Grauw’s web spot

In 2006 I took the 3D modelling course at Utrecht University. As part of this course there were two exercises that involved modelling something, and I noticed I had never posted about these!

Now mind you, I’m not a graphics guy, so don’t expect too much. Also I notice that some of the renders have aliasing and artefacts; I would create new higher-quality renders but I don’t have a copy of Maya anymore. Nevertheless, they don’t look too shabby if I say so myself :).

The first animation is a recreation of my fan:

See this PDF for a nice step-by-step walkthrough, including a photo of the original. Slightly higher quality avi file here. Maya source file here.

The second animation is of a toy train. This one I created together with Bert:

See this PDF for some details about how the animation is made and some screenshots. Slightly higher quality avi file here.

A little while ago I bought a Roland GAIA SH-01 synthesizer. It’s got three oscillators, an effect section, and almost everything is directly accessible from the front panel. Fiddling around creating new sounds is a lot of fun, and it sounds good!

Now, Roland is also planning to release a software package to edit sounds on the GAIA from your PC, which provides some extra possibilities, however it isn’t out yet and won’t be free.

But I found that Roland has made available a MIDI implementation document for the GAIA, also documenting a protocol to access its internal memory. So what I did is I started working on a little tool that can talk to the GAIA. It’s still in its early stages, but already it exposes some very interesting information. For example, I was able to extract a list of preset patch names — should come in handy!

There are currently two menus to issue commands and a log to show results. The first menu lets you play some test notes and send GM on/off control messages (looks like they just reset the GM though). The second menu is more interesting, it allows you to dump the system settings, as well as the settings of the currently selected patch (including edits). So now you can retrieve the exact patch settings, share them, reposition the controls, whatever!

Some plans for the future are to show the parameters in a little more visually appealing and structured way, and to eventually allow you to edit the parameters. I also want to add the ability to set the tempo to a specific BPM. An editor for arpeggios is also on the wish-list, and also there’s a bunch of reserved memory locations that may have something good lurking in them.

» Download the GAIA tool here

The source code is available. Consider it Apache 2.0 licensed for now, although I didn’t add license headers yet. If you want to contribute please go ahead, but let me know if you do. If you make any changes please contribute them back!

Update: As of version 0.1 it is possible to edit arpeggios, and as of version 0.3 you can organise your patches in a library. A first for the GAIA!

I always liked whisky, and since I got a bottle last February I’ve been drinking a lot of it :). Here’s the list so far:

I’m not gonna do the whole grading thing but having a list of whiskies I’ve tried seems handy. I would use some kind of whisky database website but haven’t been able to find one…

Update: My collection at Whiskybase

A great initiative was started by Wammes Witkop, Frank H. Druijff, Hayo Rubing, Robert Wethmar and Bas Kornalijnslijper to put online an archive of MCM/MCCM 1-90:

http://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/

They are soliciting the contributing authors to contact them in order to ask for permission to put their articles online. Their email-address is listed on the website.

I think this is a really great initiative, archiving these things is important. I was always already thinking all those magazines in the cupboard were really asking for some scanning :). Also good to hear that Frank and Wammes are involved. I hope they will also put MSX Club Magazines and the accompanying disks online.

It’s a shame that our author’s rights system makes these kind of preservation efforts a really complicated job. If you vote GroenLinks, maybe they will manage to do something about it! :)