Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.
Week before last I was given a 2002 vintage 700 MHz G4 iMac, one of the ones with the LCD on an arm above a half sphere dome (”pedestal”) system unit. It has 640M of RAM, so I expect it will be useful running (Panther or) Tiger. The hardware doesn’t meet the specs for “Leopard”. Besides, I don’t own a copy of Leopard (10.5), but do own copies of Jaguar/Panther/Tiger (OS X 10.2/3/4, respectively).
The iMac came with Jaguar on it. It had been unused for a while and no one knew the passwords. So it was time to learn about the esoteric Apple boot options and keyboard commands.
When Jerry Barnett & I were contemplating forming the band that became the 1970 Hub City Movers, Jerry was also wanting to build a self-tuning guitar. As a drummer, he was sick of waiting for all of us guitarists to get in tune.
I’ve heard of other attempts since then, but it looks like the first successful realization is available from Gibson. Mechanically, it “sounds” much like what Jerry had in mind in 1969.
Update 2007/11/26: c|net has photos, says there was another realization in 1998, says “The Robot Guitar”, a Gibson Les Paul with self-tuning isn’t really available until December 7. Article at http://www.news.com/Photos-When-tech-tunes-your-guitar/2300-1040_3-6218819.html.
One of the reasons I bought my Sony VAIO with Windows XP Media Center 2004 was to capture video off of old VHS tapes for transfer to DVD and storage in Internet friendly file formats. Though I’d dabbled enough to capture a little video from a tape, I didn’t pursue any further.