Using a 3D mouse with Illustrator and other things

So, I have a 3DConnexion "SpaceExplorer" 3D mouse, and it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. (That version is discontinued, but all of their products seem to be basically the same thing with varying numbers of extra function keys.) Without this thing, I either would never have built my 3D model of DNA Lounge, or my hands would be scarred, withered, immobile hooks by now.

(That is the 3D model used in the flyby animation I made to go along with our DNA Lounge Parklet Kickstarter to which you will be contributing, yes?)

Anyway, this thing has become so invisible to me and a part of my hand that now I find myself reaching for it any time I want to pan or zoom, even when I'm not in SketchUp.

It comes with settings for zooming and panning in Photoshop, but... the speed feels wrong. Do not like. I tried to build a config for Illustrator, but again, I couldn't get the timing right. It either goes way too far or not enough. Having it just type Alt-plus/minus and arrow-keys doesn't seem like the right solution.

Do any of you have Illustrator settings for it that you like?

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Ai Weiwei on How to Block a Surveillance Camera



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This is a lot of fun!

BRB, building the Antikythera mechanism...

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DNA Lounge: Wherein an iron pipe just dissolves, and we have a blinky pyramid.

These are the kind of awesome discoveries that come with business ownership:

How does an iron pipe just up and crack like that? Beats me. What's that blue crap that looks like copper patina? Beats me.

The Kickstarter for our parklet is going really well so far! We're only a few days in and we're already at about 40% of our goal! You guys rock.

Please keep spreading the word, though, because we're not there yet. That curve is likely to level off soon, and the way Kickstarter works is, if you don't reach 100% of your goal you get zero.

We have two different events tonight! In the main room, we've got the return of One More Time, the Daft Punk tribute act, with their mammoth blinky pyramid. They sold out last time, so get your tickets! And upstairs, we've got Twitch with Vice Device performing live, who also played here back in February. There was no Twitch last month, so you should be ready for another by now, right?


Another day, another cipher change

New hack: youtubefeed.

I subscribe to a lot of music video blogs, and I used to do so through Miro, but they have been so slow to track the latest Youtube and Vimeo download-countermeasure escalations in their nightlies that I've given up on it. I uninstalled Miro and wrote my own script that polls those feeds using my youtubedown.

Sorry, guys. Miro's UI isn't bad, but you're too slow and/or don't care enough about this problem. My mixtapes are suffering as a result. I'll just browse the new videos using a Finder window instead, if that means that I don't miss fully 90% of them.

(When I say "I only hack in self-defense", this is the kind of crap I mean.)

Youtube has been rolling out new ciphers almost daily of late, but my code in youtubedown that falls back on actually parsing the minimized and obfuscated Javascript to determine the new cipher seems to be fairly robust, in its own Rube Goldbergian way, so you don't actually need to download a new youtubedown every time the cipher changes now.


Vimeo's pulled some new shit I haven't quite figured out yet. I can't download this video with youtubedown.

They seem to be doing User-Agent sniffing, but in a weird way. When I play that video in the HTML5 player in either Safari or Firefox, and note the underlying "play_redirect" URL that the browser loads, I can get video from that URL with wget if I send the same User-Agent that the browser sent. However, swap in the other User-Agent, it doesn't work! URLs A and B only work with Agents A and B, not vice versa. So they must be hashing the agent into the sig? But, if I sent the same (Firefox) UA for each URL I load, including the HTML page that delivered the sig to me, it still fails. I am imperfectly imitating whatever the browser is sending, but I'm not seeing what the difference is.

The challenge here is: use wget load this HTML; pull out the signature and timestamp from the embedded JSON; and construct from that a play_redirect URL that wget can load that gives you video instead of an HTML error message.

I have not yet succeeded in this. How about you?

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