:P

“Freelook allows you to use movements of your head to accurately control your mouse cursor. This translates to hands-free viewpoint control in games such as IL2 Sturmovik and Lock On: Modern Air Combat, as well as providing a mouse alternative for handicapped users. Freelook is similar in execution to the excellent cam2pan and TrackIR systems, although unlike the latter, Freelook only requires a cheap off-the-shelf webcam.”

It requires a marker (piece of paper or LED) for proper detection still, but I can’t complain.

Nouse tracks the nose without requiring a marker, but it seems tied up as they figure out how to commercialize it.

Cam2Pan is only $10 and seems to be a bit better than Freelook.

Has anyone found the perfect cheap webcam for this solution?

Has anyone tried Freelook yet?

Eurogamer writes about the recent release.

Interesting Excerpts:

“Quest markers are provided in a clear form which means you’ll rarely, if ever, get confused about where you’re meant to be. This may be the first MMOG we’ve considered playing without a web browser open on a second screen to look up the quests we’re doing.”

“.. but by far the best of them is the Conjunctions system. Now, we confess that we’re still getting our heads around the potential of this system to some extent, but in effect it’s a timer-based system which allows you to fire off hugely powerful combo moves. When a Conjunction is available, a set of “gems” appear on your screen; click one and you’ll perform a Conjunction move, which may in turn open up further moves in the chain to other players.”

“Annoyingly, that also means we can’t talk about PvP today; the game is purely PvE (player versus enemy, meaning no inter-player combat) up until about level 40, at which point players can take part in a unique type of PvP battle in one large zone, the Ettenmoors. This works by allowing other players to temporarily don the form of famous monsters from the Lord of the Rings universe - which you can do from level 10, although of course, that’s not much use if there’s nobody to fight against yet.”

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qC1UYnJuFsY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yZmLKCoWe3A

Sounds interesting. Anyone try it yet?

I support the weechat IRC client. Goes perfectly with screen -x -r, ssh and bitlbee.

If you find yourself in Windows land from time-to-time and need a PDF reader that isn’t 40 megabytes and made by Adobe, try Foxit Reader.

A couple of quick scripts for easily burning all ISO files:

~/bin/burn:

#!/bin/bash
SPEED=8
echo ----------------
ls -l "$1"
echo Burning $1 at $SPEED x
say Insert new disc now!
hdiutil burn -speed $SPEED -forceclose -noaddpmap "$1"
echo Complete.
say Disc burning complete!
say Label. $1
ls -l "$1"
echo ----------------

~/bin/burnall:

#!/bin/bash
find -P . -mindepth 1 -type f -iregex '.*.ISO' -exec burn {} ;

Run burnall to quickly burn all ISO (case-insensitive) files in a directory and any subdirectories. When a disc is done, it will be ejected and you will be alerted with the ’say’ command to retrieve your disc and replace it with a new one, which will continue the burning process. No hunting ISO files down.

If you use MythTV, you could use easily use mythosd to alert your myth frontends that burning is complete.

After much scouring, cursing, and damning, I’ve cobbled together a script that restores my most-used windows to their proper positions.

Certainly not pretty, but it is AppleScript after all:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m through with jfs. A year in and I’ve found files with 100,000+ extents. Back to ext3 for me, as I await the stability of our shiny new ext4.

A veritable goldmine of Quake goodness.

Let’s just say I gave up the whole working-on-the-media-center-while-under-the-influence thing.

.. maybe this is why?