This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs.
If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it!
Supposedly after a while, you could tell how things were going by the shift in the animal sounds, even for minor shifts from normal operation. And of course the various alerts used loud noises like panicked Kookaburra (if I'm recalling correctly), so those definitely got the attention of even novice operators.
Oh, that? We just ignore it. They call it technical debt.
We learnt to ignore it in a few months, but it's funny when guests hear it for the first time.
I remember my PC made very distinct noises when scrolling text, compiling, and various other operations.
I vaguly remember a reading somewhere a couple years ago that someone had hooked up a click noise to linux syscalls and context switches for this basic purpose.
I just wish machines still had disk I/O leds. My laptop (a dell) is one of the last machines I've seen with a disk activity led, because it switches the charge led to disk activity with a fn key combination.
Also, if you want satisfaction there are various industries where computers are used to control mechanical devices. I worked in one where a large robot was being controlled by our software. Nothing more exciting than writing some code and hearing that think whirl and clunk away. Or somewhat frequently banging against end stops and the like when we had bugs.
That's pretty much what computer graphics programming is.
I’ve noodled around with it a bit, and it’s pretty cool.
>a friendly tutorial
>54,019 words 307,466 characters
it's basically a flat file docs
I love it when projects go so far beyond beyond what was intended, well beyond where most people would have stopped or lost interest, and in to the land of the absurd and hilarious.
This reminds me of the joy in the fun things I've done just for the sake of taking them as far as they could be taken.
Thanks for sharing.
Edit: his whole channel is awesome, what a great find. He also sorted all of StarWars dialog, manually, as one does:
“This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit.”
Someone who really invests in his trollage.
Harder Drive is one of my favorite videos.
his perhaps lesser known, but fantastic and way more interactive creation is his icfpc'06 work, http://www.boundvariable.org/
i don't know of any worthy english-language writeups, perhaps they will be posted in replies to this comment.
What an excellent example of using non-standard formats to explore interesting concepts and be exposed to different ways of thinking. This is what high school should be like. Actually, what am I saying: this is what it feels like to tinker with your pals in high school.
And now I'm looking at SIGBOVIK, Annals of Improbable Research, CMU's "ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL HERESY," the Ig Nobel prize … what a wonderful rabbit trail you've sent me down.
And yes, Tom7 is a frequent contributor :)
Renault did it some years ago to demonstrate how much control they have on their F1 engine drivetrain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0
To try to keep them in sync I used broadcast Ethernet packets.
It worked. Sort of. Then fell out of sync. They were generally on time (thanks to the sync) but had enough difference to be easily noticeable and kind of annoying.
Not unlike a first school band recital.
It was fun. Half the project was getting the speakers to beep because that’s a Win16 function I was calling from a Win32 context and I had to thunk into it.
I also fondly remember one program that made the drive's red access LED pulsate really softly on and off. Not only was I blown away that the drive can do that (I didn't know what pulse width modulation was back then), LEDs were still somewhat new enough at the time that I might not have seen a softly pulsating one before. It was really pretty.
A demo, including music and graphics, written for the 1541 disk drive -- no, it is not a C64 demo, it runs entirely on the 1541 (which has a 6502 CPU and some amount of RAM in it)
The real challenge would be moving it from tour stop to tour stop without breaking it, if I had to guess.
Are there earlier examples?
The 1401 video I actually saw in an older related HN submission; lots of comments linking out to different examples in these threads. Here are a couple, someone might be able to aggregate a bunch more:
"Eye of the Tiger" played on a dot-matrix printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 (2015, 62 comments)
"Imperial March" on a single floppy drive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 (2011, 27 comments)
Both the news site and original video of the second submission are lost to time, but luckily our saviour (of web content) Brewster Kahle has graced us with a copy in the Internet Archive.[1] The Wayback Machine also remembers a time when YouTube recommendations bore greater relevance--those on the archived video page from 2011[2] are entirely of videos of computer hardware music. Some might even still be up today.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"Imperial March" was also what was played on the first incarnation of the Floppotron, with an impressively full sound from only two floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE).
And perhaps related are those videos of the pleasingly periodic percussion of uncontrolled devices like (broken) washing machines, electronic typewriters, and air conditioners.
I presume this was trial-and-error, but how could someone tell that the current is too much for a disk drive which is being, uh, overdriven (to make noise!)?
Or maybe this was a "just in case" situation...?
So cool . . .
Probably just hard won knowledge that almost no one else would ever have.
Kind of cool in a way.
Also, why didn't he use any SSDs? (j/k)
> Even if there is an existing MIDI for a specific song, re-arranging it for The Floppotron is still a time consuming process. Every „instrument” in the setup have its limits and the track must fit the note range it can play. Making a track sound good on the stacks of FDDs or a scanner usually involves a lot of tweaking.
> Making one arrangement for 3.0 usually takes me 3-4 evenings, which is a little longer than for the older Floppotron 2.0.
Maybe there could be an kind of offline version that people can use to tweak their own MIDI and ultimately play it on the real machine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ
This says 14 years ago.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...
Not only the demo has its technical worth: that "synth" can sound amazingly.
Pure art. I hope this ends up in a museum.
This is the stuff of legends, nice work Paweł!
For some reason this reminded me of chiptunes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_p3-8fTo0 [Pretty sure some of you will recognize some of these tunes] )
---Edit--
There's more here if anyone's interested.
Floppy Music Robo-Band. Rondo alla Turca (cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI
(Pardon my immature gushing, but it really is very, very cool !)
