Category Archives: Computers, User Interfaces

Computers, User Interfaces, Miscellaneous

The Twelve Days of Software: A fun office party group sing-a-long!

December 18, 2014 kleucht Leave a comment

In a moment of creative eruption, I came up with a new set of lyrics for “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for use at my geeky work software group’s Christmas party. I created a slideshow with the new lyrics and I showed it on the projector as I led the entire group in a sing-a-long, revealing the new silly lyrics one line at a time as we all sang them. It was a lot of fun!

It was so much fun, that I thought I’d fine tune the slideshow and share it on the Internet for everyone’s enjoyment and entertainment. Feel free to share or use it to lead a sing-a-long at your own geeky software team party or meeting! It’s also funny to personalize the song for your audience. For example, I paused after singing “10 chiefs a-nagging” and pointed out that the chief in the image was Oscar, one of our favorite managers to tease.

http://www.leucht.com/The_Twelve_Days_of_Software_by_Kurt_W_Leucht.pdf

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Computers, User Interfaces, Miscellaneous

Please invent this: Smart interactive sheet music mobile app

August 10, 2014 kleucht Leave a comment

I’m a pretty busy guy, so I don’t really have the time nor the energy to implement every single great idea for a new invention that I think of. So I’m going to just release any idea trademarks that I might have enjoyed and put my invention ideas out to the general public for implementation. If you do actually end up getting filthy rich off of any of my invention ideas, I won’t sue you but please feel free to send me a little of your filthy money just to make certain that you are able to sleep soundly at night. 🙂

[image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stacks_of_money.jpg]

I thought of an iPad app that I think is probably just a small niche product, but I think that small niche might really appreciate it.

Here is the typical use case for the app. A musician downloads or purchases some digital sheet music using this app. The app displays the digital sheet music one page at a time and it has a visually appealing page swipe animation to make it look and feel like real sheet music. This is pretty standard stuff so far, but once the musician starts playing the sheet music, the app can actually hear them playing and the app actually follows along and highlights where they are in some subtle way … maybe by a blue bar that slides along the music or a subtle yellow highlight or something like that. I believe this is the really cool and novel feature of this app that other sheet music apps are not doing. Probably because it’s not an easy task. But boy would it be cool, huh?

Assuming that the app can hear and follow along with the playing of the music, then the app could also automatically turn the page for the musician if they so desire. How far in advance the automatic page turn occurs could be configurable by each user. The app should also be able to tell the musician what their tempo is versus what tempo is suggested in the sheet music.

[image from http://www.thehearingdoctors.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/music-notes.jpg]

Obviously, accomplishing all of these features would be easiest if the digital sheet music had lots of hidden information for the app to read to help it understand the notes and to find out the tempo and such. But the holy grail would be for this app to work on many of the various standard digital sheet music files that are currently out there and purchasable on the Internet. That would require a pretty smart app to decode the PDF files or whatever the format of these existing digital sheet music files, but I’m sure some really smart programmers can figure out a solution that works reasonably well. You guys and gals are very sharp!

This app should work for pretty much any instrument type, in theory. As long as the music being played can be heard by the app reasonably well. This app should also be able to tell the musician if they were in tune or not. That’s already done by other apps, but it could also be a feature of this app.

Are there any other features for an iPad or tablet app that would be useful to musicians and would essentially take paper sheet music out of the picture? Think outside the box! Come up with a solution! Make millions of bucks! I’m not really a musician any more, but I know several who would buy this app if it was invented!

Please invent this. Thanks,
Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces, Miscellaneous, Nature, Photography, Videos

VOB file fixer quickly and easily fixes incorrect video length

September 8, 2013 kleucht 52 Comments

I’m blogging about this because I had a terrible time finding a solution to my problem and I want to help other people who are having the same problem.

A while back I was digitizing old VHS tapes using my DVD/VCR combo player/recorder. I was creating raw DVDs from old VHS tapes and then taking the raw DVDs and copying them onto my laptop for editing. But sometimes the VOB files that were created by the DVD recorder would have terribly incorrect lengths when viewed on my PC. For example, a 30 minute VOB file would show up and play as a 10 second long VOB file on my PC. This incorrect time was keeping my PC software from being able to view and edit the VOB files. Apparently this is a fairly common problem with some DVD recorders, since this VOB length information is not actually used by many consumer electronic devices.

It took me a while, but I was finally able to find a simple and free utility called MPEG Streamclip that was able to fix the VOB file length data without having to completely render the entire VOB. This program has a terrible user interface and it also has a couple of quirks. For example, it gives me a couple errors regarding some Apple Quicktime software that is not installed on my system, but it did what I needed it to do anyways. But what do you expect for free, huh?

When you tell it to open a VOB that has incorrect length information, it realizes the problem during the open operation and prompts you to fix the timecode breaks or not. Once it fixes the timecode breaks, you can save as MPG (not Export … Save As) which doesn’t perform any processing nor rendering of the file because the VOB was in MPG format already, or you can export into a number of different video formats.

One other thing. MPEG Streamclip does not require admin rights to install on your PC. Just download the zip, unzip it, and run the executable. Here is the website where you can download the utility. Have fun!

http://www.squared5.com/

Kurt

Postscript: In January 2017 I got a new PC and MPEG Streamclip refused to run until I installed the Alternate Quicktime package that it pointed me to. This Alternate Quicktime package does require admin rights to install.

Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My awesome video game watch from 1981 – Nelsonic Space Attacker

June 2, 2013 kleucht 7 Comments

This watch was made in 1981, so I was probably 11 or 12 when I first got it. It’s a Space Attacker video game watch from a company called Nelsonic. I loved this watch and so did just about everyone I encountered … both kids and adults alike. This watch made the junior high version of me pretty popular! Ha! 🙂

(click for full size)

The game is quite addictive for as simple as it is. It’s basically a simplified version of Space Invaders. One button changes the direction of the cannon launcher and the other button fires. The invading space ships march across the screen and get closer if you don’t shoot them down. They shoot at you too.

Here is a video that someone posted of the game on their watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1gwNYObNPo

This watch is built very well and it stood up to lots of junior high abuse. Please leave a comment below if you remember playing with my video game watch in junior high!

Here is a nice web article on the watch, complete with a tear down:

http://watches.gafortiby.com/watch/Nelsonic_Space_Attacker_Game_watch/

Thanks,
Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My pocket computer from high school – Sharp EL-5500 III

June 1, 2013 kleucht 1 Comment

Yep. I was the kid who had a “pocket computer” in class when all the other kids just had a simple calculator. I was recently going through some old moving boxes and found this beauty:

(click for full size)

It’s a nice scientific calculator on the one hand, but on the other hand it’s a pretty capable programmable computer.

I loved this thing. I used it in high school and junior college and also during my first year in a 4 year engineering university. I remember using it at the university during my first year there because it actually got stolen by a kid a few doors down in the dorm and the campus police found it in his backpack and returned it to me because my name was etched into it with an X-ACTO knife. I etched my name on the back and also etched my initials in underneath the glass display cover so it could not be easily removed or rubbed off. I’m awesome that way. 🙂

So I used this thing for probably four years between about 1987 and 1991. About that time, the HP RPN and graphing calculators were all the rage at the university and this old workhorse was put away in a drawer.

This thing used BASIC for it’s programming language. So it was pretty easy to program. One limitation was the single line output screen. Because of the single line, I had to get creative with my output formatting, sometimes, in order to push a lot of information to the screen at one time. The other thing I remember is that it only stored one program, and I did not have a means to transfer programs to and from it. So I always kept one giant program on the thing with a start-up menu that allowed me to run a different part of the program based on what I wanted to do. So I merged many different programs into one and every time I thought of a new program to add to it, I had to add it to the start-up menu so I could select it to run.

One really nice feature that was built into this device was the matrix math capabilities. I could create very large matrices, and it would step me through filling in the values then it could perform transformations and math functions on those matrices. I used this feature a lot during some of my engineering and math classes.

Here is a short web article on it:

http://www.leonidastolias.com/Site/SharpEL5500III.html

And here is a guy who figured out a way to record the program dump from it to his Laptop as an MP3 file, rather than the standard means of recording it on a cassette tape player:

http://www.increa.com/computers/calculators/index.html

Cool stuff.

Kurt