todbot blog » macosx

MobileMe Free: iPhone to iCal OTA syncing

todbot — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:05:19 +0000

I’ve been frustrated with my calendars not being in sync between my iPhone and my Mac’s iCal. I’ve inadvertently double-booked myself many times. I didn’t want to spend $99 a year for MobileMe because I already spent a lot on remote servers and don’t need most of what MobileMe offers. I just want calendar syncing. The below has been described by many others, in much greater detail and clarity. This is really a list of things I did so I can remember it.

The essential idea is both iCal and the iPhone Calendar program can talk [...]

Roombas Go Caroling

todbot — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:12:59 +0000

The Roomba family was out caroling. They stopped by and sang a few songs. I caught a few on tape. I think they were a little tipsy on mulled 30W or something.

(revver link)

This was a demo of RoombaMidi2, a Mac OS X program to turn your Roomba into a MIDI instrument. Click the link to find out how and get the source code (and find out why they were so drunk).

Happy Holidays from HackingRoomba.com

Roomba Tilt Control and Holiday Buying Guide

todbot — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:07:02 +0000

Two updates from HackingRoomba.com.

First, if you’re unsure about how to get into hacking Roombas or just want some tips on how to get cheap Roombas, see the DIY Robotics with Roomba Holiday Buying Guide.

Second, if you’ve got a MacBook and a Roomba, try out this way of using the MacBook’s built-in tilt sensors and Perl to control your Roomba: (revver link)

Full details available on the Hacking Roomba project page.

Better Video on OS X: NicePlayer & Perian

todbot — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 05:54:50 +0000

I watch movies on my Mac. I’ve been ripping my DVDs to DivX or h.264 to my hard drive simply because it’s easier to double-click a file than hunt around for a particular configuration of atoms. I used to use VLC for any files that Quicktime Player couldn’t play, but I’ve recently come across a better solution.

NicePlayer — “Quite simply, the nicest media player for Mac.”

Perian — “The Swiss-army knife for QuickTime.”

Perian is a collection of common codecs encased in a Quicktime component so any QuickTime application can view DivX, Xvid, FLV, AVI, etc. files. This [...]

RoombaCtrl: Drive your Roomba with your cell phone

todbot — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:21:50 +0000

Ever since Bluetooth adapters for Roombas appeared, I’ve wanted to control my Roomba with a cell phone. All my recent phones have had Bluetooth. But getting a devkit for a phone was expensive and phone-specific. Trying to develop J2ME (aka “JavaME”) applications for cell phones has been a mess, especially for non-Windows users. Thankfully, Mobile Processing wraps up the ugly details, like Processing does for normal Java. It makes writing little programs for your phone pretty easy, and makes whipping up a program to control a Roomba possible.

So here’s “RoombaCtrl”, a small Java [...]

RoombaMidi: Roomba as MIDI instrument

todbot — Thu, 04 May 2006 07:08:52 +0000

[Update: an improved version of this idea, called RoombaMidi2, is available on the HackingRoomba.com Projects area.]

The Roomba has a piezo beeper that can play tunes. You’ve heard it. And its motors make noise. Why not put them under MIDI control?

So here is RoombaMidi: a Mac OS X application that creates a virtual MIDI instrument for use by any Mac OS X MIDI sequencer, like Ableton Live, Logic, and so on.

If you don’t have a sequencer or just want to play with this quickly, grab the awesome and free app MidiKeys. It’s a little virtual MIDI keyboard.

RoombaMidi has the [...]

HOWTO: Mac OS X Bluetooth Serial Port

todbot — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:26:21 +0000

Setting up a Bluetooth serial adapter like the SparkFun BlueSMiRF isn’t very hard, but not very intuitive.

Bluetooth supports many “profiles” for doing various things (phone headset, address book syncing, file exchange, etc.) One of these profiles is the “COM” profile and is a simple serial port: raw binary data transmit and receive. That’s the profile these Bluetooth serial adapters speak. All Bluetooth stacks on computers appear to support the COM profile.

The SparkFun BlueSMiRF module speaks only the COM profile and when powered on and set up, looks just like a normal serial port to software. [...]

Powerbook power cable repair

todbot — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 01:40:30 +0000

I finally broke my last working power adapter. Fortunately it was in a fashion that was orthogonal to the rest, so I was able to cobble together a working one.

Details here.

Two-finger scrolling on older Aluminum Powerbooks

todbot — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 23:44:51 +0000

The new Powerbooks are very rad: 3D accelerometers and “two-finger” trackpad scrolling.

While the former can’t be retrofitted on, the latter can, thanks to iScroll2.

Mac OSX Virtual Desktop Managers

todbot — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:30:29 +0000

CodeTek has been pretty unresponsive to my emails requesting status about the problems with Firefox and their VirtualDesktop program. Their site hasn’t been updated in many months, I wonder if the company still exists? I and many others have been stuck at Firefox 0.8 for many months now. It’s very frustrating. (See bugzilla bugid 254463)

The only other real contender for an OSX desktop pager has been DesktopManager (aka ‘wsmanager’). It seemed mostly fine, but had one glaring omission that made it unusable for me: a purely linear row of desktops instead of the 2D rows-n-columns [...]

Replaced Powerbook Hard Drive

todbot — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:45:00 +0000

Replacing a hard drive on a 15″ Aluminum Powerbook isn’t that hard. Really.

The hard drive in my Powerbook started to fail last week, making those scary “tschk-tschk-tschk” noises of something rotating rubbing against something else.

Luckily I used Carbon Copy Cloner right when I started hearing the problem, syncing the entire disk (45 GB of 80 GB) to an external one. And then this past Monday the drive officially gave up the ghost. It sounds like sticktion (sounds of the drive straining to move, but can’t), which is weird because I thought sticktion was a malady of the [...]

P900 & iSync redux

todbot — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 04:38:31 +0000

I once had my P900 working with iSync and stuff but with various updates bluetooth connectivity has gone tits up. I’ve kinda stopped caring and just emailed things on&off the phone when needed. But it looks like others have gotten it working well:

macosxhints – Add iSync/Address Book support for P908/P900 phones P900 firmware update notes

Sloppy Focus Tricks

todbot — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:09:00 +0000

Are you a Unix geek who has been seduced by Mac OS X? Are you totally frustrated with the lack of ‘sloppy focus’? Here’s some tricks to do, depending on what you want to do:

for just Terminal windows: % defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES for X11 windows: % defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true for most other Mac apps: use Codetek Virtual Desktop

Useful Tools Recap

todbot — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:08:00 +0000

I just got a new Powerbook and had to re-remember all the bits I need/like:

uControl — Capslock -> Ctrl key remapper I also use it to remap the ‘enter’ key next to the arrow keys to be a ‘fn’ key, so I can do ‘fn+arrows’ to give me easy pgup,pgdown,home,end. Codetek VirtualDesktop Pro — pager / virtual screen Like any good Unix, this functionality should be part of OS X, but oh well. It also supports a hack to sorta give one Sloppy Focus. WindowShade X — Windowshade functionality (window minimizer) This was part of MacOS, but [...]

Modal Sheet Dialog Box Speed-up

todbot — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 02:27:00 +0000

As discussed on macosxhints.com, there is a way of speeding up the ‘drop-in’ speed of those modal ‘sheet’ dialog boxes. Here’s what I like:

% defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .05

Smaller numbers make it faster, larger numbers make it slower.