Kymera Magic Wand Remote and Windows 7

Posted by Venerable High Pope Swanage I, Cogent Animal of Our Lady of Discord 21 September 2010 at 01:25PM

I recently was presented with the opportunity to purchase a Kymera Magic Wand Remote. "I get to play wizard while controlling my television?" I thought, "SIGN ME RIGHT UP!"

It's a very neat toy and considering the technology problem it is trying to solve, very well done. (I find there's some crosstalk between "flick down" and "tap top").

However it's a learning universal remote, and the problem with these is that if you use it with Windows via a Windows Media Center receiver device, the operating system will "Debounce" all inputs. Essentially you will end up able to do any input once, but not multiple times in a row without some other input intervening.

This is a stupid, compatibility breaking feature. Fortunately you can disable it. Point REGEDIT to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da. Find the EnableDebounce key, and change it's value from 1 to 0. Poof! You've just done a little more magic to make Windows compatible with something Microsoft didn't build.

Mac OS X 10.6.*, ruby 1.9.2, and rvm

Posted by Venerable High Pope Swanage I, Cogent Animal of Our Lady of Discord 12 September 2010 at 09:18AM

I've been running into some complications trying to get ruby 1.9.2 installed by RVM on OS X 10.6.3. This is likely not an original problem, but I got it to work. My environment is pretty crufty, I have an oldish Macbook Pro that came installed with 10.4, and has had an upgrade path including 10.5. Macports, and it's ruby interpreter were on my system, as well as the default Mac ruby, and a ruby source tarball installation.

I had since uninstalled all rubies except for the 1.9.2 source tarball, and uninstalled Macports in favor of migrating to Homebrew.

My specific problem is working on a project in which the .rvmrc specified ruby-1.9.2-p0, and rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p0 did not act as expected. I received the error

readline.c:1292: error: 'username_completion_function' undeclared (first use in this function)

Starting with brew and rvm installed I then needed to do some more:

Install readline:

brew install readline

Cleanup to only one version of readline:

brew cleanup readline

Link the brew install to /usr/local:

brew link readline

Install with rvm passing args to autoconf:

rvm install 1.9.2-p0 -C --enable-shared,--with-readline-dir=/usr/local

No compile errors, and proper readline support! Yay. My thanks to George at Plataforma Tecnologia for this solution.