Last.fm I must leave thee.

I really like last.fm, I like what it keeps track of. That's what I like about it. I don't like it's algo, the math they use to determine what songs you like. Yeah I listened to ICP in the 5th grade...no I don't need every single song I listen to today to be from Psychopathic Records. At one point on my "Reccomended" I could only get comedy because I liked a few comedians tracks, and a lot of nerdcore. ::facepalm::

Do not need.

So I don't care, they keep track of what I'm listening to, that's what I use the service for, and for the create your own station by tag or whatever the option is called. This station only mildly has to do with that tag, which for better or worse is usually better than the radio....wait, not if you live near/in Nashville. We have 91.1...at least for a little while. Losing that station is going to suck.

I digress. So I went to listen on my phone today, to Last.fm and sure enough there's a pay wall for mobile devices now. I did a double take...seriously. I started poking around there website to see what the deal was, and wonderfully enough there is an export in XML format, for your loved tracks.

I took the chance, and indeed Paul Simon was right. I hopped on the Bus Gus. So I grabbed that file. I decided to make it more readable for non geeks, so I did this to put a more readable version in a file called titles:

cat bsdpunk_lovedtracks.xspf |perl -pe "s/.*<title>(.*)<\/title><creator>(.*)<\/creator>.*/Song: \1 Artist: \2/gi"> titles

Yeah yeah I know, don't parse XML with regex, it will anger Chthulu. I still don't know what you are supposed to use to parse it without regex, and even if I did I probably wouldn't use it for this, it took me less than a few minutes to write.

Also does that snippet of code help...no not really. I mean that's to give you something that is human readable to other people, you know...normies, so you have a:

Song: Twenty-Three Artist: MC Lars
Song: Listen Close Artist: MC Frontalot
Song: In Arrears Artist: MC Frontalot
Song: Why So Nerdcore Artist: MC GoblinMajick

What will I ultimately do with this xml file...obviously not this, unless I just wanted to paste it up somewhere like a web page.

I think I actually want to build my own algo. In some way it can be run independently, of pay services that actually provide the music, like last.fm.

How will I do this...I have no idea. It's 4 in the morning, and I have to be at work in a few hours, I just couldn't sleep.

Until then I will use Pandora on my phone( evo shift ). My very awesome phone I am very much in love with(not sarcasm).

Installing SuperCollider3 on Fedora 11

So I went to install supercollider on Fedora and I was using the standard instructions:
http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/479

But I had some extra problems and solutions I would like to share:
Most of the dependencies I already had installed:
See Here

So basically install all the dependencies from the normal instruction sheet tells you to with yum, plus to be on the same side do them all again with -devel tagged on the end.

I compiled fftw from scratch because when I did a search for it in yum it wasn't there(I had searched for fftw3f), and so I was looking for the solution to get it to show up in scons,(when you ran scons it said Checking for fftw3f... no ) and someone on OpenSuse said compiling with the --enable-float option helped them(./configure --enable-float). This didn't help me in Fedora, however I did another search and realized that it WAS in yum, so I installed it and the devel package:
yum -y install fftw
yum -y install fftw-devel

After you build with scons you can launch, supercollider with this:
/usr/local/bin/sclang

However I wanted to add the SwingOSC to mine, so I downloaded that tar:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swingosc/
After you download that, in terminal navigate to the dir and run
sh install_linux_system.sh /usr/local
(The /usr/local is because of the way supercollider was installed)

Create a file called .sclang.sc in your user folder with these options:

GUI.swing;
SwingOSC.java = "/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre/bin/java";
SwingOSC.program = ("/usr/bin/SwingOSC.jar").standardizePath;
SwingOSC.default.boot;

So that file would be, /home/user/.sclang.sc or /root/.sclang.sc, and these paths are Fedora specefic.

Blog News

The blog has been on a bit of a slow streak, But I should have some more over the robot stuff soon and I am reading some interesting security books right now as well, so some of that may leech there way here as well. There is a local( Nashville ) hacker con ( PhreakNIC ) at the end of October I will most likely go to, however, Electric Six is playing the 31st, and there is no way I am missing that. You should check and see if you have local hacker cons, if you're not in the Nashville area, there are probably more than you think. Check out the new update on wereboobs fuckin fiction ( http://wereboobs.com/fuckinfiction ), that would be my fiction blog for those of you uninitiated.
In other news:

Interesting Reboot Remix videos:
http://cyjon.net/videos.php

Hipster Please! has a very interesting review of Schaffer the Dark Lord's new album.

DIY djsteveporter kanye west and jay z

I'm a big fan of dj Steve Porter and Jay Z....Man I love this shit.

Tutorial How to make a contact mic

Why make a contact mic?
A contact mic, will pickup vibrations on any object it is attached to. In affect making anything give off noise, or if done properly music.




Ok to make a contact microphone you need a piezo electric disc, and a 1/8 plug, and some wire. It's best to have a piezo with wires, otherwise you need to solder one to the crystal and one to the metal. Attach those wires to the plug, and wallah a contact mic. Here are the pics and the video above.

WTF DOOOD, UPDATE THE BLAG

I haven't made a post in over a week, for those of you worried I'll tell you what I have been up to. The last two or three weekends I have felt exhausted from various events, such as getting shit faced at ren faire and throwing up, or "enjoying", the company of the girls family, so this weekend I decided to take it easy, and try to get some R&R.

I've decided though, that I am never really going to be not exhausted and it's time to suck it up and just keep runing until I get a second wind wether it comes or not. So I won't let my time problems or tiredness problems effect the output of the blog any more....On that note, let's talk about the future of the blog. Right now my focuses have shifted to becoming obsessed with electronic music and the instruments one might use in the production of a live electronic music show. I have a planned contact Microphone tutorial coming up. As for older promises, here is where we stand:

SSL Part 2(Still Coming)
Beggining Hardware Hacking Part 2(On Hiatus)
Drunk Python Video Tutorials(Still Coming, but changed to Drunken Ruby Video Tutorials)

I am going to try to make the blog a little more arty as well, by providing at least a picture with each post. So Live Long and Prosper.

Things that will make you more interested in this post:
Using the tag "electroclash", to make a station on last.fm
Watching the Movie "Better Living through Digital Circuitry"
A do it yourself Syntesizer kit
The wikipedia entry for "Contact Microphone"

New Album Released -GoblinMajick

So what I have learned is that I suck at music and need a lot of practice...but because I feel I have to get something out there otherwise I'll just quit I have finished my pseudo ep which you can get here. So the next album will be put out when it's done rather than given an arbitrary time limit. I have also discovered a lot of my process, such as posting the album which could be automated are not. So I need to fix that. Be gentle, I know it sucks.

Lego::NXT this weekend, perl, nerdcore muzak

Ok so I was ill all weekend and could get nearly any of the stuff I wanted to, sorry guys. But I should be able to crank some videos out during the week. Mostly when I wasn't feeling bad I was working on some more nerdcore. I also built the "Spike" chassis for my lego NXT. And got a little more testing done with adding stuff to the perl script, to make spike move along. In the upcoming NXT post I will address, mac connection issues with bluetooth, as well as try to help with connecting a Windows machine via bluetooth. So far the time I have put into the perl NXT stuff has been pretty fruitful. So hopefuly I'll pop out a new post in the week and a video sometime soon.

I will be djing tonight, bdpunk 9unkz0r.com party

Last night and tonight I will be djing, we are having a 9unkz0r/bsdpunk blog party in the irc room at http://irc.9unkz0r.com or you can point your clients at irc://irc.9unkz0r.com. In the room #9unkz0r. The music will start somewhere around 10 Eastern Time.

BSD Punk Band

BSD(Burn subvert Destroy) has nothing to do with the operating system, however they do have to do with some kick ass punk. I noticed about 6 months ago when I got a myspace for the blog and saw that http://myspace.com/bsdpunk was taken. I was talking to a friend this morning and remembered them so I cranked it up, because it isn't awkward enough with the new roomies yet that I have to blair punk music on a frickin' Sunday morning. There main myspace page is a bit better. So check out BURN SUBVERT AND DESTROY. Also following them around the intarweb, it looks like I ran into quite an interesting DIY Music site.

No technical post today.

I am sorry you guys I am a little under the weather today so that tech post I promised has been delayed. So I am sorry, but what you should do with your spare time is listen to some Ari Lesser and read a little Cory Doctorow.

ALRIGHT METAL!

Check out geek and metal site. DUNCAN HILLS COFFEE! Winamp remote and xbox article, just some really cool stuff.

8bit Music

If you guys haven't checked out the 8bit music scene you defiantly should. Some time ago when I was chronically unemployed I got on the myspace and was listening to a lot of nerdcore. And I accidentally jumped on an 8bit site. My mind was blown I had to know more. I quickly found out who my favorites were, like Microchipkids, and 8bitWeapon. And some of the amazing artwork to come out of this stuff by kon.txt. However my favorite little peice of art was the website of 8bitklubben.dk. For realz look at the source code on that shit. There is some cool hybrid stuff as well such as soldout.



Check out the microchipkids and kon.txt.

What is art?

Art...

Aesthetics?

Design?

-SPLIT 1 WEB-

Web Design?

Web Development?

-SPLIT 2 MUSIC-

Music?

Punk Rock?

Culture?






hmmm?








music?

We are the strange

It was fun, it was stupid, it was great.

It was the most visually and aurally appealing movie I have seen in a while. It was, I think like watching the ramones for the first time they appeared. Seeing them appear on stage try to perform a song then just throw their instruments down, then eventually come back and finish their set. Yeah every watcher laughed but at the same time they knew their album collection was obsolete.

I have a music blog now as well.

It is only updated weekly. And I know you are thinking it is a punk blog, but alas you are wrong. All my life I have seen the values of many diffrent genres of musics and now I will share the best artists of every genre with you via Music Amalgamation.