New iTom Song

[filkertom]

Regarding today's unpleasantness.

I did a few things different in the mix and mastering of this one, and I'm very curious as to what you think. I do know it's a bit louder than my mixes have been recently.

ETA: Good advice from raven_ap_morgan in comments. Getting away from the mix for a few hours usually helps, and in this case I backed down the vocal and added just a touch of reverb. So, if you'd like, you can download the file again. If you want to keep the old one, name one of them something different.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

For me a kitchen timer is essential. I like to cook, but when something doesn't need my direct attention I tend to other interesting things to do (even if it's standing there pursuing an intriguing thought). Old style clockwork timers only ding once, not nearly enough to remind me that something is about to burn (or the laundry is done, or it's time to launch skype and meet friends on WoW, etc.) If I had a halfway decent education in electronics, I'd rig up an old steampunk type spring-loaded dial that you turn, the spring drives a charger for a small rechargable battery that powers an accurate electric timer that plays "It's the End of the World" on one of those jewelbox chimes but amplified through speakers so I can't ignore it.

Then I'd put it all inside a bobble hula dancer.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

I see wind up timers at large discount camping supply places (the upscale camping places never have them) but a windup clock would work just as well. Wristwatch alarms = frustration. Tried to use one on a trip to Paris, took me over an hour to get it to work, alarm was so weak I couldn't hear it when I needed to but it always sounded loud when it went off when I didn't want it to. And I could never get it to stop going off, had to eventually throw it away. My cell phone has downloadable ringtones as a "mystery" feature, meaning they promote the feature prominently, but the manual doesn't give you adequate instructions and you can't ever get it to work. A big plus for the iPhone, I was at the local apple store this morning and played with the demo iPhones, figured out how to set a song for the ringtone and downloaded "Smash the Fairies" for that purpose in under seven minutes! (I made note of the time to see how long it would take) And with no manual! Still not getting one, waiting for third generation.

As for the Rube Goldberg qualities and such, I used to do that a lot with the old gang from high school. For weekend fun we used to go dumpster diving at the industrial park and play mad scientist with the stuff we found. Would often try incorporating music into our creations because, well, _anybody_ could make a giant mutant spider robot that shoots flames, but how many people could make it dance? We used to whip up our own music boxes using tin cans, screws and sheet metal, then rig up an electric vibrational amp to get volume (Dave always handled the electronics while I was elsewhere). What got really fun was when we started getting into pnuematics. After we wore out the rubber duck orchestra bed I rigged up an old sex toy so instead of just vibrating it would bulge, roll, throb and shimmy based on what the music box played. Sue was quite fond of a piano score of "Great Balls of Fire" while Roxanne preferred "Hungarian Rhapsody" for horns. Too bad we didn't have any PDQ Bach sheet music back then.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

This is what I'm most excited about concerning the iPhone, forcing change on a monopolistic system that resists change (look at how far they are behind Japan and Europe, and are _proud_ of it). I agree with my friend (review below), even if people don't buy it they'll start to demand changes and drop the companies that don't comply. Pay a fee for a crappy quality ringtones (purposely degraded so you won't listen to the ringtone instead of buying the album... Really! That's the reason they gave!), ummmmm, no, how about I just drop your service as soon as my contract is up. One-way transfers? Not any more, make it two way or it's the highway. The next twelve months should be interesting in the cell phone world.

Oooooo, you would have been popular in my nieghborhood as a kid. We were desperate for a good electronics mad scientist. Dave was okay, but you probably would have been better. We had a couple girls in our group when I grew up, one of them was a girl who loved playing with legos and liked to build science fiction things, but her parents always bought her Barbies and pre-made accessories because "girls don't make things", which drove her crazy (literally! serious issues popping up in high school that got worse in college). I helped her score Legos (mostly on athletic wagers with other kids) and we'd spend hours building lego doll playsets that could get past her parents sexist screening then be quickly reassembled into monster tanks with cannons that really fired. When one of our gang got the use of an empty garage for our assembly projects, she was in heaven! While I was the one who figured out how to make the rubber duck orchestra bed work, Melonie was the one who spent an entire weekend assembling it, and blissing out every minute.

Last I talked to her, about three years ago, she was teaching her local girl scout troop how to make BEAM robots and helping some high school girls make battlebots. Never too late to have a happy childhood.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1958, so my neighborhood had a good mix of dinosaurs, new age and everything in-between. Melonie got stuck with sexist stereotypes that screwed her up good for quite a while (her little sister did okay, she really _was_ a girly-girl deep down). Angie's parents soon realized they were raising an alien rebel princess from the trans-dimensional planet Xanax Prime, and decided to support her as far as their limited mortal mentalities could allow. So as a result we had one girl member of the gang operating in secret to learn forbidden knowledge (she would often blackmail/extort information from much older guys who were good at shop classes) and another who would befuddle/freak out authority figures without even trying.

Now as for the guys, we were the weird ones ;-)

If you were in our neighborhood, we would have done a lot more with electronics. And vacuum tubes! Big ones! That go "Hummmmmmmmmmmm" in a threatening manner!

As for high heels, funny you should mention that. Biggest haul of gambled lego's we ever won for Melonie was by a high heel race. And I was the one who won!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

We would have welcomed you regardless of age. Fact was, nobody outside our age group had even the slightest interest in what we were doing, until things went wrong and they wanted somone to yell at for hours on end. Fortunately, most of the time they assumed it was older teenagers/young adults who flew bizarre rockets into shopping malls, and those five kids riding their bikes after it were just attracted by the sparkly flames (Angie made sure we practiced our innocent looks of befuddlement regularly, and it paid off) The few times we actively sought out grown up advice always ended with them telling us we couldn't do what we had already done.

But you... we probably could have talked you into showing us how to get it to go up to 11 ;-)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

That would have helped us out on soooooooo many levels! You would have earned our respect in, oh, I'd guess about five seconds. Two seconds if you brought cookies.

Speaking of having fun with tech in weird and unusual ways, how much do you know about RFID tags and scanners?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

Back to web searches. Every now and then I'll come up with something that I'd like to know more about, and can only find superficial beginners info or uber geeks bleeding edge techno babble, absolutely nothing in-between and no place to ask questions without being rediculed for having no brain or a chorus of I-Don't-Knows.

Oh, well, life goes on, and there's plenty of other things to look into.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

From what I've heard, it seems to be possible that using a number of RFID transponders and two or three receivers you might be able to rig up a cheap motion capture system for animation, 3D graphics and gaming. But try finding someone knowledgeable about RFID who will answer a few questions :(

As for RFID's themselves, while I acknowledge the Big Brother aspect, I just hope the paranoia doesn't kill all of the fun possibilities. Like this:

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/04/rfid_and_texttospeech_mod_1.html

(god I wish this magazine was out when I was a kid!)
I think it would be fun to rig up a hidden RFID reader on a busy sidewalk, and it turns all of the data readings into music (maybe also a projected video at night?) with a little robot sitting on the ground with a tin cup and a sign "Will process data for battery recharge"

While RFID will be a boon for inventory purposes (ever do inventory at a bookstore? It's impossible! You keep reading the back covers, then the first chapters, then the first half. then...) the belief that it will be a security system will collapse the first time someone snags the RFID from corporate CEO's, puts it on the net and Wal-Mart is inundated by thousands of Walton family members giving new orders and demanding freebies.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

I've found them in books, clothing, food, etc., and also found a couple places where you could get programmable ones in bulk for something like a penny each. So getting them is no problem. Just need someone knowledgeable to ask a few questions to. And then someone who knows electronics to help with the putting together of things. Unfortunately, the world has gone out of it's way to make sure I never learn electronics. Either the classes I sign up for are cancelled at the last minute, or are held really early in the morning. I'm not a morning person, so despite getting 3.0+ in the 6 and am classes I took, I can't remember a thing. Not even what building I went to.

As for MAKE magazine, time for subtly is over! Buy a copy, nail it to a wall where everybody has to walk past it several times a day, a rig up an LED sign that reads "GET ME A SUBSCRIPTION FOR (insert gift-giving event here) OR THERE WILL BE TROUBLE!"

Do you watch the podcasts? I've subscribed since day one and carry the entire series on my iPod. More than a few times I've whipped it out to show people an episode or two.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the record is for the longest running conversation on Tom's LJ?

I can solder, follow directions and do basic assembly no problem, just need the answer to a few questions to see if it's even possible, and if it is, how to set it up. Then find someone who could help me make the instructions to follow. Of course, after that I'd have to find someone to team up with for the software. *sigh* I better stick to things I can do all on my own, like play games.

At least it's been scientifically proven that there really _are_ morning and night people who's natural cycles are at the two extremes. Now the next step is to convince the vast majority of people on this planet that not getting up before the sun isn't a sign of laziness. Failing that, we'll just have to take over the world late at night, when the morning people are incapable of staying awake, then force them to stay up past midnight until they are a mass of groggy, mind-numbed sleep-deprived zombies who can't put up any resistance. Then we'll see how _they_ like it ;-)

Maybe you should hold a Make subscription fundraiser in your home. You know, like a pledge drive but with the advantage that you can follow people around the house when they try to run away. You could sing, dance, do dramatic readings, always punctuated by a heartfelt plea (with sad puppy eyes) for the audience to donate to this most worthy of causes, all with the assurance that you'll keep on following them around the house, all night, until they make a pledge.

I've gotten about eight people who don't own iPods hooked on podcasts. Mostly Channel Frederator, with Photoshop TV and Make tied for second, Tiki Bar TV at third place and Food Guru in at fourth. About half of those people don't even use iTunes, they download the episodes directly from the web sites. Although they are trying to find a way to use iTunes to organize and auto-download their podcasts without having to go back on all those nasty things they've said about iTunes and how it was evil incarnate for some misperceived reason ;-) Always amazes me how many people believe you _have_ to use an iPod to watch them, or you have to use a Mac (and pay Apple huge licensing fees) to make them. All you need is something that will play mov or m4p format, and to make them all you need is to format the video for the right ratio and a way to put it up for people to download. No fees, no DRM, no restrictions.

Hope you get your new machine up and running soon. If you get Quicktime (or some other viewer) on it, I'd recommend checking out the Rube Goldberg episodes. Though chances are you'll end up watching "just one more episode" until it's four in the morning and you've gone through all of them except the intro to oscilliscopes ;-)

Just a question: have you ever made BEAM bots?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

We'll have to ask Tom, won't we? ;-)
I'm wondering if Tom is even reading this, since we've kind of drifted off topic a bit. (how do you get italics here?)

I used to get more work done between 8 and 12 at night than most people did the usual 9-5, but I always ended up working under early risers who felt me being half-awake on their schedule was better than me being highly productive on my own schedule. The only problem I've had with working nights is you can't get involved in fandom or gaming, because they _always_ meet at night during the weekdays. That's half of the reason I haven't made any friends here in Seattle, I was always working when things were going on.

I got the Rube Goldberg car commercial on my iPod, one of the most popular ones (second to the diet coke and mentos one). Also got a few of those japanese ones. Used to make things like that out of Lego when I was a kid, and later would make only 5 or 6 step things, because any more than that and other people would walk into them or mess them up somehow :(

As for Make Magazine podcasts, yes, they do have some on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV3vfTQaFlo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msx9WYv1W7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzFCA-xUc8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVzorAMTnFM&mode=user&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZZYZlvXO_o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiFfW7z38vE&mode=user&search=
(you can get the PDFs from the web site)

That should keep you busy for a while ;-)

I've made "Crawlies"! A friend started playing with throwies and wanted me to make some, but I can rarely let something stay as it is, so I also attached a pager motor and made the wheel just a tiny bit bigger than the width of the magnet, so when you threw it at a metal wall it would crawl around while glowing

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Yoo-hoo, Tom... are we setting some kind of a record here? ;-)

I think we frightened him away ;-)

And thanks for the text instructions. Didn't know it worked like html

Nifty videos - thanks!

And plenty more where that came from, I've saved them all if you want copies.

Since Tom won't tell us what the record is for longest running LJ conversation between two people, let's keep going just in case.

Ever do anything with animatronics? I've tried a few times but with my lack of electronics knowledge I had limited sucess, like with one full body costume the eyes and ears worked surprisingly well (good misdirection there, nobody noticed my fingers moving hidden controllers) but the mouth was a complete failure. Someday I'd like to make shoulder ethic puppets, but that would require a kit of some kind for the basic skeletons.

How about you? What was the most interesting project you ever worked on? (it doesn't have to be completed, some failures are far more interesting that sucesses, as long as you didn't get caught ;-)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]