MuseScore: open source notation software

I’ve got an old Sibelius CD down in the warehouse, but I couldn’t be ar*ed to find and fetch, and it probably wouldn’t work on Vista anyway. So … I had a look around and installed MuseScore, a free, open source competitor for Finale Notepad (which incidentally now costs $10). David Bolton does a head-to-head…

Sugar Beast Circus

More vids. Home. “this show combines beautiful sets, stunning aerial displays and wonderful animated landscapes. Set inside a series of miniature circus tents, The Sugar Beast Circus brings back to life the celebrated circus sideshows of the 1800s” I once did a multimedia kiosk for some people using the metaphor of the red/white-striped tent. I…

Washboard + organ duo

This means I can leave percussion off the organ. But does anyone play the washboard or frottoir in Spain?

IMHO

Trouble@This Is the Modern World plays a simply divine collection of tracks.

Palm or similar as integrated sound control device

Rather than mucking around with Gumstix and stuff, the excellent Christian Blanchard runs his Orgautomatix from MIDI data and a MIDI reader on a Palm (pic here of the setup). Old Palms go for a tenner and the Z22 is around 70 quid at the moment. IttyMidi does a package including an old Palm (only…

Animated monkey

As you can see in the photo of the monkey under construction he sits on a circular ply board that is attached to a bar the other end of which runs in a gear-driven eccentric self-aligning bearing which rocks him with a circular motion. This motion is continuous and draws attention to him. If a…

Bike battery chargers

A couple of things found (a Topsy, for example, “runs for 7 hours on a 12 volt 30 AH battery“): http://www.mark-ju.net/bike_ride/equipment/charger.htm charges stack of 6Vs For about the same weight as a generator setup, you could get a solar charger that works whether you are pedaling or not. Batteries.com has one that weighs .28 pounds…

Gumstix

D says re controlling barrel organ valves using MIDI: Could probably do that very neatly using micro pc like a gumstix No need for hard drive for midi files – use flash memory. Power it off solar/dynamo, probably. Customer projects Do I want something like this? You bet: More random interesting stuff Roomba & Gumstix