The TimeChi Never Shipped, but You Can Build One From ScratchWhat do you do when a crowdfunded product you really liked gets cancelled? Naturally, you take the idea and build your own version of it. That’s what [Salim Benbouziyane] did when the TimeChi project on Kickstarter saw its launch cut short. This device allows you to set a ‘no distractions’ timer, during which notifications on one’s phone and elsewhere are disabled, making it something similar to those Pomodoro timers. What this dial also is supposed to do is integrate with home automation to set up clear ‘focus’ periods while the timer runs.
A quick prototype of the newly minted Focus Dial project was set up using an ESP32 and other off-the-shelf components. The firmware has to run the timer, toggle off notifications on iOS and trigger firewall traffic rules to block a batch of social media addresses. Automating this with iOS was the hardest part, as Apple doesn’t make such automation features easy at all, ultimately requiring a Bluetooth audio board just to make iOS happy.
After this prototyping phase, the enclosure and assembly with the modules were drawn up in Autodesk Fusion 360 before the plastic parts were printed with a resin printer. The end result looks about as good as the Kickstarter one did, but with a few changes, because as [Salim] notes, if you are going to DIY such a failed crowdfunding project, why not make it work better for you?

Somerville Sounds Releases FREE Soft Drums Lite
Before Christmas, Somerville Sounds released Soft Drums Lite, a free drum library for macOS and Windows.  The holiday plugin drop is a 64-bit-only release available in VST3, AAX, and AU formats. Somerville Sounds’ Jon Meyer said he was inspired by folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter music when creating Soft Drums Lite. He observed that for folk [...]
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Jay Gilbert: Trends that will drive the Music Business in 2025We asked a handful of the new music industry's finest to share the top trends and technologies they see gaining steam and shaping music and the music business in 2025. Today, Jay Gilbert shares his thoughts
The post Jay Gilbert: Trends that will drive the Music Business in 2025 appeared first on Hypebot.

Guide To Get Music on Spotify PlaylistsLearn the best legitimate strategies to get music on Spotify playlists, so you can reach new fans and grow your audience the right way.
The post Guide To Get Music on Spotify Playlists appeared first on Hypebot.

Music Business News You Missed Over The Christmas BreakA roundup of the music business news you missed over the Christmas break.
The post Music Business News You Missed Over The Christmas Break appeared first on Hypebot.

Noise Makers announce Studio Verb plug-in Studio Verb includes 53 SRIRs (Spatial Room Impulse Responses) that capture a wide range of acoustic spaces and promise to deliver accurate, enveloping spatial reverbs. 

Redemption arcs of 2024: Ripple’s victory, memecoins’ rise, RWA growthBitcoin’s 2024 returns were doubled by the XRP token, following a significant legal victory for Ripple Labs and expectations of the SEC potentially dropping the lawsuit.

When It Comes To DOS, Don’t Forget DR-DOS.Despite the latest and greatest Intel-derived computers having multi-core 64-bit processors and unimaginably fast peripherals, at heart they all still retain a compatibility that goes back  to the original 8086. This means that they can, in theory at least, still run MS-DOS. The venerable Microsoft 16-bit OS may now be long discontinued, but there is still enough need for DOS that the open-source FreeDOS remains in active development. The Register are here to remind us that there’s another open-source DOS on the block, and that it has a surprising history.
SvarDOS is an open source DOS distribution, and it’s interesting because it uses a derivative of the DR-DOS kernel, an OS which traces its roots back to Digital Research’s CP/M operating system of the 1970s. This found its way briefly into the open source domain courtesy of the notorious Caldera Inc back in the 1990s, and has continued to receive some development effort ever since. As the Reg notes, it has something FreeDOS lacks, the ability to run Windows 3.1 should you ever feel the need. They take it for a spin in the linked article, should you be curious.
It’s something which has surprised us over the years, that aside from the world of retrocomputing we still occasionally find FreeDOS being distributed, usually alongside some kind of hardware maintenance software. Even four decades or more later, it’s still of value to have the simplest of PC operating systems to hand.
It’s worth pointing out that there’s a third open-source DOS in the wild, as back in April Microsoft released MS-DOS version 4 source code. But as anyone who used it will tell you, that version was hardly the pick of the bunch.
Header: Ivan Radic, CC BY 2.0.

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitionsUpdated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, […]
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Turning Christmas samples into beats in FL Studio (free gifts included)
Watch us turn more Christmas samples into beats in FL Studio, and download our free MIDI files and templates to use in your own creative process.

Esperanto: The Language That Hoped to Unite the WorldChristmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barriers between people, eliminating war and miscommunication. The video below unpacks the history of this linguistic marvel. Esperanto was a constructed language dreamed up in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Russian eye doctor with a knack for linguistics and great ideals. If you’re a little into linguistics yourself, you’ll sure know the name stems from the Latin esperi: to hope.
Inspired by the chaos of multilingual strife in his hometown, Zamenhof created Esperanto to unite humanity under a single, simple, easy-to-learn tongue. With just 16 grammar rules, modular word-building, and no pesky exceptions — looking at you, English — Esperanto was a linguistic hack ahead of its time.
But Esperanto wasn’t just a novelty—it almost became the lingua franca of diplomacy. In 1920, Iran proposed Esperanto as the official language of the League of Nations, but the French vetoed it, fearing their language’s global dominance was at risk. From there, Esperanto’s journey took a darker turn as both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia persecuted its speakers. Despite this, Esperanto persisted, surfacing in quirky corners of culture, from William Shatner’s Esperanto-only horror film Incubus to its inclusion on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record.
Fast-forward to the digital age: Esperanto is thriving on online learning platforms, where over a million learners explore its minimalist elegance. It appears at places in various editions of Grand Theft Auto. It has even inspired modern makers to create new constructed languages, like Loglan, Toki Pona, and even Klingon. Could Esperanto—or any reimagined language—rise again to unite us? For curious minds, watch the video here.

Best Christmas Playlists of 2024: Spotify, Apple Music & YouTubeWe take a pause from our regular programming to offer the Best Christmas Playlists 2024 on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube complete with links. Best Christmas Playlists of 2024 Spotify. Continue reading
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Pitch Perfekt is a FREE Voice to MIDI plugin by Algoriffix
Pitch Perfekt is a new release from Algoriffix, an audio developer focused on AI technology.  Do you ever struggle with programming MIDI parts using a MIDI keyboard? Coming up with melodies using a keyboard can be difficult if it’s not your main instrument. You may have the perfect melody in your head and be able [...]
View post: Pitch Perfekt is a FREE Voice to MIDI plugin by Algoriffix

A free Thing from Acustica! Acustica's recently released Jupiter-8-inspired soft synth is now available in a third, free-to-download version.

A Twenty-Segment Display, ArtisticallyWe all know and love the humble seven-segment display, right? And if you want to make characters as well as numbers, you can do an okay job with sixteen segments off the shelf. But if you want something more art-deco, you’ll probably want to roll your own. Or at least, [Ben] did, and you can find his designs up on GitHub.
Taking inspiration from [Posy]’s epic investigation of segmented displays, [Ben] sat down with a sketchpad and created his own 20-segment font that displays numbers and letters with some strange, but frankly lovely, segment shapes. There is no center line, so letters like “T” and numbers like “1” are a little skewed, but we think it’s charming.
We’ve seen about a bazillion takes on the seven-segment idea over the years here. Most recently, we fell in love with this 21-segment beauty, but honestly the original eight(!) segment patent version is charming as well. Anyway, picking a favorite segmented display at Hackaday is like picking your favorite child, if you have a few hundred children. We love them all.

Thanks [Aaron] for the tip!