"ZX Spectrum Orchestra have been locked away in the lab writing code. They use no midi, no samplers, in fact, no instruments other than Sinclair hardware and peripheral devices. For instance, vocals on tracks are supplied by the Currah Speech. An early speech synthesizer built for the ZX Spectrum, it explores the found poetry of basic keyboard commands."
> Armed with a crappy radio we found we could get perfect reception by connecting to the air conditioning vents with a set of crocodile clips purchased from Tandy's.
similarly, the 42" Sony Bravia in our demo room is currently using the metal window frame as an aerial, the technological equivalent of a fur coat and no knickers.
i still use my win98 box (433MHz Celeron, c1999) as the winmodem it contains doesn't work under linux and it's my only connection to the outside world. i could buy another modem but would rather spend the money on cds or more disk space.
> In Vim: Press shift+v to highlight the current line, go to the opening brace, press % to go to the closing brace (highlighting the whole block in turn), then press = to auto-indent.
alternatively: go to opening brace (f{ or $) then =% will indent all lines up to matching brace.
b-but C&VG was a cross-format (including arcade) mag which was there before the individual platforms were strong enough to support their own magazines - the article is 'looks at the dawn of' rather than 'more influential'. all the mags you mention are more breakfasttime than dawn 8)
> In short: strip Flash out. Video in links only. Make it snappy.
well yes. unfortunately the bbc2 subsite has gone in completely the other direction. seems to be flash only (rotating image background, why?) and launches video the moment you enter.
> Just played and the gameplay is almost identical to the original mario brothers. 1 screen, shit comes at you from all sides whilst you try to acheive a goal. It is certainly a cool idea,but that style of gameplay bores me in around a minute.
It's JetPac (classic Sinclair Spectrum game circa 1982, rtfa for details) but with SMW graphics.
> The BBC never deliberately trashed the archives in 1974: they thought there were copies at another site.
i think he's talking about the fact that they used to re-use the (expensive at the time) tapes for other, "more important" things like football matches and horse races. the first series of Quatermass went the same way.
i use Mandrake at home and Redhat at work and some of the little differences drive me batty. here's what i do to even things out:
add the following to.inputrc: set bell-style none set page-completions off set show-all-if-ambiguous on (tab completion in bash is one of the most useful features but the beeping and having to hit tab twice seems to defeat the purpose)
modify the following in.dircolors: DIR 00:32 (directories marked as green instead of the dark blue which is virtually invisible on the black background (xterm via putty)).vimrc: colorscheme elflord (easiest to remember colorscheme that avoids dark blue)
i tend to avoid putting pwd in the PS1 because i'd rather have the extra space in the command line and because 'pwd' is easy enough to type. i usually just go with "\h:\u >" just so i know who i am(!) and which machine i'm on.
Apparently there are quite a few. The list of missing scenes makes reference to the Guide entry for the towels as being missing but it's only the Guide entry that's cut, not all the other references to towels.
There were promotional towels draped over the backs of the chairs for the recent Leicester Square premier.
> ZX-81 Computer Programmer: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, Out of Memory.
using INT PI rather than "3" will save you a couple of bytes if memory is tight (because all numbers in sinclair basic had a 6 byte overhead on top of their length whereas INT PI is just two 8-bit tokens)
see also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105859& cid=901 6933
> No, you may not: cue / rewind / download the stuff the license payers paid to produce
i hadn't seen this before but always found it curious why they'd stopped that.
from their FAQ: Unfortunately our rights agreements with the record companies mean that we cannot break music programmes up into smaller chunks, or offer a rewind facility.
however, their html-based player just uses rpm (real) files. view-source, find the rpm file and use that in realplayer and you can rewind to your heart's content.
> Vim just picked wacky letters that have nothing to do with anything, except that they're right next to each other.
when vi was first written lots of keyboards didn't have cursor keys but did have arrows on the hjkl keys (ctrl-h is backspace for instance, ctrl-j is linefeed) so it seemed logical to use those. l for forward one *l*etter also ties in nicely with vi's other action/movement commands: dw = delete word, d5l = delete 5 letters.
> emacs using fbnp. f, b, n, and p are MUCH more logical
in vim: ctrl-f = forward a page ctrl-b = back a page ctrl-n = next line ctrl-p = previous line
i'm surprised nobody has mentioned that in the previous weekend Microsoft took out a full page in a lot of the English papers (Guardian on saturday, Observer on sunday at least) telling people how to update their computers to guard against viruses etc. wasn't an advert (no pictures, just text) but a warning, like some kind of product recall notice.
another recommendation for alastair reynolds here. all of you waiting for iain m banks' next culture novel can probably ease the wait by picking up 'Chasm City' (half way through it at the moment and it's coming along nicely).
'Revelation Space' has been followed by 'Revelation Ark' (not read that yet) (chasm city is based in same universe but doesn't seem to be as concerned with the Shroud or the Jugglers) and i noticed last week that a fourth reynolds title has joined them on the shelves but it appears to be two short stories... (ah, Diamond Dogs / Turquoise Days: Tales from the Revelation Space Universe).
jeez, amazon.co.uk also lists a 5th title, 'Absolution Gap' which is 'out shortly'. could alastair reynolds be the stephen king of sf? 8)
Slashdot Mirror
here:
i cle/imperfect-sound-forever.htm
1 992325,00.html
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_art
and here:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,
laptops? too easy!
http://www.myspace.com/zxspectrumorchestra
"ZX Spectrum Orchestra have been locked away in the lab writing code. They use no midi, no samplers, in fact, no instruments other than Sinclair hardware and peripheral devices. For instance, vocals on tracks are supplied by the Currah Speech. An early speech synthesizer built for the ZX Spectrum, it explores the found poetry of basic keyboard commands."
> the codec used should be non-proprietary and completely free to implement and redistribute
the BBC has their own open source codec:
http://dirac.sourceforge.net/overview.html
(but, as others have pointed out, the content creators will insist on drm etc)
NaNoWriMo also span off a NaSoAlMo a couple of years ago which is pretty similar. (SoAl = Solo Album).
http://www.lacunae.com/nasoalmo/
> Armed with a crappy radio we found we could get perfect reception by connecting to the air conditioning vents with a set of crocodile clips purchased from Tandy's.
similarly, the 42" Sony Bravia in our demo room is currently using the metal window frame as an aerial, the technological equivalent of a fur coat and no knickers.
i still use my win98 box (433MHz Celeron, c1999) as the winmodem it contains doesn't work under linux and it's my only connection to the outside world. i could buy another modem but would rather spend the money on cds or more disk space.
> In Vim: Press shift+v to highlight the current line, go to the opening brace, press % to go to the closing brace (highlighting the whole block in turn), then press = to auto-indent.
alternatively: go to opening brace (f{ or $) then =% will indent all lines up to matching brace.
b-but C&VG was a cross-format (including arcade) mag which was there before the individual platforms were strong enough to support their own magazines - the article is 'looks at the dawn of' rather than 'more influential'. all the mags you mention are more breakfasttime than dawn 8)
> In short: strip Flash out. Video in links only. Make it snappy.
well yes. unfortunately the bbc2 subsite has gone in completely the other direction. seems to be flash only (rotating image background, why?) and launches video the moment you enter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/
can we drop the funny comments (and, for that matter, anything about people worrying about money). people died. it was only yesterday.
thanks.
andy
london
London Bomb Blasts / Pool:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/74918957@N00/pool/
speaking of dr who, the new dalek exterminator beam effect, the screaming x-ray death, is great.
> Just played and the gameplay is almost identical to the original mario brothers. 1 screen, shit comes at you from all sides whilst you try to acheive a goal. It is certainly a cool idea,but that style of gameplay bores me in around a minute.
It's JetPac (classic Sinclair Spectrum game circa 1982, rtfa for details) but with SMW graphics.
> The BBC never deliberately trashed the archives in 1974: they thought there were copies at another site.
i sodes
i think he's talking about the fact that they used to re-use the (expensive at the time) tapes for other, "more important" things like football matches and horse races. the first series of Quatermass went the same way.
ah, would appear that you're both right:
http://www.answers.com/topic/dr-who#wp-Missing_ep
it's a shame either way.
i use Mandrake at home and Redhat at work and some of the little differences drive me batty. here's what i do to even things out:
.inputrc:
.dircolors: .vimrc:
add the following to
set bell-style none
set page-completions off
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
(tab completion in bash is one of the most useful features but the beeping and having to hit tab twice seems to defeat the purpose)
modify the following in
DIR 00:32
(directories marked as green instead of the dark blue which is virtually invisible on the black background (xterm via putty))
colorscheme elflord
(easiest to remember colorscheme that avoids dark blue)
i tend to avoid putting pwd in the PS1 because i'd rather have the extra space in the command line and because 'pwd' is easy enough to type. i usually just go with "\h:\u >" just so i know who i am(!) and which machine i'm on.
Apparently there are quite a few. The list of missing scenes makes reference to the Guide entry for the towels as being missing but it's only the Guide entry that's cut, not all the other references to towels.
There were promotional towels draped over the backs of the chairs for the recent Leicester Square premier.
> ZX-81 Computer Programmer: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, Out of Memory.
& cid=901 6933
using INT PI rather than "3" will save you a couple of bytes if memory is tight (because all numbers in sinclair basic had a 6 byte overhead on top of their length whereas INT PI is just two 8-bit tokens)
see also:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105859
not 'Orange chocolate', 'Chocolate Orange' 8)
? fu seaction=TERRY.main
http://www.kraft.com.au/confectionery/index.cfm
don't diss the Monkees. thx.
> No, you may not: cue / rewind / download the stuff the license payers paid to produce
i hadn't seen this before but always found it curious why they'd stopped that.
from their FAQ:
Unfortunately our rights agreements with the record companies mean that we cannot break music programmes up into smaller chunks, or offer a rewind facility.
however, their html-based player just uses rpm (real) files. view-source, find the rpm file and use that in realplayer and you can rewind to your heart's content.
was there more than one? i only remember anthony ainley and he died recently:
r wh o/2004/05/10/10973.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/cult/news/d
> Vim just picked wacky letters that have nothing to do with anything, except that they're right next to each other.
when vi was first written lots of keyboards didn't have cursor keys but did have arrows on the hjkl keys (ctrl-h is backspace for instance, ctrl-j is linefeed) so it seemed logical to use those. l for forward one *l*etter also ties in nicely with vi's other action/movement commands: dw = delete word, d5l = delete 5 letters.
> emacs using fbnp. f, b, n, and p are MUCH more logical
in vim:
ctrl-f = forward a page
ctrl-b = back a page
ctrl-n = next line
ctrl-p = previous line
i'm surprised nobody has mentioned that in the previous weekend Microsoft took out a full page in a lot of the English papers (Guardian on saturday, Observer on sunday at least) telling people how to update their computers to guard against viruses etc. wasn't an advert (no pictures, just text) but a warning, like some kind of product recall notice.
andy
another recommendation for alastair reynolds here. all of you waiting for iain m banks' next culture novel can probably ease the wait by picking up 'Chasm City' (half way through it at the moment and it's coming along nicely).
'Revelation Space' has been followed by 'Revelation Ark' (not read that yet) (chasm city is based in same universe but doesn't seem to be as concerned with the Shroud or the Jugglers) and i noticed last week that a fourth reynolds title has joined them on the shelves but it appears to be two short stories... (ah, Diamond Dogs / Turquoise Days: Tales from the Revelation Space Universe).
jeez, amazon.co.uk also lists a 5th title, 'Absolution Gap' which is 'out shortly'. could alastair reynolds be the stephen king of sf? 8)
andy
in england the first series was called 'Scrapheap', just 'Scrapheap', no "Challenge".
don't know how that affects your theory though 8)
andy