For those that deal with complex networking, having a device’s MAC address can be very helpful in diagnostics, configuration, and firewalling. Often just using a device’s IP address is enough, but what about DHCP? Unless you can control the device’s IP range, this can cause many hours of troubleshooting. This is where having a MAC address helps.

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Recently we had an interesting opportunity to deploy 7 identical customized machines for Yon Reptile Campaign. We’ve been working on disk images to make this quick and painless, and have more or less succeeded. However, getting an archived image onto the machines has a few different methods, depending on circumstance. We also get to pay a penalty every time the underlying hardware changes, since the image bundles in specific drivers. Usually we’re able to work around this with minimal pain.

Excitingly, these new machines broke the mold (they’re slightly older, considerably cheaper machines), so we had to tweak the image a bit. (more…)

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a P5 Glove listed on eBay for $20. It arrived a couple of days later, and I started playing with libp5glove by Jason McMullan, Tim Kreger, and Ross Bencina. I built a very simple Quartz Composer patch around it.

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I made a pair of patches to allow Quartz Composer to directly interact with the Phidget InterfaceKit 0/0/4 (relay outputs) and 8/8/8 (digital inputs + analog inputs + digital outputs).

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I took Martin Kahr’s Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class and built a Quartz Composer patch around it.

This release is only compatible with Tiger (10.4).
Leopard (10.5) includes a built-in Apple Remote patch.
Please see also kineme.net for Leopard-compatible patches.

Get version 0.1 here.

Some notes:

• The events received from the Apple Remote are fairly strange to begin with.. You don’t simply get “key down” / “key up” events as I would have assumed, but instead get cooked events — for many of the buttons, holding the button down generates a different event than tapping it.
• My patch queues events, to ensure that each keypress is visible for at least one frame.

The Bower VL46TC Titanium Super Wide-Angle “Fisheye” lens with “macro” claims to be:

• “Titanium” (I think it’s actually aluminum)
• “High Resolution” (It’s a glorified magnifying glass, so it unavoidably blurs around the edges.)
• “Digital” (This one baffles me. It contains no electronic parts whatsoever.)
• “AF” (AutoFocus. Again, contains no electronics, or even moving parts. My lens’s autofocus still works when this is attached, for the most part. However, under some circumstances, the attachments confuse the camera and necessitate manual focus.)
• “To fit : […] ALL FINE SLR CAMERAS.”

OK, now the fun stuff: pictures! (more…)