A few weeks back I pitched the idea of aggregating the blogs of members from the Northern Colorado Linux Users Group and the Boulder Linux Users Group to their accompanying mailing lists. Those members responded to me with interest, so I put together an aggregate site.

With some help from Sean, NCLUG, and Tummy.com (for hosting the NCLUG sites), I'm happy to announce the Northern Colorado Linux Blogs.

If you're in the NCLUG or BLUG area and want your blog aggregated, feel free to send an email to paul [at] eventuallyanyway [dot] com.

Tonight I acquired a Korg Nanopad midi drum pad while at Guitar Center (I actually only went in to look at 4 track recorders, walked out with plenty of cables, a Boss BR-900CD recorder, and the previously mentioned Nanopad). I made sure of the return policy on the Nanopad, since I really hate buying gadgets only to find out they either don't work with Linux or work with more coercion required than I am willing to spend.

Luckily, I plugged this little guy in, and it was immediately detected by the kernel, and showed up in lsmod as Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0944:010e KORG, Inc. I usually then Google the USB ID to see if anything might come up, but nothing interesting did. I was hoping there'd be software in the Ubuntu repos that might work with this, as I was feeling particularly stoked about compiling or packaging something myself.

A quick apt-cache search midi drum yielded some candidates. I installed the first one, Hydrogen. I'd played with it before, but didn't find it particularly compelling. I started it up and started hitting the pads on the Nanopad. Nothing. Of course it wouldn't be that easy. So I went to File->Preferences, clicked on the "Midi System" tab, and, as an option to "Input", I saw "nanoPAD MIDI 1". After selecting that, I was making beats.

Linux has come a LONG way.