Uncategorized » Carl Kenner's Blog

New Kinect SDK, new fascist license restrictions

Feb 032012

Microsoft have just released a new version of the Kinect SDK. But now they expect you to buy a new, very expensive, Kinect for Windows sensor that seems the same as the old Kinect sensor. The main selling point of the new sensor is removing the restrictions from their SDK that they deliberately programmed into it, so it no longer filters out any depth values from the depth image less than 80cm. There is no word on whether they will continue to filter out depth values greater than 4m, although I suspect they will (or worse, drop it to 3m).

The new SDK 1.0 does not work with any applications written for the Beta 2 SDK, including GlovePIE. You will need to continue to install and use the Beta 2 SDK, which has moved to here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/beta.aspx

Since I haven’t agreed to their fascist license agreement yet, I am still free to point out that:

As far as I can tell, the Xbox 360 Kinect will still work with any programs written for the new SDK 1.0. These programs are required to lie and say they won’t work, but they will, and I encourage you to use the Xbox 360 Kinect with these programs.

The Xbox 360 Kinect is sold not licensed. You can do whatever you want with it, and there’s not a damn thing Microsoft can do to stop you. It is a physical tool, no different from a pair of scissors. If you buy a pair of scissors, the manufacturer can’t tell you what to do with them. The same is true with a Kinect.

It’s illegal for the maker of a monopoly operating system to abuse their position by favouring their hardware products (eg. XInput replacing DirectInput), or their most expensive products.

BTW, the GlovePIE 0.45 download file mysteriously disappeared for a few days, but I reuploaded it, and the download should be working now.

Happy New Year, happy new GlovePIE version

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Dec 312011

GlovePIE 0.45 Free is now available for download in the GlovePIE download section. It supports Kinect, using the official Microsoft drivers here: http://www.kinectforwindows.org/download/

PPJoy Source Code

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Sep 212011

Deon van der Westhuysen

Back in May 2011, Deon van der Westhuysen made PPJoy open source under the GPL 3 license. It supports 64 bit operating systems (but isn’t signed). He didn’t ever get around to posting a link to it though.

Here is the PPJoy source code: PPJoy source code

The latest couple of versions of PPJoy have been detected as a virus or trojan by most virus scanners (older versions were not). I don’t know whether the installers really had a virus or not. But hopefully someone will be able to build it from source with a different installer that isn’t detected as a virus.

You can visit his PPJoy blog, which is updated about as often and as reliably as mine.

Hey, I finally updated the blog!

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Aug 202011

I finally updated the blog! Sorry about disappearing for about a year. I’ve been busy, and I’ve been procrastinating, especially since this website started acting up and I’ve been scared to try to fix it. I have moved house though. And I’ve been busy with my girlfriend. And I’ve been re-examining some of my politics. And I’ve been studying, and I just got a new qualification in Certificate III in Police Studies. Strange, I know.

Anyway, I just invested in a new Toshiba Windows 7 x64 laptop (with 3D). So now I can try to get GlovePIE fully supporting 64 bit and Windows 7.

By the way, there’s a bug in the smooth function in the latest version of GlovePIE, so I’d better get the updated version out quickly. I’m not good at managing releases yet though, especially since I haven’t decided yet what financial model to use. But I’ll put out a free version soon.

I’ve also been working on writing my own Virtual Reality system. So far it supports Direct3D 9, a few different stereoscopic 3D modes, automatically detecting the size and shape of any monitors or TVs you have plugged in, and VR920 stereoscopic 3D and head tracking. And I made an example application which loads levels from Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Blake Stone, Corridor 7, Operation Body Count, and Super 3D Noah’s Ark (actually quite a good game despite being made by fundamentalist Christians). The VR system is designed to unify Virtual Reality and ordinary PC First-person (or even third-person) gaming, so that there’s a continuum between them. The idea is that in the VR manager you could choose WASD+mouselook keyboard controls and a fixed FOV and use an application like a normal FPS, or you could set up a HMD, or fixed screens and head-tracking, and hand or full body tracking (perhaps with Kinect). I also want to make it support motion controllers that only offer partial tracking.

Now that Penumbra Overture is open source, I’d really like to get that ported to Virtual Reality.

Update!

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Nov 122010

Sorry the website was down for a few weeks. It’s because the PPJoy installer I was hosting got detected as a trojan by my hosting company, so my websites got shut down. So I will no longer be hosting that file. Don’t worry, all the old versions of PPJoy don’t have that problem, just the new one. I also didn’t have internet access for a few weeks while I moved house (I still don’t have proper internet access, my computer is currently plugged into my mobile phone and using my small mobile quota).

There still seem to be problems with the forum, I don’t have a clue what’s going on with that.

Playstation Move is out now, and Kinect (Project Natal) is out in some countries, but not in mine.
My unreleased development version of GlovePIE is reading both the Move and the Navigation Controller here perfectly, as well as doing other things like emulating an Xbox 360 controller. The Move works a lot better than the Wii Remote for orientation and acceleration tracking, since it has a compass, and it’s gyros seem to work better than Wii Motion Plus. I haven’t got the Move’s position tracking via the Playstation Eye working yet, but it’s on its way.

I’m also working on the open source project MoveOnPC.

I don’t have a Kinect until the 18th of November, so I haven’t added support for it yet. But I have been participating in the Open Kinect open source project. And Kinect IS working on the PC (except the audio)! There’s no skeleton tracking yet, since that is done in software on the Xbox 360, and it will take quite a while to write our own software for that. But we can read the 640×480/bayer colour camera and the 640×480 x 11 bit depth camera, at 30 fps. And we can control the Kinect’s motor to move it up and down, and we can change the LED colour. And we can read the accelerometers. Yes Kinect has accelerometers just like a Wii Remote!

So, expect to be using both Playstation Move, and Microsoft Kinect on your PC very soon, and stay tuned.

Forum is malfunctioning… please ignore banning

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Jun 162010

The GlovePIE forum is malfunctioning and is banning everyone as spammers, including me. I apologise, and I assure you, I did not ban anyone. I will attempt to fix it.

In the meantime, don’t forget to visit my Xbox Project Natal Blog which has been updated with lots of new information coming out of E3, and will be updated more over the next few days.

Israel massacres Gaza aid boats

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Jun 012010

The Israeli Defence Force this afternoon (Australian time) launched an assault on the Gaza Aid flotilla of eight ships, which were carrying 10,000 tonnes of aid for Gaza, in the hope of delivering it to the people there and in so doing breaking the 3 years long siege imposed by the Israeli government. The ships were carrying 800 activists, politicians and journalists from more than 40 countries. This includes Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Paul McGeough and photographer Kate Geraghty.

The assault was made by armed troops who boarded the ships by descending from helicopters, then opened fire on the aid workers. The IDF have killed up to 19 of these peace activists, and wounded up to 80. All contact has been lost with Paul McGeough and Kate Geraghty.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

http://www.witnessgaza.com/

You can see Paul McGeough’s reports here:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/paul-mcgeough-with-the–flotilla-in-gaza-20100529-wm9z.html

There will be protests around the world throughout the next few days, so I recommend doing an internet search for what is happening in your city.

Thanks to Australian Friends Of Palestine for some of this content.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

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May 202010

Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I’m an extreme opponent of Israel’s apartheid regime and occupation of Palestine, and make great sacrifices to boycott Israel as much as possible, and my products won’t even run in Israel. I’m totally opposed to the occupation of Iraq, and before the war I organised a protest march against it of 100,000 people in Adelaide, which is the biggest protest Adelaide has ever had. I am opposed to the sanctions against Iran, and the threats of war against Iran, and I strongly support Iran’s right to switch to nuclear power (burning fossil fuels will destroy the planet). And I think Hamas and Hezbollah play a vital role in defending their countries.
But I will not tolerate Islamists making death threats against cartoonists for innocently portraying Islam’s founder and prophet, Mohammed! The cartoon South Park showed Mohammed as a member of the Super Best Friends, a team of all the world’s religious leaders who fight crime with super powers, and South Park’s creators have received death threats because of it, which has led to it’s two-part 200th episode special being massively censored by cowardly TV networks. Non-Muslims do not have to follow Islamic law, and Muslims just have to accept that. And so, in response to the constant death threats from Islamists, everyone has decided to draw Mohammed and show it publicly on this day, the 20th of May, in solidarity with South Park, and on the principle that they can’t kill us all. One of the facebook groups dedicated to this event has 40,000 members taking part. That’s a lot of Mohammed cartoons!

Here is my first ever drawing of Mohammed (Parody Be Upon Him):

The Islamic prophet Mohammed after solving a sudoku puzzle.

See, that wasn’t so bad. No need to kill me. (Of course if you do kill me it won’t help, since there are 40,000 other people doing the exact same thing, and killing me will only provoke them to draw a whole lot more and recruit a whole lot more cartoonists to the cause).

Islamists nutcases got me banned from my facebook account though (for nothing), so I’m not going to leave it at that. That was just a warm up. So I drew a much more humourous cartoon which includes some actual satire and criticism, and which doesn’t suck up to Muslims quite so much. This is the sort of satire that everyone in the civilised world has had to learn to accept in order for society to function, and we will not be making exceptions for Muslims.

Here are some screenshots I took from the recently discovered controversial pilot episode of Pokemon, where they had originally cast the Islamic prophet Mohammed (Parody Be Upon Him) as a member of Team Rocket. This was later changed to James for the TV version. Note that if you haven’t watched Pokemon, this probably won’t mean anything to you. And in case you are wondering, James is a man, and no he’s not gay. And this is a real scene from Pokemon episode 2, with the dialog unchanged.
Team Rocket Mohammed Full

I strongly urge you all to draw Mohammed yourself today. It takes less than a minute to do a quick sketch. It doesn’t require any artistic talent. A stick figure would do. United we stand, divided we get picked off one by one. If you value cartoons, free speech, or democracy, you can’t just sit back and do nothing.

Sorry, I’ve been busy

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May 202010

Sorry, I haven’t updated anything for ages. I’ve been busy with various things, including getting a new touch-phone. It’s a Nokia 5800, which has a touch screen, accelerometers, GPS, 2 cameras, a light sensor, a proximity sensor, a few buttons and a microphone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have magnetometers (a compass) which severely hinders its gaming and VR potential. It doesn’t have multi-touch, but I managed to get multi-touch working anyway in an app I made (a gameboy emulator). It’s actually not a good phone for making phone calls, since sometimes it doesn’t let you answer an incoming call, and mine won’t boot with the memory card in anymore because the memory card became corrupted (even though I didn’t do anything that could have reasonably corrupted it), and I don’t get good enough reception (but that might just be my service provider). This phone is for people who like Microsoft’s Windows operating system… you can put lots of fancy applications on it, and you can hack around with it lots, but it’s slow, bloated, buggy and unstable. Developing for the Symbian OS is pretty complicated to get started with, and installing and using the toolchain takes a lot of effort. But I should have it working with GlovePIE soon.

Oh, BTW, Sorry about the forum CSS style-sheet problems before.

South Park Mohammed cartoons

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Apr 242010

Warning! This post (like everything else you read) has been slightly self-censored, and presents a milder, less confronting version of my true views, in order to prevent me from being killed or jailed for my beliefs.

I don’t believe in free speech. What you say has major consequences. The most major is the fact that the whole planet is now on the verge of destruction due to Global Warming. In the face of such a dire emergency, any sane person would be calling for global warming deniers to be jailed. Unfortunately sane people are rare these days.

But I do strongly believe in the absolute right to mock religion mercilessly. No, let me rephrase that. I believe in the duty to mock religion. It’s not hard to see what the price of not criticising religion is. Every single country where religion goes unmocked has turned into a hell-hole, as incompetent leaders abuse their absolute power to deceive their followers.

And I strongly believe in not forcing Islamic law onto everyone.

Some on the “left” think that criticising Islam is just US war propaganda and will lead to the deaths of millions by encouraging a war on Iran. The problem with that theory is that the real war propaganda is about “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Those same “left” people wholeheartedly embrace the paranoia about WMDs, because they hate all things nuclear, even though attempts to stop WMDs (eg. in Iraq) have killed far more than all of history’s nuclear bombs and accidents put together.

So, in that spirit, I salute South Park for wonderfully satirising and attempting to portray the Islamic prophet Mohammed. And I condemn the Islamists and dhimmis for the bans and death-threats against those who portray Mohammed.

Here is a very short clip of Mohammed from South Park. Watch it (and embed it) now while you can, before it gets deleted:

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