TookItAway

I left Famous Grey a while ago now. If you haven’t done it yet, check them out, they are incredible! They did a guest spot on Radio Sonar and makes me proud to have worked with them.

Since then I’ve been noodling about, practicing, doing a bit of writing etc, I can play with a pick now! At the same time I’ve also been looking to join or create another band. A bit more mainstream punk-rock this time (Think ‘New Found Glory’, ‘Hundred Reasons’ or ‘A’), but something which includes the things I learned while playing with FG.

Aggressive, with bundles of feeling and energy I’ll see how it goes.

Here’s the promised update (Binaries + source zip).

UDPcastFE v0.17 Release.

Not much of a change, but the command line argument handling needed to be fixed. I have been using this ‘in production’ for a little while and it appears pretty stable.

Changelog:

UDPcast Reciever Frontend:

26/04/2010: v0.17
-Fixes to command line argument handling.
-File/Directory handling changes.

UDPcast Sender Frontend:

26/04/2010: v0.17
-Added ‘-f’ argument to enable a file to be specified on launch.
-Code cleanup.

I’ll be releasing an update of UDPCastFE early next week, not much changed, just a bit of cleanup and tweaks to the command line launch handling.

In other news, I’ve been playing Frozen Synapse a lot lately, it’s a really interesting turn based game, kinda like a ‘top down counterstrike’. Multiplayer is really engaging

Another OSS program thats been saving me work for a while, Italc is an awesome piece of classroom management software, better than most of the ‘pay for’ alternatives. If you need any classroom management software, at least give this a look!

It’s a really stable project, so it’s not updated all that often (although there is a new ‘preview’ release out).

Italc Homepage

UPDATE: New Version! (v0.16)

A cool little piece of software I’ve been using lately, UDPcast is an OSS utility for multicasting files and disk images.

I liked it so much I wrote a little windows frontend for the sender and the reciever, to make it easier for students and staff that use the machines I admin to copy larger files (like VM Disk images) around.

You can download that from here (Nope. See above :p). It’s released under the GPLv2 licence (same as UDPcast). While it may not be the prettiest code in the world, it is functional and there aren’t any major bugs I’m aware of. Obviously if you have suggestions on improvements (or even patches!) that would be great.

Things I’m looking to do in the next version (If one is to exist):

• Remove the hacky first/second interface option and dynamically populate a list of interfaces that can be selected for use. (UPDATE: Done!)
• Provide more control over the options available to udpcast-sender or udpcast-reciever
• Add some more stuff to easily automate the process (although you should probably just use udpcast straight from the command line for that).

On a completely different note, I might get around to posting the source to SYLO (Sort Your Life Out or SYLO, Your Learning Organiser, whichever you like more), which is a random achievement tracking system I created for the Computing department of Chichester College. We shall see!

This week, Famous Grey are in the studio putting down tunes for the EP.

Drums, Guitar and Bass is down and sounding amazing. The shouting starts tomorrow and the noise will be up on the Famous Grey myspace to listen to next week!

With the release of the SDE (Special Developer Edition) firmware for the Archos 5 Internet Tablet, the door is open for the possibility to boot alternative operating systems.

This should allow, with varying degrees of modification, any OS that supports the TI OMAP3 platform to boot on the device. As an example, Archos includes Ångström, an embedded Linux distribution built on top of the OpenEmbedded framework.

Already, there is an effort to get a AOSP (Android Open Source Project) build booting on the device, see the development diary or keep up to date with that and more on the ArchosFans forum.

I like gadgets… A lot.

It took it’s time getting to me but it turned up this week, this tablet will probably replace my Rockboxed 60GB Iriver H340 for day to day music. The A5A, as I will refer to it, is also very sharp on video, so it’s a definite improvement for most things and with 500GB of storage, I can store my whole music collection (and then some) on it!

The only issue I have with it is: NO REMOTE? This makes it a bit of an annoyance to get it out of my pocket, pull the case off some of the way so I can get to the volume rocker.

Will post funky pics soon!

This is the new band I play bass for, the tunes are shaping up to be epic!  We are looking to record an demo in the next couple of months and then play some shows and drum up interest. I am really excited about this… Hardcore!!

Click the image for our myspace page, which should have more up to date info when anything happens.

Lots of changes since my last post about my setup…

I bought a Fender MIM Jazz Bass, an Ashdown ABM210 cab and a 4-way footswitch for my amplifier (which almost didn’t fit in my pedal box!)

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