From: Wilfredo Sánchez (wsanchez@apple.com)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2000 - 15:54:53 PDT
| Driving down a California street, Eric Horvitz's cell phone
| began beeping. His office in Redmond, Washington, was
| calling with an urgent message. But it wasn't a person on
| the line; it was his PC.
Pah. Been done, in better style.
At Mac Hack last year, Andy Inatko (sp?) in his keynote told us about
some cool hack he does with his Macs along these lines. Now this is all
from memory, so perhaps I'm a stinking liar, but that would be accidental,
so it doesn't count.
It seems his cat likes to sleep on his printer, which tends to make the
printer unhappy. So he has a camera aimed at the printer attached to his
Mac, and a cat sensor attach to an ADB doodad also attached to the Mac.
While he's on the road, if the cat sensor goes off, the computer takes a
picture from the camera and mails it to him. He gets the mail on the
laptop, and if there is indeed a cat on the printer, he responds with an
attack message, which tells the Mac to notify the torso of Darth Maul,
which is attached to a vehicle of some sort, which is in turn attach to the
same ADB controller as the cat sensor, to attach whatever is sitting on
the printer. All done via AppleScript and this ADB gizmo.
He also has a radio attach the the Mac, which will hail him while he's
at a nearby Cafe' or whatever. Using the Text-to-Speech software in Mac OS
(version 7, I think), it transmits over the radio:
"Computer to Andy"
and, of course, using the speech recongition, he responds:
"Go ahead Computer"
"You have some mail you might want to read from Joe."
"What's is say?"
"blah blah blah blah blah"
and so on.
He tells it better.
-Fred
Wilfredo Sanchez, wsanchez@apple.com
Open Source Engineering Lead
Apple Computer, Inc., Core Operating System Group
1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 94086, 408.974-5174
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