2006

Computerized sound has always been fascinating to me. Ever since DOS played Circus for me I've been hooked. Oh and don't forget all those old mod player programs from back in the day. You know the ones where really geeky goth kids put together the latest Depeche Mode song into a mod file. Ah those were the days.

Then along came Re-Birth from Propellerheads which emulated the old boss step sequencing synth and drum machine. I can't even remember how many hours I wasted making nonesense noises come from that program. After Re-Birth there came Reason, an all in one electronic wonderland. But what about the good old days?

The good old days have come back thanks to some really cool hackers out there. Paul Slocum has been creating all sorts of cool stuff. He's in a band called Tree Wave and they make music with an old 286 computer, a Commodore 64, an Atari 2600 and a dot matrix printer. Yeah that's right. A dot matrix printer. Can't get much more old school than that! If you don't belive me go check out their gear on their website.

Paul was nice enough to create a Synthcart for the Atari which is a bit limited but still cool. There is one guy out there working on MIDI control for that cart. That would be nice! Paul has also created a Cynthcart for the Commodore 64. You can buy both of those over at atariage.

So that covers the basics but what about the NES you say? Well there is a company called wayfar that is creating a device called MIDINES. I bought the 1.0.2 version a while back and it's loads of fun. Basically it gives you MIDI control over the synth inside a Nintendo Entertainment System. Rad!

In my last post I described most of the applications I use. There were a lot of menu bar programs in the list. I dont think I can fit anymore programs into my menu bar at this point. Especially when some programs have a lot of menus then you lose some of the items there. I'll have to resist the urge to add more programs that use the menu bar as their home. Here is what it currently looks like.

From left to right: Remote Buddy, VirtueDesktops, Synergy, Butler, Menu Meters (Disk I/O, Network Traffic Transmited/Received, RAM Used/Free, Swap Pages In/Out and Total, Processor Usage for both cores), AirPort, Sound, Power, MenuCalendarClock, Tunnelblick, Spotlight

I don't really use Remote Buddy that often so I could probably not have that one start up at login time if need be. And the only thing I ever use the Butler menu for is fast user switching even though I only have one account on my MacBook Pro right now. It is handy on my PowerBook since Lucie is using it right now.

The most useful of all the menu bar additions is Menu Meters. Especially when developing with Zope and Plone. Sometimes you create some code that really stresses the machine and you'll see it right away in the menu bar. I also know that when iTunes goes to update podcasts that it will eat up all my processor power.