Music, Free Software & Bad Jokes

Here is a remix of my favourite SuperTux Song so far, called Dark Forest Keep Symphonic Remix. It’s basically the same song as in SuperTux Milestone 2 but rendered using a professional orchestra sample library which makes it sounds a lot more realistic and provides a much deeper atmosphere.

For anyone who is interested, here is my finished Diploma Thesis. It is titled Methoden des Software-Systemdesigns am Beispiel des Zugleitbetriebs - Eine Vergleichsstudie or, in English, Comparison of Software System Design Methods at the Example of “Zugleitbetrieb” (Train Guidance System).

HAL Is Other People, the Openmoko sound theme I made for Alphaone, has been updated to version 1.0.

This is something cool. Something extremely geeky. Something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time.

This is a gift coupon my friends gave me for my 18th birthday. Even if you don’t know German, you can probably guess what this is about. Looks like they got away cheap. :-)

Finally I, too, am the proud owner of a Neo Freerunner Linux Smartphone! I flashed the SHR firmware image yesterday and I was surprised to find that they still ship it with one of my early ring tones set as default. But that’s not the reason why this is worth blogging about.

My friend and roommate Daniel gave me the device for a very nice bargain: He wanted a personal sound theme in return. And of course, in the spirit of the whole Freerunner idea, he wants to make it available to everyone.

I own an Archos 5 portable media player. It’s a great piece of hardware based on an ARM Cortex CPU, it plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC encoded music and it runs a proprietary firmware on top of a Linux system. Unfortunately, Archos has a very strict policy prohibiting homebrew applications on their devices so they can charge extra for every new feature.

I re-arranged another piece from the SuperTux Soundtrack: The Forest Dance from Milestone 2, which can be played on piano and soprano/alto recorders. This is fairly easy to play and should be suitable for beginners.

Here’s another piece of music for you. It’s called Oldschool reEducated and was created for the Streaming Music Compo at the Breakpoint 2008 demoscene party which I attended last week with the guys from my demo group, fractal MiND.

There is a way that will allow the PhotoFrame Chumby Widget to display images that are stored on a USB drive; it is a bit tricky, but it works. The idea is to replace the web server that runs on the Chumby with one that is installed on the USB drive which will allow you to configure it easily.

Here’s how it’s done: