Mattiesworld

Some while ago, I was considering to buy a gyroscopic mouse from Gyration for my future Media Center, but I’m becoming more and more convinced I should simply buy a Wiimote instead

There are lots more possibilities while still fulfilling the original needs. The Wiimote IS a gyroscopic mouse but adds the following advantages:

• IR blaster / receiver (1024×768 resolution!!) 4 point tracking @ 100Hz
• relatively cheap! (40 EUR)
• speaker
• joystick and more buttons than standard mouse
• on-board storage
• programmer / hacker friendly
• go play multiplayer on a friends console

After looking at all the neat programs Johnny Lee put together, I guess you understand I can’t wait to try this out myself Also, be sure to check out his blog and numerous videos floating around the web.

First time I heard of the cool wiimote possibilities was when reading a post of Xfennec, in which he made a simple showcase of the possibilities with libwiimote using his favorite 3D engine Raydium. Be sure to check out the vid. I was really impressed back then, but of course Johnny did a lot more impressive stuff, the guy is a legend by now. Johnny does not use the libwiimote lib, but rather the dotnet WiimoteLib (I mention this ref especially for andrasj )

I have to admit that at first glance the .net lib seems more attractive due to its event based mechanism (internally, it does an async read on a stream in a loop though). The C lib looks a bit more basic but very easy to get started.

I was quite astonished to read about this BUG platform: “an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform”. This kinda says it all. It’s still in beta, but they are targeting Q4 2007 right now to release their BUG-base, the core product, featuring an ARM microprocessor and all kind of interfaces you might desire (notice the MPEG4 HW encoding/decoding support!). Like this featurefest is not enough yet, you can extend the base station with all kind of modules: “GPS, Digital Camera / Videocam, Touch-sensitive Color LCD Screen, Accelerometer, Motion Sensor”, you name it! Before you stop drooling over the hardware specs, save some drool to drool on the software specs. They have it nicely running on an OSGi framework! Extension galore. Judging by the screenshots, I have the impression they are running it on the eclipse framework which is an extension of OSGi (Paul, correct me if I’m wrong ;)).

This really seems the ultimate “toy for boys” or “Lego Mindstorms for adults” at least in a geeky world

Reminds me of this site/magazine where creating DIY gadgets is just daily routine..

This is one of my really old drafts. More than half a year ago I was looking for
a new monitor and had a hard time deciding whether it would be an LCD or CRT one.
Everyone buys an LCD these days, so what is my problem?
LCD advantages:
- weight
- less space needed

Do NOT read more

. Now, where does SED come in? I just wanted to spread the word. SED is for me the solution to my

Do NOT read more

here are some url’s for reference _1_ _2_

I updated my system page. Yup, I finally bought the 2 SATA drives I would hook up to my onboard RAID controller, like a few years ago. I picked the model carefully: a western digital 250GB with 16MB cache. The drive was so popular that I had to wait a few weeks before it became available again.
(more…)

Remember Minority Report where Tom Cruise handles some futuristic computer interface swinging things around using his both hands? That’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I first watched Tactiva’s tactapad in action (thanks Peter ;)). Not as futuristic as in the movie, but very cool nevertheless!