How come movies, TV shows, and the BBC News website all use roman numerals to represent the year? It’s not like they use roman numerals for all numbers, and I’m pretty sure they’re not even used in Romania any more!
So stupid.
I made some changes to my website YourDumb.net recently and decided i’d see if I could get the word out today. Luckily I have good friends online who helped me post about it on Twitter and Facebook, and word seems to be spreading now.
So yeah, check out the site, unless you found this site from there, in which case feel free to take a look around at my emo blog posts from the last 7 years. 🙂
A few of my friends have been telling me to watch How I Met your Mother for months and months. Well, the other week I decided to get started on it with Cheryl, and it’s completely hilarious and brilliant.
Over the weekend we went through somewhere in the region of 27(!) episodes (s01e11 to s02e16 I think). I’m so glad there are so many episodes to watch, but at this rate I’ll catch up before the end of the year and then I’ll be stuck waiting like everyone else. 🙁
If you haven’t seen this show then give it a chance!
Life is good and things are going well at the moment.
Cheryl’s finished her dissertation, and has settled into the new flat really well. I have actually stayed there every night since the move, so I guess I’m settling in well too. 😉
At the weekend we went to see Les Miserables at the local cinema. The performance was taking place at the O2 Arena in London, but it was broadcast to the cinema. It was really good, apart from the slight delay between the video and audio. They were sending the video as it was recorded and the audio as it is delayed. It was quite annoying. I understand that in the arena most people would have to watch on the screen, and because the video takes a short amount of time to be processed there is a delay added to the audio to sync them up, so why wasn’t this done with the cinema broadcast? Oh well.
Last night we went to meet Dave and Hayley for some pizza and to discuss going away to Prague in February next year. It sounds pretty straightforward, and pretty much only relies on Cheryl having her new visa by then. It shouldn’t be a problem, so we’re going to go ahead and book it at the end of the month. Should be awesome!
I’ve spent the last few days thinking about theremins, the musical instrument that you play without touching. When I went to see a band called Spaceships Are Cool the other day it triggered my mind. One night I suddenly decided it would be possible to make a theremin that worked using only one hand using a different design.
I plan to make one at some point in the future, when I get the parts in one place… For now I decided that I would build my concept in the browser. I started out making it with a bunch of div tags, which was frustrating, and then I realised that I could use the <canvas> tag from HTML5 to do it.
I threw together a quick page and then began thinking about the sound. I found a page detailing generating sound in Javascript in Firefox 4 and decided to go with that. I installed Firefox 4 and then started playing around with scripting everything. I started out by picking apart Paul Irish’s harmony.js file (view that site in Google Chrome and scroll to the bottom). Then I added in the sound stuff once I had values for the cursor position.
What I ended up with was a very plain page that generates sound (in Firefox 4) with the pitch determined by the cursor position on the X axis, and the volume on the Y axis. The sample time is 50ms, and at the moment there’s a bit of an annoying click. I think I might be able to get rid of that by keeping the audio element playing at 0 volume or something like that, but that’s debugging for another day.
Anyway, if you’re viewing this on my page in Firefox 4 then you should see the finished product underneath. If you’re viewing this in a feed or on Facebook then you’ll want to go here. If you’re not using Firefox 4, or you’re not sure what browser you’re using then this probably won’t work for you and you’re probably very bored of reading this by now.