Remote-controlled Bowling Ball

November 9, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

This is something I have dreamed of since I was 7. A company called 900Global, out of Texas, is manufacturing a remote-controlled bowling ball, the RC-900.

According to the company’s FAQ, the ball can be thrown as a normal bowling ball, but it works best when rolled down a ramp. It appears that the niche this company is trying to fill is that of assisting handicapped bowlers. After having helped with the bowling event of Special Olympics, I can definitely see the need for a device like this.

Also, I stink at bowling and always have, so I definitely would like one of these for myself.

Video after the break.

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Fixing Eclipse’s Autocompletion Feature

November 7, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

When I upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic, I reloaded Eclipse from the repositories, and everything seemed to be happy. Except my cherished autocomplete!

I dug around online, and found this site; the solution wasn’t in rebuilding my project, but rather in the comments.

Go into Window > Preferences > Java > Editor > Content Assist > Advanced and make sure “Java Proposals” is checked.

If you find that some members are missing, you may need to muck with some of the other checkboxes in that screen. However, when I checked “Java Non-Type Proposals”, “Java Proposals”, and “Java Type Proposals”, every member was duplicated in the list. That’s not damaging, but it is irritating. Just leaving “Java Proposals” checked seems to have made everything happy once again.

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Cool things on the Internet, round 1

November 6, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

Cory Doctrow has written a book, Makers, in which he tells a story of hackers that enjoy building new things out of trash. He has made the book available for free on his website.

Videos of each of the following are embedded after the break.

Todd Harrison carved a pumpkin like many of us, but unlike many of us he filled his with some electronics, including some lights, a big red button, and a car horn. It would be obvious enough for the horn to go off immediately when someone presses the button, but Todd made it light up the eyes, wait a moment, and then honk the horn. I want one! A video and writeup is available on his website.

Blogger Macaba created a balancing scooter that functions much like a Segway. I have been intrigued by these since I rode one, and once I get some money I very well may make one of my own.

The original source is here, but I cannot seem to find the original source’s video; this YouTube link will do. The video shows a speaking piano–that is, a mechanically-controlled piano with a computer playing the correct frequencies so that it plays back the words originally recorded into the computer. This has to be one of the coolest videos I’ve seen, and it is definitely worth watching. As a side note, I think the YouTube video I linked seems a bit spammy, but the presence of a translation makes it worth bearing.

And last but not least, three guys from Poland got together and created another of the coolest videos I’ve seen. They made a glass tabletop on which they placed bottle caps; each bottle cap represents a sound. A webcam underneath the table connects to a PC, and the PC does some image processing to find the bottle caps and play back the track, left-to-right repeatedly. It makes a lot more sense if you watch the video. A full writeup is available in Polish on their website (Polish) (Google Translation).

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Computer Musicianship

August 16, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

To the casual observer, I look like a stereotypical computer geek, and it is true that I do know my way around computers. However, I really am a geek of all trades. I have a multitude of geeky levels, and one such level is music. Nine years of piano lessons and two of choir will do that to you!

Now, music is fun, and computers are fun…what happens when the two are fused is something I could spend a whole lot of time on. There are a lot of music enthusiasts who are computer geeks…hence the plethora of projects out there for working with music on the computer.

Continue reading to see a couple awesome and free music-centric programs available! Read the rest of this entry »

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iTunes is broken.

April 22, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

I got a gift card for iTunes from my parents. Normally, I wouldn’t buy iTunes credit, opting rather for Amazon MP3 for my online purchases, but since this was essentially free money, and Apple has removed the Digital Rights Management from their online store, I figured I would go for it.

What I didn’t anticipate is that iTunes would work worse than it did years ago.

I will let my message to Apple Support speak for itself. Read the rest of this entry »

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The stuff of summer…

April 16, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

Each summer thus far, I have wandered all summer long and never made any progress on any leads I’ve had, programming-wise or otherwise. I hope to change that this summer.

So I’m making a list.

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Post-mortem on a penlight

April 11, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau
The penlight

The penlight, in its nonfunctional state on the palmrest of my laptop.

My penlight stopped working.

It’s perfectly fine with me; it was a freebie I snatched up from the Michigan Tech Advanced Technologies Development Complex during orientation week. But still…it worked, and then it didn’t. And I wanted to know why.

So I cut it apart.

Turns out that these puppies house an entire triple-A battery inside them! The outside housing of the battery is connected to the negative side of the

The penlight, cut open and splayed out on the table.

The penlight, cut open and splayed out on the table.

battery, so it comes all the way around to the positive side. It has a spring that pushes the battery away from the light bulb; when I press the switch, it mashes the spring and pushes the battery to the light bulb. Except the bulb was burned out. Oops.

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Sudoku Solver: Straight out of the mothballs…

April 8, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

I was digging around in my long-abandoned Windows partition, and I found some old backups of some old stuff. One particular program I used to be so proud of is my Sudoku Solver. It is a C++ program that I wrote as a final project my sophomore year of high school; I opened the files and made the necessary modifications to make it compile (stripped a couple of mistakes out of the header file; removed a system() call that only works under Windows) and stuck the GPL on it. It isn’t particularly clean, or a great solution, and it has next to no comments, but here’s the source of Sudoku Solver. You can compile it under Linux by issuing the command “g++ board_handler.cpp main.cpp”. As for Windows, I used Bloodshed Dev-C++ for the longest time; I believe it has a Windows version of g++ behind the scenes, so it should behave the same. I included a simple unsolved file for it to read; pointing it at sudoku.sdk saved a lot of time in debug…

Is it bad to be barely an adult and already have nostalgic moments?

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Getting K3b to burn MP3s

April 3, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

K3b is a good CD burning app for Ubuntu. But it won’t burn MP3 files right out of the box. A bit of Googling and trial and error reveals the fix for this. Read the rest of this entry »

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Getting your user-agent

March 28, 2009 — Jacob A. Rau

I just whipped up a short PHP script to display the user-agent and IP of a client’s browser. I wanted this because I was writing to Citizens Bank about a bug in their home page (a broken browser detection script). The script can be used here and the content of it is very simple:

<?php
echo "Your browser is reporting the agent string: '";
echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
echo "'<br>Your IP address is ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
?>

Yeah.

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