robot porn

Look what I made, Mom!

This is a small toy… thing creatively named “music DJ”, apparently sold by Chupa Chups filled with some kind of sweets. I found two of them and had a look inside. The four buttons play these sounds.

Inside, there is the usual black blob and, fortunately, a resistor that controls the playback rate. I didn’t bend it yet because I don’t have a fitting potentiometer right now, but I installed an audio plug in the “antenna” and a switch. The silver disk in the middle could be turned to replay the sound played last and now the switch is wired to trigger that.

The samples sounded quite lo-res when played through the small speaker but connecting it to my audio mixer actually made them come out quite fat. (Actually, the mp3 above has the sounds played through a chorus filter and some bass amplification which I forgot to switch off.)

Big, useless, mine.

After some months of watching this old switchboard just lie around in some corner I was sure nobody would miss it, so I gave it a new home yesterday. I don’t know what to do with it, yet. The big rotary switches and pushbuttons are very solid and give a very obivious haptic and sonic feedback (”cronk!”) when switched, the very opposite of today’s rubber buttons on phones and other gadgets. I love the three lights in the top right corner, they look just like something from a submarine or nuclear power plant.

Click on the image to see some pictures I took of this thing.

Hang the DJ, hang the DJ

Last night had my public debut as a DJ (in contrast to playing music on parties at home), together with the almighty roommate aka. Till. We played at the cozy Octopussy Club in Friedrichshain at a party I organized together with some friends from the university.

Things I learned: The DJ is always wrong. Girls come to you complaining that nobody likes the record you are playing at the moment, although people are dancing. You give in, play something else and other girls come complaining. Guys never seem to complain, they just come by to tell you if they like it or to see which song is just playing.

We dj’ed with Traktor 3 Demo on my PowerBook because I have not yet found a different program that simply works. Other programs do not work with CoreAudio sound hardware, rely on iTunes (which I simply dislike) or force you to “import” each and every song before you can play it back, something that is just not possible if you have 100 GB of audio data. Markus, who came to the party as well, told me that they are evaluating open source audio and DJ tools at the moment, something I’m interested in very much.

The 30 minutes limited running time of the Traktor Demo version was not so much a problem as we had enough to play from vinyl anyway, so we restarted the program every four or five tracks anyway. On the hardware side, I used the Maya 44 USB audio interface from Audiotrak I recently bought for 99 Euros. It seems to be the cheapest external interface with two separate stereo outputs available at the moment. It sure isn’t studio-grade hi-fi at that price, but it it way better than the noisy soundboards in my desk computer or my old laptop. For DJing, it’s perfect. It also has two stereo inputs I have not tested yet, but I guess they are perfectly okay for home recording. They sure won’t kill any sound my cheap Behringer mixer hasn’t killed before.

So, where’s my next assignment? Making people dance certainly appeals to one’s subconscius lust for power and being a DJ is a form of dictatorship I’m always in for.

New MIDI controllers by CME

Music thing writes about the new controllers by CME (I have never heard of them). The VX keyboard line looks nice, lots of knobs to turn, motor faders, trigger pads, a ribbon controller etc. Actually, I don’t know who would be the target audience for this thing, as it has cheesy Alleinunterhalter-features as 2 mic/line-in channels and then all this controllers designed for today’s rather electro-biased laptop musicians. And it’s red. Somehow all that makes me the target audience.

They also have a nice controller box called the Bitstream 3X with like 35 knobs and 8 sliders, a crossfader and everything you need to control live audio today. If I was doing the music I’m always planning to do, I’d need this. Especially as it has a Roland Sync24 interface to connect old drum sequencers like my 606.

Podcast #1: pong.mythos

I’m currently preparing the computers for an upcoming art exhibition called pong.mythos, curated by Andreas Lange of the Computer Games Museum here in Berlin. I’ll be in Stuttgart from February 7th till 11th to set up all the interactive and video artworks. The exhibition then will travel to Leipzig in Summer and to Berne (Switzerland) in 2007.

This video podcast is an experiment for myself to put the nice movie function of my Casio digital camera to good use and have a try at programs like Apple’s iMovie. I plan to interview some of the artists and show you what this exhibition is about.

Podcast #1 is my first attempt at doing so. It features myself, some computers and a very bad voice-over (in terms of accent and recording quality), but please have a look and give some feedback. My video podcasts will be in MPEG-4 format (H.264 codec, which seems to be the de-facto standard by now). Use VLC if none of your other players work. Everybody should have VLC anyway. The podcast will also work on iPod Video players.

• Video podcast #1: pong.mythos introduction (3.8 MB, 2:00 minutes)

You can also subscribe to the RSS podcast feed with programs such as Juice or iTunes.

Musings on becoming a Super 8 hero

I have a weakness for all things analogue. Maybe this is some form of technophile masochism, as analogue equipment is usually hard to connect to anything modern and digital. And so I fumble around with my Roland TR-606 drum machine (no MIDI), record players (no line level outputs), reel-to-reel tape recorders (no rca plugs) and so on.

Maybe I’ll start toying with another analogue technology: As I was (unsuccessfully) shopping for a Game Boy link cable today, I again came across a really nice small shop at Hermannplatz selling used photographing equipment. They really have a large selection of Super 8 filming gear, i.e. cameras, projectors and editing stations. And they’re dirt cheap, I guess about 20 euros for a simple working camera or a projector.

As I have no idea about Super 8 and the costs involved at all, I asked how much films and development were. A color film is about 15 Euros, black-and-white 20 Euros with about another 15 Euros for development per film. A standard Super 8 film is 15,25 m which equals 3:20 minutes at standard 18 frames per second (and yes, that’s silent movie of course). The (German) Wikipedia article on Super 8 gives more cool facts like the great slow motion function some cameras provide (by recording live action at double or triple speed). I’d love to have a slow motion film of myself jumping or doing other stupid things.

Of course, with everything I plan, that’s not really worth it. Still it would be cool to have special things filmed on real film, with all the technical imperfections and nostalgia-induced style. Just how retroliciously cool would a Super 8 “video” podcast be? (You see I love creating media breaches.) I wonder if it’s possible to set up a dark room at home to develop those films in short time, have them digitized and online at the same day.

Don’t panic, I won’t go there. Still a nice idea. I’ll bookmark the extensive super8wiki for later. (And no, retroliciously is not a word. And I love “analogue” with “-gue”.)

My worst digital camera

Last week I bought my worst digital camera ever (even worse than the Kodak DC20 I used in 1998), a Game Boy Camera, which cost me 6,66 Euros on eBay. I don’t have a Game Boy, so I subsequently bought the cheapest I could find on eBay, an old model aka. “Grey Guy” (although the transparent version) for 10 Euros, including (unexpectedly) another camera. Of course, I am into low-res 2-bit greyscale thingies, so I don’t consider the camera bad at all.

I have to shop for a cheap link cable, the one you use to connect two Game Boys, so I can make a parallel port cable for transferring the pictures I made with the GB camera to my computer. Dragan (who is also responsible for the great Assoziationsblaster site and one half of lo-fi pop heroes Bodenstanding 2000) has a page here explaining the software and the cable you need. (And please have a look at Dragan’s Battle of the Lofi Digi Cams.)

The reason I bought the camera anyway was to play around with the included “DJ game” which basically is a 16 step sequencer with 3 voices (wave, fm and noise) you can use for a very very basic and short music loop (things better done with the decent LSDJ and Nanoloop cartridges).

And now that I have a transparent Game Boy, it would be cool to put in some LEDs for illumination…

Sit down. Have a scone. Make yourself at home.

Hi there. You’re looking at my all-new english-language blog. I have been writing a personal weblog in German at schattenraum.de for three years now, but it really contains only personal stuff, things that friends and family members read to know I’m alive and happy. I wouldn’t want them to sift through all that strange stuff I could write about, so I’m just starting this blog with a stronger focus on my main interest. I’m not promising that no personal stuff ends up here, we’re all human, partially at least, but I’ll see that it will always relate to the following fields of interest:

• listening to and making music
• hardware hacking like soldering stuff, building strange things, circuit bending etc. “Gebastel” as I like to call it in German
• a little bit about visual design, like web design, typography, interfaces and so on
• random stuff that could relate to net culture, copyright and open source issues, video games, computer history, technical gadgets, my PowerBook and my current location in Berlin/Germany

The language I write in, as you can see, is English. The twofold purpose of this is that I can train my language skills (I read English all the time but never really have to use it actively) and gain a bigger audience for this blog as most of the things I read about (and plan to write about) are in English anyway.

robot porn is the result of two days of brainstorming for an apt name for this blog (which of course should convey all of the topics mentioned above, being funny at the same time). It refers to everybody’s favourite robot, Futurama’s Bender; as wikipedia notes:

He [...] reads robot pornography (in the form of circuit diagrams), and constantly demands attention and praise from everyone around him.

I’ve put up a little page about myself, if anyone’s interested. (Actually, I have fun writing about myself, so I’d written it even if nobody cares.)