One world, idiots

I bought myself a really tasty piece of kit this week, a Korg NanoKontrol. this little beauty lets me control various aspects of music via sliders, knobs and buttons while I play, and allows me to add expression to what is otherwise fairly automated music creation.

In the package I also recieved a coupon to get money off Ableton Live, which seems to be a fantastic piece of sequencing and performance software. I've been demoing it for a few days, and thought, why not? I'll see how much money the coupon gives me off.

So, I go to the Ableton shop, and find that I can buy their Ableton Intro package for 99 dollars or 99 Euros. Given that I'm downloading it, I'll take the 99 dollars, thanks! (A quick google shows that one Euro today is worth around 1.18 dollars). I then have the revelation that the coupon will either grant me 30 Euros off, or 50 dollars off.

Obviously, thinks I, this is a no-brainer! I'll buy Ableton Intro for 49 USD, I get some software, Ableton get a sale, everyone's happy! So I enter all my details.

At which point the website decides that I'll be paying in Euros instead, and reprices the coupon to 30 Euros rebate instead of 50 dollars, taking the grand total from £32 to £58.

Erm, no. No thanks. I'm not giving you twice as much money on a whim just because I live somewhere else in the world - we're talking about SOFTWARE.

So, no sale. Sorry Ableton - you had me on the hook, you had me putting the virtual box into my virtual shopping cart, you virtually had a sale - but you lost it at the last hurdle.

Where does the week go?

I started this week with good intentions, and ended up spending most of my time writing music and playing with my new NanoKontrol.

Still, I managed to get the cable run sorted from downstairs to up, even if I didn't manage to get anything under voice control yet. I'm not too far off!

It's amazing how fast a week goes ...

All tied up

A week on holiday brings with it a clear horizon and the promise of getting stuck in to all the work I've been thinking (and talking) about for the last six months.

I've got a spool of cat5 waiting to be put to good use and some cable trunking. Next up, I need to figure out where to drill and which floorboards to lift, both upstairs and down. I'd like to have some neat RJ45 sockets linking the upstairs and downstairs, and I'm also thinking of putting a media/compute server somewhere out of the way and that's probably going to mean I need to get some power and network cables under the stairs.

I've also made good progress on getting some hooks into the Microsoft Speech API - PySpeech looks like it'll do most of what I want, although I'm not sure if I can feed off the voice recogniser without it interacting with the operating system at the same time. The accuracy seems good for phrased dictation, but not so great for single word command sequences which may screw with my plans. I might have to break my command strings into discrete flows and make each stage gate on a selection of similar sounding words. I'm also unsure of how it interacts with different speakers.

Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have the infrastructure in place to voicerec from the bedrooms and the living room, and possibly one item in the house under voicerec control - I'm thinking of starting with an IR transmitter for the various media boxes. TIRA and USB-UIRT both look viable, although I've yet to find a UK reseller. If anyone knows of an alternative option please enlighten me - I'm basically looking for a transmitter/reciever box that connects via USB and has some form of programming API, with the intention of recording button presses on my existing remotes and playing them back to control my satellite and tellybox.

Every week has one WTF in it

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

although my weekly WTF frequency is considerably higher now Gabe's around.

Local minima

There's a guy who lives over the road from us. Even though we've been living here 6 months, he's never bothered calling, welcoming us to the neighbourhood, anything like that.

He's quite happy to park outside my house, tho. Rather than reverse into his own space, he'd rather drive forwards into the double space outside my house and park in the middle of the two.

That's about as lazy as you can get.

And justice for all

the Finns have just declared that broadband is a legal right for every citizen.

This may seem like fantastic news, but on closer inspection one has to wonder if it will simply mean more people spouting pointless trash on Facebook.

Still, the future starts here and all that. Good for you, Finland!

Leadership and solitude

I stumbled today across an interesting lecture given to students at West Point earlier this year.

I should probably get a copy of Heart of Darkness, I've not read it yet.