AR Wiki is an easy to use app designed to allow one to browse Wikipedia while walking. It creates a Wikipedia browser window centered in your Android device, with the rear-facing camera displaying a live feed surround the Wikipedia article. In this way you can browse Wikipedia while you are walking without fear of walking into a tree or a street.
Fellow Z2 hacker and blogger RK is having a Christmas quiz over at his blog. Sounds like there will be some interesting prizes, so if you think you’ve got the knowledge you should head over and test your mettle.
Ok, so I know that body hacking and personal hygiene are not my usual topics of choice, but hear me out. My entire life I’ve had dandruff, up till a few months ago. That’s almost 30 years of dandruff shampoo, medicated shampoo, frequent showers, you name it. Up till a few months ago.
Yep that’s right. I’ve had a few requests to open source Easy Inventory (the first Android app I ever wrote) since I released it back at the beginning of June. As I’ve been insanely busy at my new job (converting iPad apps to Android apps), I’ve not had much time for feature improvements or bug fixes. Seeing how Easy Inventory is currently making me about 3 bucks a month in Adsense revenue, I see no financial harm in converting it to an open source project. It also jives rather well with my socialist tendencies. Plus it’s been a while since I threw a project up on SourceForge, and I’d like to see what folks can come up with.
Almost all of my programs have hidden “easter eggs” in them. From screensavers to morse code generators I’ve put some weird ones in. Well now my website has a few! One is pretty easy to find, but the rest… quite a challenge I’m sure. Happy Hunting!
For those of you that don’t know my famous cat Nami, here’s a short sequence of her teaching everyone how to cheat at contra.
Chris Irwin alerted me in a previous article about MPD, the music playing daemon. While I was planning on installing this as both a client and a server on the dockstar stereo, It turns out there’s a MPD frontend for the Wii. I hadn’t been giving my Wii very much love lately, being so active in the PS3 scene. On a whim I picked up a little tv to use as a monitor for the Dockstar stereo, and I hooked the Wii up to it to see how things were going in the Wii homebrew community. I was BLOWN away. Not only has the wii media center grown tremendously, (it streams from samba shares), all the emulators have been updated (ps1 games from samba shares!), and there’s a tremendously dynamic game modification community (check out smashmods for some of the coolest in-ram game modification you will EVER see). The wii VNC client works quite well as a head unit for the dockstar stereo, but it’s got a native MPD frontend that I thought would be fun to get running. Read on for the setup of MPD on the Dockstar Stereo (or any embedded arm linux).
While it will be a bit before my next full update in the”Using the Dockstar as a full Home Theater Replacement” series (conveniently shortened to Dockstar Stereo), I’m always tweaking and installing things. While these may not warrant a full update, they’re usually fun little additions or tweaks that come in handy. While I mentioned in the last Dockstar Stereo article that you could run a video or Window Maker session over VNC, I never went into any details on the fun things you can do with VNC sessions. Read on for a couple of fun VNC tricks and tips that you may not have heard before. I assume you to be using a Linux installation. I’m running all examples on the ‘Dockstar Stereo’, an integrated arm board with limited memory.
As you’re probably already aware if you are reading this, I’ve got a thing for embedded systems. I guess we all do now, what with Android and iPhone tearing up the sales numbers. That said, I’ve never before had the guts to try and replace my aging Sony Dream Theater stereo system that’s hooked up to my beloved record player. Although the sound quality coming off the head unit is quite good (I replaced the speakers long ago with some good ones), it only has two extra inputs and no support for internet streaming or mp3 playback etc. I’d also like to be able to use standard remote controls (Sony HATES standards), Bluetooth devices, cell phones, network control, etc. Although I’m using the Dockstar, this tutorial would generically apply to any Debian (arm or otherwise) system. Read on for the first part in my new walkthrough series entitled “Using the Dockstar as a full Home Theater Replacement”:
