Current Projects

May 18, 2008

Filed under: Programming Django Projects

I started writing this about a month ago, and then was in a serious car accident. Fortunately it was more serious for the car than for me and my girlfriend, but the disruption to my life has been sufficient to delay this blog post. Apologies.

It's been a while since I've written anything here - I've been swamped in projects, and of course the project list has been changing from week to week - it's just how I operate.

Projects from December

In this post I detailed a few projects I was working on. Here's the current status of those guys:

• Music - I have recorded 2/3 of one song and half of another at Tim's home studio. They sound really good, and I can't wait to share them with everyone. The idea is that a professional-sounding demo will help us get gigs. If you're reading this and you can book a local rock band, check out the music page.
  
• Star Power (Guitar Hero style distortion and LEDs for a real guitar) - I wrote the microcontroller code, and have the distortion circuit. I need to get the lights and wire them up (maybe with a separate LED controller) and work out how to get it in the guitar.
• Metaverse Apartment - Shortly after writing the blog post, I decided Croquet wasn't 'there' enough for me yet. Since then, the community has released some interesting stuff that may lure me back in. For now, anyway, the status is 'on hold until the technology is a little easier to work with'
• This website - still has a few bugs, but it's meeting my needs fine. Occasionally when I have a moment I patch or add a small feature. Please report bugs.

Other stuff filling my time now

• The 'Tony Stark Alarm Clock' - There's a scene in Iron Man where Tony's latest conquest is awoken by his talking house giving her details on the weather, etc. It struck me that this kind of device is present in many science-fiction stories, and while it is usually the voice of an implausibly powerful artificial intelligence, the basic form could be replicated with a simple program. I have a Mac mini at home, and OS X comes with an easy to use speech synthesizer and voice recognition system. The program currently outputs plain text and uses the "say" command to speak. I was sure it would turn into a massive yak shave and language switch when I decided to add voice recognition, but there are excellent Python bindings available.
• Ebook organizer - I have some ideas / designs for an iTunes for my ebooks floating around in my head. I plan to use an alternative non-relational database that a friend of mine is working on, in order to give him a real-life use case for his library. I'm not sure whether I will just make something for myself or release it to the world. The hardest part at this point is choosing a GUI library.

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