Sometimes there are things that really leave you gobsmacked in a good way. Today seems to be one of those. Everything seems into flow and fall into its place and some things fall – strangely enough – into the dumpster. Checking our electronic trash at work from time to time brought me a lot of useful things for my projects. From sorted out old CRT screens down to cables and cases, hence quite a few good things turned up, but today it must have been christmas. I spotted a 5th gen iPod in the trashbox and thought I just keep it for our museums project… Apple has revolutinionized the music industry with this, right? To my surprise the box was not empty and to an even bigger the surprise the enclosed iPod 30GB seems to be in quite a good shape- some scratches and some spots … okay, but quite good to put it on display.

I hooked it up to my mac and it stated “low battery” and displays backlight beeing off. I waited and waited and finally it came up. A quick launch of iTunes showed that it kept all its files on there … WOW, that thing seems to work. After formating it and putting some music on it was time to check if there’s probably some trouble with the music output (e.g. the jack) itself. No! All just working fine and the music came out to the hooked up speakers. All buttons working and the clickwheel operating just as it supposed to. Damn it! Finnaly I got an iPod. Back in the day I opted for an iRiver 320, as it was an open system and a little hacked firmware in the name of Rockboxx was just released, making the player play tons of formats, including SID (C64 music) and MODs (Amiga modules) and lots more. Most people won’t even call it music, but nerd that I am, this is the music I grew up with and that is some kind of timemachine to go back to easier days. Anyway, my iRiver is still running, with an new battery that I popped it lately but it has one big drawback and that is the flimsy buttons to operate it. Don’t ask how often it cam close to an desaster when trying to choose a new song, while driving.

A quick question to to big G revealed that Rockboxx can be put on iPods as well, now. Wow… what a day. After reformating the Pod under virtualPc with the PC version of iTunes, I could install it. Rockboxx needs a Fat32 partition and this was the easiest way to get it. The actuall High Voltage SID Collection cosists of  more than 42.000 SIDs, but as one SID file is around 2kb the whole collection is only about 230MB. And so WOW again… all the music from the c64 on one tiny iPod, with good navigation – expect me to have some loud SID-music-drive-home-session, tonight.

But honestly: Although there is a lot of wining about sinking living standards, but when I find something like this in the trash bin I can’t follow these trend. If you throw away something like this you must have still enough money to buy a new one. On the other hand 5th gen is about 6 years old now… and there are more shiny things out there. Whoever, however: Thanks, anyway!

I always wanted an Apple //c, since I spotted one, back in our school in the early nineties. A few years ago I got one from a bootsale but it was missing all cables and the power supply, not to mention the driveledge was broken. On eBay I way occasionally bidding on one and last year missed the chance to get one for really cheap, as I told the guy that would only pay a maximum of fifty bugs for an untested computer that was missing all cables again. He put it up on the bay and it ended with a staggering 90€ pricetag. Since than prices seem to have rosen even more.

Last week a //c showed up, along with a bag, monitor with stand and second external 5 1/4″ diskdrive. I got it! Not quite cheap, but with all the extras and this groovy monitor it was okay. The lady I bought it from must have some special deal with the postoffice, as it was here the next day… I never got a big package that fast.

The first thing when unboxing was an evil smell of old cigarette smoke. I could stand it for five minutes, than Nadine came down from the upper level and asked me if I was smoking secretly. The poor little Apple looked the way it smelled. Yellow and black where the primary colours (a fresh Apple //c is almost white) and the first bootattempt showed that the smell seemed to be the minor problem here. The screen went green and was covered with jibberish chars all over. I kept it turned on, while asking google for help. After 10 minutes or so, it came up after I truned it on again. Instead of the “Apple //c”-notice it still kept saying something like “asihj $%”. Every reset showed new effects. Sometimes I ended up in the command prompt, another time it kept pumping out hexdumps…… something was completely wrong. Half an hour later, I managed to load a game but the keyboard was gone. I contacted the lady and we agreed on half the price, leaving me with a computer that was actually intended to look and act like a swan but it was more like a drunken elephant that had spent the whole night under the bar table. Nadine was so kind and handwashed the bag for me (it is still drying in the bathroom) an I started to get the baby back to life.

Took me almost 4 hours to take it appart and clean off the smoke and dirt. I completly drained the keaboard and used a special plasticcleaner, that is refered to as pigpiss by the guys of  For Amusement Only e.V., because it solves all that yellowing caused by smoke. The remains are a yellowish soup that stinks like pig peeeee.

After letting all parts dry and putting it back together the moment of truth came. The first start showed a clean “Apple //c – Check Disk Drive.” and it loaded everything I put into the drive. Great! Testing it with some games the keyboard got stuck again, repeating the last key pressed forever. Google showed me that this seems to be a common problem with the //c and a fix would include bending off a leg of chip on the keyboard…. I didn’t do it and thought to myself that this little treasure is just out of training. Every time I kept it running for some time the symptoms got better and by now it works fine. Apple! Building selfrepairing hardware since 1977.

I was not able to get all the yellowing off, but most of it. The rest is the typical yellowing caused by UV exposure (probably a harder form, mixed with tobacco smoke in my case). Half an hour ago I fixed the Apple II joystick that I got some time ago. Directions where working, but the buttons where dead. Some Spiritus on the switches and we were good to go. Here you can see some pictures and a video of my new lad in action. Besides, playing Choplifter with one hand an filming with the other is a real task.

Next thing to do is replacing the drive port, as the nuts got pulled out by some budbrain and testing and cleaning the external drive. Keep your fingers crossed that it works.

It is winter again and time has passed that quick and lazy me did not find the time nor the muse to update this blog.

Despite Nadine and me visiting Karins place on La Palma once more, I spent a couple of days in Neuruppin. Great site, nice people, bad weather.

On the technical side of life, I got an iPad and together with Simon and Julian – two friends I know from the BreakPoint and Mekka Symposium Parties – we started to work on our game again.

About 5 years ago, we started work on Wings of Fury clone for Mac.
It basically started off again when I met Simon on Skype while I was completly drunk on my annual birthday party. I had to wait till slow itunes had imported the music I wanted to play and so I sent him a short message saying something like: “We need to finish our game on iDevices”.

A few days later we had chat about switching the whole thing from 2D to 3D graphics and a the next weekend Simon presented us a basic version where you could fly around, drop bombs. At the beginning of December the three of us met at my place and worked for almost 3 days straigt and got quite far. The reactions of people we showed the game that far are all very positive. So despite the every year x-mas stress and parties going on I am struggling ditching my head into building 3D planes, probs and stuff for the game. A website will be up very soon too… so hang in there and remember the name “Pacific Showdown”.

Here’s a very early preview of the game – actually the state before our weekend.
Project Zero v03

I had the opportunity to go to New York to help setup Rucker Park, Harlem for the Nike Basketball World Expo. Off course I had to go and see the big apple. I almost spent the whole week at the production site and when the show finally started, I sneaked out walked the city and finally got my iPhone 4, yess! To be true: it is not really nice what Apple puts you through in order to get one of these. On saturday I finally had some spare time and so I went to the Apple store on broadway, not far from my hotel. I was told to that off course I could buy an iPhone 4, no contract needed – only problem: they don’t have any. But I should come back next day. “I wouldn’t come too late. 7.45 AM is almost too late”. The next day, when I got there at about 7.20 AM the line was already around the next street corner. Some guys seem to have stayed there from 6 in the morning. Honestly, I can’t imagine that Apple has a shortage of iPhones. They keep their stock in stores low on purpose. Never the less after three hours I got one – just to find out, that it had no contract, but an AT&T Simlock. Thanks to iPhone dev team and redsn0w I can use it anyway and symio makes me feel far less ripped off than those Telekom prices and their way of doing business in Germany.

Last week I was on holiday and the rotten Telekom screwed up the account data of the house we stayed in. So no internet, partly bad weather outside, no sim card from symio yet… it felt just like in the 80s, where computing was mostly a single-man-on-an-island-thingy. Earlier I figured that you can make your own ringtones by converting an audiofile to aac and rename the resulting .m4a into .m4r. No Sidplayer installed and no HVSC in sight, I was somehow stranded with my idea to convert some old SID tunes to play as ringtone. Luckily I had a trial version of Rolands Liegers great Power64 that has a sound recording function and with the complete collection of Digital Marketing disks I was ready to go. In the end it turned out to be far more work than anticipated, mainly because I had no audio edit software as well. Audacity was on my mind, when I cut the tunes with the pro version of Quicktimeplayer, but here at home I found out that either the older version nor the new beta seems to work on my Snow Leo. So don’t judge the looping cuts on the tones to hard, as I had no real tools at hand.

Next part about Apple that I hardly understand. Why only 30 seconds for a ringtone? Steve, think of all the women searching for their iphones in their stuffed handbags…. this takes more than 30 seconds and repeating a tone over and over again gets on everybodys nerve. Anyway, here are some tunes I found worthy to convert. Some of my favorites are missing (No Lightforce, sorry Thomas) but the 30 seconds barrier is hard to keep when you have no real editing tools and so I keep the gems for the next release.

SID Ringtone Pack 1 (download 7.6mb)

1. Alleykat
2. Armageddeon Man
3. Breakthru
4. Cracker Mix
5. Dexion CoOp Intro
6. Double Take
7. Formular 1 Simulator
8. Frankie goes to Hollywood
   

SID Ringtone Pack 2 (download 9.8mb)

1. Game Over
2. Helikopter Jagd
3. Holiday Morning
4. Hunchback
5. Masters of the Universe
6. Max Headroom
7. Mission A.D.
8. Mutants
9. New Stars
   

SID Ringtone Pack 3 (download 8.9mb)

1. Phantoms of the Asteroid
2. Science 451 Intro
3. Ski Dance
4. Star Paws
5. Taipan
6. The Human Race
7. The Last Ninja – Palace Gardens
8. Times of Lore
   

SID Jingle Pack (download 1.2mb)

1. Arkanoid Start
2. Rambo II
3. decrunch noise 1
4. decrunch noise 2

So now go and bother your room mate, peer or who’s just around you, with your all new/old C64 sounds. Have fun!

Finally! Yes, finally, I got a Mac Cube. I was at the release presentation in Germany, back in 2000 and ever since I wanted one.

Lately I imposed myself not to go after things I want to have, they have to come to me. Same goes for stuff that I miss. I am not searching for it, I just find it. Time doesn’t matter, the result is important. So I was really happy when Jockel offered me his G4 Cube for little money. I rang him up over a period of three weeks but he was always bussy.

This was last year, about the same time and we didn’t manage to arange a meeting. Yesterday it happened more or less suprisingly that I called him for another reason and now I have my little Cube. Damn, that thing is stylish to the last screw. Some little scratches along the way and someone has solderd some parts inside….(Hardwaretest fails with a logic board error, but the system is up and running with no problems)… looks like it has come a long way.

Last night, I swapped harddrive and and replaced the ATI Rage 128mb with a nvidea 32mb model, installed Tiger on it using Nadines Mac Book in FW Targemode and now everythign runs like a charme. I was thinking about using it as Fileserver – could replace my stupid AllNet NAS ; or maybe it will get a place right beside my new TV, when I will finally make up my mind an buy one. Should mime a good musicplayer, although powerconsumption is too high. It uses 13w in standby mode and about 50 when running (without drives). Let’s see…

Ohh one more thing: I got it with no keyboard, mouse and the speakers went bust. So if you happen to have such things for sale… post a comment.

Steve! You did it again. At first I was not amused, when you stepped into the ringtone market, although this is just a logical step. Boring….and stripping down the IPhone off its Edge/GSM Module and sell it as IPod was the next step that Apple had to take, off course. 

Concerning Starbucks… well, I don’t drink coffee, and in germany prices are far from cheap, so I don’t spend much time sitting at Starbucks. But hell, that was the next logical step, to provide the playlist of of a starbucks store. This feuture is just brilliant… or in your words, Steve “amazing!”.

Not that there are countless services that try to recognize a played  song over telephone line, but Apple once again added the ease of use, by building up and changing the infrastructure. Now let’s hope that Apple puts out the API so that others can follow.

Just imagine your favorite DJ opened up its little store on Itunes and just when you leave the club where he just performed, the actual mix is right online and you can pick it up. Or you just get the playlist of every hughe cafe, store, club, whatever you are in. At the moment, video content doesn’t make much sense, but who knows what the future brings. Adding a cam to the Pod/IPhone and the posibility to stream directly to youtube, maybe? Well, the future has just begun and it is logical in all its steps. Hooraayy!!!

…. ohh.. and by the way: At the end of your keynote, I was amused, not to say euphoric –  like always, after Steve has left the stage. 

Watch the keynote:  http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/s83522y/event/index.html?internal=g4h5jl83a