Bless Nintendo for making the Wii controller: inexpensive, lots of internal sensor data (motion sensing, tilt sensing, buttons), elegant design, and standard Bluetooth support allowing it to be used with Mac, Windows, and Linux. Now there’s free and open source software for making the most of your Wiimote as a musical instrument. First up: Wiinstrument, […]

Hardware MIDI control, full-blown synthesizer, all from a Game Boy Color. Christmas lights not included. Want that vintage-y goodness of a real Game Boy’s sound, but want new-fangled color and MIDI? Pushpin is for you. First introduced seven years ago, it’s finally been released. Brian Whitman writes: Hi, thought you’d like to know that Noah […]

There’s been various speculation about whether the advent of the video game Rock Band will inspire real-world musicians. It certainly isn’t just a Simon-style button masher. Queue up Rush, crank up the difficulty level, grab real drum sticks, and you’d better actually have a sense of timing. But maybe the real message of Rock Band’s […]

This Megatron robot is not actually playing these drums. But knowing the hacker community on the Web, he may be soon. Photo: punkjr. That didn’t take long. Just days after the games’ release, someone is already using controllers for the Harmonix game Rock Band with their computer software. Cyrus Thomas-Walker writes us: Looks like someone […]

This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of ByteMe festival and enjoying the hospitality of the inimitable Kat and Jasper, a.k.a. CDMo favourites VJZoo. We don’t have any official panels or workshops planned. Instead we’ll be devoting our time to documenting the goings-on and creative […]

If you missed the chance to make a custom Monome kit the first time, you’ll get a second chance! From the Monome site: the 40h kit allows users to assemble their own 40h-compatible device. the kit includes the circuits and keypads, requiring the use to create an enclosure and top plate. we produced 100 units […]

Okay, Leopard users — we’re interested to hear more video output results as people upgrade. We got some good news earlier this month in that MacBook Pros (with both NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards) now properly support analog video output running under Windows on Leopard’s Boot Camp. That’s nifty, of course. But what about non-Pro […]

Pimp my mobile Quartz Composer ‘Book: this shot by Flickrer qlc demonstrates just how attached some Mac visualists are to Quartz Composer. But with security protections, is every QC composition an island? Good news: there’s a fix. Quartz Composer gurus have had to face challenges bringing in network data: the problem is, to keep Quartz […]

BanPiracy.org is a independent organization pursuing “copyright enforcement” for pirated software, targeting studios with sting operations and lawsuits. Recently, I challenged them to demonstrate that they have other developers onboard aside from Waves Audio. That seems reasonable, given their website claims they have been contracted by “many of the biggest names in the industry” and […]

The Oculon Pocket Projector Pro 920 and 1440 are.. well.. actual pocket projectors. Available in December the tiny projectors pack 640×480 VGA for the 920 ($299) and 800×600 SVGA for the 1440 ($399), and literally fit in the palm of your hand. The 1440 sports both composite and VGA (D-SUB 15 pin) inputs connections, while […]