Chris McCormick

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!

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.

Scout came up with this character and I drew them.

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.