DisclosableView
Posted by tom June 25th, 2007
DisclosableView is a particular handy framework, which allows you to collapse and expands subviews on your windows, sheets (actually any NSView – as far as I’m aware). It’s written by Kurt Revis and it’s available on his website: snoize
How to properly hack your AppleTV
Posted by tom June 24th, 2007
Using the article on AwkwardTV I was able to hack my AppleTV in no-time (literally 15 minutes!) and more importantly it worked! There are some articles on the web, which just don’t work the way they describe.
The most important thing to remember is that once you add the EFI partition to your to-be-appletv-harddisk you can’t format the Media partition anymore (and basically you’ll need to start over).
For good photos on how to open up your AppleTV look at this article by Macworld, but follow the AwkwardTV instructions otherwise.
Cocoa: Deleting multiple NSTableView items
Posted by tom June 20th, 2007
NSIndexSet *selectedSet = [tableView selectedRowIndexes];
unsigned int row = [selectedSet lastIndex];
while (row != NSNotFound)
{
[yourNsMutableArray removeObjectAtIndex:row];
row = [selectedSet indexLessThanIndex:row];
}
Ruby Multimedia Controller
Posted by tom June 10th, 2007
Hereby I release the sourcecode to a Ruby MultiMedia Controller I wrote a couple of months ago. It allows you to control your Pioneer VSX-74TXVi Receiver and your Sony DVP-CX777-ES DVD Changer via a webservice. It requires RubySerialPort and can be extended fairly easily.
This software is licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL
I no longer maintain the sourcecode, but I am interested if anyone picks up.
Nokia & Apple
Posted by tom June 10th, 2007
Nokia very recently released Nokia Media Transfer, an application that allows you to sync your Nokia phone with your Apple computer. This is ofcourse great news for Apple users like me.
Installing Ubuntu 7.04 on Parallels Deskop for Mac 3.0
Posted by tom June 10th, 2007
All too easy! But in the first installation/setup screen of Ubuntu make sure you press F4 (or rather fn-F4) to select VGA modes. With me 800×600 worked as well as 1280×800 (hope I got that right), anyway I think choosing any fixed resolution works.
Ruby and Barcode Readers
Posted by tom June 5th, 2007
Today I finally “cracked” the Peninsula BlackBird II Portable Memory Barcode Reader communication protocol (using RS232 via USB) and wrote a Ruby class to read the scans from it. I got some help, from a PDF describing the protocol, but the PDF was very, very meager (to keep things polite). Nonetheless, I’m happy the guys over at Peninsula were kind enough to provide me with it.
Earlier I already wrote a Ruby class to read the scans from the IntelliScanner Mini. For that scanner however (which is actually a Symbol CS1504) is more than enough English documentation available.
Next on the todo list is to retrieve timestamps on each scan (I still need to investigate whether that is actually possible) from the Blackbird. And later, finish the code on the Mini.
Generating EAN13 Barcodes with Rails
Posted by tom June 3rd, 2007
Today I wrote code which generates EAN-13 Barcodes from Ruby/Rails, with the help of RMagick and ImageMagick. There already was a barcode-gem but that just generated Code39 Barcodes. Based on the code in that gem, better said: following the conventions in that code I created a class which now is capable of generating EAN-13 PNG images:
Why do I do such things? Well, it’s part of my new pet project: Barcodes on Demand