tomduncalf

Woah I never even considered the possibly of rebooting old OS with new features. Very cool. Would love to experience that era of music tech

Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.

I recently learned that vinyl cutters like Silhouette Portrait can be used for drawing too, which is fun as they can be picked up super cheap and they are very compact. I’m sure they’re not as good or accurate as a proper XY plotter but I’ve been having a lot of fun with mine! I’d recommend Silhouette as they are less closed than Cricut and there’s an Inkscape plugin

It still blows my mind that this is possible, as someone who spent a lot of time as a kid trying and failing to get “acapellas” by EQing or subtracting instrumentals from vocal versions haha

I’ve been doing OCR of scans of old magazines (specifically extracting music reviews and charts, so turning complex layouts into structured data) and have been impressed with GPT/Codex’s performance.

My setup has a Sol orchestrator and Terra OCR agents and seems to get great results. I’ve not dug into the details too much, it also has a Tesseract stage as an deterministic input which it told me helped. Not sure how token efficient it is but I often don’t have anything to do with my personal tokens ahead of a reset so just let it burn through it in batches.

I am impressed (both in this task and other work I’ve done) not just at how well Codex can setup a structure for a complex task like this, but how it will keep going (Claude seems to find excuses to stop) and also can critique and refine its approach as it goes.

I did try out a bunch of other models and specific OCR providers but none of them hit the same accuracy for my task as Codex so I’m sticking with it.

I posted in a comment above that I (well Codex) was able to get full Chromium running on it. It’s not fast by any means but is usable if you just want to read a web page on e-ink… so it’s not crazy underpowered

Re: the software, I do think the on device software is good, if somewhat minimal, and the core writing experience is great

Yeah I got an RM2 cheap off there and I’m very impressed. It only really does one thing but it does it well. Personally can’t really see any reason I’d need a more powerful one, the latency is great already. Maybe for the front light.

They are quite hackable, but a lot of the mods rely on some funky QT hacking… it’s all a bit kind of undocumented. I was able to get Codex to get full Chromium running in a chroot and render the screen via Xvfb though which was pretty cool and is somewhat usable, so I guess most things are possible with determination

This rocks. Such nostalgia.

FT2 was how I discovered anything about music making - I loved the euro dance music I heard on the radio as a 12 year old but had no idea about the scene or how electronic music was was made.

PC Format had FT2 plus hundreds of modules on its cover CD one month, I used to love exploring all the random stuff on there and opened it up and my mind was blown when I realised that there was music like I heard on the radio, but you could see all the individual bits that made it up.

It took a loooot of messing around to figure out how to do anything of value with it, pretty sure this was before we had internet at home, but it was the start of a life long fascination with electronic music making.

So thank you to the author for resurrecting this amazing and somewhat esoteric bit of software!

Ha I know the exact ones you mean well, going to the train from terminal 5? I couldn’t have told you what was up with them but they seem very inefficient and there’s always a queue! Thanks for explaining