IDLE HANDS

So I make VST’s on my spare time, mainly for my own musical adventures, but I usually get them to some sort of state and publish them on www.shuriken.se.

But see, I had my laptops stolen half a year ago, and I lost half of the VST I was working on. More specifically the training part of a neural network “learn how to imitate effects” type thing. I kept the VST source on another backup, so that was still safe.

Three days ago I wanted to compile that VST just to use it some, and then probably publish it onto the world. Just for fun. It does not sound very good. And then perhaps take it from the tiny proof it is now to something a bit more useful. with better networks and larger brains.

Here comes the trouble though. Xcode 4.whatever I’m using now does not have the 10.6 SDK installed. VST-GUI 2.whatever I’m using needs 10.6 to compile.

You cant install earlier xcodes on your computer, and uprading to VSTGUI3 will take more time and effort then I felt I wanted to put in.

The solution three nights later was to download xcode 3.2.6 look in the hidden folder called packages, find the 10.6 SDK installer .pkg. Install that sucker on my system and then lift it into the xcode app folder.

I’m just gonna leave this here so I remember this on my next computer when I’m angrily trying to remember what I did to make this work the last time.

And soon I might release FlyBrain.

I’ve avoided twitter for a long time, everything except my old bot I have not used or played with Twitter at all. But then Eduardo wanted me in on the open source twitter action at work so I’ve just recently read up on twitter etiquette and reset my password so I can use it.
I’ve also added an automatic tweet to any time I do a post here.

So I was at BBJam in San Jose last week. I had a good time as always on these occasions. Meeting a lot of colleagues I only mail and BBM with otherwise. And even more developers then usual. All with great insights and questions. I worked a lot during the time so I had almost no time to go to Wallmart and have a look at all the huge packs of what ever they are selling, get a few presents and look at a few of the more expressive americans you can se  there.
I got 3 of the one dollar knifes, and they passed TSA and all other security gates on the way home to Sweden. Awesome. I also tried the rootbeer float, eating at Cheescake factory (where Sheldon eats at Tuesdays, and Penny works). I had a huge slushie and a beef jerkie at seven eleven. And when I got home I slept for 17 hours straight.

Now I’m gonna make floats for the kids to se if they like it.

EDIT – The kids do not like Coca Cola with vanilla ice-cream floats. neither does the wife. or me, not really.

In the documentary “Fat sick and nearly dead” an overweight Australian that decides to go on a 60 day juicefast to get slimmer and healthier. It’s a good documentary and you get excited over getting healthier, it has a nice twist and is entertaining.

Watching this movie, and as usual, feeling a bit to large for my trousers, both me and my friend Christian felt like doing a juice-fast. Or we’ve been talking about it for a while. A pretty long while. Like a couple of month’s while. But Christian’s personality forces him to never forget. And if he presents a challenge I need to step up to it.

You all know my fascination for juicers and centrifuges, heck, I even built one. This was a good way to try the newest one out. And I do like juice. Juice is the nicest. I can drink just juice for ten days.

Also, I was curious to what happened to the poo. What happens to the poo? do you stop poing? Do you poo less? What will it look like? These mysteries are to alluring for me to leave out. Dont suggest that I should Google it, I’ve seen enough pictures of poo on the internet to last a lifetime.

So by the pre-week, where you start to eat a bit healthier, drink less coffe and perhaps quit it all I weighed in at 90 Kg. This is a little more then a 35year old man of 185cm should weigh. But what can I say, I’ve let myself go. After the pre-week I was down at 89, HOORAY. I did eat a lot of ice cream and cake during the weekend. A lot.

So the first days where pretty ok, it was still very novel, just drinking. And juicing was nice as well. I made a bottle of juice at home that I brought to work, then me and Christian went out to eat NEJ drink at different juice places at lunch. Most of them sucked though, frozen ingredients, and bottled apple-juice as base. We became juice-snobs. Later in the week, and especially the weekend was pretty hard. The second monday, just 7 days after we started we decided to stop our fast. A little bit early, but I digress.

The cons:
* You need to sip on a juice almost all the time, or you will get tired. And juicing and bringing to places is hard.
* I missed eating, not that I was hungry, I just missed to chew.
* By the end of the it I had started to hate juice, hate it so much I almost threw up when thinking about drinking more.
* They tell you to stop drinking Coffe, something I was gonna ignore. You know what happens when you pour coffe into a stomach that is only filled with water? well, all the water wants out and the fastest way is going through your rectum. This made me stop drinking coffe.
* Since you are drinking a little all the time, you need to pee a little all the time. That gets frustrating.

The Pros:
* I lost a lot of weight, I’m planning on exercising so that I keep most of the weight loss.
* It’s real fun doing something challenging.
* You get to drink a lot of delicious juice
* I got to use my withings scale to track real progress.
* I have not slept as good in a long time.
* I woke each morning when the alarm sounded, and was not dead tired as usual, and went up!
* I got to be vegetarian for a while, I have not been that before.
* I bet you clean out a lot of stuff from you’re system/guts.
* I went from 89kg to 84kg in 7 days.

Will I do it again?
Sure a five day juice-fest is no biggie, and pretty nice. It was the last two days that where really really annoying. But not thins month, maybe in a couple.

So what did happen to the poo?
At first it was normal, then it came more and more seldom, it still came, but a few days apart. And unless you drink coffee and get diarrea it’s pretty uneventful and dull affair.

I tried coffee today, and it did not taste good. I could not eat any of the fries to my “break the fast hamburger” and I went and had a box of strawberries for snack and soup for evening supper. Now I’m gonna go take a long walk and drink some water. Perhaps my habits are irreversibly improved!

My favorite festival for the last years has been Norbergfestivalen. This is a small small festival with electronic music you’ve never heard of. In fact you’ve probably never heard of the genres. I know I have not for many many of both the artists and the genres. I always have fun when visiting.

One of the scenes at the festival is Mimer, it’s an old huge building made of concrete. Everything you play there will reverberate for atleast 4 seconds. Very suitable for drone-like music. It was there I began to appreciate drone and noise, for real.

So I was very happy when my favorite festival had a remix-compo with sounds from Mimer. Yes I know, not really a remix if it’s not a song to begin with. But I made a little song that I was pretty happy with. Uploaded and waited for the deadline to come. The deadline arrived, and was moved. Fair enough, they had loads to do that weekend.

The voting was system was novel, but nice. The more Facebook likes/tweets etc you’re song got the better you would rank. If you where among the top nine you would be on a record and have a chance to get picked by the jury to play at either Mimer or another stage (with less reverb)

I was hogging F5 on the webpage and noticed that there was an article about the remix-compo competitors to check their submissions. Only twenty entries! This was good news, I would get at least three votes from myself. That would kick ass, I had almost fifty percent chance of getting in that record, and five percent to get the gig.

Now the big wait for the voting began. I was planning on making a splash here and on Facebook, and talk to my friends all over.

Still pressing on F5 in my browsers, at least once a day.

Then one day I get an email congratulations to the ten winners. This surprised me, since I hadent seen anything. But a few emails back and forth reveled that there had been a Facebook announcement, that also showed at the homepage, but out to the right in an iFrame. I did not look there. I’m not active on twitter, so I missed that. And their RSS feed had broken down, so I did not get a message there. And there was no email saying that the voting had begun, or if there was, I did not get it.

I’m sure the best ten songs are up there, if you look at sound cloud mine has a lot less plays then any of the others. I dont particularly care about winning or loosing, but this time the odds seemed to be in my favor. Listeners would get what I was doing, since they are familiar with the genre. I have entered drone-songs in general compos and finished last. What get’s me is that this time I had a fighting chance. But I did not get the chance, out of all the communications channels, none reached me.

This year I wont go to Norberg. I dont recognize any of the bands playing, and after the emotional roller coaster that ended in a pool of mud I dont really feel like driving for a day, camp on stone, fight mosquitoes big as helicopters and pretend that I’m not feeling sad because I lost out on the chance. But you go, have fun.

I bought some crystal mud. They are really small pearls that grow when you put them in water. They are supposed to be good for planting and as waterreservoirs for plants. This is a short video with the 4 hour growing condensed down to 27 seconds. I also added some artsy fartsy music to the video and a “meta” photo of the setup I used when creating the video. Sunday after-noon naive – eclecticism.

I got inspired by Zeldman’s web manifesto, readability, and adaptive design so I decided to remake the visual appearance of my blog.

While I had already started in that direction with removing stuff, there where a lot more to remove.
No more google plus buttons, I never use them, why should I have them on my blog?
No more “like” buttons to facebook, I never use them, so why should I have them on my blog?
The whole sidebar, with useless things like calendar, list of posts and google ads. I’m sorry I added the Adsense, I block all ads on the internets myself so I dont really know why I thought it was a good idea to clutter them all over here.

And the fonts, they are bigger, makes it easier to read I hope. It sure does look delicious. The images are still a problem, I want to set them to be more dynamic, perhaps later.

This time, a documentary and some new snacks.

The documentary, surplus, with the tagline, terrorized into being consumers, was an hour long.
I had no idea what to expect. I know I did not expect what I saw. I did not understand if it was pro consumerism or not. Maybe. I did not understand the message. Possibly. I’m not even sure it was a documentary.

I believe it was an hour long house music video, disguised. The five minute repetition of the funkydrummer beat was great.

No to the candy.

I ate it while watching the house-video.

Cloetta pops: “Crunchy with a salty twist” I could not taste the salt. but the candy was very chocolately and saliva inducing. I recommend a try.

John Zerzan was in the movie, I vaugely remember reading about him. From hiw own webpage: “Zerzan is an intellectual leader of the anarcho-primitivist movement, an ideology that regards technology as a destroyer of human communities. “. I have mixed feelings about that. I want humanity to change to. But there is truth in the notion that technology is not all good.

Can we make it good?

My friend Emmy wanted an exhibition at her gallery ItchySoul Atelje in Malmö so she asked her friends to make a rendition of Edward Munch’s “the scream”
She handed out canvases  20 by 20 cm in size and we all started to work on it. The Vernissage has alredy been so I thought I’d share what I did here.

First of, I’m no master painter, I used sharpies and duct tape. I wanted to make something more robotic with straight edges. And I wanted the robot to scream. A little like the death-screams of a portal gun-tower. For this I used a attiny 13v, two leds, a speaker, asome batteries and a little code. It does scream at uneven intervals. It’s all based on the tiny arduino loader, so it was pretty easy to code.

 
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It started with this:

Forth from the right is apparently MUCHO evil.

A challenge around the office was declared,

here is a before:

and this is what happened:

SCARY!

A long time ago (last blog post) I whined about not getting free stuff. Joakim thought this was sad, and decided to challenge me by sending me one package a week for four weeks with stuff for me to review. The challenge was accepted and I received my first package this week:

Interesting, some sort of candy. Djúpur, sounds Icelandic, like Tungur knifvur. I read the word licorice on the package, and I dont like licorice all that much so this might be a challenge.

And that is why I left the package unopened for a while, good thing, because I got poisoned by something I ate. Or whatever. It was as an unpleasant slice of time as you can imagine. They sealed of one bathroom at work, just for me (and so I would not make more ppl sick). If I had eaten a piece of this candy I would most defenetively blame it, but the candy alibi was waterproof.

Now to the review.

The candy tastes good. It’s got a crispy outside, that breakes most satisfactory when you start to chew on it. Inside is a piece of chocolate and inside that is a piece of licorice, but not the intrusive “all your taste-buds belongs to us”, but a good and nice addition.

The kids as always drawn to candy like moths to a flame swarmed around me and wanted to “just taste”, they “just tasted” quite a few of the Djúpur pieces. I had to hide it away so that I could have a few left for later in the evening.

In recap: food poisoning, bad candy good, challenge excellent! Like a high-school cheerleader movie I cheer, bring it on!