Back in the 80′s I really liked to watch Tros Wondere Wereld presented by Chriet Titulaer. Tros Wondere Wereld was a dutch TV program about new technology and gadgets. It really makes me happy to watch it again after so many years on YouTube.
My USB Panic Button software seems to be very popular and I have got this request from Brian:
Brian :
Hello John!
I am hoping to use the USB Panic Button hack you created at a Halloween event that I’m putting on for kids. What would really make it great would be the ability for the button to select a random audio file from a particular folder each time the button is pressed. Even better would be if the picture coincided with the audio (Frankenstein photo with Frankenstein audio, Ghost jpg with a ghostly sound, etc.) Any quick fixes or batch files that would do the trick? Thanks so much!
Brian Wheeler
And therefor I have made this special add-on: RandomImageWithSound.exe
Copy this file in the Commands folder of the USB Panic Button software and select this command (…\Commands\RandomImagesWithSound.exe ..) as shown below:
Simply add pictures in the Images folder and the corresponding wav files with the same name in the Sounds folder and there you go! Have fun!
Do you know the fantastic Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg?
It inspired me to make Silverlight Wordle and I can tell you that it looks much easier than it is…
The result is a bit slow and there are still some collision detection bugs but it looks pretty cool, don’t you think!? Try refreshing the page for some random layouts, fonts, and colours!
The beautiful colour palettes come from the site COLOURlovers.
I have borrowed the collision detection from Andy Beaulieu and Laurence Moroney helped me out with his convert-text-to-path webservice.
Furthermore I have developed a very basic word count routine that strips HTML and returns the first X most occurring words from any WebClient stream. I am using an ASP.NET page as a webproxy to be able to process any URL without the need of a clientaccesspolicy.xml file in place.
If you click on a word it will perform a search on this word.
UPDATED July 20, 2010: This new version does not need to use the convert-text-to-path webservice anymore because I use the WriteableBitmap now to render a TextBlock to a Bitmap. So now you can use any font you like! I have also improved the collision detection.
You can download the source code here: SilverlightWordle.zip
My Silverlight Money Pyramid project was inspired by a little statistics experiment that was described in a mathematics schoolbook back in the 80′s.
Again I have used Andy Beaulieu’s Physics Helper and I am also using the charting controls from the Silverlight Toolkit. Hope you like it!
