Skip to main content

Enabling External Screen

Another slow week ~ parenting, employment, school holidays and academia do not mix well.

I have the hardware up and running how I want now. My initial build with the projector on the right and camera on the left had 2 problems. Firstly, as previously noted, its preferable to have the camera on the side of the users dominant hand since this will be used the most. Secondly...the PK301 has a small fan for cooling and having this on the right meant that the exhaust heat was blowing onto my neck and was hot enough to be very uncomfortable. So today I've switched things around, tied things off, added extra washers (oh, the technology!) for stability and, apart from the need for a more stable joint to hold the projector in a position so that it is level with the users view, I am reasonably satisfied with my budget implementation. Not $350...about £350 but then I could have bought a cheaper projector (and may well pick up a ShowWX for testing) and come under budget. I still need to add a reflector to allow for quick repositioning of the output, but getting close.

However I am rambling, I really wanted to just make a note of what I had to do to enable my laptops lid to be closed and still have the external screen function :

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/lid_battery "nothing"


gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/lid_ac "nothing"

This is rather hackish since the laptop screen stays on when closed but I couldn't find any other way to do this - I'm reasonably sure I don't have this issue in windows - so if anyone can suggest an alternative.....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I know I should move on and start a new blog but I'm keeping this my temporary home. New project, massive overkill in website creation. I've a simple project to put up a four page website which was already somewhat over specified in being hosted on AWS and S3. This isn't quite ridiculous enough though so I am using puppet to manage an EC2 instance (it will eventually need some server side work) and making it available in multiple regions. That would almost have been enough but I'm currently working on being able to provision an instance either in AWS or Rackspace because...well...Amazon might totally go down one day! Yes, its over-the-top but I needed something simple to help me climb up the devops and cloud learning curve. So off the bat - puppet installation. I've an older 10.04 Ubuntu virtual server which has been somewhat under-taxed so I've set that up as a puppet master. First lesson - always use the latest version from a tarball unless you have kept t...

More Observations

After this post I AM going to make videos ;) I spent some time doing some basic tests last night under non optimal (but good) conditions: 1) Double click/single click/long tap/short tap These all can be supported using in air interactions and pinch gestures. I'd estimate I had +90% accuracy in detection rate for everything apart from single click. Single click is harder to do since it can only be flagged after the delay for detecting a double click has expired and this leads to some lag in the responsiveness of the application. 2) The predator/planetary cursor design. In order to increase the stability of my primary marker when only looking at a single point e.g. when air drawing, I decided to modify my cursor design. I feel that both fiducial points should be visible to the user but it didn't quite "feel" right to me using either the upper or lower fiducial when concentrating on a single point hence I've introduced a mid-point cursor that is always 1/2 wa...

Drag Drop - a gesture design delema!

So I've run into an interesting interaction design problem. I've implemented some very basic list interface elements and initially supported the scrolling interaction via dwell regions. I'm unhappy with this for a number or reasons : 1) Dwell regions are not obvious to a user since there is no visual feedback to the user as to their presence. While I can provide feedback, there are times where I may choose not to do so (e.g. where the dwell region overlaps with the list). 2) Dwell regions when combined with other UI elements can hinder users interaction - e.g. if a user wishes to select an item that is within the dwell region and the dwell region initiates the scrolling behaviour causing the users selected item to move. 3) Interaction is very basic and I dont really want to implement any more support for these. The obvious alternative to a dwell region though is drag and drop (or in the case of OS6Sense, pinch and unpinch) however since these are gestures, there's...