Is anyone still sampling?

Hi fellow readers, this time we’re talking music. For quite some time, I’ve been wondering about the sound of a certain area which seems to be abandoned by pretty much all bands. It was the area when sampling technology became affordable and where a bunch of musicians adopted this (back then very limited) technology in creative ways to use any kind of noise in a musical context. In this period (say, 1984-1990), bands like „The Art Of Noise“, „Jean-Michel Jarre“, „Depeche Mode“, „Moskwa TV“, and many more, emerged, who thrilled their audience with sounds that had been previously unheard. Obviously...

The Inferno Operating System: You're soaking in it!

I always thought that commercial was a little creepy.

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Inferno, Part 3: Let's Make a Filesystem!

Everything is a filesystem. Everything! This is true to a much greater degree in Plan 9 and Inferno than in other operating systems, even Linux. Using filesystems is one thing, but building them lets you do some really cool things! So we are going to take a closer look at filesystems, 9P, and rolling your own fileserver using the Styxservers library.

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A practical understanding of Flux

React.js and the Flux are shaping up to be some of the most important tools for web development in the coming years. The MVC model was strong on the server when we decided to take the frontend seriously, and it was shoehorned into the frontend since we didn’t know any better. React and Flux challenge that and I like where it’s going very much. That being said, it was very difficult for me to get into. I put together this blog post to serve as a more practical guide - the upstream documentation tells you a lot of concepts and expects you to put them together yourself. Hopefully...

2015-07-07

st 0.6 released: download

osu!web - WebGL & Web Audio

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=qdaZnQQAPqQ

I’ve taken a liking to a video game called osu! over the past few months. It’s a rhythm game where you use move your mouse to circles that appear with the beat, and click (or press a key) at the right time. It looks something like this:

The key of this game is that the “beatmaps” (a song plus notes to hit) are user-submitted. There are thousands of them, and the difficulty curve is very long - I’ve been playing for 10 months and I’m only maybe 70% of the way up the difficulty curve. It’s also a competitive game, which leads to a lot more fun, where...

Amazon Echo

I received my Amazon Echo recently. I ordered it merely as a curiosity and to generally stay aware of industry trends. But after just a few days of using it at home; I love it enough to prompt dusting off this blog after almost two years of no posts!

The first thing that caught my attention was the sheer accuracy of its voice recognition. The state of the art is already pretty good; the dual pillars of cheap, persistent computing power (i.e., “the cloud”) and renewed interest in machine learning brought us Siri (and their Microsoft & Google equivalents). In my...

Hooks - running stuff on Github hooks

I found myself in need of a simple tool for deploying a project on every git commit, but I didn’t have a build server set up. This led to Hooks - a very simple tool that allows you to run arbitrary commands when Github’s hooks execute.

The configuration is very simple. In /etc/hooks.conf, write:

[truecraft]
repository=SirCmpwn/TrueCraft
branch=master
command=systemctl restart hooks
valid_ips=204.232.175.64/27,192.30.252.0/22,127.0.0.1

You may include any number of hooks. The valid_ips entry in that example allows you to accept hooks from Github and from localhost. Then you run Hooks itself, it will execute your command when you push a commit to your repository.

This allows you to do continuous deployment on the cheap and...

freesmartphone.org API docs live again

After the outage of the VM where freesmartphone.org has been hosted on, we are now almost fully back. I have integrated the DBus API documentation (that has been hosted on the doc subdomain) into the top level documentation which now lives at http://www.freesmartphone.org. The source code has already been moved to https://github.com/freesmartphone and the new mailing list has been alive for a few months at goldelico. Now that the documentation is live again, I have plans for short, mid, and long term: 1. Short-term I'm working on completing the merge to libgee-0.8 and then cut the next point release. 2....

RFC: Future of SidPlayer, ModPlayer, PokeyPlayer for iOS

This is a post about the state of Sid-, Mod, or PokeyPlayer on iOS. Coming from the background of the C64 and AMIGA demo scenes, I always thought that every platform needs a way to play back the musical artwork created by those great musicians in the 80s and 90s on machines like the Commodore C64, the AMIGA, and the ATARI XL. Fast forward to the iPhone: Being excited about the new platform, me and another guy from the good ole' AMIGA days started working on SidPlayer in 2008, shortly after Apple opened the developer program for european developers. After...