Category Archives: ideas

emegency podcast network

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Visiting my parents place, and the power went out in the middle of the night. And I started thinking about what devices do and do not work. And I had an idea: The Emergency Podcast Network.

The idea being a localized (say. by zipcode) podcast that contains emergency info. It could include police/fire, utilities like power/water/gas/telephone/cable, evactuation info, etc.

For devices that can show text the info would be included as text files. Other devices could do the “text as filenames in playlist” trick. Devices that can show images could include maps.

You could do a map trick, and figure out the zipcodes a trip will take you through, and download all the approriate info.

Since it would be a huge number of localized podcast, the audio info could be generated with speech synths or phone menu style prerecorded snippets.

It might actually make a podcast that would be useful.

random ideas

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I want to build a mbira using a 3-4 inch diamater pipe, maybe 3 foot long. Have the keys running along the top, but mounted perpendicular to the length. With a shoulder mount. And a sight. I’ll call it a mbirazooka.

I want to make a new brake pedal for the bonneville. With the rear sets and the current brake pedal, the ergos of the pedal aren’t ideal, especially if I’m wearing boots. I want a pedal thats a little bit lower, and/or a little further right. Only concern would be getting the pedal much lower than the foot peg. Scraping a foot peg is mostly harmless. Bashing the brake level into the ground could be bad. Shouldn’t be hard to make.

I want to build an intrument of some sort you control with random remote controls. Using something like irman/lirc and
hacking it to generate MIDI would be enough. Plug that into something like Reaktor. Call the hole thing “Potatoe”. Or maybe
convert the ir signals sound input. Or maybe both.

things to remember

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about things that I should know, but do not. Like all 50 state capitals, all the U.S. presidents, world capitals, metric/non metric conversion factors, etc. Basically, things that it would be handy to have memorized.

So I got thinking about what would be the best way to do that. It seems for remembering that kind of info permanently, you really need to be forced to recall it multiple times over time. So it might be interesting to do some sort of software to do just that.

Which then gets morphed into doing it as a website. You could set it up so people could choose what they want to memorize, and then randomly send them email/im/textmessage/phonemessages/etc asking them to recall part of the info. You could setup a blog that would ask “Whats the capital of Wyoming?” or “Whats cosine equal to?” or whatever people want to burn into there brain.

You could provide various canned memory techniques (mnemonics, pegging, memory palaces, etc) as well.

You would have canned sets of things people want to memorize (the above mentioned capitals for example) and could allow people to add there own lists. You could allow people to customize the way they want to be quizzed.

You could get all buzz-wordy and allow people to add associations to info (aka, tag it). You could use said info to attempt to automagically build trees of associations to help people remember stuff. That would probably never actually, work, alas.

guitar hacking

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So, with the fretless conversion pretty successful, now I’m thinking about other guitar hacks to try. I might try converting another cheap guitar into a slide guitar. Thats a pretty standard conversion, so shouldn’t be too bad.

It would be cool to have some sort of sustainer[1] on the fretless (or the regular guitars as well). There is a mostly[2] interesting thread at Project Guitar about building DIY sustainers. So that would make an interesting project. Maybe a slide guitar with a sustainer.

Or perhaps go the Sonic Youth/Glen Branca route and tune one so all the strings are the same note. For a while I’ve been thinking about getting a electric 12 string and putting a high tuning on it (aka, more or less a 12 string Nashville Tuning). Just for chimy shimmering chordal stuff.

[1] A sustainer is just a device that causes guitar strings to continue vibrating. An E-bow is an example of a sustainer.

[2] The thread has 600+ posts in it, so a lot of noise comes with a lot of signal.

more fretless guitar pics

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Some slightly higher quality pics, showing the finished neck in more detail.


Fretboard after wood filler and sanding, with strings on (a set of .12 flat wounds)


Looking down the [un?]fretboard.

fretless guitar

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I got bored today. So I bought a cheap guitar and made it fretless. Which mainly consists of yanking out the existing the frets. A little wood filler, some sanding, and some setup work, and it seems to work.

Sample of my not so impressive
fretless playing

Filling in the fret slots with wood filler. And yes, my work table does always look that messy.


A side shot trying to show lack of frets.

As good of a use for an old Peavey “Receptor” as anything. It could use a bit more setup work. Setting the truss rod and action on a fretless is a little odd. But I’ll figure it out.

pocket ref website

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I want a website thats similar in concept to the Pocket Ref books (and other similar to-the-point all content/no filler references).

Then of course, it should be freely available (for the most part, the information falls into “facts”, and most of what doesn’t could probably be found in public domain works).

And searchable. Then the killer app would be to bundle it up into an app for a Palm or Pocket PC.

Just in case you ever need to calculate the velocity of air in pipe. Or know the approximate tensile strength of a grade 8 1/2 bolt. Or the type of household voltage in Iceland. Or the area of a regular octagon. Or the triple point of water. Or the density of carbon steel.

Seems like it could fall under Wikipedia since at least some of that info is already there.

screensaver ideas

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Once upon a time, I wrote a screensaver for xscreensaver. So, though I’ve barely looked at xscreensaver code in years, I still occasional think about ideas for screensavers.

1. A “meta” screensaver. This would render any other screensavers into a texture, that would get texture mapped to some 3d object. You could even go recursive if you wanted.

2. A version of webcollage that would point at images sources that are Creative Commons. This would be pretty easy.

3. A fake road map generator. Just randomly create something that kind of looks like a streep map. City maps would be easiest, but highway style maps would be cool as well. Think google maps, but totally bogus.

4. “old growth”, a screensaver that would draw what looks like a cross section cut out of a old tree, and then label the rings with historical dates and info. Something sort like this.

ideas

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This is the start of an experiment. The goal being to start recording all those various ideas I have and never bother to write down and soon forget. We’ll see how it works. Alot of these will probably only make sense to me.

Todays ideas:

SooperLooper

  • add “loop windowing” support that can be controled via midi CC controllers. You could control the index of which cycle to loop, and how many cycles to index. Doing this via the already existing “cycles” shouldn’t be too difficult.
  • But, the more interesting idea would be to the same thing across any subsection of a loop. Position and length of the section to loop would be deteremined by CC as above, but could be any part of the loop, not just “cycles”. Sort of a granular approach. Something like Grainstates in Reaktor
  • ping-pong or scanner mode of loop playback. At the moment, sooperlooper supports playing a loop forwards or backwards. The idea would be to add support for playing forwards, then backwards, then forwards, etc. It already crossfades loops, so this could be interesting when doing “granular” type looping and ambient/noise type stuff.

And I seem to have already forgotten the other ideas I was going to include in this entry. How about that.