Greetings from Porto! Last night's algorave was quite something. Amazing sets from Julio d'Escriván, Andrew Brown, Renick Bell, and the inimitable Mico Rex!
June 10, 2014
Amazing! I am blown away by this piece of software instigated by Jakob Borg.
Syncthing replaces Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet.
Using syncthing, that control is returned to you.
Syncthing synchronises directories of files between arbitrary computers and devices. It is:
- Cryptographically sound.
- Free and open source.
- Decentralized.
Initial tests live up to the hype. Beautiful execution, inside and out.
I contributed bug fixes to an Android port that you can install to sync files to your phone or tablet.
June 6, 2014
This is the new Pebble watch-face I've been developing - "Torino". I think it is finished now. I am naming it after the lovely city we visited last weekend.
Information displayed on the watch-face:
- Current time.
- Name of your present locale.
- Custom text from a file on your server called
message.txt(here that is the number visible below the locale). - Current weather conditions and temperature.
- Current week day, day of the month, and month name.
Tap here on your device to download the Torino watch-face onto your Pebble.
Help yourself to the GPL licensed source
code. Edit the file
src/build_config.h if you want customise the settings. I'd especially
appreciate it if you run your own copy of the PHP script and change the
URL in the build config to reflect your own server so as not to place
load on my server. That also lets you set up your own scripts to write
whatever information you like into message.txt on your server. There is
a demo script for displaying unread mail counts in that space, for example.
Maker Faire Torino
Had a great time and met some lovely people, gave a small performance with my GarageAcidLab Pd patch.
The QA session between Bruce Sterling and Massimo Banzi was hilarious. After hearing them talk I feel like I should stick a little sundial and lodestone compass on my watch just in case. Probably not a bad idea.
If you aren't already familiar with Bruce Sterling's work you should really check him out. My friend Fenris got me into his work some years ago. Way ahead of the curve for several decades now. I feel very fortunate I got to meet Bruce in Torino, and he was tremendously nice, showing me some amazing gesture controlled visualisations on his laptop and signing a maker-scene object for my friend. I'm kicking myself I didn't ask him a lot more questions.
May 28, 2014
I'm very lucky to be a small cog in a larger movement of new music called Algorave. This is dance music made by software algorithms, or to put it more poetically "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals," in the words of Alex McLean who coined the term.
I'll be playing some music from this genre live at the following places and times in the days and weeks ahead:
-
2014/05/31 - This Saturday at Maker Faire Torino here in Italy.
-
2014/06/27 - at the xCoAx conference official Algorave in Porto, Portugal.
-
2014/07/04 - at an Algorave in The Loft in Brighton.
I am very excited!
The software I am using was developed inside Miller S. Puckette's Pure Data.