The narcissistic QR code
I’ve started working with the awesome project/app/site Loopcam and the first thing we did was to add 4chan sharing.
Read more over on the Loopcam /b/log and happy trolling!!!!!
A few weeks ago we (me & Konst & Teknik) finally released the long taking new version of CopyPasteCharacter.com — a website to help people find and copy symbols and characters that are not very easily accessible from the keyboard.
The main new thing, featurewise, is that we included many more characters than the previous version had. More characters has been the top #1 feature request the past three years the site has been online. To make the site easy to use with all new characters, we have divided everything into different sets/collections such as “Numerals”, “Symbols” and “Graphic shapes”.
We also made it possible to create your own set with characters and some smaller things like sharing sets and decide what set that should be the start set on CopyPasteCharacter.com.
SNMBL is a manifestation against the constant increasing prices in public transportation in Stockholm. The first event took place on September, 18 at Slussen, Stockholm.
Daniel Eskils, together with a bunch of other people documented everything and made a movie from the event (here with English subtitles):
Peter and I did the website for the project and the manifestation. To make it easier to find out where the buses were all the time, I built an iPhone app that tracked the current location of the iPhone and sent it to the server. Then a map on the web page reads the latest reported location and show the bus’s location on the map with all the stops.
Read more about the project on www.medborgarbussen.se — mostly in Swedish though.
This project started as an idea to see how a “real world” filter for photos (like the popular Histamatic and Instagram apps) would work, except our filter is actually real and not digitally applied.
When I joined the project, Ruben Broman and Erik Wåhlström were more or less already done connecting all the hardware and had the screen working as a regular external screen connected to his old laptop. The same night I hacked together a funny looking Ruby script that fetched images from a ftp server, downloaded them and showed them in fullscren on the old CRT display while a Canon 7D took the photo. We managed to get it up and running the same night and even had time to throw together a quick iPhone application that uploads the photos to the ftp server. This early version of the project used the Ruby script, Image Capture (built into OS X) and QuickTime 7 to display the photo in fullscreen on the little display. The day after I added a Tumblr uploader so the photos get published on the blog.
This worked but was very instable so all code was rewritten within the first week it was up and running, mostly for stability but also seperated into different smaller scripts to they could run asyncronysly. We replaced QuickTime with a Quartz Composer project that allowed images to be displayed in fullscreen while not beeing the forground application, and replaced Image Capture with the command line tool GPhoto. Everything was still controlled by Ruby scripts but, as written above, seperated into three smaller classes/files so they could work in parallel, with a main deamon file using Forever The ftp server was replaced with a smarter REST based server to handle the uploading, downloading and archiving of the images.
The iPhone app was also rewritten from scratch to be cleaner and smarter. As of today, about 30 people have the beta (distributed using awesome Testflight).
Except for some smaller tweaks, the current version of the project has been up and running for about a month without restart nor crash so I would say it’s pretty stable now. We haven’t really decided exactly what to do with the project right now. We might release the app to the public and keep it going for as long as it’s possible, or just see InstaCRT as a fun hack.
I’m building a pretty cool little project with Ruben right now. More info soon
Finally they’re here — The My Domain Tote bags! Most of them are at WWDC in San Francisco right now so if you’re here, grab/ping me (@haraldmartin) for a free bag.
The bags are made by Peter Ström (also my brother) from Konst & Teknik <3 <3 <3 <3<3.
The TwitterFax is a small project done together with Konst & Teknik. It will watch a given Twitter username for mentions and then print it, together with any twitpics or yimg images attached to it.
The code is pretty simple and uses the Twitter gem for communicating with Twitter and Prawn to genereate the PDF’s. I’ve set it up to run every 15 minute using a Cron job.
Check out the full source code. You’ll need to change what typeface to use or get LucidFaxEFRom.ttf from somewhere else.
So go ahead and mention @konst_teknik to try it out!
Here’s a simple ruby script to download torrent files in Safari sent to you/an account as URLs in Twitter direct messages.
It could be used on your home server to download torrent files you send to it from something like your iPad.
I’ve set it up to run every fifth minute (using cron) to check for new files, but can of course be adjusted to something that works for you.
Also, make sure to point Safari’s download folder (in Safari’s preferences) to the same folder as you have Transmission automatically watch for .torrent files so the download actually starts.
We wanted to automatically create a grayscale version of the uploaded images for a current project. Here’s the Paperclip processor we’re using:
Until now I’ve been creating todos in Things from Mail messages in OS X using the quick entry built into Things and the “autofill” feature. But I didn’t like that it, by default, created the todos in Things’ Inbox and that I had to manually select text in the mail message to get it as notes (which is important when using Things on your iPhone/iPad when the link back to the mail message doesn’t work).
Instead here’s an AppleScript which will take the selected message(s) and automatically create one task for each email in the “Next” focus in Things. It will then archive the mail messages and show a Growl notification. The todos in Things will get tagged with the “Reply” tag (which in my setup is a subtag of “Email”).
The script is a modified version of the one found here. I also put the script in an Automator action like described in the article so you can assign a shortcut key to it without including third party software.
#protip: Change Finder’s default folder to one you often use (like ~/Projects or whatever) http://bit.ly/deofQt
Martin Ström
haraldmartin
Before upgrading to Snow Leopard I had a QuickSilver trigger (⌃⌥⌘M) to open the currently selected file(s) or folder(s) in TextMate. It was setup as a QuickSilver trigger using the Proxy Object “Finder Selection”. Too bad it doesn’t work for me in the later QuickSilver versions and/or Snow Leopard.
I missed this trigger so I made a 10.6 Service to accomplish the same task:
~/Library/Services. I called mine “Open With TextMate”
To run the service from the keyboard, run “System Preferences” and select “Keyboard”, then select “Services” in the left menu and locate the “Open With TextMate” service on the right side. Add a keyboard shortcut (I choose the same as I’m used to, ⌃⌥⌘M).
A couple of weeks ago our official iPhone application for CopyPasteCharacter.com finally became available on the App Store. The project itself isn’t too complicated but was my first “real” Cocoa and iPhone app so it took some time to get everything together and learn how to do things.
The application basically lets you find and easily copy symbols, characters and letters which otherwise can be hard to find on a regular keyboard. On the iPhone, many of these characters aren’t available at all by just using the system keyboards. Just touch one or many symbols to automatically copy them into your clipboard and paste them into any application (SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Mail etc).
I was happy to see that the app was approved by Apple only two working days after I submitted it. I had, however, waited about 2 months to hear from Apple on how we should solve a problem with my iTunes account.
Hint: You can’t use the same Apple account to upload/sell music in the iTunes Store as upload upload applications to AppStore. Create a new account before buying the iPhone developer program to stay out of trouble.
Please check out the product page with a video walk through or go directly to the AppStore.
If you’d ever need to use the screencapture command from a scheduled job (like launchd in OS X) or from a SSH session, you might find out that it doesn’t allow you to do that since you’re not the logged in user.
To work around that, run the scheduled jobs as root and exec screencapture like this instead: