I bought some new synths. Access Virus A This is the original 1998 Access Virus A . It, it was a staple synth for trance and electronic music in general for the early 00s. I am very happy that I managed to get this secondhand for less than a MicroKORG. It cost over £800 when it came out in 1998. Old digital synths seem to be unpopular at the moment, I’ve heard comments along the lines of ‘if it’s digital then I might as well use a plugin in my DAW’. But I think this is ignoring the tactile control surface that you get, and how it gets your head outside the computer and playing an actual physical instrument. The presets are really inspiring, several sounds that you will recognise if you were into electronic music in the 00s. VNV Nation, one of my favourite bands, produced their entire ‘Empires’ album with just the Access Virus A and a couple of samplers. ...

Lately I’ve had the idea of creating a text-based Roguelike in C++. This lead me on to think about the game AI experiments that I worked during my degree in Computer Science and A.I. . Essential to game AI is the notion of pathfinding, or finding a path from ‘A’ to ‘B’, past any obstacles that get in the way. One way to do this is to use the A* algorithm. I decided to implement an A* pathfinding algorithm for possible use in a Roguelike later, and chose the pseudocode from the Wikipedia example to implement. ...

I like to dabble in making and playing music. Here is the equipment and setup that I use. Ableton Live Intro This is the DAW I use. I have been using Ableton Live for several years now, and I know my way around it. I have tried others but they never really felt as comfortable. Live comes in three flavours , ‘Intro’ is the most basic paid-for version. I was surprised how cheap the ‘Intro’ version was, and how little I find myself needing the features of the more expensive versions. I only have one paid-for VST plugin, and that is the KORG Legacy Cell MS-20, which I use on almost all the music I’ve made. ...

I wanted to get a Kindlefire HDX running under Ubuntu 12.04 with adb. First I needed to setup the udev rules: 1. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules as root, and add the following line (create this file if it does not exist): SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1949", MODE="0666" 2. Change the permission of this file by executing the following command as root: chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules 3. Reload the rules by executing the following command as root: udevadm control --reload-rules 4. Run these commands to restart adb: ...

Updated: Reorganised, replaced Tiamat headset for KAVE. I use my computer a lot, for work (software development), gaming and music production. I wanted to build a high-end computer setup, as I’ve always lagged behind with upgrades before. So I gradually have been accumulating and swapping bits around to make the setup above. Internals Case Motherboard CPU CPU Cooler RAM Wireless Card Optical Drive PSU Visual Monitor Backlight GPU Audio Headphones Soundcard Headset Speakers Speaker Stands Mixer Desktop Microphone Peripherals ...

A good ergonomic chair is a wise investment if you’re going to spend a lot of time at your computer. One of the better known ergonomic models is the Herman Miller Aeron Task Chair . What Other People Say About the Aeron Jeff Atwood (from Coding Horror) says: In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I’ve come to one conclusion: you can’t expect to get a decent chair for less than $500. If you are spending less than that on seating – unless you are getting the deal of the century on dot-bomb bankruptcy auctions – you’re probably making a mistake. ...

2015 Update: The “Device Hive” project has now been changed to be called ‘Hive CI’ and it is being maintained by a team of developers at the BBC, which I am no longer a part of. It is in the process of being opensourced, see: http://bbc.github.io/hive-ci/ This year has been quite a busy and eventful one for me. Connected Red Button At the start of the year, I was working on the Connected Red Button team within the BBC. Connected Red Button is a major ongoing project in the Television and Mobile Platforms department at BBC North. Its aim is to replace the classic Red Button text service (which itself is the successor to Ceefax) with a new updated all-singing all-dancing interactive portal to internet content, available on Smart TVs and modern set top boxes. Currently Connected Red Button is live and accessible by pressing the Red Button on the new Virgin Media TiVo boxes. You can access the latest version of iPlayer, and the BBC News and BBC Sport smart TV apps from within one easy portal. ...

I’ve been working on a project at the BBC where we are using the Android command-line tools from the Android Developer Tools , to spin up and terminate series of emulators. I noticed a big problem under OSX where ‘adb devices’ was failing to register emulators occasionally when we started them up, without any error message, even though they were loaded and quite clearly running in a window on OSX. This was a real problem for our project because we needed absolute parity between emulator process being launched and subsequently being detected by adb. ...

I found this awesome cut-up poetry generator , which takes the text of famous poets and builds structured poetry out of it. The guy that made it even developed the underlying algorithm as a research project. I have put a version of a free Amazon EC2 instance, wrote a little twitter bot in node.js, and wired the poetry generator with the twitter bot, and now I have this: https://twitter.com/haikumachine - a twitter bot that posts a haiku every five minutes, derived from Dylan Thomas’s poetry. ...

To get 256 colors working within terminator in Crunchbang Waldorf, I had to do the following: Add to ~/.bashrc export TERM=xterm-256color Install a 256 color VIM colorcheme, see desert256 for example . Add the following to ~/.vimrc: set t_Co=256 set t_AB=^[[48;5;%dm set t_AF=^[[38;5;%dm ’t_Co’ specifies exactly how many colours VIM can use. The other two lines seem to be Debian-specific color code escape sequences. If you want 256 color VIM for your root user when you sudo edit, then edit /usr/share/vim/vimrc and copy across your settings from your local ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim to this global environment. ...