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29th August 2010
So I made another musical instrument, this time a small kankara sanshin – that is, the Okinawan version of the shamisen made from a tin.
It's made from a meat can, which was the biggest tin of the right proportions I could find. I originally just wanted to cut holes in it and pry the contents out somehow, but I got hungry and figured I don't want to mess with that so I just opened it from the bottom. It works just as well with an open back.
I used a piece of wood with knots for the neck, because I didn't want to just throw it away and this was more or less just experimental. I decided to use nails to route the strings on the neck correctly, I originally wanted to drill holes to channel the strings through. I rushed with the nails because I wanted to finish it quickly and chipped the wood some. Oh well. Better not rush next time. Used EBG nylon guitar strings on it.
No glue used! And it sounds suprisingly good!
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10th August 2010
My old record album – Zdenek Gromnica – Ludibrium – is finally available for purchase as a physical CD on Lulu.com for $9.99. It has a brand new packaging design (the whole CD tray, insert front and back) which I think came out very nicely. Let's just hope you'll have better luck getting reasonable shipping charges from Lulu than me, because what they've been offering me is quite ludicrous.
Enjoy!
Please note that all music on the CD is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial and can be freely downloaded on BandCamp.com. A physical copy is an opportunity for those who really want to own the music.
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10th August 2010
A simple handwriting font I made today. Not much to say to this one.
Plenty of accents: Czech, Slovak, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, you name it… If you need anything that's not there, just let me know, I can add it in a matter of minutes.
As usual, free for personal use, licensed under the Groovy General Free Font License. If you want to use it for a commercial, business or corporate product or project, just contact me and I'll gladly discuss the licensing terms with you!
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4th August 2010
Making musical instruments has been a dream of mine for quite some time. I'd say it all started somewhere between frantically collecting instruments and admiring people that build instruments out of tins and cigar boxes. So this Sunday I finally decided to get off my ass, went to the nearest hardware store, bought all the necessary tools and materials and made my first very own can jinghu (erhu)!
- energy drink - $0.50
- thick spruce pole - $0.60
- thin spruce pole - $0.40
- smoother sandpaper - $0.50
- rougher sandpaper - $0.80
- saw - $1.10
- knife - $1.60
- cotton qianjin - $1.50
Total cost: $7.00, a clever idea and some good old manual labor!
Okay, I cheated, because I have years of experience with musical instruments and I used two old guitar strings (E and B), two screws I found and borrowed a drill, but you get the idea.
So, how did I make it? First, I bought and cracked open an energy drink. This was the most delicious part of the project. After I was done with it, I washed it and cut crosses on each side of it for the neck to come through. Then I sawed two even parts off of the thicker spruce pole to make the tuning pegs, and a small piece off of the thinner pole to make a bridge. Then I drilled holes in the tuning pegs for screws and thicker holes in the neck for the screws to come through. Then I screwed the tuning pegs to the body. I searched for old guitar strings and proceeded to string them up on the jinghu (erhu). This was the most frustrating part of the project. Finally, I tied a qianjin on the strings, put on the bridge I made and a bow and voila! An energy drink can jinghu (erhu) was born!
Things I learned:
- You CAN, in fact, make a super cheapo jinghu (erhu) with almost nothing that actually plays! There's no magic in it!
- Energy drink cans are pretty thin and don't take string pressure well.
- While my tuning peg design is functional (i.e. it works), it's not very practical for the bottom peg, as it's hard to reach while holding the instrument.
- Old guitar strings don't work all that well for a jinghu/erhu, but they do work! Original jinghu (erhu) strings would probably be much less of a pain to string up.
- I should drill a hole for attaching the strings at the bottom next time, so they don't slip out of position while being strung up.
So there you have it! Now off to make more crazy instruments!
Update: I've finally changed the soundbox can last week. And I decided to use nylon guitar strings instead of steel. Here are the results:
Additional things I learned:
- Plain nylon strings CAN be bowed! Why doesn't anyone make nylon bowed instruments?
- I seem to have a problem with wolf tones. I asked around for a solution and that is – an eraser between the strings! Now to get one
- Diagonal cuts in the can seem to hold better than vertical and horizonal cuts.
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29th July 2010
I have decided to release all the tracks of my old record album – Zdenek Gromnica – Ludibrium – under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial. Even though it was previously available for free, I had all rights reserved for it, so I've decided to let go of some. What this means is that you can now do basically whatever you want with it, as long as it's non-commercial and you attribute the original work to me.
Of course there's a bit more to it, but you get the idea. If you'd like to use it commercially, just contact me and I'll gladly discuss the licensing terms with you. Read the license for more details.
I've also fixed the cut-off endings of a few pieces.
Enjoy!
Note: I've yet to provide a lossless version of Memoria vestri. Given that it's an old piece (2008), it's turned out to be quite an issue, but I'll get to it. Aaand it's finally done, as of 2010/8/8. Also, Salus needs to be fixed. Man, I hate my old work. Yay, Salus is done!
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24th July 2010
It's been a while since I last made a font. ElementalEnd is a futuristic sans serif caps only headline face. A font design that's been lying in my head for quite some time now. Originally for my metal band, so it carries its name.
Pretty simple, but specific enough that I had to make it myself.
Contains both normal and stylized versions of the letters A, E and F (use upper or lower case). Comes in regular and italic. Plenty of accents this time. Czech, Slovak, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, you name it… If you need anything that's not there, just let me know, I can add it in a matter of minutes.
As usual, free for personal use, licensed under the Groovy General Free Font License. If you want to use it for a commercial, business or corporate product or project, just contact me and I'll gladly discuss the licensing terms with you!
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1st November 2009
A new version of SaneBar (a nifty Windows utility application developed by, you guessed it, me) was just released today! It brings a new and exciting feature called Quick Launch. It is however completely unlike the quick launch you may all know.
But first, what exactly is SaneBar?
SaneBar is a toolbar that sits at the top of your screen and acts like the title bar of a maximized window, even when the current active window isn't maximized. This means that not only does it refrain from occupying any space you can't use (like the start bar does), but you can also access window features much faster. You can simply throw your mouse to the top right corner and close the active window, regardless of where or how small it is. Same goes for maximizing/restoring, where you can just double click SaneBar anywhere. It doesn't matter if you're playing Foxy Bingo while IMing your friends, or focussed on meeting a deadline at work with your email, word processing and spreadsheet applications open, SaneBar will bring sanity to your desktop. In an increasingly complex world, SaneBar simplifies.
Another useful feature it has is the "hot-zone" in the top left corner – just move your mouse to the top left corner of your screen to reveal your desktop. This is very handy when you find yourself minimizing programs to access shortcuts or files on your desktop often. Throw your mouse to the corner, launch a shortcut, then swoop it to the corner again and all your windows are back! This also works when dragging files, which makes it possible to drag or extract files to your desktop even when your screen is cluttered with windows.
Quick Launch brings the abilility to middle click anywhere on SaneBar, hold the button down, throw your mouse in any of the 8 directions (or just leave it where it is, in the middle) and release the button, thus launching any of your 9 configured applications or files incredibly quickly! Because you don't have to hunt down any tiny icons or shortcuts with your mouse, and instead use a couple of quick hand motions and just a single click, the speed of Quick Launch is unmatched by any other ways of launching apps you may be accustomed to (including the desktop, the quick launch bar or the start menu). If you decide that you don't want to launch any applications, you can right click while holding the middle button and cancel the operation.
This is one of the features that SaneBar is worth using for, was worth making for and I'm very proud of. So grab it already and give it a try!
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12th September 2009 posted on Groovy General Games Blog
You may say it's too early to announce a sequel (when Death Pong isn't even out yet). Well, Death Pong Paranoid isn't exactly a sequel. It is a different take on the concept of running people over with a ball. 'Paranoid' is of course a play on the word 'Arkanoid'. So instead of having two paddles facing one another, this time it will be solely a single player experience, with the player's mission being to destroy all of the blocks in a screen before progressing to the next level.
The people roaming the battlefield will stay (as the trademark element of Death Pong). However, this time they won't be used for points; they will only be used for money (much like the 'Massacre' game mode of Death Pong). Power-ups and upgrades will be different (to better suit the new gameplay) and will be bought for money instead of having them randomly appear from broken blocks. We also have a few bonus stages, special abilities and other nifty features in mind, so this is a very exciting game concept for us!
The good thing about this game is that not only are we building a brand, but we can also reuse a lot of the original content from Death Pong, which saves us a lot of trouble and development time, while still retaining full freedom when creating new elements and designing challenges. Death Pong is, of course, our top priority as of now. But when that's released we will fully start working on Death Pong Paranoid.
Stay tuned!
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31st August 2009
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all! I'd like to see you do better! — And so on. How can people not see the logical fallacy in this? Just because I can't/don't do something (either at all or better), I have no right to criticize it? Seriously?
Let me give you a blatantly obvious example.
Say you're given a brand new car for a test ride. You get in with the vehicle's creator (how you got to know a person like this is something I'll leave to your imagination). You notice that the headlights are facing away from the car, so that you can't see the middle of the road in front of you.
“Well… wouldn't it, you know, be better if the headlights faced the road so I could see?” you say to the car maker. He immediately jumps and starts shouting at you: “What?! Well I'd like to see you make a better car if you're such an expert! I gave you a free ride! You don't have to be here if you don't like it!”
At that moment, you're probably sitting there staring at him dumbfounded by the ridiculousness of what he just said. For some reason, this doesn't strike people when they come across criticism of smaller things like, say, drawings or blog posts. Sure, a lot of people can draw or write. "Why don't you go and make your own blog, see if people like it better, huh?" Yeah, but have you noticed that most video game reviewers actually don't make games? Or that film critics don't make movies? Or book reviewers?
Sure, negative criticism can make you feel bad, especially if it's ill-intended, but if you can put your feelings aside, you'll realize that feedback from others actually makes you improve. Isn't that usually a good thing? Unless you want to remain a bad artist/writer/whatever. Besides, negative comments can be made hilarious, if done right (for whatever reason, you can't usually make positive criticism sound funny, at least not as easily)! Sarcasm, ridicule and absurdities come into play, snarky comments appear and hilarity ensues! Humor is good for you!
So there you go! Criticize all you want, feedback is a good thing! Even negative feedback (just don't diss, that's neither funny nor valuable).
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31st October 2008
Adobe designers, are you kidding me?
Seriously, what's next?
What, are they trying to jump on the bandwagon of minimalism? The box doesn't even have the Photoshop icon on it (the colors are inverted)! Where's the borderline of minimalism? What's the point of using only text? Where are the symbols that've been used for centuries? (You know, the whole brush and paint stuff to show what the program's for, or the beloved eye…)
And don't get me even started on the new icons…
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29th October 2008
Ever since I've decided that my nickname would be FutureMillennium back in 2002, I've been using Google to check what sites talk about me, because my nickname was unique. Any results that appeared in that search were always somehow related to me, because no one else had used the name or even the phrase “Future Millennium”.
Speaking of which, how did my nickname come to life anyway? Well, I was originally using just “Millennium” as my nickname (Now don't ask me how that came to life. I've been using it since I was 11, although the correct spelling has settled later), but when I first got to create an account on the Internet back in 2002 (yes, it was WinCustomize), guess what happened? Correct - Millennium was taken. It's always been a very popular site, so I wasn't surprised. I've thought about what to put before or after “Millennium” to make it unique. I think I tried stuff like “New” or “Neo”, but those were taken too (or maybe I just didn't like them, I don't remember anymore), so I ended up with “Future”. And for 2 reasons, too: 1) I like the future (more than the present or the past) and 2) the name “Millennium” actually comes from a story I've been thinking about since I was 11 that's named “Future War”. (So yeah, Future War + Millennium = FutureMillennium, right?)
What's been happening lately is that I'm noticing new sites popping up in the Google results for my nickname. Most of them speak of the future millennium (those are usually Christian, or economically oriented, or both) and there are some people that don't care that I've been using this nickname for over 6 years now and just decided to use it. What's more, suddenly there are even domain names that do contain “FutureMillennium” - FutureMillennium.com (Creation Date: 2008-08-27) and FutureMillennium.net (Creation Date: 2008-01-11) are those I know of. The first one seems like an obvious case of domain name speculation (“Hey, I owe your name now, you pay up or you'll never have it!”) and the second… uh… I'm not really sure. But come on, Future Millennium? Compare this with my original site - Millennium Web.net (Creation Date: 2004-08-13).
So what's this now? Has it taken people 7 years to figure out it's the future millennium (that's 7 years from 2001)? And why have they never spoken about it before (at least on the Internet)? Or has just Google updated their search algorithm so that it shows up sites that weren't there before? (I don't think that's the case, all the new results are what they are to the Internet - new.)
I'm not mad, but it's bothering me a little. I've always been used to these Google results being dedicated solely to me. And now it's filling up with crap that has no relevance to me. (And what's worse, it's no good crap! It's just crap crap.) Also, they took my domain name. Seriously, people. My domain name. Who'd buy a domain with someone's nickname in it? Come on! I understand that Groovy was taken (and that it was and still is empty), but FutureMillennium?
(Oh, I should update my photo on WinCustomize…)
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27th August 2008
Lorem ipsum… you know the deal. For far too long has this blog stood still. For far too long have I owned this domain with nothing on it. No longer! Let us begin now!
Hello, hello. I'm Zdeněk Gromnica, also known as FutureMillennium. I'm a Czech student, artist, designer, writer and programmer. I'm also the president of Groovy General, s.d. and a freelancer that works for softpae and Skládanka web design among many others…
What you can expect from this blog is my thoughts, comments, but also posts encouraging discussion and reviews of many things I come across, especially of things I think I understand well (that'd probably be electronics, computers, software, hardware, art, music, musical instruments, food, you name it…)
Get ready for more!
» Read more about me
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