I found an interesting open/free circuit tonight that I wanted to price out on OSH Park.  The circuit designer was awesome enough to make the design files freely available on the interwebs...but unfortunately (out of the box) they fail the OSH Park upload checker.  "Ok, that's fine, you get what you pay for" I think...I'll just open the files in Eagle and save into a newer version or investigate what's missing...

I haven't installed Eagle PCB in a while (certainly not since I had to reinstall this laptop after the most recent HD failure).  So I go to the download page, grab the installer and run it and.....of course, it fails.

But it fails due to missing 32-bit libs.

It's 2015!  Seriously?  I've suffered with Eagle for more than 15 years now, and in spite of all my persistent gripes about usability flaws and UI cruft, we still sometimes have to use it...but now there's now this problem?  

Seriously CadSoft, it's 2015...

This is great.  If you're interested in active listening, field recordings, soundscapes, or amibent sound/music, this is a pretty good primer and talks about the origins of the term "acoustic ecology" as a movement.

Fantastic noise show at S1 tonight.  Excellent sets all around!  I didn't capture much, but the MSHR set was absolutely amazing and I offer up a few clips:

I was pleased to learn that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) has a modernized fork called Pillow.  From the Pillow site:

The fork authors’ goal is to foster active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via Travis CI
• Publicized development activity on GitHub
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index

This is great news for me, because there are several projects (this site included) that use PIL, and I have been worried about its future.  In addition to the infrequent PIL releases, the lack of Python 3 support in PIL was starting to be a real drag...and it was the main thing that kept some of us on Python 2.7.

So yeah, it's nice to have a path forward...time to embrace the fork and move on.  I will miss the PIL acronym.

Somebody is being either clever or naive -- spotted this at the checkout line:

"Childs Play" -- not a kids movie.

Such a simple and effective  (yet time consuming) way to make a mask of a face out of rawhide.  Soooo creepy!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Skin-Mask

(source)

This video doesn't do it justice...but I was shocked to see this terrifying child in a kabuki mask staring in the window earlier:

Spoiler: It's not actually a child...it's a mop.

The Church of Robotron has been working hard to find the mutant savior and to train members of the last human family. We had an opening on Wednesday, and my friend Zach edited together this fantastic video:

Here's a test video I shot of oscule's much improved jacob's ladder...it's terrifying:

If you have not yet been tested, please join us on First Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at Diode Gallery for indoctrination, testing, anti-robot training, propaganda distribution, and some good old-fashioned street devival.

• More pictures/video from me.
• Pictures from Mike
• Pictures from Zach

My absolute favorite album in an unspeakable number of years is (no secret), Xiu Xiu's "Angel Guts: Red Classroom".  From the first time I heard this record I fell in love with it...and that interest and that respect has only grown since its release.  I come back and listen to it a LOT, and it's failing to tire out.  I'm not reviewing it here, but it's tortuously odd, wonderfully crafted, and  painfully depressing / soul-searching twist of violence and sexual storytelling...with great balance of synth+drum+melody vs. subtle-yet-effective dissonant/atonal/noise experimentations.

The [official] videos in support of the album are top notch.  Brilliant and fitting and supporting works.

The purpose of this post is to consolidate the tracklisting of the supporting videos.  I haven't seen this consolidated list anywhere else, so I thought I'd put it together.  Please be forewarned, there is some very extreme content mixed in here that should be considered NSFW and certainly not for children.

Tracklisting:

1. Angel Guts:
2. Archie's Fades
3. Stupid in the Dark
4. Lawrence Liquors #1, Lawrence Liquors #2
5. Black Dick
6. New Life Immigration
7. EL Naco
8. Adult Friends (no video, yet?)
9. The Silver Platter
10. Bitter Melon
11. A Knife in the Sun
12. Cinthya's Unisex 
13. Botanica de Los Angeles
14. :Red Classroom

edit 9/20/2014: Added Cijnthya's Unisex official video

So Open Source Bridge was a month ago, and I had been so bogged down and frazzled thinking about an planning for toorcamp 2014 that I didn't have a chance to collect my thoughts/bookmarks.  Until now.

So yeah, this is a series of thoughts random, poorly organized thoughts and bookmarked tabs from the conference.  In no particular order...

• Aaron Parecki gave a great talk on OAuth and "IndieAuth" and what it means to an open and free web.  There's this thing called web sign in, and they have a wiki on how to set it up.  I want to get this going on noisybox.net. There are a bunch of important reasons why this is mostly rad, but it can also allow you to do powerful things like using 3rd party tools...like...
• Quill.  Post content to your own website, securely, using a 3rd party tool.  Shows the power of these open interchange technologies, and formats...like...
• Micropub.  An API spec for doing time-based content posting (blogging, microblogging) with 3rd party tools, but to your own site, in a way that you are fully in control of.  It's kinda deep and complicated and gnar, but it's damn sure the best thing I've seen in this direction...
• Mesh technologies, especially after certain leaks, are hotter than ever.  They still don't live up to their expectations/misunderstandings yet, but have real potential for grassroots and emergency response situations.  The Mesh Potato seems like a fun device for experimentation, if not already antiquated.
• Not only are tons of nerds using Python for data analysis and visualization, but there are mature OSS product suites that help with this stuff.  Also data dorks often use iPython notebook to facilitate sharing and exchange of bad-assery.  Reminds me of a cool mashup of sketchpad.cc and etherpad and pastebin, but Python.
• The Internet Archive is still kicking ass.  They could stand to be more redundant (DR) though.  No seriously.  They also have detailed APIs (change the "details" in any item url to "metadata" for an example), an s3 compatible API, an rich suite of open source cli tools for interacting with their APIs.  They also run openlibrary.org, an amazing lending library for digital book content.
• I learned a little about Camlistore, which is a complex personal storage system.  I think the goal is to provide a framework into which you can store and index the stuff you create online (blogs, tweets, photos, recipes, fanfic? all the things?) and have it be robust and searchable and have many other advanced things.  I'm having a hard time trying to grok how it might fit into my own personal storage needs, but I sure do get the sentiment.  It also reminded me about Tahoe-LAFS and the interesting things that can be done with that.

I'm sure I've only captured a fraction of what I found fun/interesting/inspiring!  Until next year...