MacSaber Turns Your Macbook into a Lightsaber

Petey_Alchemist writes "SomethingAwful.com forum goon isnoop has developed a useless but fun app that takes advantage of the new sudden motion sensor available in Macbooks. The MacSaber 1.0 causes your Macbook or Macbook Pro to whoosh and crash like a lightsaber depending on how you swing it around. The reviews from those who have installed it say it is quite fun--although there is some concern about whether or not 'lightsaber battles' fall under warranty."

They could also use this to play Tennis!

They could also use this to play Tennis! No wonder the Wii looks like an Apple product, it uses bluetooth to let you use your Macbook (Pro) as a paddle! Hooray!

Re:They could also use this to play Tennis!

Yeah, but with the black ones you get to pretend you're a Sith.

Talk about your gimmicks

I would buy a new macbook just for this feature (well, that and tri-booting osx, xp, and gentoo).

Use the Force Indeed

Nice little app. Can't say I've tried it myself, but it does give me horrible images of Lucas-ites squealing with glee every time they drop their laptop. Perhaps Mac put this out intentionally to make money off of repair gouging? (And yes, I kid. (Kinda (Maybe)))

Hooray!

Now I can take my $1000 laptop and shake it to hear cool sounds! I can't imagine any downside in that. Oh crap, I just dropped my laptop. I can't wait to see the clip of the starwars laptop kid.

Re:Hooray!

You are a skilled Jedi to drop your laptop while typing and being able to post before it broke!

No lightsabers

I don't want lightsaber effects, I just want to be able to use force pull on a Mac laptop. That would be fun. And profitable.

Grab it while...

...you can, before George Lucas sues the authors.

Re:Grab it while...

Lucas doesn't have a chance to sue. Steve Jobs shoots first!

Re:Grab it while...

In the dupe, Lucas will shoot first.

fat kid swinging a macbook

So when are we going to get a video of a fat kid swinging his macbook around.

...followed by a lawsuit of course.

Re:fat kid swinging a macbook

Give me a new macbook and I'll make that video. Hell, I'll even wear a cape. or wookie ears or something. (You'll have to provide that, too.

Re:fat kid swinging a macbook

Duh. There's a scene in the upcoming Special Editon II where Greedo's first shot ricoches off the cantena wall and blasts off Chewbacca's ears. Han then gets so mad at seeing his companion in pain that he shoots Greedo, even though he doesn't want to and really feels quite bad about it. That's why Chewie is earless for the rest of the trillogy.

Okay...

It would probably a lot more cheaper to build a lightsaber out of Lego blocks and some electronics. Trying to catch a laptop lightsaber in mid-air may result in a fatal (physical) crash that AppleCare won't cover.

Re:Okay...

Fatal to who? The laptop, or the Sith Lord that you're trying to brain with the thing?

Re:Okay...

I didn't know AppleCare covers braining a Sith Lord! :P

The secret to defeating Darth Ballmer is to use the Force, not your eyes. Only with the Force will you be able to parry the onslaught of flying furniture in time.

Re:Okay...

It would probably a lot more cheaper to build a lightsaber out of Lego blocks and some electronics.

You miss the point: if you shake a lego brick light saber, you look like a dork. If you shake a Mac laptop light saber, you look like a rich dork.

Suggested mods

Can you make it scream in terror/pain when you drop it?

Re:Suggested mods

or yell for help if someone moves it without disabling an anti-theft program.

Re:Suggested mods

I heard that in the newer version it'll scream like a little girl when you toss it down a chute.

I don't know about the laptop, but the owner certainly did.

HDD Motion Detector?

Is this the same motion detector that IBM's HDD labs came up with a few years ago?

The article is /.'d.

I must say

I couldn't access the site (see below), but it sounds extremely bad ass. Definitely is a selling point for me to see if I get a Mac this time around or not. It's been so precariously balanced for years...always in favor of NOT getting one, but this year with the Intel changes and lightsaber capability I'd have to say that I may as well get a MacBook for the wifey.

site dump:

WordPress
Error establishing a database connection

This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down.

        * Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
        * Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
        * Are you sure that the database server is running?
        * Are you sure WE haven't been severely pummeled by /.?

If you're unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the WordPress Support Forums.

Old News

My two year old Toshiba M200 TabletPC has an accellerometer built into it. It can tell which way it is oriented so you just press a single button to go from Tablet to Slate mode. It even came with an app that would either activate an app or play a sound if the tablet was shaken.

Pity I didn't realize if I attached a lightsaber sound to it I could have gotten Slashdotted.

Re:Old News

The Macbook (and before it, Powerbook) line has had the motion sensor for a while now. The sensor isn't the news.

Complete Idiocy...

And I love it :) I'm sitting here waving around my spankin' new 17" and smiling like an idiot. Luckily you don't have to wave it too hard to get the cool sounds.

And the SMS data display is just kinda neat anyways. I had no idea it was so detailed... now I know that my desk leans 3 points to the left.

Cheers.

iPod - iSaber

This could be the thing that finally convinces me to get an iPod. I've been resisting, but that would just be too cool. Especially if they used semitransparent casing and made the indiglo spread the whole way 'round. They could call it the iSaber

Mirror

NetworkMirror [networkmirror.com] since the original site didn't connect for me. :(

Other apps/games make use of the Sudden Motion Sen

The most famous app to use this feature is probably iAlertU, which has a demo on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkAtRfA1UXc [youtube.com]
http://www.slappingturtle.com/home/ [slappingturtle.com]

Bubblegym was one of the first games to make use of thos:
http://www.balooba.se/baloobasoftware/texts/bubble gym.htm [balooba.se]

Accelerometer

How accurate is the Mac's motion detection? Does this mean I should trade in my PC, stick a Mac in my rucksack, and let it work out how many calories I burn cycling to work?

Re:Accelerometer

The Sudden Motion Sensor is accurate enough that there is a dashboard widget that emulates a bubble level. Of course, this is in my PowerPC-based Powerbook, so the SMS is not actually "new."

Re:Accelerometer

The Sudden Motion Sensor is accurate enough that there is a dashboard widget that emulates a bubble level.

Cool... but do they have an emulation of that annoying wooden table game, where you steer a little steel ball through a tilting maze while trying to not to fall into the holes? That's clearly what the SMS was originally designed for...

Rendezvous

Maybe they can use Rendezvous to tell how close they come to other lightsabers for more realistic crashing noises at the right time.

Well..

I hear they run hotter than a light saber.

WordPress Has The Nicest Errors

I second that it would be cool to get this to scream when you dropped it.

We have successfully /. the site

I can't even see the light saber effects now!!!

What do they look like, Jimmie?

Dorks. They look like Dorks, Mr. Wolfe.

Thanks alot.

I just installed this and started playing around with it.

My daughter saw me and wanted to try. So I let her.

This lead to a saber duel and the lopping off of her imaginary friends toe.

Now, I am at the imaginary emergency room.

Oh my Gates!

MacSaber 1.0 causes your Macbook to whoosh and crash like a lightsaber

"Crash"? Then it should be called WindowsSaber ;-)
     

Think different

With the ambient light detector, sudden motion sensor, infrared port, isight, airport, bluetooth and microphone a macbook pro should be able to pry more information out of its surroundings than a tricorder. How about putting that into a game in stead of starting dangerous new fads.

This was all it needed...

The sounds now complete the MacBook as a lightsaber. It was already hot enough to sever limbs and cauterize the wound at the same time.

Torque on the hard drive

Doing this will increase the chance of damage to the hard drives to do torque while the platters are spinning.

YouTube

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xcffXvJ7TnY&search=macs aber [youtube.com]

I wonder... [OT]

What the onomatopoeia is for the sound of a Light Sabre igniting...?

iAlertU over a bluetooth mobile?

If iAlertU uses the bluetoothed Front Row remote, surely someone can come up with a way to use a bluetooth mobile instead... Sryn

Doesn't quite work on a 12" PowerBook

I tried this on a 12" PowerBook, and it doesn't quite work. At idle, the registers say the following:

Roll: Left 1835
Tilt: -2070
Force: 0 0

Motion of any kind doesn't really affect it (obviously, I didn't try too hard, because I don't feel like having sector errors all over the place). The sensor registers seem to spike at quasi-random intervals, and adjusting the brightness control seems to move the registers to opposite corners. The version of Sudden Motion Sensor in the 12" PowerBook is 1.0; perhaps the newer SMS versions in the MacIntelToshes have better magnitude-sensitivity.

Re:Doesn't quite work on a 12" PowerBook

Roll: Left 1835
Tilt: -2070
Force: 0 0

As you can see, the force is missing. May the force be with you.

Oops

I contributed to the slashdotting of a comrades' website :(

Oh well.

Mirror 1 [sherlockholmesarmy.org]

Mirror 2 [sherlockholmesarmy.org]



Don't have a copy of the original page, sorry--but it was pretty much just a link to this file anyway.

MacSaber

Unless you reapply the thermal paste in sane amounts, the MacBooks will also melt anything they touch, just like a real lightsaber!

so..

how long till a hack to use your mac as a Wii controller? pinball game tilt meter? jostle the mac and little annoying voice comes out screaming" Dont shake the baby! " just need a lil blue tooth controld rc car to strap the laptop to and let it drive itself around exploring the house. (make it an rc truck and have it tow the duster)

Hooray! It is already patented!

According to this article [kernelthread.com] the motion sensor is actually a three-axis accelerometer. I doubt that George Lucas would sue, but I know of a guy who claims that he has a US patent on the use of an accelerometer in a lightsaber toy to trigger sound events.

I suggested the use of an accelerometer on an Internet messageboard, when another user had asked for advice for building a high-end lightsaber toy. I directly got snotty remarks that it would be infringing on this guy's patent. He was then selling circuits with an accelerometer that were connected via radio-link to a PC that played sounds.

I then told him that I was building such a circuit myself and knew of other people who also had designed similiar circuits independently from eachother, because it was quite straightforward design if you know your way around electronics. I pointed out that I thought that such straight-forward patents were stealing from the community, especially if this was a software patent but that it wouldn't apply to me anyway because he was in the US and I was in Europe. For this I was banned from the msgboard, for "software piracy" (!) .. apparently the admins did not distinguish between different types of intellectual property, or they were friends with this guy. I don't know.

Mirror

Here's a mirror for you all! http://www.networkmirror.com/0hVbKVHBUZJfLz6G/isno op.net/blog/2006/05/20/macsaber-turn-your-mac-into -a-jedi-weapon/index.html [networkmirror.com]

meh

As a thinkpad owner, it's kind of annoying to see apple getting so much credit for something that IBM has been doing for three years. Actually, this seems to be a recurring theme: mac fans (and apple marketing) smugly claim that apple went and showed all the PC-manufacturing scum how to build a proper intel-based laptop. These people have obviously never held a thinkpad.

a more amusing idea for that sound effect

I'd prefer the sabre sound effect for mouse movement. And the sabre clashing sound when a mouse button is clicked.

Software-based Etcha-sketch

would be so cool on this unit.

nerd

I thought that the word "nerd" should appear somewhere in this article. Now it does.

What will they think of next?

Quite honestly, I'm looking forward to the introduction of the "light flail", where you swing it around by power the cord and it makes wonderful whooshing and crashing sounds when it smacks into things. Lovely bits of hardware those flails are.

And now, a relevant quote...

"This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments."
--Neal Stephenson

wtf?

You mean, people really buy these overpriced "pretty" laptops at 1500-2000? Man, I just slickdeal.net 'ed myself a Dell e1505 for $599 just a few weeks ago. It's drives me crazy to see people pay so much for such a "plain" amount of horsepower!

foget light sabers ..

.. *yawn* .. wake me up when it can be used to control a dildo^H^H^H^H^Hsynthesizer ..

And when you drop it...

And when you drop it, it's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Bugger the light saber sounds

I'd set it up with R2-D2 sounds. Imagine, as your powerbook hurtles to the floor, it lets fly with the R2-D2 "scream". Or it has that R2-D2 question-like beeping and chirping when it asks you a question.

thead be gone

Looks like the apple NYC store story went squish

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/19/ 2051243 [slashdot.org]

Sniff - we hardly knew ye. And there's no direct email form for mentioning this either - unless I want to create ANOTHER account on ANOTHER submission site that reads about as conceise as the flight-deck of a Boeing 757. Nice interface - looks like a drunk UI designer barfed his PRD all over the place.

Ew.

New Sudden Motion Sensor?

The sudden motion sensor is not new to macbooks. It has been in the powerbook line since early 2005.

Re:I understand...

Maybe in a classroom, but my girlfriend just got a kick out of it and kissed me after showing her this and the iAlertU app. It's probably just because she things I'm insane, but it's fun just the same :-)

Re:Hasn't this been around for a while?

the software is the news, not the sensor.