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McCain really shouldn’t speak in front of a green screen.

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Introducing the crem de la creme of our society.    Take your pick!

  or   or 

or  or

But look on the bright side:

• You’ll be dead from Global Warming, or Terrorists, or Top Soil Depletion, or Illegal Immigrants before it can get much worse.  Almost makes you think that someone is trying to scare you.  But what possible motivation would government have for making you afraid?

Folks,  I have to give extreme kudos to Dan Carlin for his two excellent podcasts

• Common Sense  -  http://www.dancarlin.com/cspage1.asp
• Hardcore History -  http://www.dancarlin.com/hhpage1.asp

I just listened to Dan’s recent podcast on the fall of Nineveh and the demise of one of the greatest civilizations of the world,  the Assyrian Empire.  Excellent Work.

More to the point of this post is a recent edition of his "Common Sense" podcast (ref. Thomas Pane) , entitled "The Government We Deserve".  His point:

• If you are unhappy with our government and want to know who to blame, look in the mirror.  And if you are one of the few who isn’t to blame then you are screwed, because everyone around you is.
• Would the American Republic be safer if its people weren’t so afraid? Dan thinks so. He talks about the connection between bravery and freedom. Also: What would happen if an honest person were elected President?

Good Stuff.  Do yourself a favor.  Give one of his podcasts a listen.

I’ll put this one to you as simply as possible. It’s a picture from one of the Mars rovers that appears to show a person (or a rock), walking along the Martian surface. This person (or rock, probably) looks so much like that classic Big Foot picture that it makes me laugh. Anyway, this Martian person (or rock, honestly I think it may be just a rock everyone) is going all over the web, so I thought I’d put my two pennies in: I think it’s a rock.

Ja Ja das ist gut. Wanken die Winkie

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Controlling my Media-PC with a Wii-mote

I have a nice slim form-factor computer on my media rack connected to my big-screen TV. Great for streaming video, listening to music, or playing videos I’ve downloaded. I’ve used a Logitech Gyro Mouse as a pointing device for this setup. Good setup, but that mouse recently kicked the bucket.

I was planning on getting that new Logitech MX Air mouse. It’s really cool next-gen phaser mouse that you can just waive around in the air to control input. (image left)But $150.00? Come on!So I went with plan B. Didn’t cost a dime

Plan B - Controlling PC with a Wii-Mote

The Wii remote is the controller for the Nintendo Wii. The Wii uses the same sort of ‘wave the mouse around’ type of controller I wanted for my PC. SInce I already owned a Wii, this would be a good low cost solution. To get this working you need: Wii-Mote Computer w/ a Blue Tooth Connection (or in my case a USB bluetooth dongle). A piece of software called BlueSoleil Another piece of software called WiinRemote Some patience to get it all configured

So, I plugged the USB bluetooth dongle into an available USB port. Then installed BlueSoleil. I installed the free demo ver which doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of their ‘pay’ version, but for what we are doing here it works just fine. BlueSoleil allows the user to setup a wide range of bluetooth connections between a PC and all sorts of bluetooth devices, (phones, cameras, etc).

If you’re interested here’s a guide on setting up connection between your computer and a WiiMote using BlueSoleil http://www.wiiprojects.org/bluetooth

Once the connection is setup the computer still has no idea how to interpret the Wiimote input. For that you have to install WiinRemote. http://onakasuita.org/wii/index-e.html

WiinRemote installs a little app the interprets the signals from the WiiMote and translates them into Mouse Input.WiiMotes have both accelerometers an a IR sensor to control input in three dimensions. Getting the accelerometer input to work was no problem, but it lacks the finer control of the IR input.

Nintendo Wiis use a IR sensor bar to receive this input. I thought I’d have to go purchase another IR sensor bar and attach it to the computer directly, but then I relized that the IR sensor bar really isn’t a sensor at all! The IR sensor bar is just an array with 4 LEDs. It provides a reference point to the sensor in the WiiMote itself. The Wiimote senses it’s position relative to those LEDs and that information is fed through the bluetooth connection back to the Wii, or in this case the PC). So I just left the IR sensor bar attached to the Wii, turned the Wii on so the LEDs would be active, and let it rip.

WORKS GREAT!

Now I have a excellent input method for my big screen media PC.

Here’s an example I found on YouTube of this type of solution. Mine looks a lot better. I’ll try to get some video posted soon.

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Ahh, if only I could have endless hours on hand to do something this creative!