Tony Blews

I’ve always wanted a “Flying V” guitar, so when Postman Pat called today I was overjoyed. For about 10 minutes. What he brought was this: a WowWee PaperJamz Guitar, bought from Amazon for £25.99.

The PaperJamz Guitar is essentially a paper thin toy guitar, or at least thats what the marketing bumph says. In reality it is only paper thin if the paper in question is The Mail On Sunday (including all supplements).

The reason for this is simple. Whilst the actual capacitive sensors and sound transducer are paper thin, batteries are not. Plus, it it were paper this, it would flop about like a rabbit’s ears. So its actually about an inch thick at its fattest point.

This particular “guitar” is number 4 in a series of 6. Each one has a different look and is programmed with three songs to strum along to. On this model they are:

1. You Really Got Me (The Kinks)
2. Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones)
3. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult) – I had never heard of this one!

For each song, you can either play in “Perfect Play Mode”, where you just bash away at the strumming area to hear the song play, and “Rhythm Mode”, where you have to get the strumming at least vaguely correct. Neither of these are really that interesting.

What is interesting about the thing is the “Freestyle Mode”, which allows you to play your own songs by using the fretboard as a, well, fretboard. While you can’t actually make real chords on it, you can play pre-recorded chord samples by touching parts of the fretboard to select the base chord and modifiers, and strumming the strum area. They even include a handy chord chart to help you:

To sum this up briefly, to get the major chord, starting at E (don’t touch the fretboard), the frets count up FGABCDEFGA. To get a sharpened major, select the appropriate chord and also touch the next fret towards the body of the guitar. To get minor chords, select the base chord and also the fret two places towards the body. Sort of. Note that the frets don’t count up in the usual F F# G G# A etc. manner, and that they are all the same distance apart (a minor niggle – and a pisspoor joke on my part there, if you spotted it).

But, can you actually use this thing to bash out a real tune? Well lets have a look (and play Name That Tune at the same time)…

So there you have it. Its a sort of guitar, but not a really good one. If your could form real chords on it, then it would be a winner. Currently its just an amusing toy. I’m sure a future version will allow proper playing, and when it does I’ll buy one. Cos i’m sad like that.

The squad has been named for Gallifrey’s quarter final game against the Cybermen.

The Doctor(sub), The Doctor, The Doctor, The Doctor(goal), The Doctor, The Doctor,The Doctor, The Doctor(sub), The Doctor, The Doctor, The Doctor, The Doctor, The Doctor.

It disappears down into the bottomless pit…

Back in 1990, that could have summed up my computing degree, but it was the response you got when dropping items into the sacrificial pit on AberMUD.

AberMUD was a Multi User Dungeon written (mainly) by Alan Cox, long before he started doing bits with Linux.

If you don’t remember AberMUD, then you won’t want to bother reading any further. But if you do recall it, then prepare to rejoice.

I’ve located a copy of the sources that will compile under Linux, and got it running.

If you want to play it, SSH or TELNET to bl83.homelinux.net and login with the username mud and password mud

I’ve had to take Telnet access off, so now you’ll need some form of SSH client such as Putty, or use the web-based ConsoleFish.

(bl83 was the name of the machine it ran on briefly at Staffordshire University)

How do you turn a £20 quid satnav, bought from the local Steptoe and Son, into a pocket media player? Well, I’ll show you.

The aforementioned ViaMichelin X-950 runs Windows CE 4.2 Core as its base OS, with the GPS and mapping software running on top of that.

What we need is to stop it running the the mapping software automatically, but leave it on there with an option to run it.

To do this you’ll need the driver disk that can with the unit. ActiveSync alone won’t suffice here, and anyway it has to be ActiveSync 3.8 as later versions won’t work correctly (especially with WinXP SP3).

So install the software, fire up ActiveSync and connect the unit with a USB cable.

Next you’ll need to download the file at http://www.gpspassion.com/download/custVM_GpsPasSion_buddy.zip and extract it somewhere (to your desktop will do).

Run the custVM_GpsPasSion_buddy.exe program and follow the onscreen prompts. Answer Next/Yes/OK until its done.

Now unplug the satnav from the USB and reset it using the button on the back.

Click the OK box on the screen twice to install both software items, and then wait for the thing to reset itself. It should now look like this:

Next you’ll want to download http://hautil.free.fr/bm/ScreenRotate.zip, and copy the files in it to \Program Files\ScreenRotate. Running that program will, surprisingly, rotate the screen through 90 degrees.

Using Windows Explorer, find the file \Program Files\ScreenRotate\ScreenRotate.exe and create a Destktop short cut (File -> Send to -> Desktop as Shortcut).

Next you’ll need to run \My Documents\CustoVM\RegEdit.exe and change some settings.

Change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ Timeouts \ BattSuspendTimeOut to be 2700 (which is 45 minutes).

By now you’ll be wondering where the WinCE control bar is, and how to input data. Well if you tap the very bottom edge of the screen near the plastic, the control bar will appear, and from here you can enable the on screen keyboard.

So far you should have a machine that boots into Win CE and has a video player (CORE) installed, and the mapping system still available (as an icon on the desktop called MapSonic.

You’ll be wanting an image viewer too, so download the file http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA003011/gqe/gq151hpce.zip and extract it somewhere on your PC. The copy the files from the ARM directory to \Program Files\GQ and create a desktop shortcut.

And there you have it. Copy some sound files, JPGs and videos onto the thing and away you go.

You want a demo? Oh go on.

(The song “Happy Birthday Tony” is (c) Crackerwax 2008)

This info was gleaned from http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=57135 but that is in French, and this isn’t.