八( ＾□＾*)

I would regularly search to see if there were any developments on the release of the Nexus 7 Dock, leaked so long ago, yet with no news or release date mentioned. Then they started to show up on Amazon, but well above list price – but one day, when I’d all but given up, I finally stumbled upon an article announcing their availability, dated only one day prior – with a link to the Google Play product listing! But, it had sold out – in less than one day (in fact, almost immediately!). I kept checking, and a few days later, it was suddenly available again – shipping in “about a week” – though in actuality it arrived much sooner, via 2-day air. And now, I have pogo pins – making this the most pleasant to use of any of my many docks – no lining up mUSB ports or 30-pin connectors – just grab it when you need it and drop it back on when you’re done – with the added bonus of being able to use Jelly Bean’s Daydreams while docked!

The first “Chapter” gives an introduction to SLUG, the Simple Low-res Utility code for Gaming, using the PMC or any other Propeller board with VGA or TV output. The second installment introduces MIGS, the Multi-Interface Game-control Standard, which facilitates the use of a range of controllers, from keyboard to NES to Wii, with Propeller-based video games.

Another great Instructable from Propellerpowered is TV Out for the Pocket Mini Computer, which I also completed along with the Creating Animation and Games chapters, since they cover the tweaks needed to use TV Out vs. VGA. There’s something great about seeing those low-res graphics on an old-school CRT that you just don’t get from a crisp modern LCD! I’m not sure what chapters Jeff at Propellerpowered has planned, but I’ll certainly be using them to supplement my Propeller education, and supporting his shop, whose low prices and fast fulfillment I’ve been very pleased with too!

My RetroCade MegaWing arrived on New Year’s Eve, and I was anxious to get it running, but ran into trouble attempting to load the firmware. I posted my problems to the RetroCade Synth Forums, and got a reply from Jack within a day, and an updated bitfile for use with the 500K after just one more day. I still intend to upgrade to the Pro in order to take full advantage of the hardware, but I was up and running and making bleeps and bloops via the RetroCade Control Dashboard immediately after loading the new bits! Next will be integrating it into my studio “for real” via MIDI, and hopefully soon, diving in deep and hacking its hardware! □＿ヾ(･_･ )

I am really pleased with my PMC so far. Assembly was straightforward, well-documented, and enjoyable, and best of all, successful! The COLOR BASIC language is a lovely flashback to my youth, spent hand-copying lines of code from the back of magazines, and the Propeller-based architecture will allow me to use it for all kinds of exciting things, and continue to build on knowledge gained from my HYDRA and Propeller Proto boards. I’ve implemented, yet not yet played with the optional IR receiver and 32K expansion, and look forward to trying the Wii controller connector. My next projects will likely be rolling my own TV-out video card, and wiring up a MIDI-IN to allow control of SIDcog via an external MIDI controller, e.g. iPad with CCK and USB-to-MIDI cable. My only slight disappointment so far was discovering the announcement of a new VGAPlus 256 kit on my first visit to the support forums, but at $12.99, it’s an amazing deal, so I’ll likely just pick one up while shopping for other accessories!

and keep up with it using the official Android and iOS apps!

2013 US TV coverage is provided by NBC Sports – you can tell how big of a priority Motorsports is to NBC by the site’s navigation – it’s under “More” – just below “Dog Show” – a worrying sign, since NBC has wrangled 2013 US F1 TV coverage away from SPEED - and is being called by Leigh Diffey – perhaps as a warm-up for his upcoming F1 duties…?

Assembly is a doddle, despite the somewhat hastily-written instructions – I was up and running within about 20 minutes. The only slight scare was when it initially failed to make any sound upon plugging into an old guitar amp after assembly – turns out that the Shape knob was just too far in one direction to make any noise – as soon as I realized this, all kinds of exciting buzzes and screeches started reverberating throughout the house!

My small disappointment with the kit was that it only accomplished one of my two goals: I had hoped for a synth kit that was simple enough for me to assemble and understand. It was very simple to build, but the “educational” aspect was a little lacking – even with the inclusion of schematics and PCB layout, I didn’t feel as though there was adequate explanation of how it was that all these little components were making these cool sounds, especially for a kit aimed at beginners, who are unlikely to be able to interpret schematics and such. Regardless, I’m very pleased with the kit, and plan on checking out more kits from Bleep Labs!

[Update: I may have overdone it slightly with the on-board cams:

...and yes, the phone I used to take that picture reverted to a 5th screen as soon as I was done!]

The awesome buttons, by the way, are from Adafruit.

As the title implies, Values, Units, and Colors enumerates the keywords, strings, numbers, and syntax associated with the manipulation of HTML elements via CSS.  What could have been little more than a crushingly boring list is made enjoyable by extensive supporting background information and history, as well as frequently goofy example values like web.waffles.org and syrup.html.  Also appreciated are details of browser support for features being described, often indicating their significant lack thereof, thus dashing the reader’s hopes of implementing an exciting feature that was just described – which is of course not the fault of the author!  Another appreciated feature is the use of mostly greyscale examples when possible – allowing for easy viewing on E Ink displays – reverting to color only when absolutely necessary, such as in describing hue angles.  The book is not without mistakes, for example, describing the iPad’s Retina display as 3,264ppi (it is 264ppi), among other typos, as of the November 26th Second release, so hopefully the “final final” content will receive some corrections, but even in its existing form, Values, Units, and Colors is a superb overview of its namesake properties.  The book concludes with a Color Equivalence Table, detailing the RGB Decimal, RGB Percentage, HSL, Hex, and Short Hex (when applicable) derivations of all 147 keywords defined in the CSS Color Module Level 3.  I’m certainly looking forward to the next installment!

Notes

1. ^ Alasdair Allan‘s iOS Sensor Programming series is similarly composed of previously-released books, though their publication is more spread out, and individual contents will be updated in their final conflation.

Product Details

Values, Units, and Colors: Foundational CSS3 Components
By Eric A. Meyer
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Released: September 2012
Pages: 46
Print ISBN: 978-1-4493-4251-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4493-4250-0

What I hoped to get out of this book, and what I think it is most appropriate for, is ascertaining a strategy for facilitating ongoing development of mobile apps across multiple platforms.  What I would not recommend it as, yet it somewhat claims to be, is an introduction to mobile development on the three platforms for C# developers.  While it does start out with basic “Hello World”-type applications for each OS, the pace becomes fairly rapid from there, and the dependency between layers once the code sharing techniques come into play can lead to some rather difficult debugging scenarios, which I cannot see someone without a sure footing in iOS and Android development concepts extricating themselves from easily.  It may be that I prefer to manually re-enter code examples – vs. simply downloading and running them – leaving myself open to such encounters – but I encountered some fairly obtuse error messages along the way – some caused by simple typos or autocompletion mistakes, but others caused by mistakes in the book, or variances in versions of the requisite tools.  Things can certainly get confusing as you switch between PC and Mac, MonoDevelop and Visual Studio, platform-specific shared libraries and the shared library that each links to, and the platform-specific apps atop that.  In addition, the book requires recollection and comprehension of previous chapters’ techniques, often providing only partial code listings, and making frequent “go ahead and do X in the same fashion as was done in Chapter N”-type statements – trivial to the experienced NIB-wrangler perhaps, but far from the step-by-step walkthrough that a mobile development newbie might require.

The example projects demonstrate the use of interfaces to abstract each platform’s implementation details from a shared layer of business logic, the observer pattern via events, per-platform partial classes, conditional compilation, platform-ubiquitous namespaces (thanks to the Mono Framework) and common .NET framework features (e.g. LINQ) over a range of applications.  Common networking functionality is leveraged to build a Twitter client, file system and database differences are explored via a note-taking app, and diverse location facilities are unified via a mapping application.  The author provides an excellent level of detail on the similarities and disparities between the three platforms, the related opportunities and caveats, and a logical project-based trajectory.  The conclusion seemed somewhat jarring, though Appendix B provides a list of books and online resources for further C#-based development on each platform.  Overall, the book was a logical extension of the superb presentation that led me to it in the first place, and provided a wealth of ideas and insight which I look forward to applying to current and future mobile app development.

Product Details

Mobile Development with C#: Building Native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone Applications
By Greg Shackles
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Released: May 2012
Pages: 174
Print ISBN: 978-1-4493-2023-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4493-2022-5

The latest Jelly Bean system update enables rotation of the home screen – really hoping this means that the long-rumored dock might be coming soon too! 八( ＾□＾*)

There are so many little things that make the live shows special, and Absolute Pleasure captures many of them; my spiritual twin Tait Nucleus? (you can tell us apart by the fact that he as a CS1x, and I have a CS2X – oh, and that he actually does useful things with his!)’s little Smiths reference during Future Is in the Future for example, or Dick Valentine’s bizarre injection of Monifah lyrics into Danger! High Voltage! and WJLB references (no Everything Counts this time though?).  If only the liner notes could diagram the moves corresponding to songs such as Dance Commander, as well as indicate DV’s cape selection during each, it would be the closest to a live experience possible without having Dick right there in front of you!

The song selection is pretty outstanding – lots of classics, including Gay Bar - with interlude (though, shorter than I usually prefer!) – but some catastrophic omissions like Improper Dancing, with its classic Stop/Continue segment in live shows; the album also falls short of a Dance Trilogy hat-trick by leaving out Dance Pattern.  The now-standard It’s Showtime! opening track, with its many opportunities for cape-wearing, gives way to Down At McDonnelzzz rather than the more recent staple Gay Bar Part Two, with its lyrical tie to She’s White, which does appear later on the album.  The album ends with all-time fantasy closing song Synthesizer - I can’t recall if I’ve ever heard it performed live, but I know I’ve certainly wished for it every time.  Other stand-outs are When I Get to the Green Building, a song about local landmark Domino’s Farms, usually appearing later in sets as an arm-waving chill-out before the final disco pogo blast, and most importantly, spoke two of the dance triskelion, Dance Epidemic - not the most rousing performance compared to some of the shows I’ve seen, but it gets bonus points for being one of my absolute favorite songs of all time!  One surprise inclusion was Crazy Horses by The Osmonds (?!) – I have no real comment on this either way, just…surprise!

This album was just what I needed to brighten my day as the weather gets colder and the days shorter – and to tide me over until the next show! #PutALittleMustardOnIt!

[Update 2012.10.11: @electric6 tweeted the story behind Absolute Pleasure's cover!]