Yearly Archives: 2004

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summary of the results from the last post…

  1. keynav mostly works, except when it doesnt, mostly in
    3rd party apps

  2. ctrl+click on Applications dragged to dock is workable
    but Quicksilver and Launchbar are
    both freaking cool and should be copied by gnome/kde immediately.
    (Or for that matter, apple…)

In other osx news, had the first case of “reboot it and it starts working”.
(in this case, the cisco vpn client failing to use the
right DNS. Or as a friend put it, “dunno, sometimes the DNS
gets stupid until you reboot”). I suspect there is a less
evasive way, but I don’t know it yet.

Posted on by

random osx questions I can’t find a good answer to so far…

How do I make the keyboard navigation better?
I enabled the extra special keyboard navigation stuff under
the accessibility dialog, but it still seems really bad. The
most common case seems to be when closing an app, and you get
one of the variations of “save file? cancel? dont save?”. By
default, these all seem to pick “save”, and there doesnt seem
to be anyway with keynav to select one of the other options.
“tab” doesnt work, arrow keys dont work, space doesnt do anything.
The Native Instrument apps seem bad about this, so it might be
an app level thing.

I need a app menu. Please.

I would love a configurable “windows start/gnome foot” etc
style menu on the dock. A simple way to launch an app seems
to be something that apple ignored. Apparently, they expect
you to put everything you use on the dock (already too big)
and go diving though the file manager to launch anything else.
Very aggravating.

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I installed a small shareware OSX app called “Vocal Lab”. It’s basically
a tuner for vocals. If you can sing (which I can’t), you can use
it to test your intonation.

It basically graphs the pitch of your voice (both in terms of
hertz and musical notes).

But the more interesting part is that I now now my speaking
voices ranges from about 105 hertz (A2 or so) up to
about 128 hertz.

metaArclight show review

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played last night with metaArclight.

Went pretty well. Turnout wasnt too bad considering Sonic
Youth was playing in Chapel Hill last night as well.

Myself, badger, and Anthony make up metaArclight.
I played a a usb game controller hooked up to my powerbook
running the “grainstates” instrument from the app Reaktor.
This is basically a granualar resynthesizer (aka, it
takes bits and pieces of a sample and plays back several
chunks at the same time). The controller was setup so
I had control over pitch, volume, grain size, and what
part of the samples the grains were extracted from. I
also had a midi footswitch setup to let me select different
samples and to control the feedback on two delay lines.
The samples themselves were pulled out of various recordings
of Phasmatodea practices.

Anthony had a cd player and various cd’s, a reverse delay,
and a looper. He was also playing the roland handsonic (essentially,
an electronic handdrum) on a tubular bells setting. He was feeding
the handsonic and the cds of chants and other sounds into the delay
and loopers.

badger was setup with the zeta electric upright and
his usual pedal array (well, a good size subset of it anyway…).

We also had two folks (Carlos and Todd) during abstract projections
(custom slides and hand tweaking and manipulation of slide projectors)
during the show. Very cool.

I think it turned out well. I wasn’t should what to expect since
I think all three of us were performing in a fashion we hadn’t done
before live (me on laptop, anthony on samples, steve on bass).

Very swirly churning noises. Fun.

Things I screwed up: I forgot the usb cable I need to hook up
the midi interface and had to run home to get it.