# url = https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt # nick = hecanjog # avatar = https://hecanjog.com/img/originals/louis-avatar.jpg # description = He Can Jog # link = Blog https://hecanjog.com/blog/ # link = Software https://pippi.world # link = Publishing https://luvsound.org 2020-08-21T12:44:00-05:00 Testing first post... 2020-08-21T12:57:00-05:00 There are lots of cool clients and tools for twtxt... but I think I'd rather play with rolling my own given how simple the format is for everything. I suppose that's the point. :-) 2020-08-22T16:18:00-05:00 Might cobble together a little personal twtxt timeline today... 2020-08-22T16:58:00-05:00 It's extremely basic but I like that I could cobble together a twtxt feed reader so easily. I'd like better formatting & mention support, but it's something! 2020-08-22T17:06:00-05:00 I don't think I'll drop mastodon soon, but I love that I could "join" a social network so to speak by writing a few dozen lines of code. 2020-08-25T23:06:00-05:00 Slow day, slow week... 2020-08-26T19:32:00-05:00 Back to using an old netbook as a text terminal connected to my work computer so I can hide the big monitor and feel like I'm blocking out the world for a little bit... 2020-08-27T20:14:00-05:00 Al Gore 'ithm 2020-09-03T17:31:00-05:00 It's a bit comforting to post here. Even though it's in some sense extremely public, because barely anyone uses twtxt it feels a bit more like posting in a private journal. It would be nice to have mult-line posts, I suppose, but I can always start a clog. :-) 2020-09-03T17:33:00-05:00 I'm starting to doubt that I will ever finish Finnegans Wake, although I'm too stubborn to accept it yet. It's still fun to read aloud, and the language is beautiful, but it goes and goes and goes... anyway there's no rush to finish. I suppose I'll keep sipping from it as long as I like... 2020-09-03T17:36:00-05:00 @ twtxt via DNS TXT would be insane and fun. 2020-09-05T23:46:00-05:00 Hm, I sorta want to re-read Foucault's Pendulum already. 2020-09-20T19:26:00-05:00 Capping off the evening with The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China. 2020-09-22T17:36:00-05:00 Happiness is a readable process list in htop 2020-09-28T21:58:00-05:00 I'm doing a thing that involves working with an external MIDI module (really, just another computer) for the first time in a long while. The realtime flow is weird, and makes want to set up some automated recording dealy so I can more easily fit everything into my usual workflow... 2020-09-28T22:50:00-05:00 Oh, OK that was actually really easy to set up. I can just run a MIDI playback script and end up with a local recording of an external module. Not super interesting but quite nice! :-) 2020-11-06T09:54:00-06:00 Before the pandemic hit in March, I'd spent the year without TV or movies. It didn't last through the lockdown, but I think I'm finally through a very long hump where I let myself melt into some distractions. I don't regret these periods, I like TV and movies, they're not only distractions, they can also be great storytellers. Still, it's good to finally feel like I need a break and I can take the time for other things again... I usually go in waves, pick it up, put it down, but this was a long one. 2020-11-06T10:02:00-06:00 At the same time I have to admit I've been more productive creatively this year than most years. I think that has more to do with Pippi getting fairly mature, enough at least that I need to spend far less time on Pippi itself, and far more time using it (and other things!) to make things. 2020-11-09T11:11:00-06:00 Got my personal blog a little further along last night... trying to decide if I want to weave this twtxt feed directly into my site, too, or leave it as a little secret corner of the web... 2020-11-09T13:36:00-06:00 Collaborative composition is tough. I think I tend to ruin things with ideas and plans. Lets hope I'm not doing it now! 2020-11-10T14:14:09-06:00 Whoops! Fixing the timestamps in my feed thanks to a hat tip from @ 2020-11-11T12:03:39-06:00 @ :thumbsup: 2020-11-11T12:03:57-06:00 2020 is all about yearning 2020-11-11T20:04:39-06:00 If there's a freshman 15, I think I've put on my pandemic 50. 2020-11-14T11:50:09-06:00 Think I'll make another batch of hemp muffins today... 2020-11-14T17:59:54-06:00 I think I want to get into curries this winter. 2020-11-15T09:45:48-06:00 OK, not too shabby. I just tried my first search with gemini and immediately found a delicious looking curry recipe. (Of course in beautiful plain text instead of 5 pages of ads and photos.) 2020-11-15T15:38:13-06:00 Hello gemini! gemini://hecanjog.com 2020-11-16T11:08:48-06:00 I've been making a daily ritual to run a fan and open the windows to circulate the air in my apartment. It's lovely, even in 20 degree weather -- I'm curious if I'll be able to do it when it's negative 20 too. 2020-11-16T12:05:13-06:00 I remember now why I stopped baking for a while. Because after I bake it, I eat it. Not as easy to dump most of my bakes off on friends during the pandemic, but I guess I'm going to try to drown my cousin in muffins so I don't eat em all. 2020-11-22T12:33:26-06:00 Looking at my firefox history, I made a list of the 21 sites I visit most often. Dreaming basically of pulling all the news-type sites into one static gemini page that updates every day... and seeing if there are CLI or other text-based alternatives for others. Some are hopeless -- like my bank's website... but I bet I could keep my web browser closed much more often if I put a little work into this... 2020-11-22T16:17:43-06:00 So little drive to do anything today... days like this I usually end up tinkering on my website though... I just banished my tablet to a box on a shelf (waiting to be given away) so that feels like something accomplished for the day, anyway... 2020-11-22T19:23:34-06:00 As predicted, I messed around with my site tonight. Maybe I'll do a bit more. It already feels really nice to be touchscreen-free. <3 2020-11-23T14:56:05-06:00 I'm checking my twtxt feed more often now that my stupid little client is pretty fast. More incentive to finish tinkering on my blog setup, maybe I'll write more. :-) 2020-12-04T15:02:16-06:00 I've been sick all week. Poor kitty hasn't played with his favorite toy all week (until today) and is currently giving me THE BUSINESS. 2020-12-06T15:48:55-06:00 @ *waves* 2020-12-06T15:49:27-06:00 Today's task: travel two blocks to the grocery store. Today's accomplishments: some reading, playtime with cat, cat video watching with cat, petting cat. 2020-12-06T18:40:09-06:00 I did my one task for the day. 2020-12-11T13:22:08-06:00 Literally just got over some kind of bad cold and now I'm feeling round 2 approaching. This is pretty normal for me around this time, but it's a bit more stressful in plague times... 2020-12-12T23:08:03-06:00 Seriously considering hibernation for the winter... for me I think that might just mean outside of work put all deadlines and obligations on hold... try to get into the habit of spending most of my time just reading, maybe take up solitare? :-/ 2020-12-12T23:10:15-06:00 It's in situations like that when I do my best work anyway... 2020-12-12T23:15:25-06:00 What is the feeling that makes this barrier every time I think of just doing these things I wish I could do all the time? Why is it that when I know I only have X number of hours until I need to return to some obligation, go back to work, etc that I feel unable to just exist as though those obligations aren't on the horizon? There is some kind of crisis of choice happening, maybe. When I took a week off from work earlier this year that all drained away after a couple days. I did all the things I dream of doing without feeling any anxiety about which I should choose first, or why I was doing this and not that. Is it possible to cultivate that feeling in the space of a few hours? 2020-12-12T23:21:34-06:00 On reflection, many of the projects that recently made me so overwhelmed that I put everything down for a while -- and down they've stayed mostly for more than a couple weeks at this point -- many of those projects were started or sparked somehow in the wake of that week off. For quite a while afterward even I kept that feeling of free exploration, and in the process knocked off a ton of things I'm still proud of now. Some kind of friction eventually caught up and pushed it all into the ground again though, and here I am totally unable to move the needle forward on anything outside of work. (And work has become tedious again...) 2020-12-12T23:26:14-06:00 Sorry for flooding your timelines, if anyone is actually reading this. 2020-12-24T01:10:14-06:00 For the latest, most up to date catalog listings. https://hecanjog.com/catalog.html 2020-12-24T15:04:39-06:00 @ It's a catalog containing a partial listing of all my commercial and non-commercial offerings: listed, unlisted, imagined, manufactured, found, constructed. Enhanced with insight from psionic druids where appropriate to tailor the experience just to you. (Some EU countries may prohibit this.) 2021-01-10T20:24:57-06:00 Kitty says: you're finally awake, lets play dummy! 2021-01-23T01:14:45-06:00 Movies and TV don't show people watching movies and TV much. 2021-01-26T09:31:22-06:00 I've been having recurring dreams where my band gets back together (in a tacitly post-covid world) and we just argue a lot. I guess at least I'm thinking about them. <3 (Also I just realized I've never once had a dream involving covid in any way. Weird.) 2021-01-26T09:35:33-06:00 Reading twtxt posts is so calming. I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by mastodon sometimes actually. I check it too often, probably. Pipe dream: a personal daily digest of blog headlines, mastodon & twtxt posts emailed from my server every morning. I could potentially then... just check email once a day and fuck off all other forum / post / news refreshing for the rest of the day... I'd miss the interactive parts of mastodon maybe? Then again, I could just reply to everything once at day too... 2021-01-26T14:57:29-06:00 Passing thought: is there a connection between the rise of modular synthesis and the decline of people who know how to operate a general purpose computer? 2021-01-26T23:51:05-06:00 In retrospect, parsing / adopting RTs formally into the platform was probably the beginning of the end for twitter. It sort of set the stage for the future: gradual erasure of unique community tricks like the dot-prefix become broken by the open convention becoming regulated as a platform feature, not to mention paving the way for quote-retweets which many seem to think contribute to the current one-sided shout match culture twitter is experiencing... 2021-01-28T13:24:33-06:00 Ahh Tetsu Inoue... where are you now? I'm playing some of his classic 90s hits today, like Slow and Low... #theStudio 2021-01-28T18:29:36-06:00 Ohhh... OK. So the difference between /usr/local/include and /usr/include is just that the former is for headers installed from source, and the latter is for headers installed by system packages? (Except it sounds like homebrew on macos just symlinks /usr/local/include to /usr/include?) 2021-02-01T18:32:42-06:00 I wonder if email would be a reasonable way to enable interaction on twtxt... something like publishing an email address for replies in the preamble of your feed, then like twtxt the rest is up to you, but I could imagine a simple moderation queue that could be checked periodically allowing the admin to move approved comments into some public space... I keep thinking I'll add activitypub comments to my site but it seems more complex than I care for. Ironically because of available tooling email actually feels simpler for this... of course, there is spam... 2021-02-01T18:39:17-06:00 It's also a shame that the twtxt spec didn't enforce post order from the start. It would make clients slightly more complex to build (barely) but then you could just stream line-by-line new updates instead of downloading every post in every feed... 2021-02-01T19:47:34-06:00 I deleted my account on a non-work slack server again... I hate it but it made me feel sad to login there. I don't know what it was. I like the people. Being too specific about what was posted that made me feel like that doesn't feel productive... but I finally admitted to myself I always came away from catching up with discussions feeling shitty about myself or the world, or something. So I did something about it, and now I'm venting about it here... 2021-02-06T10:31:40-06:00 I'm the oversleeping champion around these parts... says I to the nutso cat near me alternating between howls and a slow blink... I feel like I slept all day but I guess it's only 10-ish... 2021-02-13T06:06:59-06:00 A federated forum-like software based on read-only sqlite databases. Bring-your-own-client, like twtxt. That could be neat, maybe worth thinking beyond the headline idea... :) 2021-02-16T16:09:46-06:00 I just caught myself thinking a thought I'm sure I thought at work about 14 years ago. It was like being transported. I was back in that basement cube cursing the lack of strong typing in HTML forms... good time to get up and take a break. :) 2021-02-17T14:54:09-06:00 slow wind 2021-02-22T13:29:54-06:00 This internet thing is just a fad. 2021-02-22T14:17:26-06:00 Hm. I can't seem to view time.gov on textmode browsers I've tried. (just elinks & curl) 2021-02-23T13:16:56-06:00 I'm exploring the Cocteau Twins back catalog via two singles collections. Victorialand stands above all forever, but I'd like to hear more than the handful of EPs and misc I've encountered so far... surprising how much of an anomaly Victorialand is in their catalog, or so it seems... 2021-02-23T13:23:39-06:00 Testing twtxt to mastodon cross-posting... not sure if this is a good idea. 2021-02-25T12:50:01-06:00 STOP WORK NEVER WORK 2021-03-07T09:21:46-06:00 Starting a second job today picking up some hours on the weekend helping an old client with a new project... I was worried I'd feel overwhelmed right away but it's actually a bit fun to be able to start on something fresh that has the promise to last for weeks, maybe months, but then that's it. 2021-03-07T09:24:02-06:00 At some point today though I have an unscheduled play date with my nephew -- we're playing mario kart over the internet. I haven't played mario kart since it was on the nintendo 64 so this will be interesting! 2021-03-07T10:37:53-06:00 Is virtualbox kind of a pain in the ass to install or has it just been long enough that I forgot? 2021-03-07T12:33:41-06:00 I hope that with the new Apple ARM CPUs the current generation of mac-based generative art doesn't suffer the same fate it did in the transition from OS9 to OSX -- in other words: left to die except for those willing to maintain an OS emulator or possibly an ancient machine... but probably this is the fate of all mac and ios based software art...? 2021-03-08T10:43:06-06:00 I had a dream that I accidentally posted something on the fediverse during my IRL break from it. I used to have dreams like that. 2021-03-08T11:32:32-06:00 My nephew this weekend after we spent a few minutes on the phone trying to debug an issue with discord audio chat: "I suppose I could just call you with my telephone when we play..." 2021-03-08T19:07:48-06:00 I'm completely incapable of taking notes or brainstorming at a computer. I just tried it again and failed... notecards it is again then. 2021-03-09T12:17:10-06:00 Blustery day. 2021-03-09T15:30:42-06:00 hell yes. https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=microsound 2021-03-09T15:32:59-06:00 Related: I didn't realize Kyma was originally written in smalltalk. The ACM paper linked in the scholar search above looks like an interesting read... "micro" for them in 1988 meant microcode... 2021-03-09T18:19:04-06:00 I can never remember the order of the potrace cli arguments for some reason. 2021-03-09T18:56:10-06:00 Enjoying the vibe of this website & the tunes within it: https://sixey.es/sounds/ 2021-03-09T18:56:55-06:00 I'm curious if gemini will survive. Maybe that doesn't matter or is the wrong way to think about it... 2021-03-09T19:19:08-06:00 Someone just sent me a video they made for a song I did almost 20 years ago and it made me feel very happy. 2021-03-09T20:53:09-06:00 DNA lounge emails have a clever method to get you to open them... they always begin with a joke, so you can just see the setup in your inbox... and have to click in for the punchline. Effective! 2021-03-10T10:12:55-06:00 Communication in 2021 is surprisingly fucked. We've abandoned technologies that are totally fine (email, RSS, xmpp, even SMS and amazingly normal voice telephone calls..) for a mileau of closed bullshit platforms that don't interoperate. (slack, discord, iMessage, etc etc etc) This is not a novel observation but it drives me nuts. 2021-03-10T13:59:26-06:00 The new badges on the merveilles webring site are wonderfully useless fun. I'm looking forward to seeing more pop up & it's a nice choice to have them hosted remotely so I can keep tinkering on mine too. :-) 2021-03-10T15:04:50-06:00 I need to start thinking smaller, maybe. Short term. Now. Sometimes I live in the future too much, maybe. 2021-03-10T21:37:10-06:00 There aren't enough blankets in the world to smother me into sleep. ...but I'll take them all. 2021-03-11T08:54:17-06:00 Kitty discovered my little stash of TRS cables hanging by the desk. Well, now it's half a stash hanging by the desk and half spread over the floor or in his mouth. 2021-03-11T17:27:48-06:00 New life goal: play the rhodes part in the Bob James Taxi theme song with a Bob James cover band. 2021-03-17T13:02:23-05:00 We got a little snow the other day, but the forecast has been calling for it so much there must be someone nearby buried in it. For now my window is open and I can hear the drain flow as it melts back into the river... 2021-03-21T10:09:46-05:00 Doing a bit of MIR literature review today, catching up with what's happened in the last few years. (At least the stuff I'm interested in right now!) Essentia is tempting although huge. Still might be the best fit for our use-case... 2021-03-21T11:31:49-05:00 I'm ready for the social media era to be over now. 2021-03-22T14:36:19-05:00 Went to the river to forget the internet for a minute, but it's so nice out I'm having picnic table office hours for a while now too. <3 2021-03-27T17:53:59-05:00 Maybe I'll move to Alaska and become an unlicensed private investigator specializing in art and jewelry theft. 2021-04-04T15:22:17-05:00 In life, triage is toughest. 2021-04-11T11:58:07-05:00 It probably looks cool to present some info on social media or a personal wiki or etc with zero context... I really wish people would cite their sources more often though... 2021-04-12T11:33:49-05:00 Now playing: David Grubbs - The Coxcomb. Hell of a record. 2021-04-12T11:38:18-05:00 @ agreed...! makes me think of the intro to Helmholtz' *On the Sensations of Tone* where he points out that the book presents his findings as though he'd taken a straight path to the clear road while the actual research process looked more like spinning in circles and getting lost in the woods... also thanks for the rainbow video link, looks interesting! 2021-04-12T11:58:21-05:00 Just discovered an unsaved vim buffer sitting in a local tmux session I forgot about for days now. Yikes. At least it was easy to remember where I left off. :) 2021-04-14T11:06:04-05:00 Idle thought: what if the way out of capitalism is just to destroy the social acceptance of normal fungable currency, not power structures or capitalism itself per se... The crypto craze actually might be the prelude to currency eating itself? Then what? Maybe instead of incentives based on wealth accumulation, society can find its way to more socially positive behavior, where debts are expressed in terms of your benifit to society in general... It's nice to think about, anyway. 2021-04-14T11:13:44-05:00 Maybe Satoshi was an anti-capitalist after all? 2021-04-16T14:02:42-05:00 I can see the sinewave of my own mood skimming through past twtxts... 2021-04-19T09:52:10-05:00 I like establishing routines more than keeping them I think. 2021-04-21T18:26:28-05:00 I don't know why I ever stopped growing wheatgrass for Louis. Sometimes I see his face light up as he remembers it and pops over to the windowsill to bury his face in sweet sweet grass. :) 2021-04-27T04:29:45-05:00 twtxt is still the only "social media" that doesn't actually feel like social media to me... maybe because in reality the damn thing is just a text file on my server. :-) <3 2021-04-27T05:47:08-05:00 Oh huh, I always thought the golden hour meant both sunrise and sunset, but I guess photographers usually call twilight the "blue hour" -- makes sense! Planning a little blue hour trip to a patch of lush forest by the river at the end of the week. :) 2021-04-28T16:28:48-05:00 I'm experimenting with just powering on my cable modem for three hours a day... once in the morning, once at the end of the work day, and once in the evening. So far it's a vast improvement. 2021-04-29T00:36:05-05:00 At some point between high school and college I had a kind of personal revelation that seems silly in retrospect. Until around then I'd considered the stuff I was doing on the computer with sound and the stuff I was doing with pencil and paper (scores my friends and I would perform) was the same. I'd kept them basically in their own corners -- there was the sound art type stuff and there was the pencil and paper composition stuff. Suddenly it clicked that these were the same thing -- it was all sound, all music... obvious as that sounds now it felt incredibly freeing. I think I'm experiencing the same moment now in considering my music work and my audio/visual/generative work as different threads... the walls are coming down and it all feels so obvious yet again in retrospect. :-) 2021-04-29T12:06:23-05:00 This experiment is really working out well so far. I feel like I have so much time in the day! I'm not doing this to be "more productive" but without constant distractions from the internet all day here I am at my lunch hour having already put in a full day's worth of work basically, and still I had plenty of time to go run errands, play with my cat, have a nice breakfast, study my topic de jour, etc. Always-on is bunk. 2021-04-29T16:39:04-05:00 lol race against the clock to perform a system update before the timer on my cable modem brings me back to blissful internet-free-land... 2021-04-30T07:38:57-05:00 After listening to pop music I feel like I need a shower. Like after a day at the beach. 2021-04-30T08:12:38-05:00 Experimenting with new fruit & veggie delivery methods. Today: 1 bushel of kale, 1/2c carrot juice, 1/2c carrot & orange juice mix, 1/2c greek yogurt, 1/2c coconut milk, 2c frozen mango & strawberries, 1 banana, 1tsp matcha powder, a sprinkle of chia seeds & hemp hearts... yum! It's too sweet for me though. Would be nice if it were a little thicker. Could use 2x kale and a bit less... maybe just cut the OJ? Dial back the coconut water? Strawberries too probably, but mostly because they make it all a sickly brown color haha. Oh and I forgot the ginger!! 2021-04-30T08:55:38-05:00 Yeah, the OJ is the problem taste in here. Next time no OJ, more kale & ginger! 2021-04-30T16:12:32-05:00 I'm actually running out of things to do online when my modem is on. It's a nice feeling. :-) 2021-05-01T09:37:14-05:00 New smoothie batch today: 2 bushels of kale (filled the food processor up 2x!), 3/4c carrot juice, 1/4c orange juice, 1/2c coconut water, 1/2c greek yogurt, 2c frozen mango, 2 bananas, 1tsp matcha, 4tsp chia seeds, 8tsp hemp hearts, 8tsp ginger juice. 2021-05-01T11:35:18-05:00 There's a whole world of musical possibility between total serialism and total intuition. 2021-05-01T19:52:52-05:00 Oh if you could hear me now, meowing the Cheers theme... maybe we're neighbors! 2021-05-02T10:23:52-05:00 Graphics programming is so much fun :) 2021-05-02T12:11:18-05:00 Today's batch: 10oz frozen kale, 10oz frozen mango, 1/2c coconut water, 1/2c pineapple juice blend, 1c water, 1/2c greek yogurt, 2 bananas, 4tsp ginger juice, 4tsp chia seeds, 2 heaping tsp matcha, 1 large spoonful of peanut butter, 4tsp hemp hearts. 2021-05-02T12:28:41-05:00 Louis the cat is squeezing himself as hard into the corner of the window screen as he can, longcat nap-style. 2021-05-03T11:58:09-05:00 "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which 'culture' has become a veritable 'second nature.'" - Fredric Jameson 2021-05-03T12:13:23-05:00 Doing some lunch break re-reading of the introduction to Jameson's Postmodernism... at one point he describes postmodernism as a parasite on modernism. :) 2021-05-03T12:15:11-05:00 We're just passing full bloom postmodernism I think. The flowers are wilting, we're trying to find nature again... it's impressive that Jameson was writing these observations when late capitalism was just starting to show its budding colors. He also looks pretty good in this introduction for being vocally skeptical of the whole "end of history" thing... the mention of Walter Benjamin predicting some kind of fascist rise of a culture obsessed with aesthetics is also pretty amazing. I'll have to read more about that. Jameson claims by the time he's writing this (mid 1990) that Benjamin's worries were unfounded and it's all just a bit of "fun" actually mirrors the fake news "just kidding" fascist culture of today... maybe Benjamin got it exactly right. 2021-05-03T12:28:16-05:00 Another nice insight: Jameson rejects postmodernism as a social order -- and in that sense it does sort of operate ahistorically as just a new permutation of capitalism; a conservative absorption of culture, not a progression. 2021-05-03T12:33:48-05:00 lol Jameson: "this unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives" 2021-05-03T12:39:15-05:00 Another great one from Jameson in this introduction: "our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition." 2021-05-03T12:47:17-05:00 I could quote rhetorical gems from every paragraph in this introduction. I forgot how fun Jameson is to read. 2021-05-03T19:36:53-05:00 Clever writer, poor reader 2021-05-05T12:33:00-05:00 Chasing the new is like observing a zero crossing. There's probably no zero, the interesting thing is the relationship between what came before and what came after. 2021-05-05T13:52:34-05:00 Picked up on a long-term project over lunch. The last time I worked on this I made lots of changes I completely forgot about, and it sounds much better than I remembered. That's nice when that happens! I also thankfully found the original pitchmap for the entire thing, so writing additional parts will be much easier... I'm going to see if ardour has an API that will let me programmatically insert labels at each chord change into the session. That would be very useful! 2021-05-05T13:55:25-05:00 On the usefulness of slow work: sometimes you have to cut to cure. The last pass I made was bold and sliced up an underlayer I'd previously felt a bit precious about. It was totally the right move, and I can hear what this thing could be again because of it. If I'd tried to rush my way through it, I never would have heard things that way. 2021-05-05T14:11:27-05:00 I could never choose between working quickly and working slowly. It's not either-or -- if everything was quick I'd miss something, if everything was slow I'd miss something else. 2021-05-06T14:41:56-05:00 Stories are patterns 2021-05-07T00:46:52-05:00 Capitalism consumes history and nature itself. Omnomnomnom 2021-05-07T13:23:25-05:00 I added two large carrots to today's drinkable veggies, and handful of fresh spinich to go with the frozen kale. Note to self: don't forget the banana next time and add a little more mango and maybe this is the recipe. 2021-05-07T14:31:13-05:00 Art Ensemble of Chicago on the turntable all day. <3 2021-05-08T20:46:36-05:00 Hm. c89 doesn't define sinf in math.h... so maybe I should target c99 in libpippi for the sake of microcontroller performance... needs further investigation. 2021-05-09T07:40:54-05:00 It's still fun for this trombonist to press buttons on a trumpet. It's such an expressive & neat instrument. Small, mechanically fluid (compare twiddling fingers around on a trumpet to the huge gesticulation when moving quickly from 1st to 7th position on a tenor trombone etc) and I'm still impressed with how easy it is to glide the pitch across more than a semitone just with your embouchure. It's basically the opposite in trombone-land, I'm so used to the clean popping between partials of the trombone and manipulating fine pitch with the mechanical affordance of the slide. The trombone wants to settle into a resonance really strongly, which is not at all like the trumpet where I frequently get lost as a beginning player and find myself needing a reference pitch when picking the thing up cold most of the time. 2021-05-11T15:25:50-05:00 Huh, everybody's booking tours already. 2021-05-11T17:20:25-05:00 One of these days I'm going to have to finish reading the GNU Make book... 2021-05-11T17:38:30-05:00 Using my score for Each Band of the Telephone Wire as a case study to see what to add to libpippi next. Looks like I got a ways to go, but I might be able to make a simplified version of this with a few new modules... 2021-05-11T21:14:54-05:00 The artifacts in these Cheers episdoes are great. Sometimes, they must have lost the film and the scene switches to videotape, dark & warbly. This episode seems like it's running about 0.5% too fast, the intro sequence warbles audibly. I love watching for out-of-focus shots, overblown lighting & shakey cameras. It's so alive. 2021-05-13T06:51:43-05:00 Had a nice talk last night with J about digital art. We talked a little about Walter Benjamin's "Work of art in the age of..." and the description of a kind of linear conception of *technological* history in art, where there's this sort of idea that spectacle follows technological breakthroughs. The stunning architecture of Gothic cathedrals, the impact of hyperrealism in an age before photography, and so on. J mentioned "post-internet" art, and he's been working for an artist who is working on new ways to present digital artworks... which is still very much within this linear conception of art history being basically a story of technological innovation... and that all just feels hollow. If we accept that one role of art is to be transcendent in some way -- to pull us into a critical or aesthetic place where life maybe looks different, or we can step outside ourselves in some small way and mingle with something much greater than us. The awe-historical timeline, maybe... If that's the case then the place to look for awe in 2021 is not in networked digital spaces per se. I think, as Jameson suggests, we need to find some way back to a positive relationship with nature. It's only the awe of the interpersonal and inter-natural that seems interesting now... 2021-05-13T07:04:13-05:00 I'm no Luddite. (I'm a computer musician for crying out loud.) New tools are not bad -- as long as they remain tools. The internet for example, is a wonderful tool, but it's not a very nice *place to be*... the land of privileged images. (I say typing this message to upload at some point later on today...) 2021-05-13T15:48:03-05:00 The awe of the small 2021-05-14T08:55:08-05:00 Every time I dip into my stack of computer music journal I get totally overwhelmed in the best way. Among those recently earmarked to read: a 1988 article about applications of the wavelet transform... 2021-05-14T23:44:26-05:00 All glory to the public domain 2021-05-15T10:57:15-05:00 I got kinda excited because I discovered my crappy new printer can print PDFs from an SD card. At the moment the only way I can get it to print halfway reliably is to upload a file somewhere and have the printer download it. Anyway, so much for offline printing... I have yet to get it to actually print a PDF. It seems like you have to use special Canon software to create the PDF... I may have to give this printer to someone with a smartphone. Are all new printers a big pile of internet-connected garbage now? 2021-05-15T12:48:25-05:00 *Peeks at HN.* Ah, I see you are arguing about your favorite programming languages again. Carry on... 2021-05-16T19:54:41-05:00 Oh, rad! I wasn't expecting this to work... I used dvdbackup to mirror a copy of a 5 channel James Dashow album, which also comes with a stereo mixdown... and I can just play the VOB files back directly with moc like any other album! Nice work moc devs. 2021-05-16T20:49:47-05:00 I feel a bit idiotic for only just realizing this, but I can basically just worry about porting over the unique parts of pippi into the new c89 libpippi. Stuff like the Tukey osc, my pulsar osc, waveset synthesis routines, dynamic stochastic synthesis etc etc. Everything else I can just use the daisy DSP stuff or good old Soundpipe! Obvious I guess, but still nice to realize... that will get me more quickly to the music part. :-) 2021-05-20T14:52:29-05:00 Synthesis weekend approaching. <3 2021-05-20T14:53:15-05:00 (Last txt was a bit cryptic, but I have on long term lone 90% of a synth that a couple friends produced a few years back, and I'll finally be able to start digging into their world.) 2021-05-20T15:21:10-05:00 I really like refactoring. Clean(er) code feels nice. 2021-05-20T22:57:01-05:00 O Menander, O life, O Cheers, O Frasier, which imitates which? 2021-05-21T13:26:05-05:00 I feel like I've been sitting on a plane near a crying baby so long that I don't even remember when the baby started to cry, or why I'm on this flight in the first place. I was just sitting there on the tarmac, miserable. Now I'm off the plane, I'm back home in a quiet & peaceful spot, my thoughts free to explore ideas for days on end like it was when I was 16 years old. 2021-05-22T15:20:21-05:00 When I hear the word productivity recently I hear it as wasting time. Maybe I'll revive the term busybody. There was never such a busybody as the productive person. 2021-05-23T08:24:06-05:00 Oh happy day! A firmware update for my extremely crappy printer. Fingers crossed I'll be able to print from an SD card finally... 2021-05-23T09:20:58-05:00 Sigh... printer is still just as broken as ever. Oh well. (At least it makes for a fine standalone xerox machine...) 2021-06-01T07:59:52-05:00 The slower I move, the more I actually accomplish. 2021-06-05T15:49:00-05:00 Just watched a very exciting update about the state of Nim... I'm trying to stay skeptical because it sounds too good to be true, but there's one way to find out I guess! 2021-06-20T12:27:05-05:00 Debugging new firmware in a notebook by the river is fantastic, but some days I get more accomplished just sitting and looking out at the water. 2021-06-20T12:41:01-05:00 Keith Rowe deciding to give up the guitar because he made one unintentional move is surprising -- the implications of obsession with control for someone who has been so invested in improvisation is weird. Still, he obviously doesn't need a guitar to get the job done & it must feel terrible to have to fight your body to do what you most love. (That much I can identify with for sure.) Anyway, this new Erstlive recording of his final guitar concert is very nice. (And the moment he calls out where he loses control is totally invisible in the context of the rest of the performance...) 2021-06-22T18:16:58-05:00 Today at the river I wished I had a recorder with me. I'm usually content to just listen, but maybe I'll bring one with just in case from now on... sitting and listening to the usual river sounds, behind me a theatre troupe started to rehearse. Then, a barge passed, making a low slow tone as it moved along. A while later: a train made way probably 20 feet from the stage. Among all that: fish jumping. It was nice. 2021-06-23T13:39:04-05:00 One of those days where everything seems lost. 2021-06-26T10:05:31-05:00 Rainy & gross days are A-OK. 2021-07-07T11:04:18-05:00 The power went out last night and it was kind of fun. I should invest in some candles though. 2021-07-08T10:28:01-05:00 Attempting to reconcile my interest in generative radio with my desire to be mostly offline... 2021-07-16T10:23:56-05:00 Spent the morning before work re-arranging my studio, or at least getting a start on it. I found a new home for my mixer so I can use my computer more easily for recording again. Louis the cat doesn't even seem interested in sitting on it anymore, so that's good. Little space optimizations make a lot of difference. 2021-07-18T20:15:17-05:00 I feel like I'm watching this 3walks project unfold in front of me one little recording session at a time. Usually at this point in a project I hate everything but I've been pacing myself a bit more and I only hate parts of it right now. 2021-07-24T10:44:12-05:00 I'm not a guitarist but now and then I record with them, basically as percussion instruments. Intonation is always hard. Probably doesn't help I always tune the strings to some arbitrary chord far from the general pitches they're meant to be tuned to... I'm thinking maybe I should try to build a dulcimer-type thing that's more setup the way I like to use plucked strings... 2021-08-03T10:29:44-05:00 Someone was in my apartment while I was gone again. This is starting to get old. I figured my landlord had finally learned how to send a text message or leave a note, but it was probably just the pandemic that kept people from randomly letting themselves in. I think they were checking for a leak, or that's my best guess anyway. Totally cool, check away, I appreciate it... just... maybe take 10 seconds to give me a heads up? Please? We've spoken at length, I've written him letters... it's not malicious, he's just not super competent I think... and it's annoying. 2021-08-08T15:23:45-05:00 @ the rest of the building is mostly college students, I don't know if anyone else has had the same experience honestly. this most recent flub turned out to be a misunderstanding thankfully. I can tell he's trying. 2021-08-08T15:26:24-05:00 I <3 my plotter. My first love in computers was LOGO on the Apple II, telling the turtle how to move around... feels a little like coming full circle. :-) 2021-08-09T08:36:01-05:00 The fish were jumping this morning and a huge bald eagle swooped right in front of me on the hunt for some breakfast. I was half worried it would try to eat me. :) 2021-09-04T09:05:44-05:00 Always making the same mistakes 2021-09-04T15:35:04-05:00 I don't really like programming honestly. I mean it's fine. I just have very specific ideas and programming is the only reasonable recourse at the moment. 2021-09-04T15:37:46-05:00 For a computer musician I can't say I'm all that interested in computers per se... they're a wonderful tool, but ultimately a means to an end. 2021-09-09T02:00:39-05:00 Two-AM sounds: my cat loudly munching on the spider plant 2021-09-09T18:15:14-05:00 Ooo cgdb is a pretty nice curses UI for gdb... 2021-09-10T13:23:49-05:00 I ordered some information about trails in Minnesota from the state... there are some interesting things in here for sure, but it's sad how much of this is just a crapload of ads and a list of websites with the actual information... 2021-09-11T14:06:11-05:00 A story where cyberspace plays the same role as the dark forest in old literature. 2021-09-11T14:24:00-05:00 Train graffiti is extra good. 2021-09-12T00:42:34-05:00 The feeling of horror and wonder when being confronted with the reality of a half-imagined dream. 2021-09-12T13:33:59-05:00 I think it's kinda funny when my musical errors go from literal crashes, to obvious mangled audio, to strangely behaving audio... to silence. This is about the time for a patient refactor. 2021-09-13T13:15:40-05:00 Park office hours are the best 2021-09-26T09:37:34-05:00 I'm thinking about maybe doing an online concert & workshop series from my studio in Milwaukee... I won't be back again until November so we'll see, but it could be a fun thing to do. I'm starting to feel like performing again, a little bit. 2021-09-26T09:38:03-05:00 Just updated my little now page: `finger hecanjog@hecanjog.com` or `printf "hecanjog " | nc hecanjog.com 79` 2021-09-26T18:34:52-05:00 I really think bandcamp is great, but I'm getting prompted to enter a confirmation code from an email that never arrives when trying to login as of a couple days ago... this would be a bit frustrating if my entire music collection was in the cloud. :) 2021-09-27T11:26:48-05:00 The leaves are turning here in Winona. Hanging out with a firey one while I work in my outer office. :) 2021-09-27T13:50:18-05:00 Is soundexchange a good thing? 2021-09-28T10:24:16-05:00 My cat's new water fountain (a hand-me-down from my sister whose cats were freaked out by it) makes this fun grinding noise now and then. I think it's going to drive me nuts eventually, but for now I'm reaching for my induction and contact microphones. 2021-09-29T10:06:28-05:00 I'm almost out of pages in the notebook I use for work meeting notes. This means I get to stitch a new notebook together this weekend. :-) 2021-09-29T13:09:58-05:00 lol a bird just pooped on my laptop screen. 2021-10-03T13:50:47-05:00 Those that work in the mills should own them 2021-10-04T13:41:21-05:00 I'm on day two of what is looking like it'll be a four day plot. It's... muddy and kinda ugly right now, but we'll see what happens. :) 2021-10-06T08:53:02-05:00 I'm feeling spoiled by these perfect weather days. Cold enough that the park is basically empty in the morning, warm enough to spend most of the day working there in a jacket. 2021-10-13T16:37:18-05:00 Computer music on the train <3 <3 <3 2021-11-04T15:21:40-05:00 Organizing my apartment a little bit more feels nice. I have a spot for all the plotter and LuvSound related junk now! I can find more things than usual! This is nice. 2021-11-11T07:55:23-06:00 For me 2021 has been all about slowing down, embracing failure as a part of life, and getting the *@^% offline. 2021-12-10T22:18:20-06:00 Ugh 2021-12-15T16:55:34-06:00 Finishing things is surprisingly depressing. 2021-12-23T11:56:28-06:00 rest in peace, louis 2021-12-23T18:10:06-06:00 Carrying him from the litter box to his comfort zones spread twinkling bits of white-grey clay litter around the apartment. I find them and I feel a little nearer to him. 2021-12-23T20:32:23-06:00 I still see him in the corners. I expect him to come out. 2021-12-28T17:02:07-06:00 One of Louis' squirrel friends scaled sheer brick up to my second floor window looking for him again today, covered in snow. 2021-12-30T12:08:52-06:00 Made the mistake of looking at the news. 2022-01-01T17:04:27-06:00 Sadness became horror tonight. Not expecting that. 2022-01-02T12:38:07-06:00 I don't think I can do this 2022-01-03T08:32:33-06:00 Back to work... 2022-01-03T19:14:29-06:00 One day after another 2022-01-03T20:11:35-06:00 A week after Louis died, I threw a rock out onto the semi-frozen river. It was a crystal in the shape of a heart I picked up at the rock shop while I was waiting for the internist to diagnose him finally. I imagined it had all of his pain. Next week if the river is frozen enough I'll see if it's still there and put it deeper into the river, maybe on the old bridge. Otherwise if it sank, then it sank. 2022-01-03T20:16:04-06:00 A few days before I threw my rock into the river, I walked out into the snow drifts with that in mind. Someone had written something... emotionally distressing... onto a white plate in various colors of paint. Then smashed the plate onto the concrete by the river. I wasn't ready to throw Louis' stone anyway, but I felt a kinship with that person. 2022-01-03T20:44:32-06:00 "There is no normal life that is free of pain." -- Fred Rogers 2022-01-04T08:07:41-06:00 Sorry if I'm bumming anyone out. I'll stop venting here. 2022-01-05T13:16:04-06:00 This new Jimmy Behan album is wonderful. https://ab-jimmybehan.bandcamp.com/album/here-we-are-now 2022-01-15T00:34:53-06:00 the beatings will continue until morale improves 2022-01-23T08:55:53-06:00 Life in 2022 is very textual. 2022-02-15T14:56:04-06:00 So it goes. ‮ & on & on... 2022-02-20T13:11:28-06:00 :drake does not want: playback / :drake wants: performance (thinking about how dead streaming platform are compared to, say, how alive radio platforms are...) 2022-02-21T17:04:13-06:00 That feeling of seeing the edges of your understanding reveal themselves and then fall to the ground, uncovering a vast horizon of the unknown & leaving you standing on a small island that once felt like the entire known universe. This is a wonderful thing to happen in life. 2022-02-23T02:31:13-06:00 This might be nice: let the acoustic sound of the mini M float above a quiet expansion & fragmentation... reinforce with clean resonance (tracked? signaled?) ... 2022-02-23T02:35:08-06:00 Maybe a secondary clean feedback path -- one amp close for resonance, one far for fragmentation... 2022-02-23T02:36:10-06:00 Oh wait, exciters and cardboard would be good for the fragmentation amp... 2022-02-23T13:43:10-06:00 I keep forgetting STEIM shut down in 2020... long live STEIM. https://steim.org 2022-02-23T15:10:23-06:00 I'm really enjoying dipping into printmaking. Just discovered there is literally a public print house of sorts in town at the art center where they teach intro printmaking stuff, and just let the public use the facilities. Super cool. 2022-02-24T15:36:33-06:00 I'm making a trading card set for my sister's birthday. I have the most difficult time coming up with the backside goodies when I make cards like this for members of my family. I'd like them to feel whimsical, not be some kinda weird attempt at distilling their lives into stats like a baseball card or something. I'm finding this a much easier thing to do with close friends, stangers and pets weirdly. Family is hard to... abstract, or something? 2022-02-24T18:16:12-06:00 Aw, the plotter motor died again partway through making this gift for my sister. I've got replacements on the way already, seems like they burn out about once a year. It's just the little pen-lift motor... a bummer but I guess having to replace an $8 motor once a year isn't so bad considering how useful the thing is. :-) 2022-02-24T23:50:19-06:00 Love to all in Ukraine 2022-02-26T09:58:27-06:00 Boy, comics are great. 2022-02-27T18:18:01-06:00 I keep writing a table of contents over and over as I continue to work on a new zine. It's fun to see it evolve from a collection of my hairbrained ideas to a collection of really exciting contributions from folks I admire. I'll have a score in there, but I'm very happy to feel like I'm close to the tipping point where the zine isn't just going to be me ranting into a xerox machine. ;-) 2022-03-01T10:36:21-06:00 I guess I had to go through a kinda similar thing with eurorack that I did with MIDI back when. I would bend over backward to avoid using MIDI for all its pitfalls for a long while, and at some point realized that supporting / interoping with MIDI made it easier to play music together with my friends, it's become just another tool in the studio instead of The Enemy. Anyway, I think the chip has fallen off my shoulder about eurorack finally. The future version (which I'm working on now) of Astrid is going to support MIDI and CV I/O as first class citizens so I can go play with my friends sometimes. 2022-03-01T12:16:07-06:00 Ladies and gentlemen: please enjoy the most lovely song of them all. https://music.volcanoisaband.com/track/40000-plus-interest 2022-03-02T10:50:34-06:00 @ I just noticed fetching your feed with python's urllib is returning a 403 for me. Should I be sending a user agent or some other header? 2022-03-02T11:47:36-06:00 Aw, seems like the local comic shop is locked into a cabal of major distributors and can't carry any of the small press stuff I'm discovering now. Stupid capitalism. The folks at the shop seemed bummed out by the situation, too... 2022-03-02T11:49:42-06:00 @ I post via a bash script and read the timeline with a python script. That was just a typo, because I never use mentions. I think I got it right this time. 2022-03-02T12:35:43-06:00 RIP Bandcamp. It was a good run while it lasted. 2022-03-02T12:39:53-06:00 @ Here's a small python script to reproduce, and what I'm seeing when trying to run it FWIW: https://gist.github.com/hecanjog/0e8d39732f0beb11e93d3869d3c807f2 It's not a big deal, don't waste your time on it if nothing comes to mind. Just a bummer I can't read your feed at the moment. 2022-03-02T14:25:18-06:00 @ ah! cloudflare security was being triggered. I added a user agent that looks like a browser and I can read your feed again. Yay! 2022-03-02T19:43:17-06:00 @ gotcha, just updated my user agent, thanks for the tip. gave my little reader script some color finally too. :-) https://hecanjog.com/sofancytxt.jpg 2022-03-02T20:52:50-06:00 @ right on, looks interesting but I don't think I need those things! 2022-03-02T22:00:42-06:00 Got templates for my originals put together tonight: ready to make some test run copies at the copy shop down the street tomorrow! 2022-03-07T12:00:28-06:00 I need to get out of the habit of using the royal we when I talk about LuvSound. We were a two person operation for just a few years but I still tend to say *we* in correspondence out of habit or something. 2022-03-10T12:18:30-06:00 Next week we're getting spring weather. ❤ 2022-03-10T17:00:37-06:00 It's a magical and fun thing to go from a pile of paper to a little book. Every time, all the ways. 2022-03-11T22:56:53-06:00 10 point 3.4 inch columns seem like a good place to start for the text-dense interview bits of Letters on Sounds. 2022-03-13T05:48:34-05:00 I'm reading my first issue of Hartley Lin's Pope Hats -- actually, it's Pope Hats #2 since I haven't tracked down the first one yet -- and I'm just blown away by it. Also makes me excited to return to Love & Rockets for some reason. The (hyper)realness of it encourages that maybe? 2022-03-13T19:07:52-05:00 Making mono prints is super fun and easy. I don't have a retarder for the ink yet, that will be useful to slow the drying time but beyond water based inks and a rolling pin I did a couple prints without any special tools, just crap laying around the apartment. There's a transfer method I've seen folks do that I think would work well with the plotter -- where you lay the paper into a field of ink on the transfer surface and just apply pressure to make the print. If there's something heavy enough (a kitchen knife to start?) in the plotter I'd think it would make an OK mark. Will be fun to try. 2022-03-15T03:41:48-05:00 Books are windows and sculptures. 2022-03-15T11:29:18-05:00 Dropped off some books at the used book store (exchanged them for a cool looking thing about underground comics and a couple crusaders records) and spent some quality minutes with the very friendly bookstore kitty. 🐱 2022-03-15T13:47:00-05:00 I miss Louis so much. 2022-03-15T17:23:49-05:00 hobby over industry 2022-03-15T19:46:28-05:00 It's nice living within earshot of the train. The honks remind me both of coming home and arriving somewhere new. It sounds like the amtrak is running a little ahead of schedule tonight. 2022-03-16T15:00:16-05:00 Hey little squirrel chilling in the sun on the ledge by my window, eyes half-shut, having a nice nap. We're both enjoying this lovely day. 2022-03-17T11:50:48-05:00 I open my mouth and something unrecognizable comes out. Keep it shut. 2022-03-17T16:18:57-05:00 I'm reconsidering if I should be making cassettes at all in 2022 at the same time I'm about to release a double cassette project I've been working on for a number of years. Fun. Basically: plastic, less of it would be good. Tapes probably find their way to the trash heap a lot more slowly but... next tape project should probably at least used recycled tapes. :-/ 2022-03-22T17:20:05-05:00 slow down 2022-03-24T11:35:12-05:00 Do I actually have thoughts and desires of my own, or do I go through life chasing what I assume is expected of me? It's unclear. 2022-03-29T11:16:03-05:00 Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what is going on. 2022-04-10T07:10:56-05:00 It's social media break time for me. See you all later. :) 2022-04-16T22:22:01-05:00 Break over. :) 2022-04-27T10:51:47-05:00 Come on in, the fediverse is fine 2022-04-28T16:18:53-05:00 toot toot toot toot toot