Ten Points Random

You know what they say: Use your head.

I got a better idea: Use your feet.

I originally built my foot interface for MIDI/gaming applications but I found another great application: image editing.

I was going about filling around some lines with colors in The GIMP, and as I was working I thought, Hey, I keep switching back and forth between the paint tool and the eraser tool pretty often. When I had to switch I either needed to skim through the giant tool pallet to find my new tool, or laboriously, lift my head and chin from my left hand so I could press the appropriate keyboard shortcut.  It got old, but then I thought: Hey, I’ll just use my feet.

So I fired up my AutoHotkey editing skillz and bound a couple of buttons on my foot controller to the paint and erase tools (or rather the keyboard shortcuts for them).  Viola!  Instant speedup.

Now I can waste away my life painting away at pointless things much more quickly!

Also, I bound another couple buttons to undo/redo to help speed up fixing my mistakes.  Now I just need to figure out how to make the tools pressure sensitive using the foot pedals . . .

Edit: I also set Page Up/Page Down to buttons.  Imagine how convenient it is for me to just lean back and read something long, hands free!

So, my DDR pads, you know, the ones my friend and I built from scratch? (Todo, post pages on them.)
Yeah, they broke – again. Okay, one still works fine but the other isn’t. That makes me angry. Pissed. Unhappy.

How much is a Cobalt Flux?

So here’s what I got:

The whole thing plugs in via USB and acts like a regular joystick – the four pedals are four different axises on the controller.

And the whole thing is pegged onto a circutboard from a regular controller.

So last Friday the Unix Epoch reached 1234567890!  This happened at 4:31 PM.

Of course, working in the programming department of a web development company, I was not the only person aware of this momentous occasion.  We managed to rife up enough excitement that, by the time the final countdown began, we have the time stamp up on the projected warboard on the wall, with everyone was standing up watching it.

When the final countdown commenced, everyone counted down together.  When we reached the sequential Epoch time, the time that has been printed on everyone’s keyboards for years past and to come, everyone cheered, my manager flashed the lights on and off, and I rang the gong a bunch.

This, coming from someone who slept through last New Years.

Let’s face it.  I’m a geek.

More on this later.