I’m a hacker, developer and lazy guy. So when I found myself in the kitchen cooking, just realizing that my Pioneer VSX 921 receiver was turned down too low I didn’t walk over to turn it up or find the remote; I instead remembered that it has a bad app for iOS, meaning that it accepts being controlled remote over the network. A little bit of google searching and I found a plugin for an I-dont-know-what containing an XML with some Lua code (XML with code — yay), and also a very nice mapping table for commands the same code runs against a VSX 1021.

So a quick telnet session later I had yanked the volume up without ever leaving the kitchen! These commands probably work for most of the VSX 921/1021 series and later. Enjoy:

26FN = HOME MEDIA GALLERY(Internet Radio)

If you want to change input to the iPod port and turn up the volume, given you’re using OS X or some Unix derivative, you would do this:

There is a tone of other commands you can use, I believe 

 is very much valid for other devices in the series.

Remote control your Pioneer VSX receiver over telnet

As a big surprise I found a new version of the iTerm2 macOS terminal replacement waiting for me when I returned from my summer holiday. The release packed a number of big features, like a minimal UI theme, a magic global status bar and finally a 

The UI looks a lot more modern now. Bezels and borders tuned down and an experience that is even more content centric. I mean, tell me this doesn't look quite good!?

The rainbow colored line is the status bar that displays the current working directory, git status, process info and finally CPU + mem usage. You can tweak it with a number of ready-to-go components, this is just the stuff I decided to throw in there to start with. You can also build your own components by utilising the new API.

Anyway, enough free advertisment of iTerm2, lets get to briefly exploring that API.

If you do much of your work in a terminal, like me, you likely have some steps to take to start working on a project. I like to close everything up after work as I'm a one-laptop type of person and thus use it for different purposes after work. So every morning I go through a number of steps to get started: Open a terminal with some splits and run different processes in each. Open a few tabs for different services that I work on in conjunction. Its not that the steps are long, but from time to time I forget to start one service for example.

Lets see how we can automate these steps quite succinctly. I'll use what I believe is a common scenario as an example:

Split a tab vertically and run an API on one side and a frontend on the other side

Open one tab in the API directory and one in the frontend directory

Run git status in both to give me a glimpse of any unfinished work

When the frontend is ready, open my preferred working browser on the correct page

I also run some databases on a docker host with random ports and my real life script polls docker for the management ports to open that interface in a browser as well, but for brevity I'll skip those steps. There is a docker-py package that is fairly straight forward to use for this scenario.

iTerm2 has a tutorial you should check out as well

, and you might want to use the built-in functionality to generate the script file, which will place it inside the Application Data for iTerm2 and also make it accessible through the iTerm2 menu. I prefer to keep my scripts 

 and version controlled there, so I opted to install the required dependencies from pip and just create it myself. If you do so as well, first install the dependencies using 

I'll leave you with the code with comments as its fairly clear and understandable:

In order to run this you can stuff the file anywhere and just run it (

) or you can store it where iTerm2 wants you to and run it through the menu.

I always have an open terminal so I just run the script by hand at the start of the day. However, you can also register script functions with iTerm2 itself and actually add a button to that new status bar that will call the function. For a number of scripts that might be the right approach to take.

Explore the full API docs to get a grasp of what you can do with this toolbelt. One neat thing I can imagine is being able to configure an output matcher on a session that has a running script. You might have started this long running job you can't really stop midway and its producing a lot of garbage that you now want to filter but its too late to pipe it to a logfile via grep. You could write a function that does this with arguments for what to grep that will actually connect to the session and filter the text output as iTerm2 renders it.

I'm just happy that I could whip this up fairly quickly and save myself a few key strokes every day. Happy hacking!

Exploring the iTerm2 Python API

For our halloween party we went all out on decorating the flat. Why host a halloween party if you dont go the mile, eh? We of course had a jack-o-lantern, we cut a ton of small black bats that fly across our walls, and there were blood trails on the floors, and hand imprints in blood on the bathroom. The highlight for me however was creating an interactive Stranger Things lightning installation.

My initial plan was to use just components I had lying around from years back; Specifically a handful of Particle Core devices. The neat thing about the cores is that they are basically arduinos with onboard wifi, meaning it’s relatively easy to use the vault of resources and libraries that exist for arduino, while also making your component usable without cables for communication. Controlling individual leds are done with ease using these tiny computers; You simply plug a LED and a resistor to one of the 8 digital outputs and to ground, and then you can set HIGH/LOW to that port to flip the light on and off. But while I could get 8 LEDs this way with ease, I needed some new tricks to get up to the 29 LEDs I wanted. While there are techniques, like 

, and approaches, like using 4 particle cores, that would have worked, I found a local shop that sold 1 meter 

Before building the LED strip I got help in painting the letters on a big piece of paper from a paper roll. With the letters in place we would be able to measure and plan the wire lengths needed.

With the letters in place the next step was some hours of grunt work soldering everything together.

Neopixels only require 3 connections: 1 digital out, 5V power and ground. The strip works out of the box, but you can also cut it up into 60 individual LEDs just using scissors, and then re-solder all the LEDs with wires of your desired lengths. I cut of 29 LEDs and measured the distance between each letter and started soldering! Soldering short wires is a bit tedious work, and you probably need a pair of tweezers to get the work done. Clearly the neopixels are far easier to use if you don’t require readjusting the distance. I just had prototyping wires lying around, so I cut a bunch of them to suiting lengths and started soldering the 168 joints.

With the hardware seemingly under control I started looking into the code. I spend day in and out in JavaScript land, so I really wanted to do this using the excellent johnny-five library. While there is a really good option for controlling neopixels with an arduino using the node-pixel library, it did not support the particle core, or alternatively I would have had to use a secondary controller device running a custom firmware. In the end I accepted reality and decided on plain c/c++ with the 

 for each specific LED, and when you have set all the LEDs to the colour you want you call 

. One of the big selling points of the Particle devices are that they are cloud connected by default, and its really easy to register a function call that will be exposed through an API for remote control. We can set up a function to light up a specific LED quite easily:

I placed the LED strip under the paper alphabet in order to test a single LED to make sure it would look alright. The result was pleasing. Since this would be used for a party, the room would be quite dark, so the lights would really be visible.

With everything apparently working it was just a matter of mounting everything and writing the actual code for the project. The approach was rather straight forward: Register a cloud function in the particle cloud that would take in a word, or sentence. Loop over each character in the word, find the corresponding LED position in the strip, and add that number to a list while adding a 

 before and after the input. Then in the 

function I would pop the first item from the list of leds to be lit, and loop over all the LEDs in the strip and either set it to off, or if it matched the id to be lit call on a function that generated a random RGB colour. 

You can get the full source code on my Github

Using particle you get a simple — yet great— mobile application for controlling the cloud functions, and for accessing some general information about your core. In the end I didn’t have time to build the web app I planned for controlling the lights, but using the iOS app we could pass the phone around in order to type with the lights.

Here it is, on the wall, working great. It was a fun project and now I’m thinking about what other things I should do with the particle cores now that I’ve dusted them and peaked my interest.

Making a Stranger Things lights decoration

Design is a hotter subject than ever before. Apple is the most successful company in history, fuelled by design, and the subsequent “design thinking” philosophy.
The concept of “design” is far too important to be left to just the designer.

The design practice is often misunderstood. Many of our clients contact us because they want a UX revamp or some design touches on their applications, websites or other visual properties.
It is often assumed that the visual expression created five years ago is a replaceable skin with few ties into the underlying processes. This is a misunderstanding.

This belief has little grasp in reality. Design is not the act of painting, or picking, pretty colours on a house, an application, a brochure or a website.The act of design stretches from the top to the very bottom of everything you do as a team, as a company.

Design is an activity equally dependant on you — on everyone. Design is in everything, and design is a process used by people you would never label as designers.
Would you consider Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, a designer?What about the engineer that elaborately places electronic components onto a breadboard?

These are outlier examples, but they exemplify how our current idea of what a designer is, and isn’t, is broken. What we need is a better way to think and talk about design.

In the new market where segments converge and old distinctions as business-to-consumer / business-to-business are made irrelevant, design moves from being merely a procedural step in the work process to the very core methodology of all work.

Design is the process of deliberate planning and production of a system.

You cannot afford not to be a designer any more.
You cannot afford to hire an employee who doesn’t design.

I would argue that most of our clients are in dire need of changing into design-driven organisations, and we are often merely hired to help bridging the gap between them and the markets expectations. Putting lipstick on a pig. In order for our clients to catch up they need to internalise this mindset. It’s not something that can be patched up properly from the outside.

If your organisation’s success relies on selling an application, you’ll need your product managers, your customer liaisons, your system developers, your CTO and your CEO to be designers!

The CEO and CTO need to think in terms of design for every choice they make. Either they operate under false protection of a good revenue stream, or they are under pressure to resurface a sinking ship.

The customer liaison need to be a designer in order to transfer the customer domain knowledge and feedback into valuable design parameters for the further product development.
The system developers can not implement a design-driven system if they themselves does not speak design. Every micro interaction, every path a background process takes is part of the overall design that makes up the sum of the product.

The product managers need to think in terms of design in order to make the right choices for the product to compete in a market that is increasingly driven by design.

In fact, it’s very likely that you will need to redo the entire organisation chart as well.
Design-driven organisations need interdisciplinary teams to function properly. Departments cannot be split into silos anymore.

The informed reader have perhaps noticed that all of this sounds an awful like digital strategy. In fact, any strategy for business digitalization requires a shift in mindset towards that of the design thinker. It could be argued that this bloats the role of the designer and makes the title useless because it’s sounds all-encompassing, but this fuzziness is part of the digitalization shift.

When the entire organisation morph into “designers”, what happen to those with that job description in the first place? Are they out of business? Given that design is now even more important, their jobs also got more crucial. And the fact that the rest of the organisation are learning to design, the designers both have a big role in teaching how to think in design, and also to mediate the design processes.
Some designers might find it hard to open up and share the creative processes. They might feel they are giving up control of something that is “theirs”. As with any transformation there will be growing pains and frustrations, but these will be symptoms of the existing knowledge gap.

— There will be a personal computer on every desk running Microsoft software.
Bill Gates, Microsoft

In order to create exceptional products and services — which should be the aim of every company — one of the most important tools will be a shared vision of the future. We are not talking about the mumbo jumbo vision you already have. The vision needs to be a shared understanding of an attainable purpose, and the uniqueness you will possess that make you stand out amongst the crowd. It has to become a compass that guides you in making sure everyone pulls in the same direction.

A shared vision is a synthesis weaved together from conversations, discussions and analyses of the decisions you make as an organization. You need to drill the way of thinking so that every employee is comfortable that when making micro decisions, they choose the option that moves towards the shared vision of the future.
Building this intuitive shared mindset is the biggest investment you have to make. It’s important to not have a fixed idea at the beginning of this process, because the process itself is what shapes the end result.

The next time you consider purchasing a design project, or employing a designer, take a look at yourself — your organisation — and ask if that is what you actually need. And ask yourself if “just hiring a designer” is actually going to be the solution to your problem. The answer is very likely to be a solid no. At least not by itself.
The next time you consider purchasing a design project, you should reevaluate your expected outcome of the project. You should reevaluate how you approach the project, what types of people you allocate to it, and if your project team has the mandate to affect your organisation in a substantial way.
The next time you purchase a design project you should give it the attention and headroom it needs in order to reshape your organisation to better solve real problems.
And if you are a designer, rejoice, the next time you are hired it will probably be with more responsibility and more understanding for your expertise.

http://iallenkelhet.no/2015/10/20/kill-the-designer/

Remote control your Pioneer VSX receiver over telnet

Read also

Exploring the iTerm2 Python API

Making a Stranger Things lights decoration

Kill the designer