luminescente

Spent christmas at home in Aveiro. The usual pack of gifts, including clothes, some candy and a new Apple [Might Mouse](http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/). Damn, I was waiting for the Bluetooth version to come out but this one will do nicely too… At the xmas company dinner Luís got me a nice digital thermometer. Now I can measure how far from absolute zero this shitty house really gets (estimate: 10 degrees, max).

At home went through some of my old MP3 CDs and came accross some of my older creations (done in Impulse Tracker) rendered as MP3. Listened to them on the train back to Lisbon and got a grip before shedding any tears. At home googled for a bit and found [someone](http://members.fortunecity.com/helder_redhell/mp3/RedHellCD13.htm) who has them on a old CD somewhere.

Googled a bit more and found some tracking software usable on my Mac: [Renoise](http://www.renoise.com) and [Schism Tracker](http://rigelseven.com/schism/). Impulse Tracker runs under DOSBox, but it’s slow as hell on my 12″ Powerbook. Schism Tracker is a pixel-perfect clone and as far as I can tell, seems usable. Renoise seems much more powerful, but it has a Fast Tracker 2-like interface, unfortunately, and I never seemed to go along with FT2 back in the day, so I guess I won’t manage it now too. On the other hand, Schism fits like a glove (pun intended…).

Ah… The memories of late night tracking with the room fully darkened and nothing but a glowing 14″ CRT burning my retina with the Impulse Tracker screen layout while music flowed from the SPK OUT of my GUS Ace/SB16 combo. For a break, I’d dive into Turbo Pascal 7 and code some new effect to try to outdo Sérgio (and fail miserably every time…).

And now, back to my long forgotten habit of sample-ripping to gather a small instrument library, fetch my still unfinished tracks (some older than 5 years) and make something out of it. Be afraid!

is one of these bedside tables.

Proof I should pay more attention to my own ideas.

I thought about this long ago, a place to comment on each and every page you visit, but never did anything with the idea.

Same thing with del.icio.us, except this time I did something with it, actually: a project (called Nómada) for a class I took 2 or 3 year ago. Got me a good grade but I skipped on the opportunity to make it a much bigger project.

Shame on me, actually…

I’m in the process of making a digital picture frame out of a laptop.

Already got the laptop, my $100 laptop, a old Toshiba 430 CDT. Pentium 1 at 133mhz, 32mb of ram and a 1.2Gb disk which will get replaced with a Compact Flash card using a CF-IDE adapter. Pity this laptop (including the battery) will get trashed, as it’s still usable but you can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs.

As for the software, I’ll be using a stripped down linux installation, with X, SSH/SMB daemon and little else.

For future reference, here is one of the better guides I found on the net about this.

I still a PCMCIA network card (16 bit, pre-Cardbus) and later to find a way to enable Rendezvous/Bonjour discovery as I’ll be using DHCP to auto-configure the box, and find a way to use the built-in infra-red port to accept new pictures sent from other laptops or mobile phones. It would be cool to do it using a USB bluetooth adapter but there is no USB on this laptop to add it cheaply.

As for control, I think I’ll use the mouse-wheel and buttons from a damaged mouse and make a iPod-like interface.

I’ll keep you posted!