Ukelele tuner for the Gameboy Advance

This weekend I went for a relaxing vacation in a cottage somewhere around Haliburton, Ontario. This is usually also a good opportunity for me to try and remember some chords on the Ukelele that my girlfriend bought for my birthday a couple of years ago. The only problem I have is that I don't know how to tune the thing. Normally, I would go to a site like the online Ukelele tuner before I get started. But without a computer and internet access, I would be stuck with no way to tune the Ukelele in the cottage.

Luckily, after a bit of thinking and half an hour of coding, I came up with a tuner that I flashed into one of the Gameboy Advance units I have for the OpenEADL project (check it out). The tuner worked great, and because the Gameboy is so power efficient, I didn't have to charge it even once in the whole weekend!

You can download the code for the tuner from here (I included the compiled ukelele-advance.gba ROM). If you want to know how to modify, compile and flash the ROM into a Gameboy cartridge, read this tutorial. You can also run the ROM in an emulator like VisualBoy Advance

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The Forbidden Preface

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I recently found this beautiful explanation of the motives for academic hypocrisy elaborated by Noam Chomsky at a Harvard University seminar on February 6, 2002. With the exception of the topic, Chomsky’s entire analysis fits my experience with academia perfectly.

The focus of my PhD was supposed to be “Rehabilitation Engineering”, but I have always been very skeptical of that term. “Rehabilitation” is usually interpreted in academic contexts as the need to create some kind of novel intervention that “fixes” some deficit in a Disabled person. Maybe they had one arm instead of two, or they used a wheelchair to move around, but for the life of me, I cannot tell what is wrong with that, and this sure got me into a lot of trouble with my supervisors. Don’t get me wrong, they are really nice folks, but there is one huge problem: their “boss” is the research institutions who give out grants (e.g., NSERC, CIHR), NOT the Disabled (as it should be). Of course, this is the wrong thing to say for a mere graduate student like me, and in many ways, they tried to make sure I was aware of it.

By the end, I tried to summarize some of these “warnings” in a preface for my thesis but, of course (I don’t know what I was thinking), they ended up asking me to get rid of that too. For years I complied with their demands just so I could earn the coveted degree, but since I still feel like a fraud, I will publish the preface here in the hopes that I can recover some of my integrity… so please, go ahead, download the two page preface my supervisors didn’t want you to read or just download the entire thesis!

From the archives: The Xaviercito Tortolero Ensemble 2006 World Tour, Mexico City (4/29/06)

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This is just a taste of the successful one city, one song, 2006 world tour of the Xavier Torotolero Ensemble. As you can hear, the place was packed full with fans from all over the neighborhood. Some of them even came all the way from Avenida Revolución!

One Child per Laptop

Say you are a very eager professor with a lot of time and money in your hands. Say you work in a random university (uh.. MIT?). Say your fame and fortune has tricked you into thinking you know more about the world than you do in reality. Say you understand computers like no other human being and, “just ‘cuz”, you build your dream machine: a $100 $188 dollar laptop that takes your breath away. Say you get the brilliant idea to make one billion of those babies just so, like you, a billion children around the world can be blessed and enlightened with your magnificent creation. There is just one problem: where do you get the children from? I know! from developing countries! of course! why didn’t I think of that? They just love having overdeveloped countries tell them how they should live their lives so they too can waste their resources!… heck! they’ll take anything we give them!

From the archives: Daily Planet, Discovery Channel (10/5/04)

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This is the super cool piece about our work aired back in 2004 on Daily Planet (Discovery Channel). The report is not 100% accurate, but it is way more realistic than all the other news reports that were done at the time. I mean, of course mass media can’t be all that honest… (sigh) let’s just say most of these things get “lost in translation”. Anyway, you can see me playing around with the computer and the circuits (and, of course, screwing everything up!). Oh… and I even wore a tie for this!

Too much junk mail? Send it back!

If there is something I hate more than people calling in the middle of the day to tell me I won a Vegas vacation for two, provided I pay for the flights plus a timeshare in Acapulco, is unwanted trash in my mailbox. Luckily, a lot of these buggers send a postage paid envelope with their junk. So, since I am very conscious of other people’s needs, I send the fine pieces of marketing back to their creators in the hope that a less fortunate citizen may take advantage of their tremendous offers. So if you want to support your local post workers and force marketing companies to deal with their own trash, don’t hesitate to send the junk mail back!

Never pay for napkins again!

It has been already about 2 years since the last time I bought napkins. This was only possible after I realized that I didn’t really have to. Every time you buy a coffee, a muffin or a sandwich, without exception, you get WAY more napkins than you need! So, I got into the healthy habit of folding them nicely and putting them in my back pocket. Then, when I get home, I introduce the good old napkins in the kitchen covert to their new warm friends. Some call it tacky, but I prefer just plain smart! It’s a win-win situation:

1. You make THE MAN pay for you napkins,
2. you take care of the environment by reducing a bit your ecological footprint, and
3. you get a bit of padding in your butt!

Want a hug?

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If you were wondering what to do with your life, this is probably a good way to start. In fact, it also works if you just want to feel like you were a good person. After all, as the free hugs campaign claims: “you get what you give”, so… beware!, because I’m coming after you!

Hello World!

Will be blogging soon...