soapbox

With the new audio architecture, it’s very easy to run all of your audio data through some pretty fancy filters before you let it out through your speakers. (you can also hook up multiple sets of speakers now and drive each one with 5.1 sound if you want)

the multiple speakers aren’t the cool thing. The cool thing is the filters. You can do anything from shift the pitch of a song in realtime to adding distortion to anything you could possibly think of to do to music. Of course, editing a 16-bit 44 kHz stereo audio track in real time takes some significant horsepower (15% of my cpu was getting used up) but if I were a real musician I’d want to play around with this a lot.

One little thing though… it looks trivial to use the same method to make copies of songs purchased from the iTMS. Maybe I should think about giving out custom remixes of the songs that I’ve purchased. Maybe not.

So, I’m watching TV right now (Stacked actually. It’s a good show.) and I just saw the best ad that I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s a Verizon ad.

There’s a family (mom, dad, and son) standing on a beach with the trenchcoat Verizon guy.

Mom: Our old cellphone company was charging us an arm and a leg for going over our plan minutes. So we had a family meeting…
[Camera pans to the right where daughter is standing apart from the family.]
Mom: … and we decided it was all Wendy’s fault.

blah blah blah stuff about Verizon blah blah blah

The final marvelous point is the end where the Verizon guy thanks Wendy for suggesting Verizon to the family and she says “Thanks” and then sneers at her family.

It’s going to be a classic of advertising.

In any cocoa application, select a word, put the mouse over it and hit command-control-D.

A popup window with the definition will appear.

or you can just control-click (or use the right mouse button) and you’ll get a real window with the definition.

Dashboard is really a cool feature too. It lets you create a layer with special applets that you can show and hide easily (similar to Expose).

So now I just hit F12 and I have a dictionary, the weather forcast, the current dopler weather radar, a calendar, a nerdy clock, a dictionary, and stickies.

And there are new applets coming out every day.

I’ve just been playing around now that the observing proposal is done and decided to try out “Spotlight” the new advanced search tool.

For those of you not in the know, Spotlight catalogs basically every file on your hard drive (which makes your machine hella slow for the first hour after you install 10.4) but then makes it possible to do complex searches in an instant.

So anyway, I searched for “porn”.

The results:
A few papers that I mentioned the first amendment in…
some email messages that mention porn
a few songs by porno for pyros
some pictures.

Yes, that’s right. Spotlight figured out where there might potentially be porn on my computer and decided to show it to me.

Needless to say, I won’t be demonstrating this feature to anyone.

Team Alpha is done!

And our proposal will kick any of y’alls little pansy-ass proposals around any day of the week.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of people who read the blog that aren’t part of Team Alpha… but it’s good to be done anyway.