You know you’re going to lose them.

Or your dog will eat them.

Or an angry god will descend from the sky and burn them while they’re in your pants.

That’s right, I can only be referring to those little augmented reality cards that come with the Nintendo 3DS.  I knew immediately that I would have them for, at most, a month before losing the first one.  The others would follow suit before the year would end.

So, I wondered if I could get away with simply taking a snapshot of the cards.  Would the AR recognition kick in properly on a backlit LCD display?  Indeed it can.  So, I hurried and wrote a quick app to encapsulate all six of the cards into a small Android application.

As I was readying the app, it occurred to me that these cards each carry the registered trademarks of Nintendo.  Mario, Samus, Link, and the rest feature very prominently on the cards.  If the app was just for me, who’d care, right?  But if it’s up on the Android Market, there’s a possibility that Nintendo will have woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning and petition to have the application yanked from the Market.

That simply would not do.

So, I did some experiments.   AR markers tend to use a small subset of visual cues on the card to get orientation and other data from the camera.  I decided to take off as much from the card before the AR routine would no longer recognize it.  How much could I discard from the image?  A lot:

Each of the other cards were just as simple, though a couple required a bit more information in the image before they stabilized.  Samus being the most difficult one, but I’m working on better figuring her card out.

I didn’t bother checking the Market for similar apps  before writing this — as I progressed, I had no doubt a dozen other people tried this already, but I was itching for a project to do.  Turns out there’s only one other 3DS AR card app on the Market at the moment.  You might like that one better, it has the original card artwork, and you can scale the size of the card, but it’s significantly larger at 663k (Spare Deck is just under 50k) and is apparently ad-supported.

Hope this is useful to somebody, and try not to stare at the screen too long.  I think my friggin’ eyes are going cross.

Long story short: random situation popped up where I needed a DTMF tone dialer.

Thinking fast, I ran to the Android Market… surely there would be heaps of good tone dialers pawning at the window like puppies begging to go home.

Alas, the couple puppies I played with were either limping, rather dirty, or worse: pugs.

While I survived the ‘random situation’ through alternate means, a couple days later I decided to scour the Market for the rest of the dialers (free ones, only) and see if there was one that I could adopt… the results were disappointing.

I gave it five minutes and slammed my fist down on the desk, screaming: “I WILL MAKE MY OWN PUPPY!  ER…DIALER.”

So, from 11pm to 5am I gestated and ultimately squeezed out…ToneDef!

Okay, it’s not much better than what’s out there, but it’s a start.

And, hey, if there’s any features you’d like added to it, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll do what I can.  I plan to add the extended DTMF tones (A/B/C/D), support for delays (“;”) in the dialer string, and some of the more historic phreaker tones (not that you can use them nowadays, but hey, it’s tradition).