Yesterday I came upon the website of a hacker-legend: John T. Draper aka Capt’n Crunch, who did Phone Phreaking in the 60ies and 70ies. One of the real ancestors of what we nowadays call “hacking”. He linked a documentary about the early days and the development of hacking.

Let’s name the “Homebrew Computer Club” as one of the (of not the) first hacker-space ever made, that led to a highly influential movement within the computer-market. Steve Wozniak was part of that hacker-space and he is really embracing the hackers way of thinking. At him we see, that this don’t must develop into illegal kinds of activities, but let to a highly influential company, we still now today under the name Apple.

Hacker-Spaces are still relevant, if not much important now, than in the past. The documentary gives a good insight into meaning, methodology and cultural impact of the hackers-movement.

Author: Azraelmcv
Keywords: processing visualization matrix animation programming language
Added: July 1, 2009

Author: Azraelmcv
Keywords: visualization processing programming language
Added: June 30, 2009

You will possibly enjoy this experiment on BBC news as much as I did. A 13-year old boy replaced his iPod with a Walkman, the “iPod of the past” - a bulky piece of portable technology his father used to carry around. Some of the refreshing statements:

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Some of the results of this experiment:

“Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player. (…) Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?“

Go on and read the whole article. There are more conclusions ahead. And cool pictures as well.

Fantastic new chip-music magazine. The name is hard to remember: STFUAJPGM. But the music will last. The focus is set on freely distributed music within the chiptune community. The first episode features a selection of precious chip-tunes and small interviews as well. Keep an eye on it. It will be worth it!

PS: The first track from Shnabubula in the first episode seems to be obviously inspired by the ancestors of Tetris music. For a deeper background, watch this video, and also follow the links in the description of the video (on YouTube), for example this one. Thank you guys so much for this great stuff!

My Mother is always searching for cool motives she can use for
her carpets. So i made a generated a qr-code containing her name
which she weaved into a QRCode-Carpet

and the coolest part is IT ACTUALLY WORKS!!!

i made a processing sketch that decodes the image (click here to try it yourself)

and i also decoded it using my G1

When it comes to controlling software, let’s put it bluntly: OSC good, MIDI bad. With OSC, it’s possible to control the array of things software might do, with easy use of high-resolution data, descriptive names in plain English (or your language of choice), a path hierarchy that makes it easier to structure messages in modular software, and smart networking features that makes assignment and communication a breeze. With MIDI, um… well, prepare for lots of mucking around.

Happily, visual software developers proprietary and open source alike have done what music developers generally haven’t - embrace OSC. Thanks to the fact that this community is unburdened by tradition and commercial development tends to involve small, responsive teams, change hasn’t been so tough.

So, visualists, it’s time to reap the fruit of that development work, and make the live performance rig work the way you’ve always dreamt it should work. Our friend Gian Pablo (check out his fantastic blog) clues us in to some recent developments with Resolume 3 “Avenue.”

First stop: be sure to read the full OSC thread on the forums, starting with how Resolume Avenue’s OSC receive implementation works:

OSC manual
OSC section of the manual

That’ll get you started controlling Resolume Avenue with Processing, which could make for some cool integration of your custom-coded Processing visuals with a more traditional Resolume visual or A/V set.

Last week, though, we got into some other interesting details in that thread, like how to control the BPM thread and an undocumented feature:

Page 3 of the thread

Specifically:

There is an undocumented feature that enables you to send OSC messages from the mapping panel.
This way you can quickly find out what messages you’ll need to send to specific objects.
1. Shutdown Resolume if running
2.Open the ‘config.xml’ file in ‘My Documents\Resolume Avenue 3\preferences\’ and look for the OSC section.
3. Change the section:

4. Change the port and address to whatever is appropiate for your setup.

That also holds the promise of Resolume sending as much as it receives - no reason visual software has to be receive-only. Also, this illustrates that we need a basic protocol that allows auto-discovery of OSC-controllable parameters, but that’s a separate discussion.

Have a look and let us know what you think. And feel free to share your results across different applications (not just Resolume) on Noisepages — even if it’s a quick message to say, “darnit, I’m confused about all this and don’t know where to start.”

Noisepages OSC Group
[Warning: Noisepages is in beta - we need your participation to see how it’s used and to fix bugs, so join the Help & Development group to provide feedback, and expect more features / slicker look in the coming weeks and months]

Author: compusition
Keywords: processing
Added: June 28, 2009

Author: GlacialWanderer
Keywords: Arduino processing processing.org code
Added: June 28, 2009

Author: compusition
Keywords: processing
Added: June 28, 2009

Author: compusition
Keywords: processing
Added: June 28, 2009

Author: pindec
Keywords: cake orchestra arduino processing.org soundcipher mbcamp LDR
Added: June 28, 2009

Records and process voice at Ableton Live. See the second tutorial at Torley.com

Torley once again made some very lovely video-tutorials. This time, he teaches us how to make some freaky alien voice recordings, some topic that should be also interesting for videogame-designers. So much fun watching this. Should be also much fun doing it. Thanks!

Well, a heartening short movie about growing up. It was a student-work on info-graphics at the Vancover Film School, made by Jr. Carnest. (via)

Author: ragpickerr
Keywords: rorshach ink processing fat ribz
Added: June 26, 2009

Yeah, brilliant cartoon, that has got some insights into the gaming-market, almost as a by-product. Have Fun.

Okay, I’m making a resolution to stop filling actionscripter.co.uk with any more talk about Processing. It’s looking like I might be spending the next few months writing a book on the subject, so I’ll bottle my gushing and channel it into print. Also, my generative art already has its own home on the web so you can go explore my code there if you like.

But one last thing to say – if you want a quick start with Processing, give Robert Rourke’s HasCanvas a go. It is perhaps the quickest way of writing a line of code and seeing the result. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

Most entertaining way, to quit the dayjob

Indie-developer Farbs from Australia quit his job, to head for full-time indie-game-development. So far eventually not a new or interesting story. But the way he quit, is some kind of interesting, proving his gamedesign-skills in heart and action: We wrote a sort of “Mario clone game”, that delivered the message to his boss. Good job! Just have a play or read the original blogpost. (via)

People at the “Art and Genomic centre” in the Netherlands are working on a new kind of display-technology, that is driven by organic lifeforms: fluorescent bacteria. Huhh. It is part of the “Artist in Residence” program, and people from the Waag society Fablab seem also to be involved.

At least this really, really looks cool. They have an own blog, reporting about their latest developments. If there are breakthrough, then they’ll report it on the blog I guess.

The pattern traced out here is what you’d get if you took a pencil moving in ellipses, and used it to draw on a sheet of paper that’s also moving in ellipses. It’s a bit like a spirograph, but not constrained in quite the same ways. It’s more like a harmonograph; more on that later.

Have fun, play around with the settings, especially ‘ratio’; that’s probably the best way of figuring out what’s going on. ‘Eccentricity’, by the way, is a measure of how flattened an ellipse is - an ellipse with 0 eccentricity is a circle, one with 1 is a line.

The Long Version

I first stumbled on trochoids by playing around with plotting trigonometric functions.

I wondered what would happen if you took the basic parametric equations for plotting a circle -

x = radius * cos (θ)
y = radius * sin (θ)

- and added them to the equation for another circle, turning more than one circle in the time it takes to draw the first one, so we get something like the trails left by a point on a wheel rolling around another wheel (an epitrochoid or hypotrochoid), with these equations:

x = radius₁ * cos (θ)
+ radius₂ * cos (ratio * θ)

y = radius₁ * sin (θ)
+ radius₂ * sin (ratio * θ)

This makes some pleasing shapes, so I thought I would try animating it.

The most obvious thing to do is to change the relative phase of the first and second circles, but this just turns the whole thing round.

What’s more interesting is to animate the phase of the x component (the cosine) in the opposite direction to the y component (sine):

x = radius₁ * cos (θ) + radius₂ * cos (ratio * θ + f)

y = radius₁ * sin (θ) + radius₂ * sin (ratio * θ - f)

This makes the circle shrink to a line, then grow into a circle flowing the opposite way, and then go through the same cycle again.

Combined with the first circle, this makes the sort of animations you can see above.

Pleased with the results of this, in 2001 I made an applet to let people play with it, and that’s where things stood till September 2004.

Then I read a gorgeously produced wee book called Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music.

Harmonograph provides an impressively clear and thorough introduction to the basics of music theory, and ways of visualising music.

It does this in 50-odd pages, replete with beautiful illustrations of harmony made by harmonographs, kaleidophones, Chladni plates and the like.

A harmonograph is an instrument invented in the mid-nineteenth century, using two or more pendulums to produce beautiful pictures. The pictures are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies of the pendulums are close to whole numbers, just as chords are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies notes making them up are close to whole numbers.

The pictures I was making with Trochor were almost the same pictures produced by a rotary harmonograph, except that the pendulums of a harmonograph steadily wind down as they draw, and Trochor was arbitrarily restricted to whole-number ratios between the two drivers.

A kaleidophone, like a harmonograph, creates images of harmonics, but these are made only fleetingly, in light. It consists of a metal rod fixed in a stand, with a reflective bead on top, which is struck and then stroked with a bow.

A beam of light reflected from the top of it casts patterns onto a screen, rather like those of a rotary harmonograph, but more complex.

The biggest difference, judging by the illustrations I have seen, is that it is not restricted to circular motion:

Free to vibrate in any direction, it produces patterns composed of interacting linear waves and ellipses.

I have incorporated the idea of using ellipses, together with the damped spiralling motion and non-integer ratios of the harmonograph, into Trochor.

With 0 eccentricity, we are back to the rotary harmonograph; with 1, we have the linear harmonograph, producing Lissajous-type figures.

The equations of this version are as follow:

 x = (1-damping)ⁿ * (axis_1a * cos
(θ) + axis_2a * cos (ratio * θ + f))

y =(1-damping)ⁿ * (axis_1b * sin (θ) + axis_1b * sin (ratio * θ - f))

The code for this applet is available for anyone curious - but bear in mind I wrote most of this around eight years ago, and the rest three years or so after that, and it’s not necessarily the best code! I should probably re-do this in Processing really.