Entries from December 2007

Gretchen sent a pointer to this inspirational AAC video.

We should check out these to give us ideas for an accessible music toy.

• Jam Sessions and at Amazon
• Electroplankton and at eBay.
• NitroTracker.
• Rhythm N’ Notes
• Jam with the Band and this review.
• Hannah Montana: Music Jam

Gretchen sent me this pointer to Pam and Josh’s blog.

Over at Gizmodo is a nice video demonstration of 3D head-tracking for desktop VR using the Wii remote.

Daniel Gump has released an open source SDK for application development in the Opera Browser on the Wii. He provides access to the Wii remote functions, complete source and documentation. Thank you Daniel for contributing your effort. I’m looking forward to the great ET applications we can develop for the Wii.

Update: Some of these don’t work so well for me. The “Wall demo” completely locks up the Wii requiring a power off to recover. The Ship demo won’t start. Pressing A does nothing.

Today Gutsy automatic update brought in a new kernel and required a reboot. The reboot failed with a scary message after the grub prompt. After a few moments of panic, I remembered the command prompt available from grub and typed
find /boot/grub/menu.lst

This told me that it found them on hd1,0, hd1,1, and hd3,1. Looking at the script the update had inserted I saw that it was referencing hd0,0. Changing that to hd1,0 using the built-in editor allowed the boot to proceed. Once I had the machine up I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to fix that error.

An interesting post suggesting that the proper response to the inevitable increase in surveillance of every aspect of our lives is looking back. Why should public officials have more privacy that us?

Greg pointed me to this article over at CNN about Erik Ramsey and the work Phil Kennedy is doing with neural mapping. Very interesting work. The article mentions The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby; I’ve read that book and highly recommend it.

Alex sent a pointer to www.helpyouplay.com has some cool game ideas including an accessible version of Guitar Hero similar to our project last semester. I’m glad to see more work on accessible games.

I couldn’t get sound input to work. Output works fine but the microphone input on my Audigy2 card returned silence. After lots of Googling I found this post on Ubuntu forums. Indeed using alsamixer to adjust Master, Mic, and Analog Mix did the trick.