Posts with tag: random

Bus from Hillsborough to Chapel Hill

| tags: random

Updated: 24 April 2012 with new schedule

I've been riding the TTA route 420 from Hillsborough to Chapel Hill (and back) for almost 6 years and I love it. The benefits include saving the environment, saving money on parking (more than $1000/year) and gas (about $1400/year), avoiding the bother of driving, and fellowship with a friendly community of people. The University kindly picks up the tab through the Commuter Alternatives Program . I'm blogging about it in hopes more people will learn about this poorly advertised service.

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No news is good news!

| tags: python, random, programming

The more I cut back on broadcast news, the happier I become. I first started during the recent election season when the political ads were insane. Then I got fed up with the amateur hour over at WRAL and switched to listening to Jazz with Bob Parlocha on WNCU in the mornings. I took another step today by automatically muting WNCU's stream at the top of each hour when they play NPR news.

I get my news reading the paper and the web where I get to choose what I read. According to a recent Pew Research Report this puts me in with the young hip consumers of news.

I recommend taking a break from the talking heads, you'll be happier for it.

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Site Search Using Whoosh

| tags: random, programming

I tried Google custom search for my updated site but I was unhappy with the control I had over what got indexed, so I decided to implement my own.

A quick search revealed the awesome Whoosh search library. It is very well documented and super easy to use.

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Site Update

| tags: random, programming

Mike Pirnat's post Why I Switched to Blogofile inspired me to give Blogofile a look. The nice documentation and especially the migration strategy from Wordpress inspired me to give it a try.

Now after about 3 days of reading and enjoyable hacking, I've got my site converted with a new theme and color scheme. I'm impressed at how straightforward the conversion has been. I hacked up the wordpress2blogofile.py script to modify the paths (I wanted to change my permalinks) and to insert paragraph tags into the extracted text.

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How far should I drive to save on gas?

| tags: random

I've thought about this several times (that's how geeky I am, when I can't work, I think about things like this). Thinking about it the other day, I suddenly hit on a simple approximation made possible by the current prices.

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Trying out SVN

| tags: random

I really ought to use source code control. I know it. But my laziness combined with my poor memory, makes it hard.

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atool enables DDR pad or webcam input

| tags: blind, motor impaired, random, programming, enabling technology

Atool is an extension to our previous CamKeys project. Like CamKeys, atool allows keyboard input based on a cheap webcam. Atool adds DDR pads (or other game controller buttons) as an additional input and it allows playing recorded sounds on input events. My teacher friends in the Progress Education Program over at Asheville wanted to experiment with alternative computer interfaces in their classrooms for kids with multiple disabilities. I demonstrated MusicPad (a simple DDR pad driven sound player) and CamKeys to them. They were excited by the possibilities but daunted by editing files to control it all and depending on keyboard focus to get events to the right places.

So I hacked on CamKeys to add a GUI for configuring all sorts of events. I'll include a few screen shots below. Now the teachers are recording their own speech and music sounds and hooking them to events on the DDR pad or camera.

atool main screen atool create event dialog

The CamKeys roots of this project were funded by the Mozilla foundation.

The source is in CVS at sourceforge uncassist .

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