Re: Finally sat down and read 2106
Re: Finally sat down and read 2106
- Subject: Re: Finally sat down and read 2106
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 13:23:47 -0800
On Mar 20, 2004, at 10:47 PM, Gary (Lists) wrote:
John C. Welch wrote [3/20/04 1:21 PM]:
I'm really sure that the people who made the X-10 controller software
scriptable never imagined Andy Ihnatko using it to control a Darth
Vader
piggy bank so that his cat stayed the hell off of his laser printer.
Hey! Our cat will _not_ stay off the laser printer. What gives?
Should I
get a Darth Vader piggy bank?
OK, for those who haven't heard the story, here's the deal.
(Approximately, anyway. I got to hear it first-hand from Andy at
MacHack 2001, and I assume it's on the Web somewhere, but I couldn't
find it.)
When Andy acquired a spiffy new laser printer, his cat decided that
right on top of it was an ideal place to nap, it being nice and warm up
there. Naturally, this caused all sorts of trouble with cat hair, paw
prints, strange-smelling printouts, etc. However, merely chasing the
cat away didn't seem to take. (Like many cats, Andy's had at best
minimal respect for humans.) Besides, Andy was on the road a lot of
the time, so the cat could do whatever it liked.
At this point, most people would give it up as a bad job. Andy,
however, is a clever and determined fellow, and came up with the
following solution:
He happened to have a Darth Vader piggy bank -- when you dropped a coin
in, Darth would swivel around menacingly and say something Darth-ish,
like "Impressive. Most impressive. But you are not a Jedi yet", plus
the usual heavy breathing. Fairly cheesy, but for whatever reason, it
scared the bejeezus out of the cat. Andy got inside it (the bank, not
the cat), soldered a wire to the coin trigger, and wired that to a
scriptable X-10 controller. He then made a small web page with a
webcam and a button that would trigger the X-10 via an AppleScript CGI,
and left the camera (and, not incidentally, Darth) pointed at the laser
printer.
Next time he's away, he calls up his special page -- sure enough, the
cat is resting on the printer. He pushes the button, the bank goes
off. When the webcam refreshes five seconds later, no cat. Mission
accomplished!
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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