I made a compilation of contemporary Christian music played backwards:

While updating my website, I finally posted public links for the source and binaries of a few of my projects that previously had not been available. You can now download Looper sample sequencer for Windows, my Pi House Generator that generates house music from the digits of pi, and my Dot Matrix Synthesizer for the Epson LQ-500 printer.

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I made a screenshot search engine for iPhone apps. With almost half a million apps out there and not very many good ways to search for them, I wanted a better way to search for weird stuff. I’ll be adding filters and other new features soon.

Example results:

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This week I released a new version of my iPhone sampler app sir Sampleton with support for the AKAI Synthstation 25 keyboard dock. The Synthstation 25 is about the size of a Casio SK-1 and can run on batteries, so it’s super portable. The design is not perfect but it’s pretty good and I’ve been using it regularly for my own music now. I plan to roll out a few more updates to Sir Sampleton soon including support for other MIDI devices, more sound settings, multiple sample-banks.

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by joel

I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object. The script is written in Python and runs within the Golly cellular automata simulator. Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices in a text file that can be opened in Blender, an open source 3D graphics program. Because the script inefficiently renders every individual cube into a text file, I’m currently unable to render objects that are much larger or more complex than the images below. Optimizations to the script like combining faces, eliminating hidden faces, and switching to a binary vector file format should eventually reduce this problem.

Download the script here.

To use the script, you’ll need Python, Golly, and Blender. Run Golly, load or draw your starting pattern, then choose Run Script in the File menu and find my script. Enter the number of layers to render; initially try around 10 for large patterns, 100 for small patterns. The script will create a file called 3dlife.raw which you can import into Blender with File->Import->Raw Faces. On my computer, Blender will struggle or crash if the raw file is much more than 150MB.

examples rendered with LuxRender:

Niels van Dijkhuizen made a MIDI interface for the Cynthcart that does it all through simulating keypresses and paddle movement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL2oBjugmx0

This book looks good.

I’ve released a new version of my Commodore 64 synthesizer cartridge that includes several new features and some fixes. See change log below. The cartridge and EPROM upgrade are available from the Atariage Store and the ROM images and source are available on the Cynthcart page.

Cynthcart v1.2.4 changes:
– PAL and NTSC note tables and autodetection
– full-screen video mode
– second paddle controls pulse width, LFO depth, or pitch
– automatic activation for filter paddle
– improved keyboard layout
– onscreen help
– SID editor help and status display
– dummy SID register to edit 3 oscillators at once
– save an editor patch in memory
– fixed patch/sound change glitch when playing
– fixed bad notes in top octave