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 here!

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!

Installation

1. I’ve setup Dropbox to share my Things database betweeen my laptop and a computer at home which is always online.

2. Buy and install Prowl on your iOS device.

3. On the home computer/server, install things-rb:

   $ (sudo) gem update --system # if you're on an older RubyGems version
$ (sudo) gem install things-rb

4. ..and the prowl gem to talk to the Prowl API

   $ (sudo) gem install prowl

5. Save this file somewhere (like ~/bin/prowl_things.rb)

6. Setup a cronjob to run the script as often as you’d like. Mine runs every weekday at 8:45 am.

   45 8 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/ruby /Users/me/bin/prowl_things.rb

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.

Everything you need to know is in the README on GitHub so if you’re interested in this, check it out.

I wanted to display my ToDos from Things on the Desktop using GeekTool so I created a command line tool in Ruby (backed by a library) to access the database.

This way you can see what needs to be done but without switching (or even launching Things)

It’s in a pretty early state right now and probably has bugs but I’ve been using it for some days now without problems. I’m planning to add write-support as well (so you can create tasks from the command line if Things isn’t running) but right now it’s read-only.

For more information, check out the README file and source on GitHub or this thread on the Things’ forum

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

DEFAULT_PORT = 3000

puts (`ps aux | grep [r]uby | grep script/server`.split("\n").map { |l|
  server = l.split(/\s+/)[11..-1]
  (port = server.index('-p')) ? server[port.next].to_i : DEFAULT_PORT
}.max || DEFAULT_PORT - 1).next

I aliased it to ss in .bash_profile like this:

alias ss='./script/server -p `~/bin/available_rails_port`'

(Btw, Happy 2008! I haven’t updated this site for a while)

Tired of see the the soooo 1999-ish font “Verdana” every time you get a local error page in Rails?
Now you don’t have to. With this plugin the error pages will use Arial or Helvetica instead—finally!

./script/plugin install http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

./script/plugin install -x http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

git clone git://github.com/haraldmartin/verdano.git

Happy new year!