10: Life is sexually transmitted.

9 : Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

8: Men have two emotions, Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

7: Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day, teach a person to use the internet
and they won't bother you for weeks.

6: Some people are like a Slinky .. Not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

5: Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

4: All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to Criticism.

3: Why does a slight tax increase cost you £200.00 and a substantial tax cut saves you £30.00?

2: In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is Weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

And The Number 1 Thought For 2008 :

We know exactly where one cow with Mad-cow-disease is located among millions of cows in Britain but we haven't got a clue as to where millions of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of Immigration.

- Scott (Blatantly copied from somewhere)

New Laptop Arrived. Portal.

:D

Need I say more?!

Al

I came across this neat little plug-in last night.   What it does is take all the images on the page, and puts them into a fly-by-wall type preview allowing you to pan through the images, select and enlarge the image you want.  A few sites like google images, facebook, myspace, flickr and deviantart are already compatable with this plug-in, so I can presume it isn't hard to add the necessary markup to make it work on any site.

You can see a quick example below I made searching for Italy on google images (click for larger picture):

The plug-in is made by cooliris, is around 1Mb to download and you can find more info and a demo here.

YAY!

Using a 9 volt battery I have managed to get the IR lights to work (as tested through the laptop via BlueTooth).

The blue light on the left is simply to show that the curcuit is working. It might look like the LEDs on the right are shining but that's just the reflection of the light. They are actually working, sending out IR light!

If anyone has any ideas as how you get a really bright IR LED into a pen (do you get 9 volt mini batteries? Do I even need 9 volts?)

Time to check out Wikipedia or my new friend: Battery University

Al

I’ve taken apart the sensor bar and found it to be full of useful things I would never have thought of getting had I got the components separately. For example, I would not have thought of putting a small blue light to show when the IR Leds were on (as they are invisible to the naked eye!).

However a small problem has arisen – my complete lack of electronic knowledge! I thought that although the bar required 6 X 1.5 volt batteries to run, it only really needed 2 AAs and everything would be fine (and it would fit better to the glasses).

But I was wrong... so time to learn about electric circuits!

Al

Wii Project stage 2:

Well some stuff arrived in the post:

So I now have everything I need to get some head tracking up and running at home properly!

But to make this a little more relevant to Signals I have decided to use this technology to make an interactive whiteboard for our meeting room!

Any help with this would be appreciated (hint hint @ Gary and Scott!)

Watch this space!

Al

I got home last night, fired up the laptop and installed a Bluetooth adapter (which took longer than Windows to install... why is that?!) to link my Wiimote to the PC.

Within a few minutes I had managed to create a link between the PC and the Nintendo Wii remote, downloaded the software from here and was up and running.

Ok, I looked like a fool dancing around my room holding my Wii sensor bar to my forehead, but the 3d effect produced on the tiny screen was truly awesome! And well worth the effort.

Next steps:

1 – Link the laptop to the big TV to enhance the effect (need to by a VGA to Composite lead)

2 – Get hold of some Infrared LEDs, a pair of safety glasses, some glue, a battery and other electronic bits to make the head tracking device (or HTD from now on – I’m doing this properly after all!!)

3 – Create a 3D program that I can interact with, utilizing the power of the PC and the interaction made available by the HTD*

So I have a wireless Wii Sensor bar coming in the post from Amazon (I see this as the easiest way of getting the bits I need...) which should arrive tomorrow!

The only question left is what am I going to do with it once I have it all set up?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address!

Al

*er... I should probably learn how to write C# to do all this too!

It’s very rare for me to have a proper geekgasm, but this guy really ignites my inner nerd! So much so I have purchased a Bluetooth adapter and will be linking my Wiimote to my PC at home!

Here is another great use of cheap technology to answer a usually expensive need:

Maybe we could do this in our conference room?

Alastair

It would seem it's human nature not to leave things alone. We will take something designed for one role and use it for something completely different. This emergent use of technology creates some unique and unusual uses of existing objects. Take a look at what you can do with a Nintendo Wiimote:

I think I might give this a go when I get home! If I do I’ll post some videos of my results!

Alastair

Why is blogging so hard? We all have so much to say and yet can't find the time to say it!

I guess it's better to be too busy to blog that have nothing but blogging to do!

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Alastair