Trying out Revivex

Having had the Juho for over half a year now, and the DWR coating that sheds water is kinda gone. Haven't been in a major shower yet - the rain thus far have been quite light, and the Juho, while it does absorb the water, still keeps me dry.

With winter properly coming up in South Australia, I thought it be best to re-coat it. Got some Revivex together with Granger's 30 Degrees Cleaner, and it seems to do the trick. Water definitely beads up, but will have to wait for a real shower to see how it performs :)

Fiio X1

First up, no pictures here as there are so many reviews and photos of this MP3 player online.

The MP3 player that has been with me for almost 5 years, a Cowon D2+ has been having hickups lately, not reading the external sd card. Plus it's suffered lots of trials and tribulations - falling off tables etc. and having to be taken apart so as to move the buttons to their original positions etc. It's had a good long run.

While I would love an MP3 player that is top of the line, perhaps one of the Ibasso things, my mp3 player is mainly to be used at work, on trains, on planes etc so while I do want good sound quality, superb sound quality would be a waste. Hence, the X1. It's priced very affordably at USD99 (I bought it for AUD138 with shipping from Minidisk australia), and is touted to have some good quality DACs. So how does it stack up agains the D2+?

First impressions were: detailed, but not as exciting as the D2+. However, after some fiddling with the D2+ and disabling the EQ, I must say the X1 and D2+ are around the same level. Good, but different. I felt that the D2+ was slightly warmer, with a touch stronger bass response.

The X1 on the flip side, sounded sharper, more detailed. This was with my Grados SR80. I tried doing some comparisons on my daily use IEM - the Shure SE215 and kinda gave up as seriously, I find the SE215 so boring compared to the SR80. The lack of highs also put me off so I went back to the SR80s.  I tried fiddling with the X1's EQ to match the EQ of the D2+, but the differences were very minimal to my ears, unlike the D2's EQ that is very readily audible.

The main reason why I use the SE215 on a daily basis at work is because of its good insulation, and that while it is very boring (i.e. detailed), it is not tiring, as it does get with the SR80 after awhile. Also, it packs down into a tiny case around the same size as the D2+.

I'm also wondering if the X1's DAC pushes as much power as the D2+ - the D2+ has my SR80 around 15/100 of the volume, while the X1 needs about 30/100 to get the same levels.

Interface wise, the X1 has this round circular control up front reminiscent of the older ipods. It works ok, though I tend to overshoot the menus. One annoying thing I've found is that when the display is powered down, only the volume control buttons still work. I'd expect the next/prev buttons to work, but I don't think they do with the display off. Very annoying. A setting in the menus allow you to choose which buttons are active when the player has its display turned off.


One other niggle, which is not fair to the X1 as it's not a touchscreen - is that the D2+, and its touchscreen, allows you to jump to any part of the song at a touch - with the X1, you'd need to hold down the next/prev button and wait as it traverses the timeline. There is no A-B function either, so if you are a musician wanting to practice with that, no go. And yes, that's something the D2+ has. And I've only used it like once, so...

The package comes with a silicone cover (great! No need to spend $$$ on extra cases), and has the screen protector already applied. And with 2 extra screen covers too.... were they expecting this mp3 player to be exposed to lots of scratching? Like maybe cat owners? I honestly cannot see the need for 2 extras... Additionally, there are stickers to attack to the player to give it a carbon fiber look, a wood look, or an American flag look. Some kinda warranty thing in the box, as well as a usb charging cable.

What else.... oh, the X1 does not have any internal memory, and uses micro sd cards.

Overall, the X1 suits my needs very well. For the price, it is neigh impossible to complain with what it delivers.

If there is any big niggle, for me it'd be the interface. Having to press the power button just to change tracks is annoying. And the navigation on the D2+ with its touchscreen is just lightyears faster and more accurate. Again, sticker price - the D2+ probably cost twice the price of the X1 when I bought it.

Orico W9PH4

I wish companies would name things better! W9PH4 is soooo descriptive! As bad as Casio and their watch naming. GAH!

Anyways, I realized my usb hub, a tiny Targus portable thing was only USB2, so I thought it'd be nice to step up to a USB3 hub, especially with my USB3 drives.

Visited the usual shops along Rundle Mall, but nothing that was unpowered caught my eye (incidently, I went to the Apple Store to see if they had any nice usb hubs, nada. I did try out the Apple Watch though, it's really a fun gadget! I really like the concept of having a watch on my wrist, so I bought a Casio. But that's another story.)

Made a trek down to MSY, another computer retailer at the edge of the Adelaide CBD and picked up this Orico brand 4 port usb thingy. They actually had two Orico unpowered 4 port hubs, and I basically picked this one simply because it was smaller.

The power buttons are a mystery though, this is the first usb hub i've had that had individual buttons to turn on each port. I really think it's unnecessary, and the mechanical switches add a layer of possible failure. In any case, I'm leaving them all switched on as USB is hot-pluggable.

I hope.

On the flip side, it's very well built (compared to some of the other more flimsy units I saw in store), and the usb cable is permanently attached, and is quite thick. I'm hoping this thick solid cable means its delivers the full USB3 power spec, and being built-in means I won't lose the cable when moving between places.

Did some quick transfer tests with my Touro S and doesn't appear to be much difference when transferring a 1gb file through the hub or with the hdd directly connected to my laptop.  Guess its good!

Touro S

Popped out at lunch to get this little baby. So far, it's proving it's mettle, a 1gb test file wrote in about 7~8 seconds, pretty damned fast for a bus powered portable drive! Writing from the Touro S to my desktop took about the same time.

I still need to transfer my vsl samples - I didn't realize I've got 600gb of samples just from vsl >.>

What a joke, spent so much on vsl and I'm not using them at all. Oh well. I'm sure I'll get back some day or another. Sample lust is a thing.

Harping for a thunderbolt external drive. Nah.

I've been meaning to move my Caldigit FW800 drive that houses all my samples over to a portable thunderbolt drive - mainly to reap the speed benefits, as well as to lose the power adaptor (plus I have 2 thunderbolt ports doing... nothing), and I went down to (probably) the only place in Australia you can buy it - the Apple store. Sadly (thankfully!) they were out of stock. A bit bummed, I ran around the usual suspects, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, JB Hifi etc. They carried mainly WD and Seagate stuff.

WD portable drives form the bulk of my backups, and the are a damned good bang for the buck for what they are. However, for my sample drive, I want something faster to stream my samples. Now, I'm quite thankful for the thunderbolt drive being out of stock, as I realized that thunderbolt is kinda pointless for a single standalone 7.2k rpm drive. After looking at specs, even usb3 won't get maxed out by a single 7.2k drive.

After some hunting around, it seems MSY has in stock some HGST Touro S drives. 7.2k, usb3, 1tb. Just what I want. Probably going to pick that up over lunch tomorrow. Once I get rid of this Caldigit housing (it's not bad, fw800 + usb3) and move to the bus-powered Touro, I won't have to wait weeks for the sample drive to arrive by post - and save on postage!

Unity 5.0, my kindle, and a banana.

No, they are not related at all. As the self-proclaimed Most Boring Person with a Blog, I have to put in something more boring in addition to the boring stuff I post.

I ate a banana today*.

So, with regards to my Kindle - it's the 3rd generation keyboard, 5 years old now? - has been acting up recently. Freezing and resetting suddenly. Been _slightly_ tempted to used this excuse to upgrade to one of the new ones with the backlight - would be super to read in bed without the ceiling lights on.

But anyways, as I'm saving up for my dream aircraft carrier and can't really justify buying a new kindle, a quick google search had me taking the kindle apart, and lo and behold, the rattling that was going on inside, was due to loose screws! Those little buggers must have been the cause of my freezes. Got them screwed back in what I hope are their correct positions. Will know shortly if this is truly the cause, or if I truly need to speak to my banker about buying a new kindle.

For all the electronic toys I have, the kindle is probably the one I keep in the highest regard, and will definitely replace if lost or damaged.

Finally, Unity 5 got released today! Surprisingly, the free version (rebranded to "Personal Edition") comes with many coveted features only previously available in the pro editions - which cost a pretty penny - the profiler is now available, as well as render to texture and other nifty toys. This is apart from the new toys released in 5. And it's "free".

Basically, if you earn more than 100k gross a year, you need to get the pro version. This is perfectly fine for dabblers like myself, but many people are grousing that the key feature that they want, in the pro version is the removal of the Unity logo at the start up of apps and games.The cost to remove the logo can run up to several grand, in order to obtain the pro version. And now, with all the key pro features available in the Personal Edition, and not everyone needing the pro features, makes it sort of a tough sell. This, is from someone on the outside looking in.

Drawing a parallel to Houdini, which has 3 tiers - Apprentice, which is Non Commercial, Indie (my license!) which is valid for those who gross less than 100k a year with minor restrictions, and of course the full blown commercial licenses for Houdini/FX. Indie has got to be popular, I got it mainly to support sidefx, and because its 200 bucks. It's finally finding use with Unity.

I would think Unity would gather a fair bit of support (and maybe revenue!), if there was a middle tier that caters to devs who earn less than 100k, but would like the logo removed. It would slot right in perfectly with Hindie. But that's the random pitter patterings of the Most Boring Person with a Blog.

Right, unity's finally downloaded. Time to launch!

*and bananas are delicious.

Jupiter Ascending - what's up with it?

I honestly think my tastes must be at some perpendicular angle to most people. What's wrong with Jupiter Ascending? I absolutely enjoyed every minute of the show! For some reason, it gave me very familiar feelings, similar to that when playing Final Fantasy - to be brought into another world. And I really enjoyed my visit.

Spoilers Ahead:

Loved the ship designs, loved the detail inside so many of the sets, loved the otherworldly architecture. It's quite a universe. The technobabble at some parts just gave me a big grin.

On the flip side, there were things I that were poking in my mind like: why didn't the processing plant or whatever it was inside Jupiter like collapse like paper when wolf-dude cracked through it? The gravity that deep inside a gas giant has to be crazy. Even if the main structure is able to survive, I do not see how regular people could survive - the atmosphere should have vented near-instantaneously.

And what's more, what's with that processing plant doing inside jupiter? Like the bad guy wasn't supposed to harvest earth for awhile longer until he learnt about Ms Jones. Or do such processing plants just standard operating procedure when a planet for harvesting is seeded?

The story also felt somewhat rushed, I thought the idea of 3 siblings trying to figure out what to do with the re-born empress was quite undeveloped, and generally just not very cohesive. I get what's going on, but maybe more time could be spent developing it.

Defo would love to watch it at another time. Don't think I got my name in the credits though. Boo....

Houdini Random Dungeon Generator

Title says it all :3 My long term plans are to use this to generate some kinda data as input into Unity.

Houdini - Unity - Vertical Cross from Lat Long map HDA

Bit of fun this evening :) Writing out vertical cross maps from a lat long map input. Have a few times I've been needing to do this, so might as well create a Houdini Digital Asset to streamline stuff to one-click.

Houdini OpenCL kicking butt!

Spent some of this evening moving stuff to my new laptop, and also got the latest production build of houdini to play with. H14 now runs absolutely smoothly on osx 10.10 - previously on 10.8 houdini would crash when I select a point! According to forums this is a open gl 3.3 thingy, not available on the older osx. Should have upgraded, but I had too many fun mini-projects going on to deal with a major os upgrade.

Last I did major upgrades of osx... nothing happened. But you never know, and dealing with os upgrades and stuff like that - I avoid it if possible.

OpenCL also works a treat! Running a smoke solver with openCL make a tremendous difference in sim speed. On the flip side, in order to get that speed, we're not supposed to use caching and other things, which affects workflow. Perhaps simming at mid-res on the cpu + cache will be good for judging the performance, then running the full sim at high res with OpenCL...

That said, my gfx card only has 2gb of ram; it's not going to do sims as large as what the main cpu memory can handle.

EDIT: OMG Grain solver runs pretty swift on opencl! RAR RAR RAR!

Big jump, houdini 14. Can't wait for Unity 5 to be released then I can play with Houdini Engine :3

Houdini + Unity FTW

Testing out how a character in Houdini can be brought over in Unity. Appears to be quite straightforward, and once inside Unity, the rig is picked up automagically! Afterwords, setting up an animation controller to retarget some random animation clips into the imported rigged character is very straightforward.

No idea what I'd do with this info hmm.

Spring Is Here!

A short piece I got inspired with last night! Harpsichord doing some good 'ol alberti bass, and I've taken the cello up to its highest register. Yum!

Exploring A* in Unity!

So I was introduced to Shattered Pixel Dungeon last week, and interestingly, it's not as addictive as I thought it'd be. It's great to spend a few turns playing it before bed or whilst on the can.

Pathfinding isn't something new, and I've actually coded A* in C++ years ago... not sure if it's still on the blog somewhere. But I was like.. yeah, pathfinding rules! Let's code it up in Unity! Plus I've not had a chance to play with the new UI in 4.6, so this was good fun.

The distance parameter, H, changes the results quite dramatically. Originally, I used the Manhattan Distance (I was following this tutorial) and while you get a solution, it was quite meh. Changing it to simply the distance between the selected node and target provided a much improved result.

Weather!

The weather this week has been craaazy! The earlier part of this week saw temperatures in the high 30C, and it was nigh impossible to sleep at night. I only have a ceiling fan, and with the poor circulation, it takes a long while to cool down. Some night I could only sleep probably after 2-3am >.<

Last night though, the temperature dropped crazily, and this evening, I actually found I really missed my jacket as it had dropped to 16 degrees C! The next week is forecasted to have very nice temperature and wet at the same time.

Even landmarks get festive!

Haven't left the apartment other than heading out for a swim or to buy groceries. XD

Sometimes I wonder why I learn CG...

I guess I'm feeling a little lost, as I'm not yet feeling the love for the classical pieces I'm working on at the moment, and I have to be one of the few people who have never touched a guitar till their mid thirties!

Granted, the guitar is quite enjoyable, but I never got into the crazy in-depth keenings when I was learning other instruments. I'm like... "yeah, not bad, making progress with this hal leonard book..."

And I only have *one* book, amazingly. Maybe I've gotten a bit more miserly, as I had a friggin' stack of sax and piano books.

......

Oh right, I forgot... the traveling around for work bit. Riiight. XD

......

The music so far that really draws my soul in, is actually lute music transcribed for guitar - more accurately, Early music. However looking at those pieces, I think they are still a leeeeetle too advanced for me at my stage.

Plus, I really want to figure out how to write for CG.

Maybe you'll see me with a glockenspiel next.

No, a marimba is more likely. XD

Houdini Cube Maps

There are a few built-in ways to generate environment maps in Houdini - they can be auto-generated by each object, and you'll need to use the isixpack command line tool to combine them, or render a polar environment map with a camera and use hdrshop to convert to whatever format you need. The isixpack workflow is a tiny bit annoying and I wondered if it could be possible to generate a map like this at a go directly without isixpack. Also, I don't run windows, so HDRshop is out of the question for me.

Came up with this idea of using Mantra's UV space rendering to render a cube with its UVs laid out in the vertical cross format. And the shader simply shot a ray into space (the direction vector is simply current object space position, as my cube was at the origin). Good fun. Now to do something more productive, like figure out bullet constraints in-depth.

Path of the Reindeer

So, this is the piece of music that has got me thinking about laptop upgrades. This evening, I found some resources online that allowed me to get MIR working - basically 1024 buffers and large processor buffers in Logic - and most of the time it gets by without buffer over runs. The next assignment I have will be much simpler, harp with 4 percussion instruments, no worries there!

Laptop Amortization

This weekend has been a busy one... kind of. I've been working on my music assignment for about 3 weeks and finished writing all of it in Printmusic on Saturday.... then decided to spend the rest of the day reading a book :P

Most of Sunday was spent sequencing the written music - that's the process of making actual audio from a score. The sounds I use are from VSL, which are one of the top companies for writing detailed intricate music. I like to pretend I'm writing detailed, intricate music. But the stuff I wrote can only be accurately sequenced with either VSL Dimension Strings as well as a few other libraries out there.

The reason being is that, for example, I have 8 string players on my first violins section. I've written some lines that need these 8 string players to be split into two groups of 4. Some composers compose music that requires taking 8 players into 4 desks, one pair of violinists per desk.

Lots of orchestral samples record all 8 players (nb: the violin 1 group varies depending on the orchestra) at once, so you can't really split them up. If you play two lines with 8 recorded players each, you are arguably getting the sound of 16 players. Not good.

Dimension Strings from VSL, gets over this issue by actually providing samples for each individual player. Even more crazy, they do it for each individual string, each note sounding different depending on how hard the strings are played, and multiple recordings are done for each volume level and much much more.

Unfortunately, this means that instead of just reading of one set of samples, I'm actually having to read 8 sets of samples for just the 1st violins vs just one set for other sample libraries. Add in the various "articulations" - different recordings of how an intrument is played - short notes, long notes, intervals between notes, special effects. All these also need to be recorded at different volume levels, as a french horn for example, sounds totally different at maximum volume versus played softly.

Intense amounts of data to process..

And my machine is 4 year old, Core 2 duo laptop :P

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The machine conked out yesterday, with 16 violins playing together. No crashes, just the usual - "unable to process that much data" warning. That was no problem, as Logic, as many DAWs, feature a Bounce to Disk feature. Basically, it writes out the live audio played back by the sampler into a sound file on disk.

Playing back this sound file is near effortless; I have over 20 separate tracks for this piece, and the cpu meter in Logic barely ticks over playing the files together.

But sequencing the sounds is only part of the game, there is still mixing and mastering.

For "mixing", I have not used the traditional way for a long while, but rather use another of VSL's awesome tools, "MIR". MIR works hand in hand with VSL's samples to make samples sound like they were played back in a specific location.

Unfortunately, this comes at a very heavy cpu cost, and my poor core 2 duo was only able to run about 12 tracks in real time. I had to basically bounce to disk every time I make changes in MIR. Very annoying, when previously on smaller ensembles I could do all my changes in real time.

To be fair, VSL's minimum requirements indicate an i7, ideally a Xeon; I'm on a Core 2 duo!

Which brings me to laptops: Is it time to upgrade?

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I've got my macbook for about 4 years now, bought it certified refurbished for just under 900 pounds if memory serves. Solid machine, not any problems so far, and I put in a SSD last year and got a major boost in speed.

Getting a new laptop is _slightly_ unreasonable as I don't really do anything serious with it. The odd houdini test here and there. Web browsing. The retro games off GOG.com don't need that much horsepower!

But it would save alot of time if I didn't need to do all these bounce to disk operations So.... how much did my laptop cost me all these year?

Quick maths indicates its about 19 pounds a month, amortized over 48 months. Not too bad I think!

So, if I were to get a new macbook, I can sell my existing one, which would bring the price down, and that would help bring down the amortization as well.

Another issue is that the newer modelled 13in macbooks do not have nvidia graphics, and I have concerns about running Houdini on them - my Core 2 comes with a crappy nvidia something, which is good enough for all the stuff I want.

Ponder ponder ponder.

Weather and stuff

It was warm last night! Could not sleep till probably 3am? Whatever it was, I was waking up endlessly in the heat. Blah. Oddly enough, the temperature dropped like mad, and it was very cool when I left the house this morning.

I'm not sure what's going to happen when the full summer temperatures hit! XD

I also came across Chrono Cross for vita! OMG! I can't wait for the holidays to come so I can dedicate a few days to playing it. I love the music, and I hope the game play lives up to that of Chrono Trigger. That, and FFX/X2 will keep me firmly in place at home...

Can't wait XD