WillWa.de

Hellen Keller and her communication system.

“It is not blindness or deafness that bring me my darkest hours,”.. “It is the acute disappointment in not being able to speak normally. Longingly I feel how much more good I could have done if I had acquired normal speech. But out of this sorrowful experience, I understand more fully all human tragedies, thwarted ambitions, and the infinite capacity of hope.”

See also this this video of Anne Sulliivan and Helen with some more information about her speech development.

This is a pretty amazing little film. Interesting for anyone interested in Occupational Therapy, Assistive Technology, AAC and Communication, film-making.. Everyone.

Wonderful little film. The backstory is just as interesting.

This is water.

Recently I’ve been tidying up my references and reading habits. After playing with a number of paid-for applications, like Papers I’ve decided to stick with Bibdesk on the mac and PocketBib on iOS. Personally I find myself using CiteULike a lot more to keep the data up-to-date than any desktop apps so Bibdesk/PocketBib is really for my reference and offline reading habits rather than editing needs.

This is achieved by one-way syncing all the CiteULike data to a folder on dropbox running a small script that is here. Download and run at your cron-pleasure but please change the API line on 53 so I don’t look like a bad-guy to the CiteULike gang who are lovely!

Updated the Music Switcher recently. Amongst other things:

• Support for more switch boxes by using alternative key codes. Particularly useful for the Don Johnston box
• A better way to access help and the latched time using an option in the right click of the menu tray. Heck of a lot nicer.
• Support for VLC. I hate the way Windows Media Player (and iTunes to a certain extent) is awful at dealing with anything other than video encoded in 1998. So the music switcher now works with VLC too.

The full details is here

Happy St Patricks Day/Weekend(!)

Loving Andy Councils work. (The babel tower of language)

This was for a feature on learning languages and communicating with people. It is a modern tower of Babel type thing. It goes from the bottom level where there is a language gene that people share with Chickens, Crocodiles and Cats to the top where people are able to communicate by reading each others thoughts!

Rubber bands rule (If you have a spare hour watch the much longer chat here)

A little montage from my walk round town

Mark & Sam. Two fab people who use AAC & AT highlighted by the Guardian Christmas Appeal for the ACE Centre.

(via ACE Centre Christmas charity appeal – video)

Dogs driving cars. Awesome. Now cats - follow that!

I really hate exchange. Like really. As time goes by it looks like Exchange and the days of Outlook are numbered - Office 365, Google Apps, iCloud and the like do look like the future. Thank goodness. However the future isn’t quite here for everyone just yet. If your office run a Exchange server you can get Mail, Calendars, Contacts and Notes on your iPhone if your IT department run all the numerous patches and learn about active sync…. Yay! However if you use a shared Calendar managed through the Public Calendars feature of Exchange its not so easy to get this on your mobile device. Infact Public folders/calendars aren’t supported by the iPhone whatsoever. Boo! But don’t despair! I’ve done it! Yay! How I hear you ask?!?

Well in short it requires:

• Publishing your Calendar. Outlook really only allows you to do this using WebDAV so you need either a webDAV server locally or remotely. If its locally we can use Dropbox to make it available anywhere and everywhere.
• Adding a full URL to the *.ics file to your iPhone.

Before we begin, note the problems with this approach:

• If your machine that does the publishing is ever off it won’t update your Published calendar
• Due to the way publishing works it is never “live” its always a copy of what is being made on the server.. Still, I think this approach is way better than other methods (e.g. the Google Sync method) which are equally always out of date.

Step 1 - Set-up a WebDAV server

Two options for this. If you have access to a server I would recommend setting up a WebDAV share on that. Follow these tips for that if you are on a Linux box running Apache. NB: Access to the vhost file is needed - you can’t usually do this just with .htaccess files. NB2: We are not setting up a CalDAV server here - we are just publishing a file to a webDAV server. Our phone will then grab the URL of this .ics file when its live so your WebDAV server needs to allow public (unauthenticated) access to your file. For security I recommend making your ics file a rather random string (step 2).

Otherwise set-up a webDAV server on your own machine. This doesn’t have to be accessible from the outside world - we will use Dropbox for that. Follow these instructions to do this on Windows - and do follow it by the letter - including the Windows Authentication features that need to be installed. I was scratching my head for sometime wondering why the thing wasn’t allowing me access. grrrrr…

Set the WebDAV folder up to somewhere in your Dropbox. If you aren’t bothered by someone accidentally finding the Calendar then place it in your Public folder however I would recommend placing it outside of the Public folder of dropbox.

Step 2 - Publish the Calendar

Follow these steps. For the WebDAV server details enter them; either the ones on your public webDAV server or the ones from your localmachine. For this it will be

http://localhost/Calendars/

(if your WebDAV share is “Calendars”.. Make sure you follow the tutorials and this will hopefully make sense)

Step 3 - Add the calendar URL to your Phone

If you have gone the Private WebDAV/Dropbox route you will need to get the link of the .ics file recently created by the publishing by Outlook. Navigate to the file in question in Explorer, right click and select “Share Link”. A web page so appear (login to dropbox if it asks you for that). On the “Download” button control+right click and copy the link. This is your ics url that you will need on your iPhone. I recommend emailing yourself this link!

If you have gone the Public WebDAV route then things are a bit neater for you. Just note the URL to where the file is and away you go (remember though that it needs to be viewable by all - no authentication for read access).

So now you have a link to the file - something like

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/9890890adadsad987ad/Your_Shared_Diary_Calendar.ics?dl=1

or

http://myserver.com/webdav/calendars/MyRan7adomNam3dCalFil3.ics

Now simply add that to an “Other” calendar account in your phone. Follow these steps for that..

Side-Notes

Do look at DavMail if you need to get your Outlook account playing nicely with Mail, Calendar and Contacts on a Mac or Linux box. Note though that Public Calendars won’t work if there is a space in the Calendar name. No matter what. So the above approach is still useful.

Please vote for Hilary’s Straws on Vimeo - a great video contender for the Focus Forward Films. Particularly worthwhile if you have an interest in AT. More information on Hilary here if you are interested.

Some brief highlights from my recent trip to Arches National Park, Moab, Utah. A big thanks to Doug and Brent who gave me the tour last thing on Friday which resulted in some shots other than balanced rock!

Not totally happy with the processing just yet - working on it over this weekend. Any suggestions gratefully received! For more see this set on flickr

Grid 2 Scientific Calculator

The Grid 2 provides a number of workspaces to do neat things; control a mobile phone, environmental control using a plethora of connecting devices, computer control and programme control to control windows based programmes and many more. If you would like to have a simple calculator there is also “Calculator” workspace which allows you to have a simple addition, minus, division and multiplication calculator. Currently if you want a higher level scientific calculator you have a number of options; the obvious is to use the calculator in windows and use a computer control grid to control the calculator (hint and hint). Although programme/computer control is very neat - it can mess a keyguard user up as you need to make space for the programme. So the alternative in this case? Well you could get more advanced things like 1/x, exponentials and so forth in the standard Grid computer control workspace - simply by programming the formulae into Grid cells - but only if you can do it using the +,-,*,/ signs.. and you quickly come unstuck when you need to reference variables..

As a different approach I wondered “could we create a more complex calculator using an external programme to handle the math!?”. To do this I tried creating a small executable that you pass a mathematical argument to (e.g. —command=sinh ) and a value (e.g. —toeval=121 - if no argument passed takes what is in the current copy buffer) and then the output is passed back within the paste buffer.

The answer to my query is “Kind of”. The difficulty is that the grid doesn’t have any neat ways of passing variables or functions back and forth - either within it or externally via an API. The only way (thanks to Barney for this tip off) is using the copy buffer of Windows.

This is ok - but it means that if you wanted to do a sum like (121 * 45) + 16² = you can’t simply. Currently you would have to do 121 *45 on its own, remember the result then do a 16² and add that to the previous result. If anyone has a neat way of creating a Memory button then that would help!

(There is another way - I guess you could use a text chat workspace and replicate what the calculator workspace does by firing every piece of text off and analysing it.. thing is though you have to put a wait command on the grid for the exe to run and its all a bit slow..)

Anyway - if you fancy using what I have created in its current form and want to hack it go ahead. The code:

• The Grid Bundle and Executable (nb: its windowless) (to use place the GridSciCalc directory at C:/ - feel free to edit the paths in the bundle
• The source code of the Executable

Thanks to Google for my weekend in California last week for the GSoC unconference. Apart from feeding me non-stop (the bacon was amazing) I learnt quite a bit too. Thanks to Jorge & KomodoOpenLab for inviting me and of course Elyas on the fab work on Tecla. It’s been fun :)

I had to visit didn’t I. (It’s Apple’s HQ in Cupertino, California if you were wondering)