Bent Derelict Spacecraft Keyboard, Musini Ambient Music Generator

Mike’s description: “It’s the type of artifact you might discover hidden away on a derelict alien freighter drifting aimlessly somewhere near the ancient center of our galaxy … There are mysterious faded glyphs on the buttons – the remnants of a now long dead language.” Mike aka Chronovalve writes CDM to share two new projects: […]

DIY MIDI Controller from Pennies and Popsicle Sticks

“It’s kinda ghetto”, notes creator Cousin Throckmorton, but a series of pennies becomes a touch interface for Ableton Live and drums in Battery. Apologies if you’ve seen this; I hadn’t. (That or else I had, and they didn’t push the whole “pennies and popsicles” angle.) The $.08 Ableton Live Controller His MySpace blog, 13unluckysongsaboutlove, is […]

Adobe Lightroom Goes 1.0: Shipping Soon, Introductory Price US$199

We’ve covered Lightroom from early in the beta. Now adobe have put up a product page, thanked the half-million beta testers, and announced that Lightroom won’t be a part of CS3, but will be shipping mid-feb, for an introductory price of US$199 (until May, then $299). I feel that $200 is quite reasonable for the […]

Quartz Composer: Fun, Easy, Frustrating and Beguiling

Robert of Flight404 fame has posted his initial dabblings in Quartz Composer. I find it rather exciting that a Processing Ninja such as Robert can find inspiration in QC. I have a terrible head for languages – both human and machine – so I’ve been wondering whether a node-based environment may be easier for me […]

Mute VJ: Open Source, Flash/Flex-Based Visual App Integrates flickr, Yahoo Maps

VJing with flickr? Clubbing with Yahoo Maps? Flash/Flex and Apollo-based apps present some interesting new ideas. We’ve been tracking the excellent Flash 9-based Onyx VJ tool, among others, and it’s nice to see the “open source Adobe-based VJ app” category growing. Mute is very early in development, perhaps not as far along as Onyx, but […]

Vista Launch is Here; Developers, Help Us Get Ready

This afternoon, I’m off to Microsoft’s Vista launch shindig. I’m hoping there will be clowns and ponies. After all, Microsoft can afford a party. As for the OS itself, I can’t resist relevant quotes from Star Trek III: Uhura: Would you look at that! Kirk: My friends, the great experiment: The Excelsior. Ready for trial […]

Gallo’s 5LS Prototype: Gorgeous, 78-inch Tall Giant Speakers

While on the subject of Gallo Speakers, here’s about as far as you can get from the baby-sized A’Diva satellites: speakers that tower 78″ tall, pack some 12 4″ aluminum woofers each, and deliver nearly omni-directional sound. Micro speakers (5″ each), yes, but in a slender but tall enclosure. The Reference 5LS speakers, due third […]