Hi Bret,
Here’s a hopefully-concise glossary I’ve been working on for the core of the Escaping the Rectangle “platform”:
app
Apps can be run by projectors and kiosks; they are webpage-bundles that receive laser coordinates and can communicate with other apps.
camera
Cameras help us find laser beams on surfaces.
projector
Projectors run apps on surfaces.
surface
Surfaces receive light from lasers and/or projectors.
kiosk
Kiosks are devices that run apps inside of rectangles.
laser
Lasers pointed at surfaces are detected by cameras and sent to apps.
I’m starting to write a simple “app” to handle configuration of the above. Ideally this “app” can be implemented on a surface/projector and grow to show source code, live execution, &c.
I’m imagining that you would upload apps to the platform, and then assign them to projectors and/or kiosks.
— —
The Last Mac Mini was comically hard to fix, but I’m getting there. Even after wiping the hard drive, when I went to re-install the operating system I was still having bizarre mouse problems. Like the mouse pointer moving, but clicks not working. I could get pretty far through the install process using the keyboard, but not past the crucial last step where I needed to select a hard drive. This step required clicking, which was simply not possible, despite my using a USB mouse. I reset the PRAM (whatever that is) but it still didn’t work. I reset the PRAM five times in a row, and then, suddenly, I was able to click and re-install OS X. Then, OS X started exhibiting the same problem!
Finally, I noticed that the freshly-wiped Mac Mini had associated itself with a dangerous North Korean computer virus that identified itself as a Bluetooth device called, innocuously enough, “Rick’s Trackpad.” It’s very hard to disconnect a bluetooth trackpad! Sometimes when I turned off Bluetooth the computer would be left in some weird state like dragging a window and I would have to hard restart because I couldn’t release the window. Disconnecting from “Rick’s Trackpad” would work for a few seconds, but then it would automatically connect again. It took many gymnastics to “remove” the trackpad (because you can’t remove a device while Bluetooth is off, and, apparently, you can’t click when bluetooth is on). After removing the trackpad, a pop-up called a “pairing request” would come from “Rick’s Trackpad” every 10 seconds or so. I must have clicked “cancel” 20+ times before it stopped showing up… knock on wood, but I think it stopped trying to pair. This could be filed under “pedantic” and given no further attention, but maybe like Dave’s fascination with A/V presentations going horribly and routinely awry, these multi-device configuration catastrophes may be worth breaking down in case we can discover some general convivial design patterns for these chicken-and-egg distributed configuration issues.
R.M.O.