How to control HTML5 slides with your hands via webcam

Posted January 31st, 2012 in Kindle, Mashup, Mozilla, Open Technologies by Bogo

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.

I am Wikileak’ed

Posted January 30th, 2012 in Closed Technologies, Mashup, Mozilla by Bogo

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

Installing #JRebel on #Fedora and #Eclipse Helios

Posted October 18th, 2011 in java, Mashup by Bogo

Since we launched free version of JRebel for non-commercial products called JRebel Social I was curios how fast I can install it on my Fedora 15. I thought it will be a hard task, but I was surprised how easy I done it.

What is JRebel?

First of all this is a must have tool for every Java developer. Why? See this cool PDF for an great answer to that question. or watch this video.

0. Let’s install Eclipse HELIOS first via yum.

#yum install eclipse

Note: It does install and JDK also, so you don’t have to be worried about that anymore :)

1. Install the Eclipse Market place

Eclipse market place is not installed by default on Fedora’s version so you will need to do that.
1. Click on Help >> Install new software
2. Choose “All available sites” and write “marketplace” like shown here:


3. Install it

2. Install JRebel

Click on Help >> Eclipse Marketplace and choose/ search for JRebel and click on install:

Select all of these, if you are not sure what to do or read more about them here:

Read and accept the JRebel License and click on Finish button

3 Configure

Go and login to https://social.jrebel.com/ in order to get a FREE (yes no money charged) license for JRebel

JRebel Social login page

Register and follow the menu to activate your license

Start the eclipse and choose you will use JRebel Social:

Jrebel Social and Eclipse

Working with it

Read more how to use it here with screenshots and instructions

Subscribe to my RSS and win a free postcard (via snailmail)

Posted May 27th, 2011 in Mashup, Mozilla, Open Technologies by Bogo

Hello,
If you don’t know me, my name is Bogomil – Bogo for short. I am from Europe (Bulgaria).

I am an openweb hacker and a community enchanter (because I help people to create magic with their skills).

I am writing here about OpenWeb, FOSS Community management, hacking, Javascript, PHP and different interesting stuff and if you subscribe to my RSS feed (click here to do that) and if you send me your address (click here to send it to me via secure form) I promise I will send you a nice postcard using snail mail or I can buy you a beer if we meet somewhere.

Visit my blog

If you are coming from a planet or a link, please visit my blog to see what I am writing about.

Thanks,
Bogo

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