Jill produced a beautiful interview that we made with my Dad, Peter, first shot after his diagnosis, and Jill rapidly edited it ready for playing at his wake. It was a deeply moving way for Dad to be there for all of the people that loved him.

Mediamined is a project I've been working on together with the great folks at Imagine Research for about a year now. With some help from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we're now making public some of our technology.

This is the tribute I presented with my sister Gaye at my father, Peter John Smith's funeral:

I'd like to talk about Dad's life through some of our personal experiences and recollections of him.

My father Peter Smith passed away this morning at 10:37am at Kalamunda hospital. Thankfully I was able to be with him, my sister Gaye, and mother Dorothy at the time of his passing, which was peaceful. His condition had deteriorated very rapidly and thankfully this kept his suffering to a minimum. Thank you all for your kind wishes.

A heads up that I will be on a panel at the Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference entitled Is Your DAM REALLY Ready for Audio & Video Files? This will be a great opportunity to discuss some of the work that Imagine Research has been working on over the last year.

Continuing in my series of keyboard repair blogs, I recently bailed an old Roland PC-200 keyboard out of storage. This old guy is just a 4 octave MIDI controller (no sound generator), but it fit the bill for having a reasonably sized polyphonic keyboard for a NYC apartment. Unfortunately it had long ago developed a problem with an F# key no longer working.

While there are newer controllers with many more buttons and polyphonic aftertouch, it seemed such a waste to replace it just because one key didn't work. After a little net research, a problem with many keyboards is that the carbon contact pads glued onto the rubber deteriorates. Replacements for these are available, but this was not a solution to the problem in this case.

Some time back, I acquired a Micromoog analog, monophonic synth. These little beasts are a single oscillator synth, but include a sub-oscillator, 24dB/Oct filter, good modulation, ribbon pitch bend and CV interfacing. The clincher was one appeared cheap on Ebay advertised as requiring "Tender Loving Care": the wooden base needed replacing, but that it did work.

I already have a Multimoog, which is a two oscillator, pressure sensitive keyboard version of the Micromoog, and the thought of operating the two in unison was too great an opportunity. The Multimoog needs work on the power supply and obtaining a Micromoog helps diagnose the Multimoog's power supply behaviour. Expect a blog about the Multimoog in the future.

A friend who has returned to studies, and therefore low on cash, had bought a second hand PowerMac G4 Mirror Drive Door model. After a good many years of service with the previous owner, and a year with him, the G4's power supply died, as that model is inclined to do.

Repairing the powersupply is dangerous and difficult, and obtaining a second hand replacement is expensive, and that model was notorious for how loud the power supply was.

The hills surrounding Leh Palace, Leh, Ladakh, India, July 2001. Formed by an equirectangular stitching of 4 images.

Yes, I've succumbed to another form of distraction, I'm now tweeting on twitter.

It was the combination of Jordan's hilarious International Jet Trash and Henkjan's Music Cognition tweets which made unable to resist...