If you’ve ever played with linux and managed to get x11 up and running you’ll very likely have been presented with, or soon found a little app called xeyes. Quite simply it’s two eyballs that follow the mouse pointer as you move it around the desktop.
Well Hunz wanted to move them into the real world….
“The eyes are made from large pizza boxes cardboard and rolled by RC-servos that are controlled by an ATTiny2313 that’s connected to the PC using the low-speed software usb stack.”
The intriguing and novel part of the hack is that he’s using a video filter plugin for mplayer to do the processing rather than building a custom app.

It’s a little short on details at the mo, but he says he will post more details.

Real Life Xeyes

Via Hackaday

Or “Squeezing it where Microsoft wont put it.”

I have been running Xbox Media Centre (hereafter XBMC) on my chipped Xbox for over a year now. It’s a handy and cheap way to be able to play multimedia files and DVD’s through my TV and amplifier well away from where I keep my p.c. XBMC is a really nicely written peice of software, although it does rely on being compiled with tools that leave it in a legal grey area. For more info see http://www.xboxmediacenter.de/.

Currently much of my media is still stored on the p.c. and streamed over the network to the Xbox, but I will soon be upgrading the harddrive to turn it into the primary media store for the network and so will be streaming back to the p.c. in future. But before that happens, it’s time to make it all look a bit nicer. (more…)