Brett Hutley's Blog

Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.

Continue reading “Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac”

I just brought Maplin's USB Digital Microsoft with 400x magnification, which is advertised as having Windows-only drivers. System Profiler identified the chipset as being from Vimicro Corporation. I went to the Driver Download section of their website and downloaded (and installed) the DRV_ZC0301PLus_070305 driver. I then opened up Photo Booth, and was able to select the Vimicro camera as the video source. What I should have done was just try and access the Microscope using Photo Booth before I installed the driver, as I half suspect that there was no actual need to install that driver. [caption id="attachment_294" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Close-up of a new razor blade"][/caption] Please try to use the microscope with Photo Booth first before downloading the driver, and let me know in the comments if that works.

Emacs on my Macbook Pro uses the "alt" key (the one to the left of the "cmd" key) to be the Alt (meta) key when doing things like Alt-Backspace to delete backwards by word. This is quite annoying for me as I naturally try and use the command key for this. To fix this put the following in your .emacs file.

(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)