Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software

Borderlands

This is one of the most interesting sound generators I've ever come across. Borderlands is a granular synthesizer that generates sound from randomly selected "grains," or samples, in a waveform. It started life as a commercial iPad application, where its unique user interface was perfectly suited, and ended up as open source abandonware. Borderlands offers such an uncommon set of features and such a unique way of interacting with sound that it is worth the effort to get it installed and, hopefully, worth the effort of adopting the project if you have the skills. The project's dependencies may take some tracking down, but as long as you have build-essential installed, you should be able to build the source code with a simple make after that. With that done, source some interesting .wav files and place them in the correct folder. Running the application will also require a running and preconfigured JACK environment. With a bit of luck this can be as simple as installing JACK and running the daemon with the pasuspender -- jackd command.

It's worth the effort. The waveforms of whatever audio files you drop into the correct folder will be displayed in a window. You can use the mouse to move, rotate, and scale around the background canvas. It works just like editing images in something like Gimp. It was this interaction that was so effective on the iPad. But the real magic happens when you press G to add the granular synthesis generators. These nodes can be moved and scaled across the waveforms, and the circular areas within them are used to generate particles that play the discrete audio element beneath their pixel positions. By moving these and the waveforms together, you constantly create new and evolving sounds that take their inspiration from your original audio, and it sounds amazing.

Project Website

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~carlsonc/256a/Borderlands/

Manipulate audio waveforms and grain cloud generators to create evolving audio textures in Borderlands.

Internet limiter

Timekpr

Even Apple has noticed that this thing it started, a compulsion to look at a screen every 10 seconds, may have its downsides, especially for children. Its latest devices have a rather neat feature that lets an adult see how long someone is using their device, as well as the kind of activities they're up to, making a distinction between "social networks" and "creativity," for instance. Many newer routers, too, will let you limit specific MAC addresses in the amount time spent online and which services are available and when. Linux is of course technically capable of implementing similar limits. Most of those routers are likely running Linux, but I'd ideally like to see an application that made setting such limits as easy to use as possible for the largest number of users, and that's what Timekpr does.

Timekpr has been around for a while, but recent releases are far more desktop agnostic than the Gnome-bound earlier versions. I had no issues running it on the latest KDE Plasma release. After installation, it will run automatically, and when you load up its control panel you'll be able to adjust time and access limits for each user on your system. Just select a user from the drop-down list and switch to the Limits & Boundaries tab. From there you can set both an access duration for each day of the week and a time frame when access is allowed, such as an hour in the evening for homework. From the status tab, you can see when the user is allowed access and easily grant them extra time or reduce their time limit to act as a reward or penalty. It all works perfectly, and while it can't yet enable or disable specific services, it's perfect for running on a family laptop or shared computer.

Project Website

https://launchpad.net/timekpr-revived

Limit the amount of time user accounts on your system can access the Internet.

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