Category Archives: Misc

Duet Prevents Reflector 3 From Installing Properly

Reflector 3 not working

Reflector 3 not working due to Duet being installed

Recently, I had to install Reflector 3 on a Windows Surface Pro laptop to resolve an issue presenting in a classroom. Unfortunately Reflector 3 would not work for me after installing. All I could see was a blank window.

The issue was sue to Duet being installed on the Surface Pro. Removing Duet, rebooting, then reinstalling Reflector 3 fixed things. Thanks to Squirrels support for suggesting this.

Resources For The Future (To-Do)

Over time I accumulate a set of resources and things-that-I-should-do,-but-don’t-have-the-time-at-the-moment. Rather than these getting lost, I am posting them here to come back to later. Maybe.

Greenscreen / Chromakey On The Mac

Before and After

Before and After

A work colleague asked about creating chromakey / green screen images the other day. The wanted to use their Mac computer to superimpose pictures of students on notable Chicago locations.

My quick-and-dirty suggestions were:

  • Photo Booth (the easiest, most appropriate solution from my perspective)
    • The downside to using Photo Booth is that it crashes on my laptop due to my installation of a Bluetooth webcam.
  • iMovie (a bit of a hack, but the process within iMovie is extremely easy)

Another colleague suggested using Photoshop. This tutorial clearly outlines the process. The above example only took a few minutes to create – I did not follow the tutorial fully to the end (hue saturation) which would have removed the green fringing.

Another option would be to use Veescope on iPad.

Steamed

For the first time in quite a few years I have a Windows PC (Surface Pro) at home, so I thought I would check out a few PC games. Nothing too taxing on the tablet, the Surface is not really a games machine. As luck would have it, Steam was having a sale. I now have a mini-library of older games to play:

  • Final Fantasy VII
  • Half-Life
  • Half-Life 2
  • Portal

Video Mode Change Failure

Unfortunately Half-Life refuses to play on the Surface Pro, with this error message:

The game has detected that the previous attempt to start in OpenGL video mode failed. The game will run in software mode.

Solutions on the Web suggest changing the Set Launch Options:

-software , -OpenGL, did not work for me (the game ran, but in a unusably small window).

-w 640 -h 480 allowed me run the game in a usable window.

Half-Life

Aha, now I have a playable game

-w 1024 -h 768 allowed me run the game in a better window.

Half-Life

This isn’t going to work…

I believe the screen dimensions of the Surface Pro are 1920 x 1080, so I gave that a try:

-w 1920 -h 1080

However, that resulted in a window that exceeded the bounds of the display. For the moment I will stick with XGA.

Next, getting a suitable joystick/gamepad…