SID tune player for the iPod
I don’t run ever since I had that job where I had to wait in Penn Station every morning for five or ten minutes and I would slide down against the wall between the Sock Store and the Place With The Good Hazelnut Coffee and watch people sprint for their train. You get the impression that running was not something we were meant to do. But the waffle scene in Prefontaine always stuck with me, and I amble through life in my daily walkers: the the $8.99 AllHeart Ventilated ComfortClogs. They are the closest thing to Shoes Made in a Waffle Iron, as they are Shoes You Can Put in The Dishwasher.
The $149 iPod Nano is a dual-core ARM running at 160 MIPS, a gorgeous screen, a nice interface, serial in and out, audio in and out, a couple gigabytes of flash, 24 hour battery, and then you can buy a plastic case for $29 from Nike with an inverted piezo and have it output your walking speed and distance to an XML document in the filesystem. Not enough people view it as a viable development platform. The iPodLinux people have reached the milestone of prompting someone to make a website that plots SVN commit frequency– this confirms Rock Candy Style forever now– so why are these droog designers still using $500 Mac Minis and projectors they stole from the Interactive Communications Department A/V closet to play sine waves and scroll WordArt on 6-bit gradients? My local bowling alley used an Atari 1200XL for this, guys. If it’s a purchase order problem, launder 17″ iMacs through eBay, you’ll probably pull a profit enough to buy some extra Foxconn 30-pin connectors.
The point of this update is that I spent a good few weeks in 2004 ignoring real work with Shifty making a SIDPlayer port for the 3G iPod, You can download it here if you like (best if you are equipped to compile Podzilla, and put the HVSC in your root folder) and it was almost ridiculously easy– even back then when we didn’t know how to set the volume in the audio driver. With my morning acquisition of the $29 ’sport kit’ I bring SIDpod out of retirement, begging someone to mash-up, as they say. I’ve done my part (well, I did two years ago) & I hope somone is working hard on getting the accelerometer bits realtime from this Nike plastic pea-pod– because My Power Song is Wizball, and I want my step count modulating the VCF.
Be back soon.