There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.
Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.
Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.
Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.
Yet another very cool, very online version of a traditionally desktop application is Gliffy. Gliffy is a very capable, although obviously not as feature-rich tool as its desktop counterpart, Visio. But who cares? Most of us really don’t. Using most of these tools, like Excel or Word or even Visio to its fullest extent requires a lot of time and experience. After all, games have been developed in Excel. Games! Your typical online spreadsheet doesn’t have that power, nor should it. I’m typically the first in line for more features, but not in this case. Let’s leave these online apps nice and small and quick, and they will serve the majority of users out there.
Windowing and Graphical User Interfaces are taking some more big steps. You may think that I may be talking about Windows Vista with Aero, but while it has some neat features, I’m not. Instead, let me first tell you about the coolest thing in X Windowswindow managers: Beryl. I’m totally going to date myself in this article by reminiscing about when I used twm, mwm, and fvwm. The X-Windows/*nix marriage was definitely something that I love - you have the power of a *nix kernel, a totally customizable command-line based shell, slap X-Windows on top of it and run any window manager you want. Your computing environment, your way.
Where was I? Oh yes, Beryl. Having been stuck in a predominantly MS Windows environment for years now, I’ve lost touch with the latest in the windowing advances. Luckily, I know folks who do keep in touch, and I was recently shown an extremely cool demo video of Beryl (and there are probably dozens of videos now). If you’ve seen demos of Aero and been wowed, prepared to be floored. Features in Beryl include warping windows, zooming in and out, using a cube as an abstration for a virtual desktop environment, transparency, wrapping windows around edges, and so much more. Just watch the video here:
September 3, 1999 at 10:18 AM · Filed under Software
Robert Cringley has just written a really interesting article on how he
sees the future shaping up for Microsoft, Intel and the Open Source
Movement and why. Yep, maybe we will all be running Linux and some free
Office Suite in the future… I can’t remember what it was like when we
were all running Atari’s, Amiga’s, Commodore’s and Mac’s and Windows
was slowly building its presence - it was probably similar, and no one
paid attention to Windows until they were actually running it
themselves.
He has also written a lot of really interesting articles in the past
that are worth taking a look at it. Just click the ‘Old Hat’ link.
September 2, 1999 at 10:13 PM · Filed under Cool, Misc, Software
Ok, there really isn’t a commercial to be aired for Linux during the next Superbowl, but this writer got to thinking about what such a commercial would be like. The cool thing here is all of the follow-on ideas that were generated by the readers. Some of them are pretty funny, and when you think about it, many of them would make really good ads. (See, you don’t need to be in Advertising to come up with this stuff, just a decent imagination).
Yet another very cool, very online version of a traditionally desktop application is 