The world of noates

Voice Command of your Toppy
This was just a bit of silly fun, but someone mentioned a few weeks back if it was possible to mute the Toppy by telling it via vioce recognition. It turns out that it was really very easy, as I had already put AppleScript into VirtualRemote.app. So all you have to do is make an AppleScript like this:

tell application "VirtualRemote"
   sendKey numbered "65548"
end tell

Then if you save this as an app with the title of what you want to say eg "Toppy mute" or "Silence", put it in the Speakable Items folder in ~/Library/Speech/Speakable Items (just the main section if you want to access it at any time), then turn Speakable Items on in the Speech Prefs. Make sure that the VirtualRemote TAP is running (you will have to run it without any other TAPs though - press 0 during startup and then launch just the VR TAP), and say the magic words. The Toppy should then mute or unmute as appropriate.

[/otherapps] link

ToFi progress report
I just thought I'd say where I was up to in regards to ToFi. The app works well on USB 2 machines but seems to fail usually on USB 1.1 transfers. Using an old hub, I could replicate the problem, but so far I have been unable to solve it. By tweaking the maximum packet size, I was able to get one firmware transfer to complete fine, but another firmware file failed. However the good news is that the failures always seem to occur in the same spots (for a given packet size and file), so I just need to work out why!

Until I sort that out, I'll release an interim version (v0.2) of ToFi soon. It has a great new icon and simplified layout (thanks to Angus Hume!) and a German localization. I'll leave the (semi-successful) tweak in too, if anyone finds it has improved things please tell me.

[/otherapps] link