I received a sonuus i2M musicport for Christmas 2011 which has proven to be a great tool for getting the creative juices flowing. Here’s the first recording I created using it to record guitar and MIDI parts in GarageBand using my late 80s strat.
Welcome
Welcome to pantsonhead.com - the thing that is beauty to all that behold her. The wearing of pants on one's head is the most liberating of experiences. We recommend you try it at the earliest opportunity. Better yet, take a photo and send it in for our gallery.Stadium of Dreams – Sonuus i2M musicport
December 28th, 2011FontSoup Screensaver for OS X
June 10th, 2011Lately I’ve been exploring Objective-C and writing OS X applications using Xcode. It’s pretty interesting and it’s always good to try/learn new things. I decided porting an existing application from Win32 to OS X would be a good test of my grasp of things, and keep things interesting. I decided to port the FontSoup screensaver as it has a few interesting parts but is still not overly complex.
I’m pretty happy with the result so far, it looks good to me (right up to 1080p) and has support for a wide range of font encodings (Western, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese Traditional & Simplified, Korean, Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil, Tibetan, Armenian, Symbol, Dingbats & Braille), pretty much anything that was pre-installed with Snow Leopard.
This version is definitely still beta as there a few tweaks I need to make yet, but if you’re using a Mac and wanna try it out and I’d love to hear your feedback.
Your can download the FontSoup screensaver for OS X here.
HTML5 Canvas iPhone applet
November 8th, 2010
Today I decided to start exploring the new HTML5 canvas tag and see how easy it was to program. I wanted to make something with a high update rate to check for flickering, to try the basic drawing functions, and to catch and process click/touch events. I also wanted to have a stab at an iPhone app, so I threw together a randomized colour cycler. The canvas is repainted every 75 milliseconds so the the colour fades through different spectrums. If you like the colour it’s displaying you just tap the screen and you can see the hexidecimal code.
I think it turned out pretty well. It runs nicely on my Ipod Touch and in Chrome, and moderately well in Firefox. I found some pretty good references to help me pull it all together, Dive Into HTML5’s Canvas reference, a great Waves canvas tutorial from Michael Nutt, and 12 great iPhone Development Tips from sitepoint.
Click here to try the Glow – Radmonized Colour Cycler Canvas applet.
Monkeys found our camera*
September 9th, 2010This video was released in way back on 9th February 2010, but it’s still so great to watch I wanted to post it here. I highly recommend watching it fullsceen.
* Yes, I know they are chimps, not monkeys – but that’s how the video was titled.
We got fish
August 8th, 20105 year old Georgia introduces the world to our new fish. We purchased 4 guppies (2 blue neons and 2 tuxedos) as our “starter” fish. Look forward for more reports later on as we add more fish.
Family Comes First
August 3rd, 2010
Today I was a little shocked to discover that it’s been the best part of three months since I tended to this site. On 14th May 2010 my son Zac was born and I’ve been happily focused on him lately.
It was nice to discover a slew of comments regarding the Random Text plugin and although I am sorry some of you have had to wait a while for a response to your questions and suggestions, I am comfortable that my priorities are in the right order. Having said that, I will hopefully be releasing an update incorporating some of these suggestions shortly.
Thanks for your patience.
Update 2010/08/04: Random Text v0.2.5 has been released.
Fake Hollandaise Sauce
March 15th, 2010Yesterday was Mother’s Day (or Mothering Sunday for purists) in the U.K. so I decided to make Eggs Benedict for breakfast, but I was a little short on ingredients for the Hollandaise Sauce. I managed to throw together a fake version that worked so well I decided to share it here.
Ingredients:
Mayonaise, Milk, Cider Vinegar, Sugar, Paprika, Salt, Pepper
Method:
Starting with a base of Mayonaise in a saucepan, blend with the milk at a low heat until the texture is smooth and creamy. Carefully blend in the tiniest splash of Cider Vinegar – be careful here because too much will ruin the sauce. Add a pinch of Sugar temper the vinegar (I had no Lemons so had to use the Cider Vinegar, Lemon juice is better). Add a pinch of Paprika for a bit of colour and flavour, and then Salt and Pepper to taste.
I’ve not quoted any ingredient measurements here because I just judged it by the consistency, taste and smell of the sauce.
Check Out This Hilarious Video
February 5th, 2010This is pretty funny the first time you see it, so I thought I’d post it here since I’ve not made an update for a while. Enjoy!
Sunrise video
October 25th, 2009I found an old .m4a file of this track that I wrote years ago (when I was in my “synth” phase). The original files are long gone, but I managed to convert this back to wav/mp3 and threw together this video with some screen captures from Winamp’s Milkdrop plugin.
Using PS2 SingStar discs on PS3
October 11th, 2009
When I fired up SingStar on my PS3 today, I was prompted to download an update. After installation, the update details were displayed as “Fixes compatibility with some SingStar® discs for the PlayStation®2 console“. Before today, I was not aware that PS3 version of SingStar was capable of using PS2 discs.
Apparently backwards compatibility was announced back in December 2008, but I guess I missed the memo. I foolishly assumed that that they were incompatible since the PS3 doesn’t support PS2 games, but since the game-play elements haven’t really changed the SingStar developers have graciously added support for reading content from PS2 discs.
Since I already had SingStar, SingStar ’90s and SingStar Singalong with Disney on PS2 discs, I now have 80 more songs that had not been sung in a long time. The only duplicate track I have is Lovefool by The Cardigans. My four year old daughter was very pleased to see the return of SingStar Singalong with Disney (only available for PS2) and Aqua’s Barbie Girl track.
Admitedly, the video quality is not as good on HDTV as the native PS3 tracks, but the audio is perfect and all the tracks I tried are still completely playable, and you can create/save snapshots and videos if you have a PlayStation Eye for your PS3. Having said that, please note that “Media recorded from songs on PlayStation®2 format SingStar® discs cannot be uploaded to My SingStar® Online.“
