I've been annoyed for months by my laptop selecting my neighbor's access point over mine. On every startup I'd have to make sure I was using our network. I looked a few times but apparently with the wrong search terms. The answer is to use gconf-editor as described here . One point that momentarily fooled me, you do not want to use sudo for this.
| tags: blind, motor impaired, ideas, enabling technology
Here's an idea for a simple game to encourage movement to music. I'm drawing from our Comp 80 class ideas for Generalized DDR .
In this game the player moves to music. Their score depends on how well their movement is synchronized with the music and on how many different moves they made. A more advanced version allows them to play along with the music though various delays will have to be overcome to enable their sounds to be sync'ed with the music. The system keeps track of their score and rewards improvement. Perhaps new tunes get unlocked like in DDR.
| tags: ubuntu
I had tons of problems with Gutsy on my computer at work. Feisty worked great so I expected Gutsy to be even better.
| tags: enabling technology, links
Diane P pointed me to this interesting looking book " Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design ".
| tags: random
I've been a platelet donor for the Red Cross for years but driving over to Durham to donate is a bother (can't ride the bus so I have to drive to work that day but then parking around here is awful). So I'm going to give the program here on campus a try.
| tags: blind, enabling technology
Update: Maze Day 2008 will be April 30, 2008.
| tags: ubuntu
This D800 has the 1920 by 1280 screen and the touchpad defaults are way too slow. I looked for a tool to adjust it but don't see one. I edited xorg.conf to look like this:
| tags: ubuntu
I tried upgrading to Gutsy on my old Dell D800 today, it took about 7 hours to download the packages and then the upgrade failed. It couldn't get the screen resolution right and didn't detect my graphics hardware. The CD does it just fine. So I wiped the root partition and did a clean install. That seems to work fine. The wireless configuration was effortless. Now to figure out all the packages I need. I should keep some notes on the changes I make too.
| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology, links
An interesting story over at ScienceDaily about an RPI student's camera-based head-tracker music system . This will be very popular if they make it freely available.
| tags: random
I do my best to avoid the horrible 1980's vintage computer system over at advising (3270 emulator running on a PC) but it has one feature I couldn't find anywhere else; screen 1GE. This screen tells you what new curriculum requirements a course meets. You'd think maybe there would be a list in the undergraduate bulletin, and you'd be right except it is sorted by requirement, not by course! You might expect that each course description would list the requirements it satisfied but you'd be wrong.
So, I wrote a short python script to scrape the data off the requirements page from the bulletin . Here is the output of that script for quick reference without requiring a 3270.