derek kwan關志豪🦦🐈🍛🐧🍮 @mrufrufin@post.lurk.org

trying to record myself talking for NIME and I have never been great at speech things but trying to record myself talking makes it so much worse, i even forget how to make certain sounds with my mouth and the best of out millions of takes have weird pauses in them. i guess i will never become a va/seiyuu lol

i've been (slowly) teaching myself #rust and i stumbled across this (so not mine) https://github.com/x37v/puredata-rust and maybe it's recency bias but the whole #puredata external coding/building process feels quite a bit more pleasant here than the usual C way of doing things

first semester of online cs grad school done (hci and ai for robotics) 💪 next up in a week for the summer semester is ai and going through the norvig book (not sure what emoticon goes here)

weird music-oriented keyboard ebay listing somebody tweeted on the birdsite that i thought was worth sharing here

https://www.ebay.com/itm/124706901862?hash=item1d091c4f66:g:gfsAAOSwzf1gjxQ-

i remap my caps lock (and windows key) to L Ctrl (holdover from my emacs days) using setxkbmap and several times during the day, it seems like my external keyboard forgets it and it resets to a normal caps lock (it's probably when i slightly bump the usb hub or something) and atm i don't want to figure out running that command automatically when the keyboard connects so i will just complain about it on here for now

if there are any takeaways from this hci class for me, it's about the value of alternative representations (visual, aural, etc.), higher levels of manipulation and representation (because there's no sense in futzing with the lower level stuff if you don't have to), abstraction, the value of letting computers/programming languages (visual and textual, high and low level) do the work, the power of interaction and networks with both human and machine (and human mediated by machine)

and also that i am still so very bad and very slow at reading and so very easily distracted, i mean it's taken me hours to read 8 pages and i fell asleep twice in the middle of it and i still have so many more pages to go why why why

ah, now i'm running into the limitations of having a free account on vimeo and i'm not able to set the quality of a player with just a free account and i'm unhappy again

TIL YouTube's player API is really horrible to work with and the way they suggest loading it is really weird and indirect and also wasted a few hours trying to figure out how to get it to actually work. Vimeo's player API on the other hand... actually works the way including a JS library should actually work and doesn't have any weird redirects to totally different domains

one of two emoticon-ified portraits of my cats #LURKbirthday #fediverse https://derekxkwan.com/other/visual/catmoticon/

autostereogram from a series tackling Asian American stereotypes #LURKbirthday #fediverse https://derekxkwan.com/other/visual/studover/

i have recurring dreams of going to an arcade and i kinda wonder what made going to the arcade a special experience vs staying at home and wasting my days away on a genesis. are arcades still a thing (granted covid didn't kill the last of them)? was what made arcades special communality or accessibility (emphasis on pick up and play and shorter experiences)? is there a nowadays equivalent to arcades?

would anybody know a way of way of hosting music somewhere to be streamable but not downloadable (bonus points if there's some api i can trigger from javascript)?

i usually don't care about making things downloadable (and I would rather things be downloadable), but this music isn't mine (and i don't want to get hit by copyright things) and it's for an academic-oriented visualization (and we're wanting to tie the music into it) so we're also in the process of trying to get permission and/or figure out fair-use sorta things.

in other news, I'm presenting (well, being zoom present and having a prerecorded presentation shared) at mgss hosted by mcgill tmw on my project with sofy yuditskaya and sophia sun which was a ml-based karaoke art installation:

https://mcgillmusicsymposium.wordpress.com/contact-us/

what i like and don't like about this robotics ai class is that if i mess around enough, i can get things working moderately well and not know quite why it works. which i guess is the case with a lot of code sometimes but also means i should probably study for the final.

i've been taking robotics: ai techniques this semester and i'm actually enjoying these ai sorts of things, although it seems like 95% of getting these things to work is in the tuning and I don't think we've been given nearly enough info how how to tune these things and I'm still not very good at it.

i find it fun how it's taking these simple sounding ideas and you write code and oh hey, look at you over there you're doing things all by yourself that's pretty cool. not sure how to apply it to my art things yet and i don't think i wanna get into robotics (so what am i going to do with learning ai things?! dunno quite yet) but it makes me wanna take the rest of the ai-related classes. i'm also appreciating how so far it feels way less stats-y than ml-related material i've come across so far (bc i never really particularly liked stats) and we don't have to download huge data sets but we'll see where this all goes.

anybody use a metronome app on their phone around here? looking to ask a bunch of questions for a research project for an hci class i'm currently taking if so and if you're interested, my dms are open. thx <3

online gallery I curate for has a little project called "Yours, AML Space" where we send around a box and decorate it as we are fit and this is my little contribution. Made something in #p5js to generate stylized depictions of polybius squares ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_square ) showing the positions within the square and the sides showing in dots the rows and columns the letters lay in the square when encoded. The squares say "CONNECTION" and are overlaid a picture I took from the... Denver airport I think? Some airport a long time ago and I used a fragment shader to basically reverse the colors where the square bits are.

The little blurb I've been posting along with this picture is: "a connection based on the same shared earth, underneath the same big sky." because I suppose particularly for me its easy to forget we're all in this same physical world together even though we might not see each other physically? and it seemed fitting for this project.

https://youtu.be/aPin82pIThM

i really like the production the latest jaga jazzist album wrt the different senses of space layered on top of each other

i guess adafruit makes a feather with bluetooth le and with sensors built in https://www.adafruit.com/product/4516