Tikitag

Oct 27 2008

TikiTag on Linux

After the O'Reilly GMT interview , the nice folks over at Tikitag sent me a Tikitag presskit to play with. I actually got it about 2 weeks ago but I only got like 5 minutes of time with it earlier. Just time to find the Linux Client and get that to connect to their site. So far so good ... I however couldn't get a connection between my reader and the client. The readers' led was constantly on.

So today I connected the reader to my Fedora based Dell Laptop, I figured out the content of the Debian package and copied those files (a startupscript and a jar file to my laptop)

The led started flashing gently. I restarted pcscd , started the client and the Java client detected the reader , I launched the Tikitag Dashboard but that failed to detect the reader till after I restarted my firefox.

From there on I could map tags to url's etc. So now I have a bunch of Tikitagged Businesscards.

So my next step is to figure out why it isn't working on my EEE. Because after all the EEE is what I carry around when going to conferences and other places .. which is when I might want to actually use the TikiTag reader. (Any ideas anyone ?)

There is a lot of potential for this kind of technology.. Imagine using it in a museum where you get a tagreader equipped device which you can use to read information about the artworks you are about to see.