Got a Raspi4 with 4 gigs of ram as a gift! Enabled a powerdown and powerup button by adding dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=3 to /boot/config.txt. Got fm_transmitter maintained by markondej working. The project seems to be less complicated then PiFmRds which I was using previously. Learning to add buttons, switches and sensors to the Raspi. Dreaming of adding a WH1602C-YYH-JTK# – LCD display too (I salvaged a unit in New York). Added a button using thagrol’s python script Switch button on GPIO, short press / long press. A short press starts fm_transmitter and long press terminates it. This is done using scripts lauched from python subprocess.Popen(['/home/pi/fm_transmitter/broadcast.sh'],shell=True). I haven’t found a good way to terminate a broadcast, attempts to use pkill cause the a segment of a broadcasted file to loop.
Ilkka send me an interesting link Käsittämättömät koodirivit musiikkina [Incomprehensible lines of code as music] (2014) Viznut (aka Ville-Matias Heikkilä) which introduced me to bytebeat. The text also gives a thorough introduction to Demoscene development culture. Bytebeat is a music programming method which produces rhythms and melodies in complex ways users don’t seem to completely understand. It can be used online (here are some samples for experimentation). There is a tutorial of sorts available Discovering novel computer music techniques by exploring the space of short computer programs (2011) Viznut. Also read Reaching for the blocks of the living world (2018) by the author which feels like an attempt to bridge coding (optimization) and permaculture (degrowth?). The text explores two modes for studying: analytical mode vs. intuition. Viznut argues that “The trial-and-error mode is not problematic per se, it just needs a lot of cycles”.
As a child, I used to believe in endless linear progress. There were ever higher buildings in the world, ever more TV channels, ever-faster computers and spacecraft. […] In my teens, I started to notice the dark sides. […] As a response, I started to embrace an opposite kind of esthetic and technological ideology: small is beautiful, bits are beautiful, hacks are beautiful. True progress is about deepness and compression instead of maximization and accumulation.
Viznut has also made the PC-lamerit online series (2015-2019) which I’ve been browsing last night.