So, for the last few months I’ve taken a break from the PhD to do some work for a theatre show for The Border Project, Half Real.

There’s a lot of technology in the show. In particular, most of the set is projected, and we are using a Microsoft Kinect to track the actors on stage, and modifying the projections based on their location.

I’m working on Linux, and using OpenNI for interfacing with the Kinect. Things almost worked perfectly. In this post I will document the trials and tribulations of getting the Kinect to work for Half Real.

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I’ve spent all this morning trying to talk to the Microsoft Kinect using OpenNI. As it turns out, the process is not exceptionally difficult, it’s just there doesn’t seem to be any up to date documentation on getting it all working. So, this post should fill the void. I describe how to get access to the Kinect working using Ubuntu 11.04, OpenNI, and NITE. (more…)

I’m currently in the early stages of writing my PhD thesis. I’m writing it using LaTeX, and I’m trying to get the perfect build system and editing environment going. Yesterday I had a look at Texlipse, a plugin for Eclipse. There was one problem: EPS figures didn’t work.

In newish versions of Latex, if you use the epstopdf package, your images are converted on the fly, but this wasn’t  working in Texlipse. Luckily the fix is easy, and the rest of this post explains what to do.
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I’ve been using Ubuntu since the 6.06 beta. It is my main operating system on my desktop at home, computer in the lab, and my laptop. Normally, I do distribution upgrades. This shields me from a lot of the changes happening around me; the user experience doesn’t change that much when I’ve already got everything setup how I want. However, I just had to do a fresh install on my desktop. While my home directory is backed up, I am currently looking at a default user desktop. So, what do I think? (more…)