robot porn

Seedy films

I cleaned up my parents’ garage today. There were still three boxes full of my video tapes, movies and Star Trek recorded from tv in the nineties, but also lots of tapes I shot myself, mostly at home or at school. After some years in the slighty clammy garage several tapes have started to mold. Not good. Only the cheap Kodak tapes are affected, the BASF tapes look as good as ever.

Tiger Tunes

My 1970 EKO Tiger Organ fortunately worked after a little cleaning, but it was still out of tune, about a quarter note too low. Switching the main power selector from 220 to 240 volts changed nothing about that (which is good), so I opened the case again in search of a tuning knob. There is none.

There are, however, 12 oscillator circuits, one for each note of the octave, and each board has big tuning pots (or maybe variable capacitors; I don’t really know). So although the organ sounded fine when being played because all 12 notes were off the same amount from the standard tuning, I had to re-tune all 12 circuits.

I wanted it to be quite exact, as tuning means opening the whole device, something I don’t want to do too often, so I googled for a tuning program and the first thing I found is Instrument Tuner for Windows, which is shareware but works for 30 days. Having a frequency display that shows how much the current note is off made it quite easy to completey tune the organ in 20 minutes. Now I’m playing “House of the rising sun”.

Dead tree music hacking

Imagine you forgot my birthday last month. To calm your shame, just preorder “Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking” by Nicolas Collins for me (e.g. at amazon).

I guess most of the information in this book is on the web as well. But I like books. They’re much easier to have them carelessly lying around on the coffee table so visitors get the idea that I must be strange.

(Who’s your daddy? GetLofi.com)

To bear arms.

Okay. So Medha sucks at blogging but apart from that, he’s just the nicest and funniest guy you can imagine. And he did the second coolest thing that happened to me last weekend. (It would have been the coolest if he hadn’t just used exactly this weekend which was like the best in a year for reasons not explained here.) Anyway. Now I have this ultra (I know Till’s reaction will be “Ultra!”) great Commodore C= logo wristband Medha collected at the CeBit IT fair. And he just gave it to me. Woo! What else could I be wearing while typing on and making noise with my trusty old C 64?

Just one month until the new Prophet64 C 64 sound module is out. And I’m on the preorder list.

April will be great. For many reasons.

Nerd update

Been busy. The next two weeks I’m working for my old colleagues from the JFC in Cologne (reinstalling all their computers and setting up a CMS for a website). That means more money and money means more stuff.

I was asked to dj on a friend’s party yesterday and looked for a bag or box to put in my PowerBook, an external hard drive and the audio interface. I ended up using a small cheap flight case for CDs, drilling a hole in its side (and closing it with a cable duct used for desks) and placing all the stuff inside (including a powerstrip). So I just have to bring the case along, take out the PowerBook and put it on top of the case, plug in all the cables and start playing some music. Still have to make a power Y-cable for the laptop and harddrive power supplies (instead of the power strip) to save some space.
No university lectures until april. That means:

• Replacing the empty backup battery in Till’s Yamaha Sequencer
• Performing the Filter Mod on Till’s Korg Poly-800 synthesizer (adding a pot for filter cutoff)
• Getting a new stylus for that old orange record player I found on a flea market (and maybe make it run from batteries to have some music outside)
• Having a try at one or two of ladyada’s POV toys
• Modifying my slide projector for halogen lamps (I found another one on the same flea market; maybe I’ll buy and remodel that one too)
• Finding out how Phillip’s strange old Grundig tape deck can be used (it only has one 8-pin DIN connector which apparenty carries audio as well as power)
• Building a noisy toy gun from several cheap sound toys and a plastic toy space-gun
• Buying that strange Kawai SX-210 organ/synthesizer I already tried twice in that small second-hand music store in Kreuzberg
• Waiting for the new great Prophet 64 cart (C64 synthesizer, drum machine and sequencer)
• Doing even more (music, travelling, jumping around, girls)

I’m such a nerd. I even bought a book just about joysticks. (Ah, and just today I bought a Super Nintento console, so we could use Litte Sound DJ on a big screen.) I failed to buy another Casio SK-1 (circuit bending’s favourite victim) for 20 Euros. And I ordered old Russian black-and-white Super8 film stock I read about on Retro Thing. So that means:

• Getting a cheap Super 8 camera. I’ve seen a Cosinasound 130 M at the flea market today. Looks cool. Nice zoom objective, does slow motion. Perfect. (Actually, I don’t know anything about cameras.)
• Filming something that looks great on grainy, overaged, low light sensitivity russian b/w film.
• Building a homemade film digitizer. Hey Buck, let’s do that in summer, maybe August.
• Finding a girl who can bear all that. =)

Push the button

I bought a 1-inch-button making machine yesterday. Some friends talked about having some 200 buttons made for their band and I thought I might as well buy a machine to make them at home. I figured the expenses would be covered by selling the buttons in the near future. Even if it does not add up at the end; I’ll still have the machine to play with.

I got it from buttons.de via ebay including a circular paper cutter and 1000 button blanks for a total price of 223 Euros (including shipping). Please talk to me if you live in Berlin and want me to produce buttons for you. Just for fun I set up an extra page for the machine to see how long it takes until I’m back to zero.

pong.mythos: Day 2

No Podcast so far as I just don’t have time here. Wednesday had 12 hours of work while yesterday was more like 15 hours. I didn’t even leave the museum to get some lunch and completely failed to notice the snow falling outside.

On the positive side, first of all, I like this work, so I’ve been authoring and burning DVDs (and learned a lot about converting strange video formats so that they finally will work; maybe I’ll write a separate article later about all the programs I used). setting up computers, running around a lot and even soldering plugs and more stuff that actually isn’t my job here.

The second good thing is that I was actually finished by quarter past midnight yesterday when the final DVD left my PowerBook, which really has grown to me by now. It generally performs better and is more fun to work with than any other system I have used, both free and proprietary.

I really like all the artist guys here, maybe it’s not to late to try and introduce everyone of them on this site. Maybe this afternoon we’ll have some spare time. Of course, they’re all pretty geeky and I feel like we’re having a “coolest t-shirt” contest here, as almost everyone is wearing shirts relating to games, hacking and nerd stuff in general.

The big press conference is at 11h, so I’m going to fix the last odds and ends. More pictures and stuff later.

pong.mythos: Day 1

Actually, it’s not day one. Some people have been working here for a week now, but it’s my first day in Stuttgart.

I’ll try to assemble my first video podcast from here tonight, but of course we’re sort of in a hurry to get everything up and running for the opening on friday afternoon. I help all the artists setting up their pieces while putting together the DVDs that will run in loops on several monitors. Converting different video formats to go together is not so easy after all and I needed several programs to make it all work. Strangely, taking parts of standard DVDs to assemble another DVD isn’t easy as all, as you have to rip and demux and later mux (multiplex) the audio and video and so on. It just isn’t drag and drop like with audio CDs.

Have a look at some pictures on flickr (I tagged them all with “pong.mythos”). A list of all artists and their artwork is here.

The big Berlin-Treptow flea market

I’m really into flea markets, because (if they are good) they manage to include lots of items I like to buy, like music on vinyl, furniture, musical instruments and odd stuff in general. My favourite flea market in Berlin is in the Treptow district right next to the Arena concert venue. It’s not open air, but in a disused factory building and while generally open to everyone to sell his stuff, mostly occupied by regular sellers who have their own booths and spaces in the factory halls (some pictures here).

If you come to Berlin and are interested in seeing all kinds of… stuff and marvel at the wonders of industrial mass production of the last 60 years, you definitely need to check out this flea market. (To me, it it the proof that our world is real and not a Simulacron-esque simulation, as I can’t imagine you could artificially build a scenario with millions of objects in all kinds of colours, shapes and physical features.) Actually, you could furnish a completely empty house with items from that flea market only.

The market is best visited on weekends (I really don’t know if they open during the week.), only five minutes to walk from the Treptower Park train station (look for Eichenstraße on the map). While you’re there, have a look over Berlin’s Spree river, which runs directly behind the market halls. You can get a nice view of the city and the Molecule Man from there.

Some sellers have begun to specialize in certain products, so there’s one guy only selling remote controls (but he has all of them), another one offers only clocks, and of course there are booths dedicated to colourful 70s appliances like orange telephones and tv sets. Lots of eastern-european stuff, too, of course. You can also get all kinds of machinery, power tools and even old medical devices. I doubt that everything being offered came to the sellers on legal ways.

Last saturday I bought an old Aspectar 150A slide projector from eastern german production. Unfortunately, the lamp burned out after two minutes of use and it seems to be hard to get a new one (230V, 150W, Ba15S socket). They are still produced but expensive, I guess. The small photo shop I wrote about had none of these lamps but they suggested that I remodel the projector so it works with today’s normal halogen lamps. (They don’t know that you can get me everytime by suggesting I build or hack something, so I guess I will eventually do that.)

I saw this old portable hamonium (made by Harmona in Germany), working, complete with stands stored in the top cover, for 180 Euros, but I don’t know if that is a reasonable price for it.

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.