If you have had the chance to use an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might have noticed a “small” inconvenience: these devices do not appear as removable storage drives in Windows, like prior versions of iPod (classic, nano, etc). This effectively prevents the iPhone and iPod Touch to be used for data transfer. There is some discussion online about why and how this happened. In my opinion, this is a two thumbs down situation for Apple for trying to limit the possible uses of these cool devices. I hope that this business model will soon be replaced by a more open-platform approach.

Fortunately, Albert Pelhe, a good friend of mine, informed me about a workaround to this problem. DigiDNA came up with DiskAid, an application that lets the user copy files to and from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is freeware and claims to have 0% of adware, spyware and virus content. The only inconvenience is that it must be installed on every computer where the device is meant to be used as a removable disk drive.

If anyone from Apple reads this blog I have a request for them: please let information flow freely. You can try to control it, but you will become unpopular in the realm of techies. Thanks,

Oszkar

Over the last year I’ve written about the Kindle, about ripping books and about the future of electronic readers. Clearly, I’m pretty excited about this technology. However, I still don’t own an electronic reader, mostly because I haven’t found one that would help me with a major need: reading pdf and Word documents. The problem with the Kindle and other readers has been their size. With a 6″ screen they’re considerably smaller than legal size paper (14″ diagonal) which is the size used for conference papers, theses, student assignments, etc.

However, now there’s a larger device. The iRex digital reader has a 10″ screen. I haven’t read a review about it yet that would tell me how well it works with pdf and Word documents intended for legal or A4 size paper. Here’s a CNET review by David Carnoy to which I posted a question regarding pdfs, but apparently David doesn’t bother responding to questions. Another review may soon be posted here by Adam B. and he is clearly a lot more responsive to input from the community than David.

Other e-readers with large screens will soon be on the market. Here’s one such device by Plastic Logic (impressive!):

I’ll let you all know if (or should I say when?) I finally purchase one of these.

Andrew Kun

Hello,

As you know, we have multiple computers that we use during our experiments. We have to prepare every computer before the experiment and then collect the data after the experiment is done. The usual procedure is to use a check list so we do not forget something. NASA have been using this approach for some time:

We still manage to forget things, though. And given that all our computers are connected into a network I decided to automate some of the procedures.

Setup: Multiple computers, each of each must have a set of properly configured applications running. The settings may be changed during different experiment stages. For example: Pre-experiment stage (all applications are launched, subject id is provided),  Experiment part 1, Experiment part 2, Post-experiment stage (save data files, close applications).

Solution: Imagine that all the applications that we use can be controlled from a command line. Then all we need to do is to execute proper commands on every computer. That is simple: every computer runs a “command execution server” on startup. The experimenter creates a batch file for every stage of the experiment that connects to the “command execution server” to run commands with proper parameters.

Problem 1. Most applications are GUI based. But AutoHotKey provides a solution for this problem. AutoHotKey can control mouse and send key presses to the windows. It even comes with a recorder that allows easy creation of the scripts.

Problem 2. What to use as an “command execution server”? Programs similar to Remote Desktop are GUI based. Telnet and ssh require user permission settings and could be cumbersome to configure, but they could provide additional security. Given that we are not worried about security (it’s a local isolated network), I implemented a server and a client in perl (thanks to the Network Programming with Perl, a great tutorial by James Lee). The server will execute any perl script that a client sends to it (yes, it can be dangerous, but it is also very flexible).

Solution: The server runs on every computer. Every computer also has a set of AutoHotKey script files that control the applications (this is an example of an AutoHotKey Script, which executes a notepad and writes a message in it). The experimenter executes a client that informs the server to run the proper commands (assuming AutoHotKey is installed properly):

my @args = (”AutoHotkey.exe ScriptExample.ahk _SUBJECT_”);
system(@args) == 0 or die “Failed to execute given command\n”;

Notice that the client substitues _SUBJECT_ for a given parameter and ahk script uses it. This code is saved in a file such as ExecuteScriptExample and is piped to the client. This is what the experimenter does to run a script on a remote computer:

perl NetCli.pl Subject1 IPADDRESS_1 <ExecuteScriptExample

I hope this will help you to automate your own tasks. One can execute or even dynamically create batch or perl scripts and then run them on the remote computer.

Thank you.

Alexander Shyrokov

TouchKit fabrication prototype (check!), originally uploaded by stfnix.

Apparently the folks at Nortd are getting closer to shipping some TouchKits. The picture above was just posted on June 27. This looks like a good size screen!

Andrew Kun

Check out this article from Cognitive Daily on how to report on scientific research to a general audience. Note that many of the suggestions are equally valid when they’re applied to documents aimed at scientific or technical audiences (e.g. “Explaining your figures is crucial…”).

Andrew Kun

As I was searching for resources and information for my current project (the skin-conductance glove) today, I stumbled upon this very interesting, but related, project at MIT’s Media Lab.

They call it a Galvactivator and it is…a glove which measures skin conductance…only it’s not publicly available. However, they use it basically as a modern mood ring, only it’s more accurate. It measures the wearers skin conductance and then displays it via a LED by varying it’s brightness, and it has a variety of uses, according to their FAQ. I do wonder if a similar setup would work better for us, since it seems to overcome the issue with making a glove with finger-tip electrodes fit many different sized hands.

I really like the LucidTouch project. Check out the video:

I wonder how we can use this idea in Project54… E.g. instead of using the touch sensor in the back we could experiment with Oszkar Palinko’s instrumented glove, or a new version of this glove. If we kept the glove design with push buttons, you wouldn’t have the option to move objects around, but you could still click virtual buttons using the hand overlay. Since in the Project54 system’s GUI there are no objects to move, but plenty of buttons to click, this may be a good approach for us.

Andrew Kun

Here’s the answer by iBar:

Andrew Kun

Cool video (although some people are not impressed):

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Andrew Kun

Check out Cubit, the open source multitouch display by NOR_/D, in this video:

Very cool! You can now place an advance order for TouchKit, the development version of Cubit.

Here’s a good article with more details on this display and other similar efforts. Want more pictures? Click here. I tried to search Flickr for some customer-generated pictures (that is pictures of what the TouchKit product may look like and how people are using it), but no luck yet.

Andrew Kun