Made in Renoise, with two String Thing instruments, Init and 8th Arp phrases and some lo-def effects. I like it; I think it’s got that cavey feeling, kind of. And spacey too, of course.

I do like Renoise a lot; I’m sure you may have noticed all of these demos have been on different setups and DAWs, and that’s because I’ve been trying to figure out what I can be most comfortable with. Renoise is kind of the fusing of a tracker program and a professional DAW, which makes it interesting to work with.

The blog’s been stagnant throughout March, but trust me in saying I’ve kept myself occupied and more will be coming up going into spring.

New demo! It’s weirdly improvised as always, but not too bad I think.

This time around I used BandLab instead of FL, which is a neat piece of kit that runs in the browser. If you want to look at the mix itself you can find it here. I didn’t do any panning so it might not sound that gud.

As a partial followup to my last ThinkPad post, here’s Chromium 34 (from 2014) running on Windows 2000.

It’s not the most ideal for daily use as it’s quite buggy, but it astonishingly does work. If you want to grab a copy, go to this place here run by a nice fellow. No installer, just a zip.

If you don’t have KernelEx on your install, I have that stuff hosted on w2krepo; you’ll want usp51.zip and Windows2000-UURollup-v11-d20141130-x86-ENU (Extended Kernel).7z. I’d suggest to get them installed in that order, as UURollup messed IE stuff up for me before I did install the latter. They’re both very useful updates/patches to have, and the same sdfox7.com site has plenty of software that wouldn’t run on 2000 otherwise, such as Flash 29 (which, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten working as of yet) and a portable version of Firefox 48 (one I have not yet tried).

I had actually started on this about a week ago, got tired and then accidentally slipped into a Neopets obsession. But I still have made a bit of progress with it.

Here’s an early screenshot from the 18th, when I wrote both of the current pages on [#root#] and [#path#]:

On the 19th, I added a nifty warning, since classless.css, the light CSS framework I’m using, has some basic card stylings baked in and I tacked on some more CSS for flavor.

After a short period of inactivity that brings us to today, where I hacked on classless.css a bit to give it a more characteristic theme, and I. (Zoomed out for the screenshot.)

Only the [#path#] and [#root#] entries have been written as of right now, and it’s all still very much incomplete. I’ve yet to figure out quite where to go with it and how it should be organized, though the styling part’s almost covered, featuring that small thing with the footer I’ve been wanting to do forever with an Apple iWeb-esque silhouette to say that hey, this was made in AutoSite.

I should say, one annoying thing about writing this was getting attributes to escape properly for the input examples. Using HTML escape codes like [ for [ would have easily kept Apricot from replacing it in an HTML document, but due to how I have CommonMark set up to process Markdown files internally, what would happen is that by the time Apricot came to start replacing attributes, the Markdown parser would have (for some reason that’s beyond me) replaced the escape codes with that they represented, meaning that Apricot would treat the examples like they were actual attributes. Annoying, and there’s little I can do about it.

How I worked around it was by starting the line with HTML, which kinda bypasses the Markdown preprocessor altogether. It’s a.. little messy, but it’ll work.

All this is now up on the Github repository, so changes going forward are incremental. I added the output folder to the .gitignore so it doesn’t get messy.

I have had this T41 running Windows 2000 for a while, but for the longest time I had a problem with the drivers for its internal Intel wireless chip. Its configuration embedded right into the Network Adapter properties window, which was neat, but there was no way to save profiles and more importantly, it only supported WEP encryption. And you’d know that wouldn’t fly today.

The annoying bit is that I had used AntiX and MX Linux on the laptop during its past life, and wireless (and WPA2) worked perfectly, albeit with some issues with range. It’s possible that had I used XP on it, WPA2 would have worked there too since there’s a native wireless stack. Unfortunately for me though, an updated Windows 2000 driver was nowhere to be found.

That brings us to probably the best $10 (or 10000 Microsoft Rewards points if you want to be specific about it, or 6.02214076×10²³ Neopoints adjusted for inflation, not including $0.74 sales tax) I had ever spent. And, as it turns out, it even came early instead of the Feb. 24-March timeframe I had expected.

And surprisingly enough, it came new in box, installation CDs and all:

Installation was fairly simple. I worried a little when I noticed the Standalone Driver CD was meant for XP/Vista (versions of Windows that did ship with a wireless stack), but the Resource CD fortunately did have the software that’d run on 2000 SP4.

Connecting to my home network with the software seemed to be a little problematic at first, with it saying Connected to Router and not having obtained an IP address or found the default gateway, but connecting to my Time Capsule worked out fine. I’ve checked again and it seems that was just a temporary issue, now works fine. And with that, here it is:

I’ve always liked the PC Card form factor, whether it be the original PCMCIA standard, CardBus or the newer ExpressCard. All those sleeker, slimmer, modern laptops tend to forgo this type of expandability for the promise that USB-C will eventually solve everything and that dongles are the answer. As for that, I’ll always prefer the T41.

(And it still works)

Made this demo within a class period. I didn’t have FL 10 installed on this laptop, so I had to settle with the 7 trial again. This time around, I did some more complex mixing, instead of using plugins all on Master; it worked out well. You may also notice the return of PRCPiano from James Blunt is True Speedcore, as I had been aiming to do a slightly more chordy thing. Notes were quantized at a beat or so. Came out nice.

I’ve just realized I had this in my media library. It predates this blog, but it was a good shot and I felt it’d be right to share.

A couple days ago in Red Wing I saw a book by a photographer who had caught a sunset every day over the span of 365 days. It was impressive work for sure.

I got hooked up with a box copy of FL Studio 10, which remarkably installed on the ThinkPad with no issues. I was a little concerned it wouldn’t run, as the system requirements stated XP or Vista and not 2000, but it installed anyway. I haven’t been able to make out whether it runs any worse than 7 on the Pentium M processor (the requirements stated a Pentium 4 or greater), but it appears to be working well.

What that means is that you could expect more demos coming from me in the future. The FL Studio 7 trial version didn’t support any project saving, which means should I come back to the demos I’ve posted previously, I’d need to reconstruct it from MIDI. Which isn’t impossible, just tricky to get the same sound, as knobs and plugin settings weren’t exported.

But anything I try out going forward is definitely gonna get saved, meaning I’ll be able to work on it after the initial export.

So, does that mean dcb slapcore soon? Maybe. >:3c