Author: Kenward

Creating music on Android

Lately, I’ve been looking into music composition apps on the Android. I’ve found a few that I like. Electrum is a straight-forward drum machine. I like that it is very similar to typical drum machine programming, so if you are familiar with that, then it will be easy to pick up. It comes with some built-in drum sounds, lets you download some, or add your own. Reactable (see screenshot to the left) is a fairly experimental composition tool High learning curve. You connect samplers, loops, sequencers, delay effects, etc, to make music. I can see making decent electronic music with this, but I’m still learning. I’m also experimenting with NodeBeat (fun and easy to use but creatively limited) and SPC (looks like a loop sequencer mostly but I haven’t spent much time with this one). I’ll probably write more on these later after I’ve had a chance to use them some more. Maybe even post some MP3s.

Fix Android “Low on space” message

I finally found a fix. I’ve been getting the “Low on space – phone storage space is getting low” message on my HTC Incredible often. I get this message even when I have hundreds of MB free. I’ve tried ignoring the message (no other problems really come up). I’ve tried deleting applications– that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. I think I’ve figured out what it is. The fix isn’t permanent, but it does clear the message.

Please read and understand the whole thing if you plan to do what I’ve done below. It’s involves deleting data– you may lose important information.

Continue reading “Fix Android “Low on space” message”

Fixed my iTunes skipping problem

Since I upgraded my PC to Vista, iTunes had been skipping. Under XP on the same machine, iTunes had been playing OK. Playback would stutter/skip several times a minute. It was really annoying. I couldn’t find a fix anywhere, although all the fixes seemed to point to Quicktime or upgrading codecs. However my fix turned out to be something else. In Quicktime, I changed “Play audio using” from “Direct Sound” to “Windows Audio Session”. No more skipping! Apparently the “Windows Audio Session” option became available with iTunes 9.

DrinkGen – a tool for generating mixed drink recipies

Click here to generate mixed drink recipies with DrinkGen.

Some examples of drinks invented with DrinkGen:

Hopeful Cocktail
3 oz. Whisky
Juice of 1 a Lemon
Fill cocktail glass with Cola. Add cracked ice.

Mathematical
1½ oz. Whisky
1 oz. Tonic water
Shake with cracked ice, and strain into in a collins glass.

Horrendous Albany
1 oz. Vodka
3 oz. Whisky
Stir, in a rocks glass. Add cracked ice.

Tarot Plot Generator Update

The Tarot Plot Generator has been updated to be a stand alone HTML page. You can now save it to your computer and you don’t need to be online. The previous version was at Abulfia. The new Tarot Plot Generator was made using RandListGen.
Tarot Plot Generator is a writing tool, to inspire plot ideas, using the symbolism of the tarot. It details the main character and three acts with fourteen cards.

Svibice – 511 Vibrations Per Second MP3

I decided to participate in the Wikipedia names your band (and album cover) game which directs you through randomizing sources for your fake album cover. And them you mash them up using Photoshop, or in my case, GIMP. All fun and games until Vic required me to make the music to go along with the art. This is almost what I had in mind, download the music here: Svibice – 511 Vibrations Per Second

[The song is hyper fast, 160 BPM is fast for me, with distorted bass and waves of fuzzy guitars. Chanty cut up drone vocal.]

(source photo by Joao Carlos Alves, licensed under creative commons)

Converting MOV to AVI

Kim has a Kodak camera that makes movies in MOV format, with no option to save as AVI. We need AVI format video to use in Windows Movie Maker, because it WMM doesn’t like MOV (which is the default format of Apple’s Quicktime). So, after struggling with various converters that didn’t really work, I found (or re-discovered… I had used it before) MP4cam2AVI. It is free, as in Free Open Source, download from Sourceforge.