Fruitbox

I just finished uploading ClipSpeak 1.5 to various places. Check it out on CodePlex!

A few days back, this crossed my thought: We interact with our computers through a keyboard that has quite a number of keys. We can do the same things, albeit not as comfortably, on our mobile phones, which traditionally only has about 1/10th the number of keys as a full computer keyboard. If we take this to the extreme; How many keys are needed to control a computer, the way they work today?
This is a nice case to apply the principle of reduction and emulation to. If we have a device which can emulate a computer keyboard, it can control the computer, since the regular computer keyboard can.
Step 1: Consider a device with only arrow keys and an enter key. To control a computer with this device we would only need to have an on-screen keyboard program, where we navigate to the key we want to press and hit enter.
Step 2: Now we don’t really need that many arrow keys. One is really enough: the “forward” key. Think of a keyboard represented linearly, and when we move to the end we get back to the beginning. Although neither convenient nor practical, we can now control the computer with two keys.
Step 3: Why have two keys when we only need one? After all, two keys to remember is even TWICE as many as having only one key. Let the software program switch selected key every second, and you press the enter key when the key you want is highlighted. Or alternatively, make a double-click equivalent function, but then this could be treated as having two keys.
Conclusion: We only need one key, which I think should referred to as “the any key”.

Did you know: There is a well kept secret in the history of computing: The first keyboards only had one key (bet you didn’t know that, eh?) After all, keep it simple is nice, isn’t it? Why design a complicated piece of hardware when you can have a big, easy-to-hit, RSI monster like the one-key keyboard. If you wanted to, you could even make it really small. You didn’t even have to learn touch typing or anything like that! But no, it wasn’t until someone invented the cracks between keys that things got more complicated.
Remark: This blog post is copyright(c) 1956-2009, written on a one-key keyboard.

Yesterday I started a small project to create a C# application that would let me play my MIDI keyboard from another computer over the internet. This application now works, and I call it MIDINet.
MIDINet has a client-server-architecture. The server listens for incoming UDP-packets, parses those and translates them into MIDI messages, which are sent directly to my Roland E-86. The client is set up to send packets to my server when the user presses certain keys on the computer keyboard.
Usefulness: questionable. Funness-factor: High!

Are you using MS Paint? In that case you might want to have a look at Paint.NET, which is like the new paint. It is free, runs on the .NET Framework, and has a lot of features that MS Paint lacks: layers and effects for instance. A very good thing about Paint.NET is that it is very easy to extend its functionality by plug-ins that are very easy to install and use (just put a .dll-file in a folder and you’re done). There are a lot of great plut-ins out there: effects, language packs and what not.
Check it out at www.getpaint.net.

ClipSpeak 1.5 will hopefully be out pretty soon. Some things to look forward to are:
* Save to MP3 — Put your texts on your MP3-player
* Lots of bug fixes — including a couple of bugs related to Adobe Reader and Firefox
* Change voice speed and volume — These settings can be changed in the voice selection dialog
* Toggle ClipSpeak on/off — via a keyboard command.

As the title says, I am going to write about customising LaTeX to work with Swedish typographical rules and conventions. The articles will be in Swedish and will be on my Swedish blog, Fruitbox 2.

So the pirate bay trial, #spectrial, is now over. One year in prison and a fine of 30 million Swedish crowns, that’s the sentence. This outcome clearly shows the inadequacy of the justice system when laws are unable to keep pace with technological development. Sadly, I am not surprised. Now who will be the first to sue Google for aiding in copyright infringement?

The next version of ClipSpeak, namely ClipSpeak 1.5, will feature two quite important improvements. One of them is SAPI4 support, which will allow you to select the voices you might not be able to right now with 1.0. The other feature is the Save to MP3 function, which I think will be a very neat feature to have.
As usual, if you have suggestions, head over to the CodePlex page!

It’s out, in a lot of places! Google it.
Voice selection is in, but ’save to mp3′ is still missing. Hopefully it’ll be there in the next release.

It’s out! Where? Head over to CodePlex!
http://www.codeplex.com/clipspeak

It’s out, ClipSpeak 0.9!
Head over to CodePlex to check it out: http://www.codeplex.com/clipspeak.

ClipSpeak is a lightweight text-to-speech tool that speaks text you copy to the clipboard. It’s small, and tries not to be in the way, keeping user interfaces and interaction to a minimum. I intend this to be a quick and easy tool to use when you need something read aloud.
Right now it just sits in the system tray’s icon area, reading whatever you copy to the clipboard with the currently selected SAPI5 synthesizer in the control panel’s speech dialogue.

I intend to have the first release up on CodePlex within the next month.

ClipSpeak at CodePlex

Flimag hasn’t had much progress since my last post. I’ve been poking around at this thing and that and thought about things now and then. This project is quite difficult, and requires much time, so I’ve decided to work on something else for awhile. Check out the post above!

So I’ve been looking at this thing and that, trying to figure out what to use for Flimag, and I found out that Windows Vista finally has a compositing window manager, Desktop Window Manager. With composition, windows are drawn separately into buffers, and this sounds like it could be very useful for a screen magnifier. I believe many of the Linux magnifiers use this methodology.

A Screen Magnifier Using “High Level” Implementation Techniques.
This is yet another great paper, not relying on DirectX overlays!