Another visit to the Oramics Exhibition

I got to make another visit to the Science Museum to see the Oramics exhibition, which has grown considerably now. I love some of the new exhibits like the Fairlight and the WASP synth, and of course the ATARI 520 ST.

I must try and find Daphne Oram’s book soon. I hope to get to see the exhibition again before it closes, and I hope they add a few more bits and pieces too. Hope you like the pictures.

Early tests of StyleTap on 3G

After I’d gone through the somewhat laborious process of getting apps on the StyleTap emulator I finally got to fire up SoundPad from miniMusic. Now the notes on StyleTap say quite clearly that apps that access native hardware for sound will not work, so my hopes for music applications running inside StyleTap weren’t high. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that both SoundPad (above), and NotePad worked fine and were, at least initially, usable.

The other thing that I was reminded of on the Palm OS was that you have to have your user name set up correctly or registration codes won’t work, which is very annoying. However, what is more annoying is that StyleTap will only allow you to change the user name once in every 24 hours.

I’ve still got 10 days of my trial left, and if I can get this to be a reasonable device to work with for Palm OS apps then I might even buy the licence.

Testing StyleTap on the 3G again

It was around this time last year that I was experimenting with running various things on my iPhone 3G. Mainly I was trying out Android from the iDroid project, and I’ve been doing that again, but I’m also having a go with StyleTap the Palm OS emulator for jailbroken iPhones. Whilst I’m not holding out too much hope for it to be useful for any old music apps on the Palm, it may have some use elsewhere in the Palm OS universe.

Anyway, I don’t have long to see if it’s useful as I’ve only got 10 days left of the trial period to go before I have to get a licence.

Clearing out some old audio clips

I’m clearing out recordings from FIRe (my fav iPhone field recording app), so expect a bunch of recordings in the next few hours. Some of them are quite big though.

The Green Hornet

I watched the Green Hornet tonight. I’d heard it was rubbish, but actually I thought it wasn’t too bad on the whole. A bit cheesy and silly, but fun and overall quite watchable. Perhaps it was just that my expectations were set very low?

Anyway, I had fun.

What’s on your wish list?

Well it’s nearly Christmas and I’m finally feeling a bit more in the Christmas spirit at last. There’s always so much to do and get through, but this year what I’m looking forward to most is just having some time to catch up with myself and tinker with things that I’ve been meaning to tinker with for ages.

Counting down

Only a few days until Christmas and each day there are less people on the trains and less people at the office. I love that feeling of thinning out.

It’s like every day more people decide that that’s it, the year’s over for me. There’s a sense of weariness about people this year. Like they really need a rest. I know I do.

A new Sylvian retrospective in Feb

A new Sylvian album. Well, a compilation. A retrospective actually. I looked at the track listing. I’ve got them all except one. So the question is, do I buy it just for the sake of a single song? The answer? Probably.

Words that have been overused in 2011

There have been a few words that I’ve come to loathe when I see them in articles and blogs. Not because they aren’t good words but because they’ve ceased to be used as words to convey a meaning and are now just sign posts to signal a movement or trend.

They are:

  • Platform
  • Disrupt
  • Curate

I’m sure that there are many more, but those are the ones that irritate me the most. I find that they just get used for no reason anymore, and then have no meaning whatsoever.