Creating With Code

A blog by Robert (Marty) McGuire

Entries Tagged as 'HowTo'

Automatic MakerBot Camera Pt. 2 – Wiring it up!

February 16th, 2010 · 3 Comments

Recently (thanks to the Internet), I figured out how to remote control a digital camera over USB using CHDK. However, if I wanted my MakerBot to be able to automatically control that camera, I needed a way to wire it up!
CHDK’s remote USB trigger functionality works by detecting when it receives power over USB.  This [...]

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Tags: HowTo

Automatic MakerBot Camera Pt. 1 – Remote control camera with CHDK

February 1st, 2010 · 1 Comment

One problem with making time-lapse videos of MakerBot prints is the fact that the MakerBot works by moving the build platform (and therefore the object being built) around in the XY plane, resulting in an unwatchable blur.
It recently occurred to me that, since the MakerBot is such a hackable platform, I could probably make nice [...]

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Tags: HowTo

Face Detection in Static Images with Python

February 20th, 2009 · 7 Comments

One of the things I’ve been longing to do with my mobile photo-sharing site Camura is to offer image annotations, like objects and faces.  Over the last couple of years I have been increasingly frustrated by the appearance of face tagging on services like Facebook, and the recent addition of face recognition to iPhoto has [...]

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Tags: HowTo

Getting the Boarduino working with OS X Leopard

June 12th, 2008 · 2 Comments

I’ve been into hardware hacking on and off for much of my life, but I’ve never really had the time and confidence to design and build my own hardware. In recent years, projects like the open source Arduino have been slowly convincing me that I just might be able to do this stuff.
When a [...]

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A couple of Leopard configuration tricks

June 12th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I find Google to be a more and more valuable resource as time goes on, especially when seeking knowledge about how to make this new MacBook act like I want it to.
One thing I noticed early on was that pressing Tab to move around various interfaces, from Finder dialogs to web pages, would only tab [...]

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Setting up Rails and MySQL on OS X Leopard

June 12th, 2008 · No Comments

I recently purchased a MacBook to use as my primary development system. One of my first plans was to get up and running with Rails on this new machine. Given that Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes with Ruby version 1.8.6 and RubyGems 1.0.1, I thought I would be in good shape, but there [...]

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Tags: HowTo

Extracting projects from a shared Subversion repository

May 28th, 2008 · 2 Comments

I recently had the need to migrate a project from a Subversion (SVN) repository that was shared among many other projects and groups to a fresh repository where it would be the first of many projects.
My first instinct was to simply use svnadmin dump to dump out the contents of the whole shared repository, transfer [...]

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Simple online storage with Amazon’s S3

May 20th, 2008 · 4 Comments

If you’ve been following all of the latest buzz about data and applications “in the cloud”, then you’re probably already familiar with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). If you’re not, or if you’ve never had the chance to play with it, then this post should help you get up, running, and able to easily [...]

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Tags: HowTo