My Pegboard+Standing Desk Installation

Lisbeth and I normally try to throw a Danish Christmas party every
year and this time was no exception; and I even got to have some fun
geek-pimping the event.

This time around I had setup my 52″ TV to have a slide show of gorgeous
Christmas style pictures mixed in with photos taken during the party
transferred wireless via an Eye-Fi card and had it synced across two
laptops via Dropbox and to top it all off I were taking a picture
every 15-seconds to be able to do a “high-speed” playback of the whole
event to the tunes of the “Benny Hill” theme song.

Below I’ll outline the things I did to make it all happen.

What I used in the process:

* 52″ Sony LCD TV
* Mac Mini
* Eye-Fi X2 Pro
* OSX built-in screensaver (since no other app out there does it right)
* Hazel w/Apple Script
* Macbook Pro
* Gawker
* Some hours of searching for initial images

“Live” screenshow:

The setup is simple.

First you configure your Eye-fi card to place the photos in a specfic directory, i.e. "/Users/max/Pictures/incoming".

Secondly you configure Hazel to on any change to that directory to move the file to the location you want the screensaver to pick up the files, i.e. I used "/Users/max/Dropbox/screensaver" which is in my Dropbox so I could easily sync to another machine when needed. Then add an Apple script action to Hazel that contains the following code:

tell application id "com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine" to quit
tell application "ScreenSaverEngine" to activate

Those two lines are needed to have the Screen Saver restart to make it pickup any new photos coming in.

Finally, you need to enable and configure the Screen Saver to pick up the pictures from the "screensaver" directory. Beyond that I believe I used the default transition settings since they give a very smooth but still somewhat dynamic experience.

With those things in place every time I took a picture with my camera containing the Eye-Fi card it would automatically upload the photos, restart the screen saver and eventually the photo taken would show up.

I would say it is important to pre-load your screen saver folder with some beautiful images (search for 1080p desktop backgrounds will give you a good start); otherwise the same, possibly ugly and boring photos taken in the beginning of the evening will be shown again and again. It’s better to have it spread out with something beautiful in the middle.

And for those who are curious, the reason for the Hazel/script instead of i.e. a scrip that reloads the screensaver every 5 minutes is to avoid to constantly see the Screen Saver stop and then start again. With this solution you only get a reload when it is actually need. You could probably do this without Hazel and just use Folder Actions but Hazel is just simpler to setup.

Screensaver Synced to another screen

Having the screensaver synched to another screen I did because our party is “spread” over two rooms. It was remarkably simple to do since I already configured Hazel to move the files to Dropbox and therefore the only thing I had to do on the second machine was to setup a Hazel script or if you wish Folder Action to run the same script as shown above.

Then when Dropbox syncs over a new file the screen saver is automatically updated.

Recording the Party for later playback

For this I used Gawker which is a free opensource piece of software which only functionallity is to grab images from a source such as your webcam.
Thus I simply configured Gawker to take a picture every 15 seconds with the built-in iSight of the Macbook pro and it automatically creates the video stream.

Before publishing the result I used iMovie to spice it up with some background music and cut out some boring segments to make it a bit more lively and the result is as seen above.

I had great fun setting this up, having a party and then edit the result and now you can too

I’ve been pretty happy with my previous Service Apple script to dial a specific conference call bridge, but as I started having to use more it got too annoying to add a script per specific numbers.

Now I’ve updated the script to be able to use directly from LaunchBar (or other launchers) as the dial action for contact book entries.

on dial_skype(num)
  set connect_wait to 10 (* seconds to wait before sending additional tones *)
  set dtmf_wait to 0.2 (* seconds to wait between sending DTMF tones *)
  set pause_char to "," (* character used to indicate a pause *)
  set pause_wait to 2 (* seconds to wait for a pause *)

  if num starts with "tel:" then
    set num to (text ((count "tel:") + 1) thru -1 of num)
  end if

  (* remove any spaces in the number otherwise Skype won't make the call *)
  set num to replace_string(num, " ", "")
  (* replace %23 with # since launchBar seem to force encoding of numbers *)
  set num to replace_string(num, "%23", "#")
  set parts to split(num, pause_char)
  set parts_count to count parts
  set phone_number to item 1 of parts
  if (parts_count > 1) then
    set dtmf_parts to items 2 through -1 of parts
  else
    set dtmf_parts to {}
  end if

  tell application "Skype"
    set active_call to send command "CALL " & phone_number script name "s2"
    set skype_call_id to word 2 of active_call
    delay connect_wait
    set bridge to "ALTER CALL " & skype_call_id & " DTMF "
    repeat with dtmf in the items of dtmf_parts
      repeat with tone in the characters of dtmf
        send command bridge & " " & tone script name "s2"
        delay dtmf_wait
      end repeat
      delay pause_wait
    end repeat
  end tell
end dial_skype

on split(str, sep)
  set {tid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, sep}
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to sep
  set parts to text items of str
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
  return parts
end split

on replace_string(str, fr, t)
  set {tid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, fr}
  set temp to text items of str
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to t
  set str to temp as text
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
  return str
end replace_string

(* for LaunchBar *)
on handle_string(s)
  my dial_skype(s)
  open location "x-launchbar:hide"
end handle_string

(* comment out for QuickSilver *)
(*
using terms from application "QuickSilver"
  on process text qsText
    my dial_skype(qsText)
  end process text
end
*)

Instructions for usage with LaunchBar

1. Copy the above script and save it with Apple Script Editor in your favorite script location (I use DropBox to share scripts such as this between machines)
2. Goto LaunchBar Action Preferences
3. Set “Phone Numbers” action to the file you saved in Step 1.
4. Use Launch Bar to find a contact’s phone number and press Enter.
5. Skype should now start and dial the number.

You can also simply add the above script to a directory that your LaunchBar scans for scripts and use it via “Tab” on items; allowing you to use it on everything not just Address Book phone numbers.

Instructions for usage with QuickSilver

To use the script as an action for QuickSilver simply remove the comments from the lower block mentioning QuickSilver. How to configure QuickSilver to pick up the script is left as an exercise for the readers who have QuickSilver installed.

Instructions for Other Launch mechanisms

My previous blog shows how to embed a script like this into a Service menu entry, and if you use another launcher you just need to read their docs for how they want the script formed and apply it similar to what is done above for Launch Bar and QuickSilver.

Last Minute Comments about Phone Numbers

The script assumes the following about phone numbers:

1. has to be in international format (i.e. +<number>) as otherwise Skype will not dial it.
2. spaces are ok, but they are stripped out automatically otherwise Skype will not dial it.
3. ‘,’ is used as a pause character and as the start of DTMF tones. Thus “+123456789,1234#” will dial +123456789, wait 10 seconds for connection and then send 1234# as individual DTMF tones with a small pause in between. Additional commas will give a 2 sec delay. You can see and change the values for all these pauses in the top of script.
4. due to LaunchBar escaping ‘#’ with ‘%23′ the script replaces ‘%23′ in your number with ‘#’; this should not be a problem since ‘%’ is not a valid DTMF tone AFAIK.

Hope you will enjoy it as much as me, it saved me a ton of time and frustration when it comes to conference call dialing

Leave a comment if it works for you!

The last 3-4 years I’ve been travelling alot to and from Switzerland and especially Geneva Airport.

I normally always take a trolley for my suitcase and carry on luggage since I realized that it makes my long flights much smoother not having strained my back or feet with moving around bulky and semi-heavy luggage (and no, four-wheeled luggage does not help since I still have to carry my carry on bag).

But lately Geneva did the most annoying thing. They started requiring you to put 2 CHF in to get a trolley.

I understand the reasoning about it since the airport probably feel that it is cheaper to let their customers put back their trolley instead of paying personel to pick them up.

But seriously, how many international passengers arriving in the airport will have an actual swiss franc coin in their pocket ? Bill notes maybe, but not coins! And even you have a coin you can’t get it back when you reach the “No trolleys allowed signs” since Geneva airport never bothered putting up trolley stations inside the airport where you can get your 2 CHF back!

End result: Tired international passengers will have to carry their luggage since they don’t have the coins, and local swiss passengers that have the 2 CHF will still leave the trolleys left and right since there are no sane place to get the 2 CHF back again….I guess those 2 CHF is now a tip for the personel Geneva airport couldn’t let go since there is still work for them to move the left over trolleys back to their origin.

Rant over – now ill continue wait for my flight