This was a particularly formidable night, owing to the arrival of Stephen with his awesome home-made hurdy gurdy.
I also gave a bit of a talk about SuperCollider, and some hacklabbers got to try it out on their laptops. We got Ioann’s old Yamaha keyboard working and played with pugs.
The next music night will be on the 17th of February. Is there something you’d like to hack next month? Join us on our mailing list and come along on the night!
Global game Jam was held at Napier University for Edinburgh this year. I took part with one of my friends, Tom Joyce. We had previously taken part in a game jam before. The theme for the 48h game development event was a picture of a snake eating its tail laid out in a circle.
Our interpretation for the theme was the circle of life, but we also took more literal elements in the form of snake poison. Our game celled Apoptosis (official term for the cellular mechanism of programmed cell suicide) follows the journey of a poison acting on a body, at the cellular level (level 1), the arterial level (level 2) and organs (level 3). Hacklab is kindly hosting it here (Chrome recommended).
Ubuntu has a new feature for the unity desktop, you can “search” for commands in menus of (seemingly) legacy apps and across programs. It creates a really cool console way of interacting with GUI programs. This is better than windows’ search the start menu for programs which I also like a lot. Damn, the HUD looks like it could be better than tab completion, or browser address boxes that Google search! Apparently its planned to take voice commands too… woo!
(annoyingly Robot Operating System is not supported on the latest version of Ubuntu though 
need another LTR quick!!! ) Ubuntu HUD
Its nearly RaspberryPi time!! I am excited. John Alexander of Shropshire Linux User Group has been developing a breakout board for it.
“This may be of interest to folks in Edinburgh. It’s the first revision of our prototyping board for the RaspberryPI .
All the best John”
Computers are the most flexible tool in the engineers toolbox. When I grew up I think I was lucky to be born into the start of the home computer boom of the 80s. Computers like the BBC micro and spectrum were very easy to program, and because computers were so novel, our expectations of what could be achieved were easily within the reach of single programmer. Now were in the millennium, and PCs do so much more, the methods we use to program them are much more complicated. Learning to program has become very difficult on standard computing kit found in the home. So how should the next generation learn how to program?
On a wet and windy night when anybody sensible would be staying inside, a few hardy individuals ventured out to the Hacklab to celebrate 30 years of the BBC Micro.
Several BBCs, now in Martin’s possession, had made the trip north and after a bit of swapping of keyboards etc one was ready to go. The power switch was flicked followed by the classic bleep from the speaker.
Attempts to use a real floppy drive resulted in “funny noises” so a floppy disk emulator board with a 2GB SD card (probably enough to store every BBC title many times over) was used for storage. It didn’t take long for classic titles such as Elite, Repton and Stryker’s Run to be loaded up and played with enthusiasm.
Many British children of the 80s and early 90s grew up around a BBC either at school or home if you were fortunate enough to have one. I remember school teachers’ children (and often large group of friends!) would spend many hours on the BBC that had been brought home from school for the summer holidays.
The computing landscape has changed massively since the BBC was king. Raw computing power many magnitudes more powerful than a “Beeb” are now available for a fraction of the cost. However arguably computing has become less accessible with the complexity of many modern systems making it hard for a fledgling hacker to start their path. Products such as Raspberry-Pi aim to encourage such learning but the fact remains that there won’t be anything quite like a BBC again.
After a night of “prototyping” and filing LED ends flat we can proudly present:
Running from a 12volt rail of our wall mounted computer wall-e, vistors to the lab will be guided to our door. 6 LEDs sourced from Al’s random stuff box are used for illuminations with a cunning resistor arrangement.
Last weekend in the Barbican in London, a whole bunch of hardware and software hackers got together for Music Hack Day. Anyone who likes a bit of music in their hacks should check out this event, where everyone gets together for 24 hours and creates new and innovative music applications. Sponsors like Spotify, Novation, Last.fm and more (check the MHD website, there’s loads of them) open up their technology, pay for the pizza and beer, and give prizes to the creators of their favourite hacks.
At the end of 24 hours, 62 different hacks were made, from Kinect dancing games, to owl keyboards, to musical t-shirts. The London Hackspace were out in force, running a neat little room of hardware hackery that yielded some great projects. They also wrote a blog entry, which you can read here.
To my mind, the most mad-scientist-worthy hack was the Helimin, a musical instrument that you control by flying a remote controlled helicopter across the room. Evil genius. Despite Terrible Manflu I managed to make a little facebook-wall-enabled step sequencer that I may yet finish one day.
If you like music, you like hacking, and you like sleep deprivation, you should go to Music Hack Day. If you want to see the future of music technology, here is a complete list of all the hacks that were completed and demoed last Sunday afternoon.
Okay, so I’m writing this with a bit of a sore head because we were hacking till gone midnight and I had to get up early the next day, but it was worth it. Last night was the first in a monthly series of music hack nights at the lab, and it was crazy popular. There were more people than chairs at some points in the night!
There was lots of talk, lots of playing with real and software instruments, some soldering, some embedded audio, and even some flashing lights. Watch the video at the end of this post to get a feel for the vibe. There was also discussion about ways to involve hacking with music, technology and performance.
Thanks to everyone who came along and made it a great night. We’re planning the next one for the 16th of December and we’re hoping to do a jamming session. There’s a public wiki for sharing our ideas right here. Go there and add yourself to the People page, or to suggest things to do in December. We’ll argue about it nearer the time on the hacklab-discuss mailing list 
Robotics blogger, Per Sjoborg, from flexibilityenvelope, is coming to visit us on Sunday the 20th. He is bringing the coolest pieces of consumer modular technology yet, Modrobotic’s Cubelets. I’ll be down from 2pm onwards if you would like to join us, or do any other kind of robotic hacking.
Tom
