Image Tricks - Free & Fun

This morning, I downloaded a cool application by BeLight Software called Image Tricks which leverages Cocoa and Core Image.

The Kaleidoscope effect amused me, and I used Snapz Pro to capture a movie while playing with the kaleidoscope count parameter.

My ATI Remote Wonder Stopped Working

Just a quick note about a problem I had (and have partially fixed) with the ATI Remote Wonder I bought to control my MythTV using Fedora Core 3. I had initially installed it a couple weeks ago, and it worked as a mouse, and would send recognizable keystrokes to the irw utility, and I could create a .xmodmaprc to map the buttons to special keystrokes in the mythfronted application.

Then I rebooted and it stopped working entirely. No mouse. No keystrokes. No controlling MythTV.

I did a lot of web searching, and tried a lot of things. Then I found some mention of using the irrecord utility to create my own lircd.conf file. I already had such a file, which I downloaded from somewhere, but at least with irrecord, I can see if the device was doing anything at all. So:

#irrecord lircd_temp.conf

After going through the irrecord wizard, I compared the generated file with the one I had downloaded, I found that 1) the "gap" value was different, and 2) that all the key codes were off by one in the most significant hex digit, such that the OK button, for instance, was 0xF31E instead of 0xE31E. I edited my original /etc/lircd.conf file to use the appropriate gap, and updated key codes, and after restarting the lircd daemon, the remote started working with my ~/.mythtv/lircrc mapping file to allow me to control mythtv.

I still don't get mouse motion, mouse buttons or keystrokes out of the remote. So I assume there is some other configuration file somewhere which has the wrong key codes in it.

And I don't know why the codes changed, or whether they will do so again in the future, but I thought I'd let the universe know what I discovered.