Controlling Samples by Spitting Them

Last night, Nate and I were able to sucessfully and intuitively control up to 3 or 4 individual drums based on different sounds vocalized into a mic. The bass drum would play when 'oooh' was sung, a snare when 'eee' was sung and a cymbal when 'aaah' was sung.  There are still some kinks in the system, but as a proof of concept, it works fairly well.  The mapping between input sound and MIDI event are learned in real time so you are not restricted to different vowel sounds.  The 3 distinguishing sounds could have just as easily been a clap, growl and whistle.  The code: fftknn.

Growing Couscous

edit: no wonder! Couscous is not grown. Couscous is made of wheat, and traditionally rolled by hand for days before being sub dried for months. doh

It is more common for the word growing when nearby the word couscous to refer to how much in popularity it is changing than the process by which it forms.  At least in the top 10 hits.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is not just about innovation, free speech and democracy, it is about keeping the newly forming synapses of our collective mind free from corruptible power structures.

god damn this is important.

Passwordless login for SSH not working

I have not been able to login to my system with passwordless SSH for some time now and finally figured out the problem.  I had to change the permissions of my home directory to disallow writing by everyone.  I knew that ~/.ssh and the files in it required specific permissions to be set, but I hadn't heard about the home directory having similar requirements.