Last night I made some changes to my mouse; we’ll see if they’re improvements or not. Originally I was dismantling it to clean it. Something had gotten inside the wheel and was causing it to scroll inconsistently. Once I got inside, though, I saw an opportunity to tune it. First was the clicking on the…
Category: Computers
Laser Pointer Interface
A while ago I built a computer input device using a laser pointer and regular usb web camera. It was a pretty simple setup, and I used a lot of existing tools as a jumping off point. Here’s a writeup of my work and details for how to replicate it and what I learned. First,…
TV Remote Alarm
We had an interesting problem at work. There’s a display in the main lobby of my building that shows the calendar of all the conference rooms and a map showing where they are in the building. It’s pretty handy for visitors and looks really slick. The problem, though, is night. There’s no point in having…
Hard Drive Surgery
A friend of mine recently had a minor emergency when a portable hard drive was knocked off a table and ceased to function. I was called in to help. Indeed, it did not work. When plugged in (and I tried on multiple computers and operating systems), it wouldn’t be able to recognize the device. Since…
VAST Contest 08
One of the things that sucked up a week of my evenings this summer was the VAST contest. VAST is a visualization conference, and I had decided to submit to a contest they were hosting. The premise of the contest is to use or develop tools to analyze a dataset and discover the threat. They…
An invention of mine
Here is a video of something I put together not too long ago. It’s me using a laser pointer to control a mouse on my projector. I have a projector that I hooked up to my computer. I also hooked up a webcam and wrote some software that analyzes the camera image to pick out…
Surgery on my baby
Yesterday my projector was acting up in a very unfriendly way. There was something wrong with the lighting. It was uneven with a couple lines through it. Worse, when I moved the projector, the lines moved, and I could hear a part moving around inside. Eventually, percussive maintenance no longer affected any change in the…
Typical me
A few days ago at work it was snowing. I don’t have a window in my office, so I was getting regular updates on the rate of snowfall by more privileged coworkers. The terms they used were wildly inconsistent, though, and I thought there had to be a way to determine the actual rate of…
Computer Lights Show
Back in college I occasionally did DJ gigs. It was a lot of fun and I did some pretty neat things to make it easier. I had a remote control for my WinTV card and I remapped the buttons to control WinAmp, so I could control the music while I was dancing on the floor….
Composite to S-Video
With the projector in my apartment, I have a VGA cable and an S-Video cable running as inputs. However, my Playstation2 cable only has composite video output. It turns out that composite can be hacked into s-video fairly easily. By running the composite video signal to both the brightness and color parts of the s-video…