That feeling you get when you run

$ php tvVolUp.php

And the god damn tv’s volume goes up a level 😆

Now to clean the shit out of the chaotic mess I just made and make it work from a Rpi which I’ll then add to my voice activated list for my google home.

Coz you know voice activated TV remote in PHP 😍

Back the mid 90s at secondary school, a friend came back from holiday with a Casio CMD-40 TV remote control watch. It was like magic, no one had never seen anything like it before.

We pranked our history teacher so badly, changing the channels, volume and turning the TV off while we were supposed to be watching some video on Henry VIII or something (no idea, too busy PMSL).

We'd pass the watch round the class to keep em guessing.

In the end, school replaced ALL the TVs and were seriously pissed off, to this day I believe they had no idea it was us!

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

All employee meeting, tv has no volume.
Guess who gets passed the remote to figure out why there is no sound...

I had a booth at a small event to represent my business. I had prepared a web-based game for people to play to win a prize. I had it running on a PC mirrored on a TV so I could do my work on my Mac separately between visitors.

During a speaker’s presentation, someone bored with it came up to my booth and I introduced her to the game. She started playing it but the sound was up too loud and drew attention to her. I quickly used volume key on the top row, but nothing happened. So I thought the fn key needed to be pressed and held to change the volume. Nope. Then I thought I’ll just use the volume control in the dock. But the browser was full screen, and when I tried to quickly change that, some other unknown thing happened and some other stupid MS configuration screen filled the screen. She gave up trying to play at that point and I felt super stupid.

When did it become so hard to use Windows machines and software? I’ve been on a Mac for about 8 years now and using this Windows laptop just feels ridiculous to me. Like some broken toy that came from a bargain bin at a dollar store. The whole thing feels cheap and like it’ll break in half if I twist it accidentally. Other Windows laptops I look at in the stores occasionally just don’t measure up in build quality. Like the companies know you’ll get max 2 years useful life and throw it away.

Flipping SMPlayer - I opened a video on other monitor (TV) and was trying to lower default volume (by keys) to not wake up family. But the SMPlayer decided to show some window about donations which blocked all hotkeys for a player. Good job, now that I probably woke my family I am sure I won't donate you.