In the last two months, there has been a fair (but not overwhelming) amount of media awareness around the Evoke Alternative Platform winner demo, »nano«. I’ve been interviewed for a minor German internet portal and for a major German Mac magazine and received almost exclusively good ratings on pouët.net. Finally, a few weeks ago, Gasman (a well-respected scener) started a thread about it in the iPodLinux forums. There were numerous people wondering about how it’s possible to do real-time 3D graphics on the iPod nano. To answer these questions once and for all, I’ve taken much time to write this very long post that really should contain all relevant information.
Read more …

Last week, I read a paper on how to partially encrypt MPEG Audio data. That is, modify an existing audio file that it is still syntactically correct, but sounds more or less broken. For example, imagine an online music shop that offers free, but partially encrypted music downloads: The files are in bad quality, and you have to pay to restore the full fidelity. But I digress.
The point is: that paper was inspiring. I decided to try the presented method using MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (»MP2«) as a basis. I chose this format because it’s the simplest audio compression scheme that is still in broad use today (for example VCD/SVCD, DAB and most prominently DVB). Layer III (»MP3«), AAC and Vorbis are considerably more complex. And, it just so happened that I got a copy of ISO 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) on my hard disk :)
While working on the project, I thought that it’d be cooler to write a full decoder instead of this mere proof-of-concept »look what I can do to my MP2 files« hack. So I developed a small MPEG-1 Audio Layer II decoding library called kjmp2 which eventually evolved into a less-than-4k MP2 player application …
Read more …

Not even three months after the Beta 2 version, Microsoft released the first Release Candidate of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system to the public. My Beta 2 test lasted only one week, because Vista simply wasn’t ready for everyday use back then. But according to numerous other reviews on the net, RC1 made much progress since. I was a bit sceptical about that – how far could they have come in just twelve weeks? So it was time to do another test with the current public pre-release version. The bottom line this time: Vista has indeed become a somewhat usable system. I’m not going to ditch XP in favour of Vista soon (simply because I’ve already installed too much applications on the »old« system), but in a year or so, I think that will be an option.
Read more …

Summer is the traditional demoscene party time: Assembly, Evoke, Buenzli and over half a dozen others take place in only about two months of time. While I only watched Assembly on AssemblyTV last weekend, I’ll attend Evoke 2006 in person. Instead of writing a lame post-party report as usual, I’m going to do a live report and write about stuff as it happens (given that the Internet connection works). So stay tuned and watch this post grow over time …
Read more …

I didn’t update CENSORED for quite a while, but during the last week, I finally took some time to push the project further. The result is version 0.2.0, available from SourceForge since yesterday night. The new version is all about artwork support: JPEG or PNG files that are placed next to music files will now be shown on playback. This sounds simple, but in fact, this little feature took me about half of the time I spent for the whole 0.1 series. Alas, this has only partly to do with the complex data structures Apple tends to use – a good share of the problems I had was generated by myself …
Read more …

Believe it or not, 3DRealms is about to release a game Really Soon Now. And I don’t mean the kind of »RSN« they kept telling us for the last ten years – this time, they have released a demo of the game!
Of course, I don’t mean Duke Nukem Forever (DNF). I’m talking about Prey, the other vapourware product of 3DRealms. It’s been in the works since 1995 (two years before DNF was first mentioned!) and it’s finally finished. While development of this title was not as twisted as DNF’s, it’s nevertheless interesting. The project used a very, very ambitious graphics engine that generated stunning images back then. In 1999, development stopped for some reason, and in 2002 the lead programmer died. Development was then assigned to the external company Human Head Studios, who kept true to at least parts of the storyline.
Read more …

Testing, reviewing and ranting about Windows Vista Beta 2 seems to be all the rage lately. Normally I don’t like trends like this, but I’m into eye candy and wanted to see if the Vista Desktop really proves to be usable on my normal desktop system. And I had that 32GB empty NTFS partition on my hard drive that really needed to be filled :)
Read more …

As you may or may not already know, I use both Windows and Unix-like operating systems, both at work and at home. (I’d like to add OS X to that list, but Apple decided to sell the underpowered x86 Mac minis at ridiculously high prices, but that’s another story …) In the last few days, I had a fair amount of »fun« (note the quotation marks) with Linux, though.
Read more …

When writing a program for an iPod, the first and foremost thing to implement is, of course, sound. I, for one, did some of the graphical bells and whistles first, because that’s where my real business is, but today, I wanted to add a little bit of music. It was going to be a smooth ride, I thought, as iPodLinux’ native sound API is just plain and simple OSS.
Read more …

What does a geek do with his newest high-tech gadget? Exactly – he’s hacking and/or putting Linux on it! This weekend was the time for my trusty iPod nano to become modded, with the intention to run some self-written homebrew on it.
Read more …