Well, I am right now at the Vegas Apple Store at Fashion Show. It looks a bit different from the “common” ones, and is actually a bit smaller than both the Pasadena and the San Diego ones I’ve been to.
Well, time to go off and have a little fun with the Dual 2.7 GHz G5 with the 30″ monitor 
Today, I have just discovered Speakable Items in Mac OS X, and, man, is it *awesome*!
I just turned on Listening in your System Preferences, and my iBook began listening for voice commands. It also provided a floating palette for feedback, so I could see if it heard me. I could optionally have it listen only if a key is pressed and held, or after I say a key word, like “Computer”. There’s also a Speakable Items palette that shows the user what commands the computer knows, and one can add one’s own commands by making AppleScripts that run the command, and name it whatever you want to say to run the command, then move it to the ~/Library/Speech/Speakable\ Items/ folder
I easily made some iTunes scripts for play, pause, and other commands.
The speech recognition worked real well, and understood my commands most of the time. What really surprised me was when it understood the command “open nFoldMan” and actually started the application.
Mac OS X continues to give me wonderful surprises even after I used it for a year. And I definitely don’t regret switching.
“Click here for the video(Hacking with Ramzi)”:http://www.santoalt.com/videos/hacking_with_ramzi.php
Heh, saw this on the defcon forums, and thought I’d share this with everyone.
Enjoy!
In CompSci class, we’ve just got an assignment where we have to work on a program in Java. It can be on anything and can do anything, but has to be worth about 4-5 weeks of work.
Well, I’ve decided to do something with Cocoa, just to start getting familiar with it. But, I need some ideas for the project. Someone in our group proposed a stock simulation. I think it may be too easy if we just pull stock information off the internet, and too complex if we simulate stocks by making our own class.
Well, any ideas on how/what to do with the stocks? Or maybe some other project we can work on?
And, no, it cannot be in Objective C. The class is *Java* orientated.
*Update*: Well, the group has decided to do a Chess game instead.
I was looking for a widget that can either run commands in the shell and display the output, or run the ‘cat’ command on a file. I was going to use it on Folding@Home, to display the unitinfo.txt file.
In boredom, I made a widget for Dashboard in Tiger that runs the ‘cat’ command in UNIX in a user-definable interval, and refreshes the result.
You can get it “Here(dashcat.v0.1.zip)”:http://lokisnake.com/widgets/dashcat.v0.1.zip
It is currently *not* user-friendly, but it gets the job done.
To change the settings, you would need to go into the .wdgt bundle, and edit the javascript and css files. It isn’t complicated to work with, but can be improved.
I will be improving this little by little. And feel free to submit comments and suggestions to lokisnake (at) lokisnake (dot) com