Author: Engine

DJ Cyberpunk at Necto for Factory 18

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Last Monday I was once again privileged to spin Factory at Necto for the 18th anniversary of the night.

Set list:

  • Dead Stars (Version) – Covenant
  • Lack of Sense (Razormaid Mix) – Tribantura
  • Dream Machine – Lazerhawk
  • Avernus Dorsa – Vector Hold
  • Disappoint (Negative Format Remix) – Assemblage 23
  • PUPPETMASTER – REIN
  • Citizens (Shinra Remix) – Randolph & Mortimer
  • Le Disko (Ferry Corsten Mix) – Shiny Toy Guns
  • Onslaught – Alex & Tokyo Rose
  • Take the World – She Wants Revenge
  • Circling Overland – Front 242
  • More – Odonis Odonis
  • Wild Animal (Aura Shred Remix) – Hante.
  • Demon Chaser (feat
… Read the rest
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The VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer, Part 1

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1. Initial steps.

On little more than an impulse, I purchased a VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer shield off eBay for thirty bucks. My thinking was that if I could reverse-engineer the remote control protocol on a cheap LED ceiling light, I could build some sleazy Teensy hack to control the light colors through HomeAssistant. The VM205 gets its own entry because it’s a project in and of itself, and looks to require some porting, especially if I want to run the latest OS. Fallback, of course, is to run an OS and kernel recommended in the VM205 docs.

The … Read the rest

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Trial by Flame

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Making the most of a 30-day trial of Autodesk’s Flame.

Flame is really the ultimate badass in finishing work, where all the elements of a TV show or commercial, or even FX shots on a feature film come together and get baked out in all the different resolutions and formats required to deliver it to a client for broadcast, stream, or theatrical release, or whatever else they can think of.

To that end, Autodesk lets you drive it around for 30 days before they hit you up for a subscription, which is substantial, so if you’re attempting to learn it, … Read the rest

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The Peel Sessions

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Peeling 30-year-old tape off 40+ feet of boat (both sides and the stern) is an onerous, tedious task, and the temptation is always there to use something to make it go more quickly, even if that something could damage the surface under the tape.

I didn’t go there. Not worth it. But I did manage to make some progress on the red pinstripe above the rub rail. The tip about using a heat gun to soften the glue and return some flexibility to the tape was dead on: Every so often, I’d get a nice long strip of old tape … Read the rest

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Prostar 190!

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Since I knew what they were, I’ve wanted one of these. I learned to ski behind two different family fish-and-ski boats, each with just about enough horsepower to pull a skinny kid out of the water on two skis, and then with some difficulty, one big wooden ski found in the garage of our then-new home in Michigan. At one point, I graduated to a 1974 Jolly Roger with a 125hp Johnson outboard, a low-slung runabout purpose-built for hooning away the day on the lake with beer, friends, and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the 8-track.

The Jolly Roger was capable of … Read the rest

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Zynthian: Fun with Dexed

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Over the weekend, I had a wild hair up my ass to buy some kind of FM synth off of Reverb.com, because I needed a multitimbral sound source to get some use out of the 8 MIDI tracks of my Octatrack, which I powered up after a long work-filled hiatus. I wanted the FM sounds of the early 80’s

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s we had a Yamaha TG33, which was a multitimbral, digital FM synthesizer with a joystick for doing vector-based modulation. Like its cousins of the time, the TX81z, the TG55, SY77 et al, it … Read the rest

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Sesame Street Trauma

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Some of you are old enough to remember the OG Sesame Street. And some of you will remember this:

This was part of Jim Henson’s live-action “Numerosity” series, and for some reason, it popped into my head today.

Now, this is an old, old, memory. According to the wiki, it was produced in 1969, and without giving the scrapers any real personal information, let’s just say this would have been before I started grade school.

Now, the weird thing is that back then, I absolutely remember not finding this funny at all, nor did I get any educational value or … Read the rest

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Zen and the Houdini Text Editor

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houdinifxSplash.jpg

A career ago, I was a Senior Houdini Artist and Senior Creative Consultant for Side Effects Software, makers of the the amazing DCC package, Houdini.   Houdini allows you to do all kinds of amazing stuff, and a quick Youtube or Vimeo search will reveal the mindblowing works of talented artists who have picked up this oddball workflow and run with it at the speed of light, proving that it’s not just for FX pipeline nerds anymore.  There’s also a lot of stuff that may not look great, but don’t let that put you off: people are sharing their learning … Read the rest

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Xwax display over X11 is pricey.

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A major performance issue solved: when xwax is displaying in a remote X11 window, the rate of importing tracks is absolutely abysmal. Xwax enables importing of tracks to the player with a shell script called “import.” It’s basically a big case statement enabling the import of different file types based on their extension, and to use the preferred import executable on a particular file type.

Examples given are mpg123 and ffmpeg, and the fallback importer is ffmpeg, so each file type has a command line extension that looks something like this one tweaked for Ogg Vorbis files.

exec ffmpeg -loglevel … Read the rest

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Magic Leap, OSC, XWax. Working.

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In the last six weeks or so since I posted anything about this, I blew up two computers, revived one computer, and learned a hell of a lot about C programs, Unreal Engine 4, networking, and remote development.

The principle described in the previous post is sound:  Spatialize the digital DJ experience by integrating the data with the physicality of the turntables.  Yeah, ok, but isn’t that what Traktor and Serato do?  Sort of.  You’re still checking your mail on a screen.   Not that my current iteration is any less awkward, but the basic idea is there.

This is what … Read the rest

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