low quality of the video, I just kinda hacked it together. The screen capture and live video are slightly out of sync, and the CCD in my digital camera simply isn’t able to handle the brightness of the LEDs.

The video clip at the end is complements of Charlie Deets. Please don’t laugh at the poor software interface design; it was just a toy.

It has long bothered a friend of mine and myself that there isn’t a keyboard shortcut for the “Message Viewer” menu item in Mail.app. Of course there is ⌘-1 to bring up the Inbox, but it only works if the Message Viewer is not minimized. If it is–nothing happens. ⌘-0 brings up Activity Viewer; hardly what we’re looking for. So here I introduce to you ⌘-↩ (command-return) for Mail.app. A small hack you can apply to Mail will bind ⌘-↩ to “Message Viewer” from the Window menu.

Instructions:

EDIT (Aug 13, 2007): Be sure to read the comments before considering executing these–perhaps hackish–instructions.

1. Quit Mail. Make a backup copy of Mail.app
2. Ctrl-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents, navigate to “Contents/Resources/English.lproj”.
3. Replace MailViewer.nib with the one included in the zip file.
4. Re-launch Mail.app and enjoy using command-return to bring up the main window.

If you are familiar with Mac OS X programming, you might choose to simply open the MailViewer.nib file from Mail with Interface Builder and edit the keyboard shortcut for the Message Viewer menu option.

A couple notes of caution: The instructions here are for Mac OS X 10.4, with Mail.app version 2.1. Even a minor bug fix in Mail could destroy this modification, or make these steps obsolete. Do not attempt to use the attached .nib file with other versions of Mail.app, especially as it is updated in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard.

As a side note, in authoring this post I found out how to type special characters and symbols in Mac OS X. It is easy to insert special symbols with the Character Palette, but some symbols I’ve wanted to type directly from the keyboard as I encounter them somewhat often. The key is to turn on “Unicode Hex Input” in the International preference pane, under the Input Menu tab. When this method is selected, any unicode character can be accessed by holding option and typing the 4 digit code. For example, the european point of interest symbol, or command character, can be accessed by typing ⌥-2318.

I was able to find the information about the Unicode Hex Input mode in an article from 2002, and the character codes in a PDF from unicode.org.

In order to make this blog post more useful, I will disclose first tips for skipping voicemail greetings. According to a couple of websites, one may simply press the appropriate key (varying by carrier) during a voicemail greeting to be instantly forwarded to the beep:

• T-Mobile - #
• Cingular - #
• Sprint - 1
• Verizon - 1

I have yet to try all these out. Additionally, “*” may work if these fail. If I would much appreciate comments if anyone has first hand experience of other numbers working with other carriers in the Chicagoland area, or corrections in order to make this the canonical reference for the midwest.

Hopefully this will save everyone lots of time in life.

But none of the preceding information has anything to do with San Francisco. I very much enjoyed my trip there for WWDC and am anxious to release some of the code I’ve been working on which utilizes Leopard technologies. It’ll have to wait until October. The trip was great for reasons beyond just the conference though, I had fun seeing Helvetica with Chad. I also bought a new Freitag wallet.

Though there were some low points to the trip. I was trying to play Taboo, but upon opening up the box I found the AA batteries had leaked, and I got some acid on my hand, leaving me with an unsightly acid burn. I also chipped my tooth.

Finally, while I was out there I had the opportunity to work on the Justin.tv widget a bit more. Look for a new version, supporting all the new channels soon.