ZKM - Media Museum
This weekend, the ZKM (center for arts and media technology) in Karlsruhe celebrated its 20th birthday. Both museums, the media museum and the museum of contemporary art, granted free access to the exhibitions. A great occasion for a cloudy sunday afternoon visit.
ZKM - Museum of contemporary art
This year’s Maemo Summit is over, and Nokia gave away some N900 to the community. Unfortunately, Michelle Gallen was not pleased with the unboxing experience at all and complains a lot. Frankly, if you’re getting a Porsche, would you really complain that the ignition lock is on the left hand side :) ?
I hope the Summit results in existing software being improved or ported and new software to appear. If you are missing software, you can still hack it on your own, thanks to the open Maemo platform.
For details shared by attendees, refer to the #maesum hash tag on Twitter. You will find several videos about the device, even some shared by Nokia. I for myself prefered to get my hands on it instead of watching pr0n, but due to the enormous price tag of 600€ it will last a little while before I decide to get one. Truly, it’s no problem to resist preordering it. Really. Promised.
A couple of days ago I noticed that my internet provider obviously hijacked my DNS queries. When I clicked a valid URL on or tried to upload images to my very own blog, I was told the address was not found and prompted by some »continuative results«:
Thanks for the help, guys...
Blumax Fixed
Recently my GPS mouse got bricked. Thanks to a hint of a friend, who sent me some IRC log, I was able to fix it easily.
Fireworks (public domain image by Jon Sullivan)
19 years ago, germany has been reunited. To celebrate this day, the 3. October is a public holiday, known as »Tag der Deutschen Einheit«. I’m just listening to a broadcast of the Deutschlandfunk. It provides original recordings of the happenings between 1989 and 1990, as the peaceful revolution prepared the end of the GDR and the German reunification.
Just as last year, we will man a booth at the Open Source Expo 2009, which will happen at the Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, on Sun 2009-11-15 and Mon 2009-11-16:
It’s a much smaller and more local exhibition than the Linuxtag, but a nice one anyway. We will probably be three people on sunday and two on monday. If you plan to attend, we could shift people, so please do not hesitate to contact me.
One of my all time hobbies (besides computers, software and openstreetmap) is programming and playing synths (»Yes I can«). Today I took some time to hack the Korg Z1. It’s a physical modeling synth which provides models of various instruments, like analogue synthesizers, electric pianos and organs, bowed and plucked strings, or woodwind instruments. I used the latter model to create a sound that sounds like an unknown acoustic instrument, but in fact it’s a newly invented instrument.
One of my favorite musicians is Joe Zawinul, who was one of the rare masters who knew how to program and to play synths. He used similar sounds from a Korg Prophecy, the monophonic predecessor of the Z1. I learned a lot about music by listening to many of his compositions. Additionally they are an excellent source of inspiration and, last but not least, joy. Here’s the sound I programmed in SysEx format:
It’s not finished yet. I still need to program a better vibrato or tremolo for the modulation wheel and some overdrive for the x-y-pad controller. The portamento controller, however, is ready to use as well as the two assignable buttons and, most importantly, the pitch bender (“Jammerhaken”). The pitch bender modulates the reed pressure, resulting in a bend range of about a minor third downwards and two semitones upwards. Due to the pressure reduction, the latter one also result in more noise in the sound and less harmonical tones.
The two buttons will add some hard distortion to the sound, reliably distroying the acoustic feeling of the sound >;-> .
Here’s a simple recording I did in a couple of minutes without any preparation or even mastering, so I apologise for the boring and unstructured playing. But anyway, “a sound says more than thousand words”. The string pad comes from an Acces Virus synth, and all sounds have been played live, without using any MIDI sequencer or multitrack recorder. I hope you like it:
»I like beautiful sounds« (Nasca Octavian Paul)
Satellite (by user ivak of openclipart.org, public domain)
Since today, EGNOS is officially up and running. I’m pretty curious whether this will improve the accuracy of positioning data received by my GPS toys.
