Joe Button's Website

By unfortunate historical accident the term "guitar synth" seems to have become synonymous with "guitar-like MIDI controller", which is odd as MIDI is fundamentally quite poor at representing the way guitars are played. I wanted to try ditching the MIDI stage and controlling an oscillator directly from the pitch of the guitar. First port of call was the frequency tracker in swh-plugins, but it didn't seem to work particularly well (sorry Steve). So I knocked together an LV2 plugin using Paul Brossier's Aubio library, which includes pitch detection functionality among many other handy things.

You can download my plugin's source code with:

svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/audio/lv2/pitchdetect

The bad news is that it currently requires the trunk version of Aubio, which will become 0.3.3 when it is released. So you can't actually run this without getting your hands a bit dirty yet.

Here's a video of me playing guitar through Dave Robillard's Ingen audio processing environment with the pitch detector and an oscillator. As well as showing off the pitch detector plugin, this serves as a bit of an introductory tutorial for Ingen, which in my opinion is underdocumented and underappreciated.

(Direct YouTube link)

Since I moved to Bristol I haven't listened to most of my music collection, which remained packed away on a hard drive for several months. I have now addressed this state of affairs in a characteristically ludicrous and impractical manner.

My friend Wayne was kind enough to donate me his surplus Linksys NSLU2, which I've installed the fabulous OpenWrt on. The prebuilt image I tried didn't seem to play nicely with bluetooth so I built my own version out of svn. I installed mpd and connected my USB hard drive and speakers.

Recklessly disregarding this wise admonishment, I decided to knock together my own solution to controlling the music player from my bluetooth phone. There are various solutions already, but they all seemed a little on the heavy/byzantine side for me and my slug. So, I threw together a small C program to relay messages from my bluetooth phone to mpd. Actually it just relays messages sent via bluetooth to any host/port, so there might plausibly be some other use for it. Don't know what though.

This just left the app to run on my phone. The phone's a nokia 6021 and runs J2ME/MIDP2.0. I'm not much of a java programmer but I managed to create a somewhat working app (source here). To describe it as basic is understating the case, but hopefully at some point I'll get round to turning it into something more complete.

My esteemed friend and ex-colleague Dave has written a Dashboard widget that shows you pollen forecasts for your area in the UK. Get it here.

I thought my UK pollen forecast gnome applet might be useful to more people if I made it available as a Firefox extension. If I'd realised how much faffing about was going to be involved I might not have bothered, but anyway it's done now.

It has a page here at the official Mozilla addons site, but you need to be registered with the site to get it there until somebody reviews it and judges it fit for public consumption. So for the time being you can get it from my website.

Zirtek, the manufacturers of anti-allergy medicines, provide a free (as in beer) desktop app that tells you the pollen forecast for your area. It's Windows-only, but with a small amount of cunning we can work out what it's doing and make our own version. Wireshark reveals that the app is downloading data from an XML feed here. Zirtek don't seem to publicise that url but it's on the public internet so I guess there's no legal issues with using it.

I made a gnome applet, which you can install as follows:

$ svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/pollencount/gnome_applet pollencount_gnome_applet
$ cd pollencount_gnome_applet
$ sudo make install

Then right click on your panel, click Add to Panel and select 'PollenCount'. Right-click the applet to set your region.