This is the new Xpander Geek
category of my weblog. Rather than
try to maintain another blog on the XG site, or cunningly alias/symlink
one to the other, I'll just redirect people from the "blog/news" page on
XG to this page. That way, when I link to other blog articles, the
relative links should still work. The RSS feed for this category is http://johnp.net/blog/xg/index.rss.
And the first piece of news is, I've cemented my claim to the "Xpander Geek" title by identifying the font used for the "Xpander" logo text, as you can see to the right. It is Friz Quadrata Bold, apparently created by a Swiss dude called Ernst Friz in 1965. I started with the creativepro.com font searches page, then tried IdentiFont, which correctly picked that I wanted ITC Friz Quadrata, but didn't show me the bold variant, so I couldn't confirm that it was correct. Then I fed my scanned & Photoshopped image into WhatTheFont, which got it bang on. I was very impressed. But MyFonts was "not yet authorized to sell this font directly", so I had to go to fonts.com to actually buy it. USD29 for Mac & Windows OpenType, and they tossed in another font for free. They almost blew it when their store's Javascript didn't work in Opera, but I gave them a second chance and completed the sale using Firefox. Hooray for Firefox! Hooray for Opera! Long live the Web! etc.
Coming up: my plans for the site. Some interesting ideas are presenting themselves, given that the Xpander seems to be 100% programmable and controllable via MIDI. And there's all sorts of fascinating bits of Xpander information out there waiting to be collected and collated, much of it dating from before the dawn of the Web. And one man's name keeps cropping up: Mr. Mike Metlay, editor of the Xpander Users Group Newsletter and keeper of the Xpander/Matrix-12 MIDI System Exclusive Xpander Patch Editors Specification. But more about him later.
Well, work has kept me pretty busy lately, but I'm always thinking
about Ngake. And I'm trying to converge some work stuff with Ngake (or
at least Lisp) in order to make some progress.
In the meantime, my latest would-be hobby has me looking at electronic/computer-based music systems. I think that sound design, synthesiser programming, composition and performance could all be fruitful domains for Ngake. And I think that applications targetting those domains might be better received than some of my software tools ideas, since musicians seem to be much more open to novelty in their tools. For example, this guy has video of him using a Lemur control surface, Continuum fingerboard and Kyma sound design software to good effect.
Today's roundup of interesting links:
Interesting sites I've come across lately:
There's an Oberheim Xpander up for auction on TradeMe. The guy wants
$3500 for because he paid well over the odds for it himself, but I find
myself craving it rather badly. Unfortunately we're having a few
cashflow issues at the moment. We'll see what happens. It's certainly a
more worthy and massively more practical lust object than last time.
Links:
Curve, one of my
favourite bands (currently disbanded) have a page on their website that offers the chance
to remix the original
tracks from the song Unreadable Communication. You can then
send in your mix on a CD, and they'll list it on the site.
Very cool.
Further to the D-110 post below, I checked the schematic and the path of the MIDI input signal is very short, so hopefully if I take it apart and trace the track from the socket through the optocoupler (a Toshiba TLP552, apparently equivalent to an NEC PS9601) and into the CPU, I might be able to debug the problem. Or not. Who knows.
Python Paste
