mark.nine

icom I

Mark — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:37:48 +0000

Iron Chef of Music (ICOM) is an event that takes place every 1st and 3rd Sunday of a month in a location in Chicago or online. You’re given a secret sample (WAV or MP3) of a random recording. In the past, this has ranged from a recording of a game of table tennis, an 8-bit game, a clip from a movie or a kitchen environment. From that sample, you must create a song in under two hours. No other external sounds or forms of synthesis can be used. At the end, all tracks are uploaded and are played back to back to everyone. Visit the FAQ for a little more information.

The sample for the latest one (March 7, 2010) was a recording of someone messing with Styrofoam. You can listen to it here.
From that sample, i have made this song in under two hours:
Until the end by the chief of thieves

If you have FL Studio 9 and would like to see how it was done, you can download the project i made. The .zip file contains the samples cut from the original source file, Glitch VST (Effect) and the project file itself. Just double click on it and it should open everything just fine.

Download FL Studio Project

in case you haven’t noticed..

Mark — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:19:17 +0000

on the right hand side, you’ll notice the text “get this album now:” and an album cover right underneath it.

What i’m telling you is to GET TO THE ALBUM NOW. If you can stream it, stream it. If you love it, buy it.

The one i currently have up is an album by Home Video and I can not fucking stop playing this entire fucking album.

Apple’s plan to blind us with colors.

Mark — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:13:10 +0000

There’s quite a number of you Apple users out there that use Boot Camp to run Windows naitively on another partition. When Apple released their 3.1 drivers (64-bit version here), most of us jumped the gun, downloaded it and installed it. With it brings support for the new wireless magic mouse, official support for Windows 7, and a couple of other stuff.

Wait a second, why are my colors brighter? My reds look like they’re about to vomit all over my screen. The new 3.1 update automatically adds “digital vibrance” (i.e. “enhancements”). I wouldn’t call this an enhancement. It looks horrid.

In the NVidia Control Panel, under Adjust desktop color settings, you can see that the third option, which is Digital vibrance is bumped up all the way to 79%. That’s right, that’s the default. Apple is blinding you by enhancing the colors to make up for the fact that they put 16 bit LCD panels in Macbook Pros, even though these were advertised of displaying “millions of colors”.

Thankfully, you can turn it completely off. Just set the slider all the way to the left to turn off the disgusting explosive diarrhea of colors. You’ll have to do this to a second monitor you may attach as well.

cassette gameboy.

Mark — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:02:20 +0000

Once again, Tom is proving the impossible and making a contraption that converts an analog tape into digital gameboy data.

He’s going to have a detailed guide coming up in the near future.

Check it out.

this is where i end

Mark — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:00:16 +0000

and you begin

IM conversations part I

Mark — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:21:36 +0000

Tom: http://madison.craigslist.org/m4w/1568706277.html
Tom: HAHAHAHA
Tom: You can be his “girl”, Mark.
Mark: He looks like the kind of guy who would drug my drink.
Mark: No thanks, i’ll pass.

experimentation with the obsolete.

Mark — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:04:41 +0000

So what better way to spend a Saturday than to go a friendly neighborhood Goodwill and buy two cheaply priced VCRs and travel to a dollar store and purchase blank VHS tapes? I may be a couple of cables short of what I need but i can purchase a couple of those super cheap off of monoprice.

The word of the week is Lo-Fi!

i’ll be taking a bit of video i made and other video from the great internet archive for a good ol’ music video. For which song, you may ask? You’ll have to find out. The idea is taking all of that footage from digital means back into analog tape (vhs). Then that same footage from that tape gets recorded to another vhs tape, then back to the previous and so on and so fourth. In other words, i’ll be looping this video through two tapes, hopefully degrading the quality further as it passes. The trick here is getting that video BACK into my computer. don’t know how i’ll manage that.

i didn’t have the videos ready at the moment, so i did record some music (notably Strangers and a bit of Nova Scotia from Artificial Horizon) onto a VHS. I then proceeded to remove the tape and crumple it up with my hands and smeared my fingers all on the top side of the tape. Then i neatly rolled it back into the case. The result is a beautiful warble effect:

Strangers / Nova Scotia (Lo-Fi) by the chief of thieves

i also plan to get a tape deck and do the same thing, only with cassettes.

at one point, i did manage to get the vhs tape stuck, for whatever reason. I had to open the VCR and see how i could manually remove it. In defense, the VCR managed to give me a nasty cut on the thumb. I got the tape out but now i have to leave the cover off to manually push the tape downward, if i’m inserting a new one. not a big deal, really.

new firmware / announcement

Mark — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:52:09 +0000

We regret to inform you that after this new 2.20 firmware update, we will no longer be developing or updating for your Mark™ Character. The decision was a difficult one but it’s best for the company. We will instead be focusing on newer, more advanced Characters for personal enjoyment. Your Character will still be fully functional, but will no longer be issued any new updates. If you would like to continue to stay up-to-date with the latest features, please consider replacing your obsolete model with a newer one. We’ve made it easy to replace him. Do note, however, you can not be in possession of two live Characters at once. It is highly recommended that you disable your old model rather than completely leaving him. Leaving your model may cause him to do unexpected actions or behave uncontrollably. To replace an older model, we recommend making a back-up of any data so it can be transferred. The killswitch must then be activated and the final shut down sequence will begin. You must then throw your old Character off a bridge, incinerate him, or bury your old Character.

New in this update:
Now compatible with IRL engine 4.10
New mini games can now be played when performing tasks
Loading times have been decreased
Dream notebook has been added – Allows for recording of dreams in real time
Kodak Zi8 – Allows your Character to record his environment in 1080p High Definition
Achievements – 60 new achievements to unlock

Bug fixes and updates:
Fixed a graphical issue where new shoes would not show up properly
Fixed an issue that made music creation more difficult than it should be
Fixed an issue where inventory would not be displayed properly
Fixed an issue where the backpack would disappear when walking into a new location
Fixed an issue where waking up at a certain time of night would cause him to behave strangely
Fixed an issue where background music would play suddenly
Fixed an issue that caused the Character to be stuck in the bathroom door
Applying for a college class no longer displays graphical bug
Health bar now disappears when there’s minimal damage – can be brought back upon request
Fixed an issue where the stamina bar would be stuck on screen after being completely drained and regained.
Trade system has been modified and updated to accommodate for recent items.

ironically..

Mark — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:59:29 +0000

..we ended up using bbPress after all.

phpBB or bbPress

Mark — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:52:53 +0000

We’ve been meaning to add our own forums for I/O (and general netlabel) community for quite a while. Since we decided to bring I/O up from dead, we thought we would go ahead and go with the idea.

First forum software i thought of was phpBB. It’s free, it’s popular, everyone knows about it. It’s also extremely complicated (from the admin look of things) and creating templates from scratch can be hard and time consuming. We started looking for other alternatives and we came across one called bbPress, which is a nice little lightweight forum. Very simplistic and minimalistic. Problem is, it hardly comes with any features built in. Out-of-the-box, it doesn’t support:

custom avatars
attachments
signatures
post count
ability to display members online
bbcode
private messaging
polls
smilies/emoticons
topic icons
post preview
ability to report post
display unread posts.

That’s right. From a clean installation, bbPress doesn’t have any of that. Features that are common in even the most obscure php based bulletin boards. bbPress, however, does support plugins. And guess which features i listed above are available in plugins? All of them! Which means people who were willing to use bbPress had to go and manually find (Or write their own!) the plugin they want, download it, upload it to the proper folder via FTP, then activate it from inside bbPress. Repeat this process for every single plugin to cover basic features that other bulletin boards have from the get-go. Oh, let’s not forget that if a bbPress update were to come out, there’s a good chance that upon upgrading, you’ll find half of your plugins malfunctioning and/or completely dysfunctional. At least the community is a little more helpful than a certain other plugin.

So for all the work of modifying the theme and uploading a ton of plugins just to do basic shit, we’re moving back to phpBB. It’s just not worth it.

I do salute you, mr/mrs. developer, who may have spent countless hours of their own time, writing plugins for such a shameful excuse of a bulletin board. Let’s just hope your plugin doesn’t spontaneously combust if a bbPress update were to come out.