Void In Quebec

May 16, 2009
0 Comments

Late last year, I started writing some NES-inspired 8-bit music—I say ‘inspired’, because I used OpenMPT and YMCK’s Magical 8bit Plug instead of the original hardware. The method might not be much like the real thing but the sound essentially is, including all the original constraints (e.g. being limited to one noise channel, one triangle wave channel, and two pulse wave channels).

I was planning on putting together and releasing an EP-length collection of these ersatz 8-bit tunes but my focus shifted onto other things. It’s been months since I last worked on them, and the odds are most won’t be properly completed. A couple of tracks have been finished, however, and so I packaged them up along with an alternative version of the title track to come up with this:

Dashiell Dunn & The Odds - Void In Quebec

Download

You can download the entire Void In Quebec single (zip, 14 MB) or download the individual tracks:

  1. Void In Quebec (mp3, 7.55 MB)
  2. À Consommer Avant (mp3, 3.98 MB)
  3. Je Me Souviens (mp3, 2.74 MB)

License

Creative Commons License
Void In Quebec by Dashiell Dunn & The Odds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I love derivative works! Let me know if you’ve made one.

Categories: Projects » Music » Void In Quebec
Void In Quebec is a three-track single featuring NES-inspired 8-bit music.

How to combat swine flu

May 3, 2009
1 Comment

The powerful pork lobby has managed to get the WHO to call the current worldwide influenza outbreak ‘Influenza A(H1N1)’ instead of swine flu, because they believe consumers may believe pork products are now unsafe.

Instead of asking for a confusing and unnecessary name change, Big Pork should be actively trying to get consumers eating more pork. Here is my idea of a poster for such a campaign:

It's our planet now!

Categories: Design & graphics, Humour and Projects » Graphics » Remixed propaganda

New Iron Chef wallpapers

April 22, 2009
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I made some Iron Chef wallpapers a few years ago, but they weren’t that good. These new ones are more stylish (click the thumbnails for the full 1600×1200 versions):

Chen Kenichi

Yutaka Ishinabe

Hiroyuki Sakai

Masahiko Kobe

Rokusaburo Michiba

Komei Nakamura

Masaharu Morimoto

Categories: Design & graphics and Projects » Graphics » Iron Chef wallpapers

Fight the power

April 11, 2009
4 Comments

There are a few ways to get your hands on Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package. One is to qualify for the $900 tax bonus payment. Another is to be Thérèse Rein. But, there’s something else Australians can do to get free stuff from the government, and all you have to do is complete a little online form. Thanks to the Australian Better Health Initiative, you can get—wait for it—five free tape measures, to support your ‘event’. Alternatively, you can download a PDF, print it out in 6 pieces, and stick your own tape measure together.

Categories: Humour, Local, Politics and Suggestions

The McDonald’s Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator

March 28, 2009
3 Comments

The McDonald’s Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator can roughly determine the best location to fly to to get access to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, based on flight time and whether it will be breakfast time once you arrive.

It is perhaps better explained with an example: it’s 1700h (5 PM) in Tokyo, and you want a McMuffin, but the breakfast menu isn’t going to open for another 13 hours. You can’t afford to wait that long, but where else can you go? The answer, as this tool will tell you, is Honolulu. You’ll arrive around 0616 local time, ready to stride into a McDonald’s and get breakfast. In Tokyo, it’s only 0116, and you would have had to wait hours longer for your McMuffin.

The code is very simple, and the time zone calculations don’t account for DST (since they don’t use the date at all). Flight times are calculated based on latitude and longitude coordinates, a distance formula I got from Wikipedia, and an estimated average flight speed. You can use this tool for times other than breakfast, but it will get confused if midnight lies between the start and finish times.

Categories: Programming » PHP and Projects » Web applications » The McDonald's Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator
The McDonald's Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator is a tool for roughly determining the best location to fly to to get access to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, based on flight times and time zones.

Avocado, an online image gallery application

March 7, 2009
2 Comments

Written in PHP and tailored to my needs, Avocado is a free lightweight personal online image gallery application I have been working on.

I’ll be using it for my own gallery, so you can see it in action there. This first release of Avocado is a beta version, 0.5, and it’s not going to get promoted out of beta until (among other things) it has better search and editing capabilities. Still, it’s perfectly usable as-is, although the documentation is highly incomplete.

It goes without saying that the source isn’t an amazing example of good coding. It’s not too bad, considering the scope of the application, and I certainly learnt some things along the way. Speaking of the source: zip (37.7 KB) or tar.gz (31.8 KB). Aside from compression formats, the downloads are identical.

Categories: Projects » Web applications » Avocado and Programming » PHP
Avocado is a free lightweight personal online image gallery application.

Psychic predictions

January 26, 2009
1 Comment

Tonight, viewers of Today Tonight were in for a treat: Australia’s psychic of the year, Stacey Demarco (who technically calls herself a witch), offered her predictions for the coming year. As the presenter promised, the details really were spine-tingling. There was one especially serious prediction, concerning Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

According to Today Tonight and the psychic, this year our fearless leader “may be beset with a serious, even fatal heart problem”. (One has to assume that Australia’s top psychic is not just referring to the rheumatic heart disease he already has a history of.)

While the language in the report is tentative, with a little analysis we can see that the prediction has simply been toned down to avoid alarming the viewing audience. The psychic recommends “better diet and exercise” for Kevin, but this warning brings up a potential paradox:

If Kevin heeds the warning and manages to take good care of his health, he won’t have heart problems in future. But, if he doesn’t have heart problems in the future, she wouldn’t have been able to predict them and warn him about it. Since the psychic has forseen heart problems in Kevin’s future, we know he’s definitely not going to heed her warning.

There’s no doubt about it: Kevin Rudd is in trouble.

I know the world’s thoughts are now with Kevin in his time of need, so I’ve created a centralised resource for everyone wanting to keep up-to-date with news on Kevin Rudd’s upcoming heart attack*:

braveheart.maestrosync.com

—

* Technical note: while the term ‘heart attack’ specifically refers to myocardial infarction, for simplicity, all life-threatening problems with Kevin Rudd’s heart will be included on the Kevin Rudd Memorial Heart Attack Counter.

Categories: Projects » Web applications » Braveheart, Humour, Local and Politics

Facts and figures

January 5, 2009
2 Comments

Today’s episode of Today Tonight included a segment which featured a number of classic shonky current affair themes: today’s children being too insulated, political correctness gone mad, youth gone wild. It was rather impressive for a total non-news story. The start of the segment included the presenter making a comment along the lines of “what about the number of teen suicides these days”—no further elaboration was forthcoming, of course. It’s almost a given that Today Tonight is going to be full of crap, so I decided to look for some real statistics on the subject.

I didn’t have to spend very long looking, though, because there’s a very convenient source of statistics for issues like this. It’s the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and its website is full of useful and detailed facts and figures. In this case, I consulted a number of resources relating to suicide:

The figures I am using are for persons (male or female) aged 15-19 (which is as low as the statistics go), expressed in deaths per 100,000 estimated persons in that age group. First, the low-resolution (every 5 years) graph for 1921 to 1995:

graph

Yes, they have been going up. They’ve been going up since the 1960s. There’s nothing new about this. Let’s take a look at the graph for 1996 to 2006:

graph

They peaked in 1997. Since then, the suicide rate has been declining. This really is not news. In 2006, the figures had gotten below 1971-1975 rates. Data for 2007 and 2008 isn’t available, but it’s highly unlikely that suicide rate would have doubled in the last two years.

I’ll let these facts speak for themselves. Also, I’ve forgotten what the story was supposed to be about, but I’m sure I disproved something somehow.

Categories: Local and Maths & science

1938 Japanese civil defence posters

January 4, 2009
3 Comments

The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought by Japan and China between 1937 and 1945, around the same time as (but starting before) World War II. There is a collection of civil defence posters from 1938 on the National Archives of Japan website. They’re available in ultra high resolution but at large sizes you can only view small sections of them at a time. I found this frustrating, because I liked these posters (I like most government/propaganda posters). They’re haunting, unsettlingly elegant and beautiful depictions of the horrors of war in a country which had suddenly come into the modern age.

I liked these posters enough to want high-quality offline versions. So, I made them, by downloading the images piece by piece and then reconstituting them. I figured I’d put this convenient collection back up onto the internet for anyone who’s interested. There are 55 images in total, divided into four categories. Each ZIP file is around 60 MB. Each image is around 2000×3000 pixels—this is only a quarter of the maximum size available on the original website, but it was going to be way too time-consuming to get them at full size. The image filenames include the posters’ titles from the original website, whose English I cannot be held responsible for, but they do provide some clue as to the meaning of the poster.

If you are at least casually interested and have a reasonable internet connection, you might as well download these. If you are casually interested but only have a poor internet connection, I’d recommend at least having a look at the original website.

Examples




Download:

Categories: Design & graphics, Politics and Things I did not make

2009

January 1, 2009
2 Comments

2009

Superficially stylish.

Categories: Design & graphics and Projects » Graphics » Miscellaneous graphics