pixel blog

The following is copied from an email addressed to Studio Kanzen, creators of SubPixel – a digital culture video blog.

Studio Kanzen,

this evening I discovered someone/something called “SubPixel”. My sister asked me what videos were mine on YouTube, saying that she did a search for “subpixel” and found something that looked like porn, so didn’t open it at work. Something about a guy with his shirt off and a girl with her hands somewhere near his groin. “No, I don’t think I have anything that looks like porn, or anything with a guy with his shirt off.”

What was she talking about? YouTube. Search.

I see… SubPixel: Clone a Willy Penis Mold Kit Review

Quite amusing, but no, not one of my videos.

Hi, I’m subpixel. I’ve been pushing pixels under that name since 2002 when I started taking club and party photos for Australia’s dance music community at InTheMix: “sub” as in music, and “pixel” as in pictures (digital photographs). On later reflection it occurred to me that the name had other interpretations, such as “subpixels” meaning “images from a subculture”, or “subpixel” being the thing (or person) underlying/behind the images I was capturing, especially since I was responsible for the images and rarely “in front of the camera” in my own photos, or those taken by other photographers in the Sydney scene.

After being an InTheMix photographer for a year or so, and having made many new friends along the way, I was more inclined to go where some of those friends were going, and less inclined to take on ITM photography assignments elsewhere, though still continued taking photos, including as “official photographer” for an underground party called Undercurrents, and today have an archive of some 70,000+ images and short video clips. I was without a camera – I mean a camera I cared to carry with me, since, now I think about it, I did actually have at least one other – for about 6 months two years ago, and found that to be a bit depressing. That slowed me down a bit, and I don’t seem to have been taking as many since then (or perhaps for a while before), though do go through spurts on occasion.

Photo madness in decline, I am still behind the pixels nonetheless. I acquired subpixels.com in 2003, and continued to use the name, especially for creative projects. In 2006, after a late night laptop-and-video-projector good times retrospective for a friend’s farewell at a city fringe music bunker (another friend’s house with a killer sound system and wall to wall wax) in Sydney, I was asked to supply visuals for a live electronic music gig called Laptopjam, and so the subpixel name moved on to be my VJ moniker.

I appeared mainly at live electronic gigs, VJ meetings and house parties in Sydney until I was roped in as resident VJ for a fledgling club night (Mind! Reggae Dubstep) in Brixton by Italian DJ Unity Selekta along with Earl Gateshead [Trojan Soundsystem] when I moved to London in 2008, strangely enough from my Gumtree listing looking for a place to live. Around the same time I discovered a local VJ community, VJlondon, where I made friends, had fun, and through which landed various gigs around London including a couple more live electronic gigs. I also joined the sizeable contingent of VJlondon crew appearing at LPM 2009 – Live Performers Meeting – in Rome, apparently the only Australian representative. Through Dr.Mo, who organised most of the VJlondon gatherings, I met architect and artist Alex Haw of atmos (currently working on the CLOUD for the 2012 London Olympics), with whom I collaborated to realise the Weather Projection installation at the inaugural Smart Light Sydney festival – me, a Sydneysider, scrambling to write the code in London (and in Rome after LPM!), and Alex, a Londoner, scrambling to put together the hardware (and content) in Sydney – such a mixed-up world we live in! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to Sydney to see the result, but I’m back in Sydney now, and have rejoined forces with the live electronics party/promoter Midi In The City as well as taking up residency with the closely related TECHnique crew for their monthly techno parties and festival vibes at the Earthdance Sydney 2009 Campout. I have just completed another international collaboration, this time with Venetian producer and deepindub netlabel founder, Maurizio Miceli: a “VJ clip” for Way Out [DIDVJ002] to promote his latest EP.

You can find clips from and information about past VJ gigs at SPXL.TV, and other stuff like my blog including experiments with Processing at subpixels.com.

Posted in: Internet, London, Reflection, Sydney, VJlondon.org by subpixel / Tags: Dr Mo, Earl Gateshead, Unity Selekta, vjlondon.org

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Sourcemap – Open Supply Chains

An incomplete Sourcemap for LPM 2009 in Rome, Italy.

Data is based on the artists list on the LPM site.

This Sourcemap was started as a Travel Map and saved, but when attempting to re-edit the map, the “passengers” have each been converted to 97kg of cargo. It would be nice if the map remembered that these were supposed to be human passengers (eg 1164kg is a bit mysterious!).

-spxl

Posted in: Festivals, Internet, Italy, Travel by subpixel / Tags: LPM

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• Users’ IP addresses are not logged (Startpage is currently the only search engine that does not log IP addresses).
• Other data like the anonymous search queries are deleted from the log files within a maximum of 48 hours, often sooner.
• Startpage servers have been enabled to handle https requests using SSL (encryption available in most browsers).

Check the Startpage site itself for more information.

Link: https://startpage.com

-spxl

Posted in: Internet, Privacy by subpixel /
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sIFR fonts delivered by www.fontburner.com

What is this about?.. A neat little service allowing you to use any of over 1000 freely available fonts for the heading elements on your website by means of including a line of “code” in the <head> section of your page. Sweet beans. :o)

It works by using Javascript to replace each heading element (<h1>, <h2> and so on) by a little box of Flash. If Javascript or Flash is unavailable, the original text/font is displayed. Win-win!

-spxl

Posted in: Site Maintenance, Web Development, typography by subpixel /
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For some reason, just recently I decided to see if spxl.com was available to register, and to my surprise found that the existing registration had recently expired. What luck! Only… I wasn’t able to register it immediately, as the registrar was holding it in some unusable state (assumedly to allow time to milk some extra higher fees from the existing registrant) and I was told to try bidding for it on some other domain auction site. I don’t know what the details were for using that site – a minimum bid of something like $60, but what exactly would that get me? Maybe the domain… I don’t know. What I do know is that since then some (apparently) Chinese domain squatting company has nabbed it, and seeing prices bandied about in the $100k range for similar domains I wasn’t inclined to make further inquiries. I did notice that spxl.tv was available, though, and the temptation took me… some credit card details and so on later and it was mine. Who needs vowels anyway?

New site coming soon: spxl.tv

-spxl

Posted in: Site Maintenance by subpixel / Tags: SPXL.TV

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For some number of months (the numer itself unknown) my galley has been offline. I was rather concerned that the days (weeks?) worth of tinkering with it, loading gallerys, editing meta-data, etc, had been lost in some abysmal database screwup.

Today I used my web host’s autoinstaller to create a fresh gallery to make some comparisons, to see what’s what.

I enabled a debug setting and was looking at another page for a while and discovered a response indicating that connection to the database had failed. I don’t know the eact cause of this – the database did exist on a server, and I was able to view/administer it through the control panel, but maybe it wasn’t accessible via the “local” php script(s) forming the gallery.

I took a backup of the existing database, created a brand new database, imported the backup, updated the gallery configuration settings with the details of the new database and, hey presto!… my gallery is back! Joy!

I suppose now I should do something about it not containing any new photos since September. :o)

So, what made me come to be tinkering with this now? Well, it is snowing here in London now, as of yesterday – a few inches at least I reckon – and I wanted to share a few photos.

Stay tuned.

Link: subpixel’s gallery

-spxl

Posted in: Photos, Site Maintenance by subpixel /
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Esfera_mod_by_spxl_6
based on Esfera.pde by David Pena

Source code:
Esfera_mod_by_spxl_6.pde
Hair.pde
Oscillator.pde

On Thursday 18 December there was another VJlondon.org meeting at Cafe 1001, and again there was a triple-head setup with three projectors onto the back wall of the main room. Nice!

I’d decided that this time I’d work on this Processing sketch to have some 4:1 content for the massive screen. Up until this point, the tentacled object in space had been stationary and not especially interesting-looking. On Thursday morning I started tweaking the program with a view to actually being able to VJ with it, adding a bunch of new features like being able to move it around, make it bigger (“zoom”) or smaller, and more easily change some of the parameters. The tentacle shape changed a bit, as well as the appearance with some new oscillators to change the red, green and blue of the colour, and some mystery 1’s and 0’s on the surfaces. I’m no expert on lighting yet, but at least I managed to do something about it being so dark (as appears in Esfera mod by spxl 5).

I was perhaps a little too engrossed in what I was doing, and at some point realised I was already running late for the gathering!.. and rushed off to Brick Lane with my still warm code. The setup at Cafe 1001 was improved on last time, with a large table for laptops, etc bhind a raised bench with the projectors on it.

The tentacled space thingo was quite well received by the crew, though at that stage it was a bit of a beast to deal with effectively. Having pointer and keyboard inputs, I plugged in my Wacom and handed it to Rob to move it around while tapping at some controls myself on the keyboard. Even at 1920×480 it seemed to run pretty fast (and so it damnwell should!), and with the ultra-widescreen had a nice spacious and spacey feel about it.

I also tried running the radial gradient array sketch at that resolution, but, being a 2D pixel-based affair, my machine just wasn’t fast enough (or rather the program is too intensive) to get above a crawl instead of scintillating flashing colours.

Nevertheless, both sketches have been updated since then, and the Game of Life sketch created, and I’m starting to get a bit mental with trying to put nice comments and such on everything as well as make improvements and add new features. I think the commenting is taking as much time as anything else!.. and of course generally tidying things up, rearranging files on the webserver, updating all the past blog entries with Processing sketches to have a consistent look, and so on. I think I should really investigate creating a plugin or filter or something for WordPress – maybe a little database to keep track of the sketches and format them all nicely. I’m already running in to versioning issues, and changing the structure of the files is bad news for old blog posts!

Yesterday I did some work on creating a better timewarp effect – rather than change the speed of all of the oscillators, instead manipulate the “number of milliseconds” that have passed (this value is used in calculations by the oscillators) and also modify things like how far the object moves or rotates for the frame. Since the program was using simple easing logic, I’ve fudged it by multiplying the easing factor by the square of the (less then 1.0) timewarp factor, or leaving it alone if the timewarp factor is 1 or more (making the movement “faster than the mouse”, as it were,  seemed like a bad idea).

You see the brighter patch of red on the top-right of the sphere in the screenshot? That’s caused by five point lights just near the sphere arranged around the funnel of text. unfortunately the Java applet doesn’t seem to play on my machine (nor does version 5 of this sketch), and I think the lights (or use of lighting generally) is what causes it to fail. Then again, I don’t actually know, so this is only a guess! If you have the PDE installed you should be able to recreate the sketch from the source files.

-spxl

Posted in: 3D Graphics, Animation, Cafe 1001, Interactive, OpenGL, Processing Sketch, Site Maintenance, Subpixel's Creations, Subpixel's Gigs, VJ / Visuals, VJlondon.org by subpixel /
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Just above this there should be a “Google Gadget”. This is, of course, just a test.

-spxl

Posted in: Web Development by subpixel / Tags: gadgets, Google

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Here is a copy of a letter I have just submitted to Internode, the internet service provider I used in Sydney, with my objection to the development and introduction of the so-called Clean Feed (ISP-level internet censorship) proposed by the current Australian Labor Government.

Originally addressed to Internode support with copies to Mark Newton and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the support address bounced, so I forwarded the original message to some other published Internode addresses. Two separate autoreply messages tell me I’m now in the system…

Yes, there are typos and at least a couple of sentences that went astray somewhere in the middle. And if you do read as far as the postscript, yes, I do miss my old connection, and my apartment with the view over Darling Harbour. It’s getting cold here in London.

-spxl.

To: Internode Management,

I’m hoping whoever in support receives this can direct it to the appropriate department or manager within Internode; that the other published addresses are for residential and business sales or accounts, none of which seem entirely appropriate.

As a prior Internode account holder, currently living in London and likely to be using Internode again when I return to Australia, I want to express my concern and dismay over recent news in the Australian and international media about the so-called Clean Feed that the government wishes to strangle Australia’s internet networks with.

If Australia was ever considered an internet backwater (and to be sure, it has), that was nothing compared to the ridicule and sheer disbelief that the rest of the (western, at least) world is now showing for this draconian attempt to censor the internet.

The example, I think in Finland, of a similar scheme being trialled being used to block access to an anti-censorship site is a perfect example of exactly how this system will, both unintentionally and worse yet intentionally, fail and be abused.

I have thus far read only a few articles on the subject, and a search for “clean feed” on the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy site (http://www.dbcde.gov.au) appallingly returns only a solitary relevant result – a speech by Helen Coonan in June 2006 at http://www.dbcde.gov.au/newsroom/speeches/protecting_families_online – but it seems odd that no-one mentions the obvious that this policy is almost certainly primarily about something other than “protecting the children”, which that referenced speech indicates wasn’t really possible in 2006.

I am aware that “the Mark Newton letter” of 20 October 2008 addressed to Kate Ellis is not the word of Internode, but to me it is vindication of my choice of ISP, that it is staffed by technically competent, thinking individuals who are willing to say what they believe in defence of their own rights and the rights of the community. I am horrified to hear that Stephen Conroy (or his office) made moves to have him silenced – the disturbing element of the system already rears is ugly head. Point blank: the Clean Feed is about censorship, not protecting the public. It is there to give a reason for the government (pressure groups, et al) a convenient mechanism to stifle dissent. Once the system is in place, it won’t stop the things it is “supposed to” stop, but it will stop the casual user – the greater community, if you will – from finding news and being able to have their own “democratic” voice. I am totally opposed to this and other similar criminal imbalances in the network, which in our information age is as fundamental and essential as water and electricity have been in previous times.

This does raise an interesting parallel, though, and that is of the artificial introduction of fluoride compounds into the water supply at a state or federal level: hazardous toxic waste that has never been proven safe to administer to people, which costs the community financially to implement, has no demonstrable benefits and a whole raft of negative long term consequences, all, supposedly, in the name of “saving the children” (from having bad teeth, in the fluoride case).

It is my current understanding that government is about to start (or perhaps already has started) a trial, seeking participation from ISPs. If some 80% of poll respondents are against the Clean Feed but the government blindly (or should I say determinedly, since the real agenda is to control the population’s ability to dissent, not to give the population what they want) pushes on, the “people”, including businesses, should push back – and if all it takes is _not_ investing time, money and other resources on developing a police-state-enabling technology _for_ the government, then I say do that; and make a loud public statement to say why. You don’t need to go into detailed studies and analysis of cost and effectiveness; you can simply look at the big picture and see that censorship marks the road to tyranny and object purely on ethical and moral grounds.

I may be living in London, but I will be returning home soon enough, and I want to make my voice heard.I don’t want to return to find my beloved internet, freedom of choice and freedom of publishing, chopped off at the knees.

Sincerely,
George Webeck.

London, UK.
PS: With regards to the earlier internet backwater comment, I miss the great ADSL2+ Internode connection I had in Sydney; much faster than most broadband services available here in London; certainly the one I’m using now.

Posted in: Australia, Censorship, Clean Feed by subpixel / Tags: DBCDE, Internode, The Mark Newton letter

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A lone voice in the emptiness of web-space called out to me, asking about how I posted a Processing sketch to my blog. Gabriel’s comment:

Hi

first off, love the sketch. I am looking for a dead simple way to post my sketches on a blog. For the image above, are you doing a screengrab and then cleaning it up? Is there a ‘tool’ out there for grabbing one without the tedium of either adding code to the sketch itself or having to go into photoshop and crop out all the unwanted stuff?

what’s your workflow?

I can’t take the credit for the coolness of the sketch – it was written by David Pena and came as part of the processing-0144.zip download from Processing.org – I only tinkered with it a bit.

In any case, I don’t know exactly what I did, and I know that I rearranged the files on my webserver some time after the original post, but here’s the general idea (with a note that I’m running under Windows XP):

Export from Processing

Get the sketch up and running in the Processing Development Environment. Cool (thanks Davin Pena and the people who built Processing, the Open GL engine, et al). I think the sketch needs to be saved before doing an export, so do that if you haven’t already, and do an export [File > Export (Ctrl+E)]. This creates a folder called “applet” in the same location as the saved sketch (where the .pde file is). In this folder are all the files that are needed to run (or might be needed, such as the system-dependent JOGL files for various operating systems), and which you somehow need to get on to your webserver later.

Grab a screenshot

In my case, I used IrfanView to take a screenshot whilst the sketch was running. IrfanView, if you don’t already know it, is a small, fast and free (to use, for non-commercial purposes; not open source) image viewing application for Windows. it has a bunch of basic editing features built in, like screen/window capture, which I use quite often, so am familiar with the shortcuts and how it is set up.

Not necessary to understand, but since the question asked about things being easy… Note that once you’ve done the following a couple of times, it becomes easy enough and fast enough for most purposes.

1. Open IrfanView. For me, this means three keystrokes (Windows Key, i, i) because I have an “Image” program folder in my main “Start menu” and “Irfanview” is the only entry starting with “i” in that folder. It might take 5-10 seconds on my machine the first time, but note that this is a 4-years old install of Windows XP on a laptop running  (still “working”, amazingly enough, despite several chances to die horribly installing service packs and possibly hundreds of applications going in and out besides!). Still, better than waiting for Photoshop for a small job.
2. Start screen capture [Options > Capture/Screenshot... (C)]. I use the “Foreground window – Client area” option with hotkey (Alt+Z), showing the captured image in the main window… these options will be obvious when you’re running IrfanView.
3. Give focus to the running sketch, hit the hotkey (Alt+Z in my case)… easy.
4. Cleanup (optional): I wanted to give more prominence to the ball, so a crop was in order. Create a selection – you can left-click-drag a rectangle, or, as I wanted a certain size, I used [Edit > Create a custom crop selection... (Shift+C)]. There are plenty of options; I wanted 4:3 aspect, and entered 450 for the width, which automatically set 337 for the height. You can also specify the top-left corner of the selection, however I usually leave this as (0,0) and after the selection is made use right-click-drag to position the crop selection. Once you’re happy with the selection, [Edit > Crop selection (Ctrl+Y)] performs the crop.
5. Save the image: [Edit > Save as... (S)] (note that, unusually, (Ctrl+S) is for Save and (S) on it’s own is Save as, however since this image is from the clipboard and not a file it doesn’t make any difference). There are many image formats you can save out to (I think you need to install the IrfanView plugins to get some of them; I recommend the plugins for the JPEG lossless rotate if nothing else). I’ve decided to use the same base filename as the sketch and put it in the “applet” directory with all the other files needed to run the sketch. (This probably isn’t what I did in the first instance, but could be in future!)

Get it online

For me, this meant using FTP to upload all the files in the “applet” directory to my web host. My original plan involved creating a “processing” subdirectory from my web root, with a separate “applet” directory for each sketch, renamed from “applet” to the name of the applet.

eg. web_root/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl

I created a new blog entry (I’m using self-hosted WordPress) and inserted an image (specifying the full URL http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png for the image src), hyperlinked to the “applet” directory (using the full URL).

This worked just fine.

It bothered me that the library files were so big – not because of the space required, since I have some 500 gigabytes available…), but because of how long it takes me to upload even a few megabytes. Yes, I am impatient; around 20k/sec is not a speed I am happy with, but I digress. I also had the intention of, at some time in the near future, to upload a bunch of sketches, and realised the burden of downloading the libraries every time isn’t something anyone needs. It might be possible, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a sketch running that referenced libraries in another folder.

What’s the answer? Put everything in the same folder, of course!

(2009-01-06 edit: the everything-in-one-folder solution wasn’t working out so well, so I have rearranged my Processing content into separate folders for each sketch. The following notes are therefore no longer accurate, nor recommended!)

So the file structure was as follows:

http://subpixels.com/

processing/

Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html – sketch’s web page

Esfera_mod_by_spxl.jar – applet archive

Esfera_mod_by_spxl.java – Java source

Esfera_mod_by_spxl.pde – Processing source

Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png – screenshot image

..and all the other required files…

The hyperlinked screenshot HTML looked (almost) like this:

<a title="subpixels.com: processing applet | Esfera_mod_by_spxl"
   href="http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html">
<img src="http://subpixels.com/processing/Esfera_mod_by_spxl.png"
     alt="Processing sample: Esfera mod by spxl" /></a>

Of course, a linked image caption costs extra. ;o) Something else I did was create a symbolic link named “index.html” which I’ve pointed to “Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html” so that anyone navigating to http://subpixels.com/processing for a poke around didn’t get a directory listing. I could have just renamed (or copied) the Esfera_mod_by_spxl.html file, but that would be too easy…

And for your edification, the result, with the updated Processing code, executible, Java file and screenshot. I’m uploading the new files now. Okay, maybe not now, but soon. (This reminds me of a scene from Spaceballs…).

Esfera_mod_by_spxl
based on Esfera.pde by David Pena

Source code: Esfera_mod_by_spxl.pde

Something I didn’t note earlier, is that I put in a mousePressed() callback to start/pause the animation when the mouse is clicked. I’ve put in some new comments about that, modified the code slightly to be clearer for people new to programming, and added/updated various other comments.

I probably wouldn’t recommend embedding the applet itself into your blog posts, since several posts on one page means several applets, and if anyone else’s system is like mine and takes aaaages for the Java runtime to load for the first time, people are going to leave your blog possibly before even seeing any of your content… probably not what you’re hoping for!

I’m sure putting everything in the same directory will come to bite me on the arse when I want to start using a data directory, but that could be solved by the sketches having their own named subdirectories I suppose.

(2009-01-06 note: my arse was bitten when Processing 1.0 was released as the OpenGL libraries changed!)

Perhaps I should stop concerning myself with such things until I actually publish another sketch… That’s right, I put one sketch online and stopped right there!

I have half a mind to create a WordPress plugin to handle some of the details nicely. The other half of my mind is saying, “What do you know about creating WordPress plugins?!” :o)

And now to test the multiple-sketches-in-one-directory theory… Stay tuned!

-spxl

Posted in: 3D Graphics, How to..., Interactive, Processing Sketch, Web Development by subpixel / Tags: IrfanView, screenshot, Spaceballs

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