Let me say it clearly: ASUS I Hate you.
Ok, actually I don't hate asus. They make great products. I'm just ranting about the fact that they limited their notebooks' media keys to work only with, say, Windows Media Player or Media Center.
I was a big Winamp user (I recently switched to MusicBee) and I was desperate to find a way to make my media keys work with it so I could play Left4Dead and skip songs while playing.
After hours of googling I found the answer: http://zaak404.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/controlling-foobar2000-with-asus-g73-media-keys/
All you have to do is to replace ASUS' DMedia.exe (C:\Program Files (x86)\ASUS\ATK Package\ATK Media) with the supplied one and you are almost done. Zaak404's versione requires you to write a small configuration file to make his program interact only with one single media player... I'm lazy (and I reinstall windows frequently) so I made my own version of his program and it doesn't require any user effort.
So, kudos to zaak404 for doing all the real (read "hard") work on this code. I just edited it to make it work "globally". I'm using windows' keybd_event function, which has been around from win 3.1 I think :D It's deprecated, but it still works in windows 7 so... I don't give a fuck about it ;)
I packed the binary in a Zip file with a .bat file. To install it just right-click install.bat and run it as administrator. Now restart your PC and all should work fine. If it doesn't it probably means ASUS changed the default DMedia.exe's directory, so you have to find the new one and copy manually .\bin\Release\DMedia.exe.
If you have any other problem, just drop a comment below.
Download .ZIP
Repository@BitBucket
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
Rainy Day (AKA "Random stuff in Processing")
So here we are again... A little test-sketch done in Processing (http://processing.org/) to test out the feasibility of some ideas, of my brother, about a simple art installation.
The idea is to put a projector and a camera in a dark room. The projector would show a greyish background along with computer generated rain (simple stuff, not photorealistic) and cast the shadow of the people passing against a wall.
Using the camera and some Processing/OpenFrameworks kung-fu the rain should start bouncing against shadows' edges.
Here's a screenshot of the first sketch. Just trying out some ideas with a static and simple image:
The rendering (without the OPENGL option) is quite slow, as you can see in the applet linked below. That's due to some quick'n'dirty hacks to get the job done in less time. I also lowered the number of particles created per-frame.
It also could take a lot to load because I'm using a 4MB mp3 for the background "music". I should definitely cut it :D
The idea is to put a projector and a camera in a dark room. The projector would show a greyish background along with computer generated rain (simple stuff, not photorealistic) and cast the shadow of the people passing against a wall.
Using the camera and some Processing/OpenFrameworks kung-fu the rain should start bouncing against shadows' edges.
Here's a screenshot of the first sketch. Just trying out some ideas with a static and simple image:
The rendering (without the OPENGL option) is quite slow, as you can see in the applet linked below. That's due to some quick'n'dirty hacks to get the job done in less time. I also lowered the number of particles created per-frame.
It also could take a lot to load because I'm using a 4MB mp3 for the background "music". I should definitely cut it :D