Category Archives: free culture

inkscape tracing

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I finally decided to give inkscape a try at importing and vectorizing some of my doodles.

It did a much better job than I expected. It choked on some of the larger doodles, but then, I can’t really blame it for choking on say, doodle31.

Take a look at some of the example traced svgs. That just includes the SVG’s that do not crash firefox ;->

Which reminds me that I need to catch up on the doodle scanning. I think I’m one or two dozen behind.

Red Hat High

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I spent a good chunk of this week helping teach a class on music and audio production for Red Hat High, a week long camp for rising 9th graders.

I was very nervous before the class started, as I assume we were under prepared and the students would have trouble with the tools. But that was not the case at all. A few minutes of instructions to get the basic, and they were off running.

The first day or two were mainly getting the students introduced to the tools (Audacity and Hydrogen).

Then after that, we were onto the projects. One of the parts of the camps was that the students are to present what they did over the week tomorrow to all their peers (and parents?). So each student was to prepare 2minutes of audio for the project. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted to. Some wrote pretty sophisticated song patterns in hydrogen, and overdub vocals or freely licensed loops with audacity. Some folks did interviews, or “talk shows”. Pretty high quality output for a week of only a few hours a day (9am-noon everyday).

It was interesting discussing some of the various issues related to copyright and reuse of music with the students, who generally don’t really have to think too much about this.

Spent a few hours today doing a collage/mix/remix of the students work for the presentation tomorrow. I think I managed to learn more than a few things about the tools this week.

We had a pretty good student/teacher ratio (15 students, and typically three teachers [myself, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and a few other folks]). But one things for sure, teach a class of 9th graders will wear you out.

BarCampRDU

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I’ve signed up for BarCampRDU.

I’m not exactly a local tech celebrity, and I don’t really do anything interesting with technology, but what the heck.

There are certainly topics I would be interested in participating in, but not that much I would consider myself an expert in. Could talk about work stuff, but *yawn* system management *yawn*.

I see Jay claimed the last open spot before the waiting list ;->

islands in the stream

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I know a couple of people that read this are up on osx audio, and/or icecast and such, so…

I was reading loopers-delight, and one of the posters detailed a setup they used to stream a live set to the net. Not the newest idea in the world, but I’d never really given it much thought as something I could do if I happened to be playing a show in a venue with some wireless access.

Anyone using icecast or similar tech under osx? I’d probably be running the sound into cubase or Ableton Live to record, so would probably need to stream it from there (perhaps after some basic compression, etc). Anyone done anything like that?

All the phasmatodea stuff is freely licensed anyway. I don’t really expect anyone to listen in, but it would be something interesting to try anyway. Geek value.

Though the idea of adding a big pile of software to the already complex setup I have is probably asking for trouble, I might give it a try one day anyway.

If anyone has any experience doing this under linux, I’d be interested in hearing about it as well. I can always bring along the linux laptop as well.

Some info on doing this via icecast someone from the loopers list posted.