It’s oddly apropos that bits are coming together, here on the eve of the (calendar) new year. Bits of technological, musical, and epistemological* flotsam and jetsam seem to be accumulating into useful shapes in my immediate vicinity.

To wit - this person has posted a handful of schematics and sound clips regarding the construction of circuits exhibiting chaotic behaviour, and using said circuits to control synthesizers. In other words, a chaos-driven instrument is within reach of my handy laser screwdriver soldering iron.

I’m very excited.

*more on this later - I’m still working on putting it into words.

OK, so I’m late to the party, but this is friggin’ cool!  Jack is a killer audio routing widget for linux that allows multiple applications to participate in audio I/O streams.  There’s been no direct equivalent on windows, AFAIK, except for ReWire, and that’s not universally supported.  This port of Jack seems to have an ASIO backend, so all your audio apps can see it.

I’m in the midst of rebuilding my windows box, as much as I love linux, the audio support isn’t quite there yet (least not with my hardware), so I’m gonna remain a fence-sitter for a while longer.  More news after I give it a play and see what happens…

A-ha! It seems I can post from my phone, it’s just that the “visual” editor view doesn’t work. Not a show-stopper, but it does make formatting something of a PITA.

Why? I’ve resisted for years the urge to buy any of your sexy products. I’ve turned a blind eye to their beautiful lines, I’ve hardened my heart against the allure of things that Just Work. Alas, the flesh is weak, and I let a JesusPhone into my life.  Why, then, does it fall so fractionally, tragically short of being the Coolest Thing Ever? Why is there no ToDo widget?  Where are the other Bluetooth device profiles (hello? best iPod ever, no wireless headphones)?  What’s up with the sadistically recessed headphone jack that forces me to surgically modify innocent cables just to satisfy my desire to listen to you at work? Why, FFS, don’t any of the aftermarket auto interfaces work right, and maybe more to the point, why aren’t there any out yet that do work (granted, that last bit isn’t your fault, but you’re damned by association)?

/r/s/

Vaguely Disappointed

A completely insecure, but very convenient on a trusted network, Samba configuration:

• http://www.debuntu.org/guest-file-sharing-with-samba

Tricks to get a Presonus Firepod working with FreeBoB:

• http://subversion.ffado.org/index.fcgi/wiki/InstallOnUbuntuFeisty
• http://freebob.sourceforge.net/index.php/UdevConfiguration

I rebuilt my main workstation yesterday - XP has been acting weirder and weirder, so I decided to take another whack at using Linux as my primary platform. I have a dual-output (VGA and DVI) NVidia graphics card, and making it work with my two LCDs was one of my first issues. I’ve grown accustomed to having lots of desktop real estate, and wasn’t willing to give that up. Turns out, it’s much easier than it seems. » Read the rest of the entry..