Wow - It's been over 2 months since my last Slashdot posting (after some silly number (>100) in January)... I'm only here now to turn off the e-mail notifications. I think a new job helped get it out of my system though.

Don't you feel that PCs should have more knobs? Ever since I saw some really nice demos of Soft|Image a few years ago at ECTS, I have been hankering after some. They had a Peavey MIDI contoller box, with 16 sliders, and a bunch of buttons and dials hooked up to various animatable parameters within SI to allow them to use the model like a puppet, in real time. Very neat.

3D Studio Max also has MIDI input as a potential controller for any parameter (colour, size, position, rotation, fade between two textures...).

Build your own PIC-based MIDI controller explains the basics, and has plenty of links to other pages with more info. Of course, a USB-based box o' knobs might be nicer, but MIDI is already supported by most OSes. I daresay you can write a MIDI plugin for Girder to get contol of most of Windows from the knobs without dealing with all the automation side from scratch.

WTF? Correcting information in Slashdot is apparently a troll. God forbid that there be anything accurate. I only posted the correction in the first place because otherwise some weiner would point it out for me to prove they got their MSCE.

Likewise, posting actual information is likely to get you labelled a 'karma whore'.

Newsflash: my karma is maxed out, and has been for the last year. I don't post to win the game, or get the points. I don't even moderate, so it's not the power. For some wierd reason I like Slashdot as a forum of discussion, not a playing field. Go figure.

[/rant]

Too much caffeine, and too much bullshit. I'll be glad when I'm done with this week. Feh.

After reading some fascinating threads here , here and here about Slashdot's moderation, and the apparent abuses of power (both moderation and anonymity) by Slashdot editors, I kept seeing mentions of the Journal system, and how it would allow you to discuss such things 'on-topic'.

Where does this message show up? I don't think anyone gets to see it without looking up my page explicity. The 'journals' link on my personal page only lets me search for a journal by username, assuming I know the usernames of some of the other 100000 /. posters.

More ambient instrumentation for unix is LavaPS. It produces an animated lavalamp, where blobs in the lamp represent processes on your system. Bigger for more memory, faster moving for active processes (an idle system ends up with a load of various sized blobs sitting in the bottom of the lamp). You don't get a huge mass of numbers out of it (although you can get detail by clicking a blob), but it makes an interesting counterpoint to something like GKrellM.

Peep is a tool that allows you to listen to the health of your network. Rather than the obvious beeps and burps, it does this by producing a dynamic ambient soundtrack, which varies with the activity of various services. The theory is that the brain is a lot more sensitive to changes in ambient sound, and it doesn't require active concentration for you to take notice.

The ambient sound part of this is also available in two other bits of software: Boodler for Linux, and Aire Freshener for Windows. Aire Freshener comes with a whole bunch of nifty soundscapes (Star Trek Bridge? (TOS or TNG), Womb, Busy Resaurant, etc...).

Poot poot poot. Narf zort poink.
(the new foo bar baz)