Hello! It's been a while since my last post here, but it felt like the time was right to start posing again; not on Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky, but on a good old-fashioned blog. You see, the Internet is a store, but it used to be a
Travel
Today I finished a pack of 100 coffee filters; that wouldn't normally be much of a milestone, but this is the first pack of filters I've finished since moving to the US. After three months in San Francisco we're feeling quite settled now, but
Games
This weekend was Ludum Dare again, and again Switchbreak asked me to write some music for his entry. It's called Underground City Defender, and it's a HTML5/Javascript game, so you can play it in your browser here! The original idea for the game was to
Linux
Last weekend, almost exactly five years after I bought my Blofeld synth, I sold it. With plans to move to the US well underway, I've been thinking about the things I use often enough to warrant dragging them along with me, and the Blofeld just didn't
Games
With new consoles on the market, and plans to move to San Francisco later this year, I figured it was time to cut down on some of the console clutter I've collected over the years. For now, I still have our 360 and PS3, but I've
Games
The draw of the familiar can be a funny thing; I don't often replay games, but sometimes, after enough time has passed, all it can take is a brief mention somewhere to bring back a wave of fond memories, and the desire to relive them. Over the last
Games
This weekend was Ludum Dare 26, and as usual when Switchbreak enters such things, I took the opportunity to tag along. The theme was "minimalism", but his game, called MinimaLand, deliberately eschews that theme; it tasks the player with bringing life and detail in to a very minimalist
Games
I've spent the last week working on a game for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge with Switchbreak and Amanda Lange, and by virtue of the fact that it's a seven-day project, it's now finished! It's called Cosplay Mystery Dungeon, and you
Linux
In my recent post about SSDs I did make one major omission, which a friend pointed out on Twitter afterward: https://twitter.com/zoomosis/status/307486664031338496 Indeed, I don't run a swap partition in my desktop PC -- RAM is cheap, so I have 12GB of it, and if
Leigh's rants about photography, travel, games, music, and tech
I've had bad luck with hard drives lately -- in the last month or so I've lost two of the drives from my desktop PC. Luckily, I'd set up RAID-1 for my Linux install just beforehand, so I didn't lose anything important
Over the last week I've put a bunch of time in to my new game project, a Switchbreak game called Civilian. I've been working on music for it, but this blog post isn't about music -- it's about the crazy stunts you can
Download 20130114.ogg As someone that plays keyboards I've been mostly resigned to the fact that I can't put guitars in any of my tracks, but after some playing with guitar samples available at the Flame Studios website, I'm cautiously optimistic. Flame Studios has
Before it gets too far in to January, I wanted to take a quick look back at last year. I had been planning to record an EP, along the lines of the track Texel that I released in late 2011, but instead, I took part in the RPM Challenge and
Download 20121230.ogg I got two great new studio toys for Xmas: Loomer Aspect and Sequent. This sketch is a quick demo I made while getting a bit of a feel for them both. Loomer's plugins are all available as native Linux VSTs (as well as Windows and
There was a solar eclipse in Australia today; in a few lucky places, such as Cairns in far-north Queensland, it was a total eclipse, but down here in Melbourne it was just a partial eclipse. I wasn't sure if the sun would be up high enough to
Things have been quiet here of late, but I've actually been quite busy! I've just finished the sound design for Candy Grapple, the latest game from my good friend Switchbreak. It's based on one of his Ludum Dare games, Waterfall Rescue, but it'
It was nearly two years ago that I got my first Android phone, a HTC Desire, so I figured it was time for an upgrade, so this week I picked up a shiny new Galaxy Nexus. While it's not quite as fast as some newer phones, it'
I haven't written about any astronomical stuff for a while, but today was a special day -- the 2012 Transit of Venus. A transit is just like an eclipse, but with a visibly smaller object moving in front of a large one; in this case, Venus moved across the
Download 20120603.ogg Musopen is a fascinating project -- it hosts public domain recordings of, and sheet music for, a large number of classical pieces. Many of the most famous classical works have long been in the public domain, but while the compositions themselves may be free to use, recordings of
The last week has seen the announcement of two new LV2 synths, both from Qtractor and QJackCtl developer and all 'round good-guy Rui Nuno Capela: synthv1 and samplv1. Both are in the early stages of development, but they're already looking very promising. You can never have
Things have been decidedly quiet here after the flurry of activity across March and April, but thankfully, in the real world, things haven't been quite so quiet. I've been working on a new project with a couple of really talented guys, and while I can'
