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Braille Game Ideas

| tags: blind, enabling technology, ideas

I think I see how to make the DDR pad work with this new generation of browser-based games so I'm thinking about a successor to Braille Twister. I don't know if we'll have it ready for Maze Day but we'll see. I'd like your feedback on the concept.

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Maze Day 2011

| tags: blind

This year Maze Day will be 28 April 2011 from 9 till 2 in Sitterson Hall on the UNC Chapel Hill Campus.

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Spatial sounds for javascript

| tags: python, sound, javascript, blind

Statial ("3D") sound greatly enhances games for children who are visually impaired but the audio node in HTML5 doesn't even support panning left and right much less the time delay and filtering of true spatial audio. This post describes a python script I hacked to transform sound files so that they appear to originate from points surrounding the listener.

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Komodo Edit Run Command

| tags: python, programming

A sudden change in my teaching assignment to teaching Comp116 Introduction to Scientific Programming in 2 days resulted in a frantic search for Python programming tools that work the same across Windows, OS X, and Linux. The Enthought Python Distribution looks like a really good turn-key solution to having Python + Numpy + Matplotlib easily working on all three but we also need an editor.

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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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