The need to code "something completely different" made me do Background Shuffler - a beautiful background changer for Gnome. I wanted to extend the UNIX philosophy to desktop applications so Background Shuffler only changes your background. It does not make coffee.

So I spent a few days hacking and with the help of great tools and libraries like Quickly and appindicator I managed to build this nifty little program that I'm using all the time now.

Features:

• handle all through the indicator icon. No mysterious script running in the background, retain complete control over your desktop at all times
• make the backgrounds change as quickly or slowly as you like
• integrates with F-Spot, so search for certain tags or ratings
• optionally specify a folder that will be searched with photos

But I guess screenshots explain a thousand words.

You'll probably be best running Ubuntu Lucid (10.04). To install the app just download the deb or add the ppa to your sources at: https://edge.launchpad.net/~luopio/+archive/ppa

Bugs, suggestions and patches welcome! Email at lauri(dot)kainulainen(at) gmail.com

Silently we (me and Jari Suominen from Medialab) released PENALTI - a fun ball racing game that uses the accelerometer available on many symbian (s60) phones. The idea started from mlab's Rapid Mobile Prototyping workshop and was fueled by Nokia Forum Game Development challenge.

We did a few days of intensive coding and submitted our game. Didn't win the whole thing, but we were the best in TaiK (dunno, if anyone else participated :) ). Prize? A Nokia 5800 phone. Suits me fine, since my trustworthy ericsson is falling apart and the N95's from mlab don't suit my style. I'll just use it until I get my hands on an android phone..

Thanks to the symbian effort of making installations as hard as possible, you'll need to do some work to get penalti working. Mostly just installing a few extra applications. Get the game and the instructions from the site.

Interface Design with Electronics is one of the best workshops Mlab offers. During a five day period students get a very hands-on experience with Basic stamp microcontrollers, various sensors and other electronic stuff. As always the workshop ends with a group project.

We did "Mothman", a strange audio-visual "installation" that reacts to ambient light and distance from viewer. We used Pure data, Processing and Basic Stamp with an ultrasound and light sensors. It was a lot of fun. Now I'm trying to come up with a new project idea that would involve sensors..

Get the code and graphics here. Sound excluded due to big size. For a glimpse see the presentation we held.

Long time since last post.. things have accumulated in such fashion that I'll have to do this one braindump.

First off if someone was wondering the weird Turkish pages that replaced all index-pages on sokkelo, the reason was that our webhosting provider was hacked by some Turkish script-kiddies (damn kids). Apparently they got in via a hole in their software (not a direct attack against sokkelo). Luckily only index-files needed replacing.

Secondly I've posted my first processing experiments here in case someone is interested. The sketch in question takes photos via the webcam and allows you to draw over them with a laser pointer (or mouse, if you can't project the image anywhere). Kinda works like the Graffiti Research Labs Laser Tag system except we don't do perspective correction and they don't do photos. The thing was used in our official MLAB-party that kicks off our studies in HelsinkiMediaLab. Our Flickr MLAB-feed is now cluttered with "art" created by people at the party (we had automatic flickr uploading through a python script).

Here's one work just as an example. Download the sketch here. Let's say it's licensed under GPL.