April 6, 2014
Nomadic McCormicks

Scout in sunglasses

We have gone nomadic. We are having a great time!

Some things/talks I am attending/doing and showing PdDroidParty and algorithmic music stuff at:

April 6th - Los Angeles. Patching circle at Crashspace. That's probably today if you are reading this in the USA. Sorry for the late notice.

April 11th - New York. Patching circle at NYU. I will be co-presenting with Dan Wilcox on Pure Data on Android and iOS.

Early May - Virginia Tech patching circle and a small performance as part of DISIS. Not much detail yet. Will post when I know more.

May 7th - New York. Dorkbot presentation on PdDroidParty.

This next one is later in the year when we are in the EU:

June 26th/27th - Portugal. Algorave performance at xCoAx.

If you are on the east coast of the USA, or in northern Italy, or southern France, or London, we will be located in those regions in the next months, so let me know if you want to have a beer or for me to deliver a talk at yr thing or what have you.

Snowdorks

Feb. 11, 2014
Evenly Distributed

tower.png

Jan. 27, 2014
3d Printable Sixteen Sided Hexadecimal Die

Hexadecimal Die

This is a Hexadecimal die that you can 3d print. Download the STL file or get the source code on GitHub. Hopefully useful when generating private keys and the like.

Jan. 20, 2014
Alien Insect

alien-insect.png

Almost certainly exhibits tripedal gait during locomotion.

Jan. 16, 2014
A Book for Scout (With Sourcecode)

A few weeks ago I made a little book of advice for my daughter in a what-if-i-die-in-a-plane-crash frenzy before taking an international flight. The content comes mostly from a blog post I wrote during the week after her birth. Here is the book on Archive.org if you are interested. It is Creative Commons licensed so go nuts. This is a technical blog post about getting the book ready for the JIT printing process.

I used several free software tools in the process:

  • vim (gvim specifically) is my editor of choice.
  • Inkscape - vector graphics, layout.
  • Ghostscript - PDF formatting.
  • PDFtk - PDF manipulation.

I used blurb.com to print the book.

The following makefile converts the source SVG files for each page and the cover into separate PDF files, then assembles them into a single document, and then transforms the document into the PDF-X3 format that blurb.com requires.

SVGS=$(shell ls pages/*.svg)
PDFS=$(SVGS:.svg=.pdf)
PDFS_BLANK=$(foreach pdf,$(PDFS),$(pdf) page-blank.pdf)

all: we-can-do-this-cover_x3.pdf pages_x3.pdf

%.pdf: %.svg
    inkscape --without-gui --file=$< --export-pdf=$@ #--export-text-to-path

pages.pdf: $(PDFS) page-blank.pdf
    pdftk $(PDFS_BLANK) cat output pages.pdf

%_x3.pdf: %.pdf
    gs -dPDFX -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOOUTERSAVE -dUseCIEColor -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sOutputFile=$(<:.pdf=_x3.pdf) -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress ./PDFX_def_wecandothis.ps $<

clean:
    rm -f pages/*.pdf
    rm -f *.pdf
    rm -f _x3.pdf

To get these programs issue sudo apt-get install inkscape make pdftk ghostscript on Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. You can get the complete source files for the book on GitHub so that you can use this as a template to make your own book. The SVG images for the pages are in the pages subdirectory and the cover is we-can-do-this-cover.svg. The makefile builds a "Small Square" (7 × 7 in / 18 × 18 cm) book but you should be able to change the source SVG sizes to make a different sized book.

The font is my own handwriting. The original TTF is here.