YCombinator funding – Deadline March 26, 2012

Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2012 funding cycle. It will take place in Mountain View, CA from June through August 2012.

Million Dollar Zazzle Open Innovation Challenge – Deadline February 17, 2012

Calling all innovators and entrepreneurs! Do you have the next great customizable product idea bubbling up and ready to explode on the scene of today’s revolutionary global customization market? Well, we’re ready to put a million dollars in technology, marketing, and distribution on Zazzle to work to launch the innovative concept that resonates most with our panel of industry leaders, academics, and investors as the next big thing!

NLNet – Deadline is Tomorrow – February 1, 2012

Do you have a valuable idea in the area of the network and Internet technology, and are you looking for financial means to make your ideas come through? Or do you have an existing project that requires additional means to enable further development? Then submit your proposal to NLnet foundation before the next following deadline and see if we can help you.

I had an idea to show kind of human computer interaction during my Fosdem talk. I may not use that, because I will not have time to polish it, but it works quite well if you want to use it.

The Idea
The idea is to control slides only by moving my hand, without any devices in it.

The plan:
0. My web-cam should detect my move
1. After detection an event should be triggered
2. As a final action the slide should move to the next one

Motion detect

$ git clone https://github.com/sackmotion/motion.git
$ cd motion
$ ./configure
$ make & make install

Configure it

Motion comes with a great almost working config file, so just copy it to make it “official”:

$ cp  /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf

Open it, search for those values, edit them and read what are they for:

;on_event_start value
event_gap 60

to become:

on_event_start xdotool key Right /OR xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Right/
event_gap 1

Event triggering

You may need to install xdotool using your package manager. This tool allows you to emulate keyboard action in different combinations, but I will need to emulate pressing the right arrow key.

How it works:

When web-cam detects movement an event emulating ‘right arrow’ key is pressed. Since I am using HTML5 DZslides from here, this allows me to move to next slide only with moving my hand in front of my webcam.

Run

Run it and move your hand in front of your camera. You may want to turn on the logging to see the motion detection and the event detection if it’s not working at first.

$ motion

If you have any questions, please let me know.

A friend of mine just show me a info about my efforts to establish Pirate Party in Bulgaria published on Wikileaks:

(SBU) A Bulgarian Green Party leader and two other Bulgarian
activists have started a petition to establish a Bulgarian “Pirate
Party” which advocates for free downloading of copyrighted materials
among other things. Under Bulgarian law, 5,000 signatures are
required for a political party to be formally established. Given
the fact that Bulgaria’s Green Party has generally attracted less
than one percent of the vote in national and EU elections, it is
unlikely that the fledgling Pirate Party would surpass the four
percent voting threshold needed to win a seat in Parliament.
Nonetheless, if this new party begins to win support from the
general public, IPR enforcement and legislation could face political
obstacles in Parliament in the future.

P.S Bulgarian Green Party leader == me
Source