pcd

i'm doing a distance pdc for a number of weeks

so excuse if i'm pretty silent while i work

don't want to rush it - it's only the end of the world as we know it (as usual)

i'm keeping a shirt-pocket sized moleskine notebook

i may write about other things, or about the pdc - but most misteriously

i'm old, so we'll see what happens if i try to, you know, learn

c ya!

Ethics

I just had a look at permaculture ethics. The planet, people and surpluses are mentioned. It's easy to look them up in detail.

I don't know if it's the same for others, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way when people - not just permaculturists, but anyone - talk about ethics. It's a bit as if they wanted to impose theirs on me.

This speaks more of my sensitivity than of whatever it is that those others may really want to do. I guess. :-P (We people are varied.)

That said, I don't exactly dislike the notion of hacker ethics. Based, you know, on initiative, cooperation, sharing and play. (I'm people too.)

All of which leaves me ruminating ... two things (which end up being three, as usual):

(1) Could there be an intersection, or maybe an edge, among both ethics? An intersection would be acceptable for me personally. An edge, as between ecosystems (a beach is land and sea together), would mean more riches.

(2) In any case, what are ethics? I think each is an array of weights for our decision functions. We decide among options based on factors, and those factors are more or less important depending on our values.

"Values" are nothing special: just the elements and features a specific person considers desirable in a specific situation. (Desirability that's usually relative to other elements and features.)

So a "value set" or an "ethic", in my simplification, is the array of weights we apply to the array of factors in the subjective cognitive function that takes specific factors in and outputs a specific decision.

If you're deciding, say, on starting a business installing solar panels, you may give different weights to being lazy, to earning money, to your wish to leave the campsite better than you found it, or to whatever other factors you're considering.

Finally, in my ruminations, the very notion that a decision is "a function with weighted factors we use to choose between options" makes me wonder (3) whether there might be a meta-ethics which would give lots of value to thinking: the (sometimes cooperative) activity of including more factors, generating further alternatives, etc.

So there you go! :-)

Almost done

I've been working on the same subject for more than eight (8) years.

Learning from the many and from the best. Going out on a limb to suggest obvious innovations in approaches, and also hiding in partial annonimity to be able to ask dumb questions and pose inappropriately silly worries -- in it for the learning. Annoying friends, allies and even a taxi driver or two as I re-worded the threat and the possible actions, again and again and again. New angles became not-so-new, and I was lucky to keep (most of) my friends.

Now the work of offering my understanding back to whoever cares to look into it is almost finished. At around eighty (80) pages, it's a meagre ten pages per year, and yet not exactly E=m*c^2-concise either. Most of my (fingers and toes-countable, if I'm lucky) readers will stop after quickly reading the 6-page summary, the 2.5 index pages, or maybe looking at the pictures. I know that.

But at long last it's (almost) over, and different conversations may (or may not) emerge. Like a music band that creates a new album, I don't know if going on tour will bring further conversations or if it will be a flop, best brushed under the carpet, nice try and ain't you glad it's over.

My attention is now fully uncommitted, if that makes sense. It was a load of work, and whether others like it or not I'm (almost) free.

I've met exquisitely good people, as well as, you know, the others. We'll all be glad we can change the subject. :-)

Some temporary insights on free-software music

Not there yet, but approaching what I'd like to use.

KXstudio on top of ubuntustudio 12.10 very much does the trick for me. I can either use Ardour 2, recording acoustic tracks only, maybe with the metronome, and leaving drum integration for whenever; or I can use MusE, which gives me internal MIDI instruments (something I'd like to use a little, even though I'm basically a guitar player without a MIDI guitar), and maybe (if I can get SimpleDrums, the internal percussion thingie, to work) even rhythm.

I'll want to use just one piece of software. Used MusE today and upon reentry the connection with ZynAppSubFX (or whatever it's called) was lost. I want to sit down an play if I can.

That said, it looks like the layer of integration provided by KXstudio is a good model. I read somewhere that Debian will have a saner sound infrastructure soonish. We might yet get to the point in which you can download an .iso image, burn it into a DVD, install it into your hard drive, and just use one piece of software for the basic frequent activities.

We've come a long way since, say, 27 years ago, when I used our Apple IIe to write 394 lines of assembly code (that's as close as machine language as you can normally get) which accepted keypresses on the numbers and returned a list of "note, duration" pairs.

I just want the flow I get from playing alone, then playing against my own previous track(s), then maybe redoing the pieces with greater care so as to show what I hear inside, and finally maybe even playing with others if they want to.

Not much of a request, I think.

And it does look like we, free software zealots/fans/enthusiasts, are getting there.

Yay!

Guitar to piano, then choir

I use Linux. Browser, libreoffice-writer, freemind, pdf-reader, and generally not much else. I like to think my system is as free as I can make it, but of course I currently have to use proprietary gear: a computer (acer aspire 5742g), a usb sound card (edirol ua25ex), headphones and an electric guitar.

So I installed ubuntustudio 12.04, carefully looked at the ua25ex manual and adjusted the switches (also checked the headphones, badly tightened cable!), told the "sound configuration" that I didn't want to use the computer's sound system, fired up qjackctl and told it to use the ua25ex card, and then fired up rakarrack (fx on, reverb, tell qjackctl as in the picture), then zynaddsubfx (instrument piano, tell qjackctl as in the picture), then tell rakarrack (midi) ... even ardour 2.8x.

Mostly, I had to discipline myself to check every detail, not accepting that a connection was good until I disconnected it to see if there was no sound, and reconnected it again to hear it come back. I hadn't done this in the previous _years_, and was lost all that time. (Yes, you read that well. Years. I had managed some things, but never this full system.)

My conclusion is: it's possible (tho' the midi is experimental, slow and delayed), I need to make it automatic (drill, baby, drill), and all this could use some usability (not the last mile, but rather the last inch: explain every tag rather on the verbosity side).

More when I've processed the pictures, reproduced the process, uploaded some audio, etc. I'd really like to document this. We users need to document successes, and I know many others are doing that. I mean we need to document whole systems, explained for seven-year-olds. This might help developers, right?

The sound-to-midi feature of rakarrack is experimental. I hope it grows to become something really useful! (Excuse the enthusiasm: I'm 50 years old and I've been waiting for this since I was 15, when I kindly "stole" a family member's recorder so I would have two identical recorders - both battery operated, I remember well - and be able to record a second guitar while the one I had recorded first played out loud.)

Also, I want to document my thinking on how to do, erm, a little bit of song-writing. I'd like to write a song a day for a month, and publish at least one in three. This will take everything from tuning and making backups to designing to recording to publishing. I need to get ready for that, and document it, and feel at ease with the process before I jump in.

It'll be crap, but it will be my crap. And yours, cos over the years a few kind souls created open licenses, software, gear and what not.

More soon, I hope!

2012

A quick entry before being pulled into family gathering to watch 2012 melt into 2013.

2012 was the year of:

Yet more family surgery. All's well now, but was recovery slow & bumpy!

FluSCIM. Heavy, tough, almost toxic weight-lifting. Thanks to a few friends, it's well on its way to being "done and out", so that real business (brutal peer and non-peer review, if I'm lucky) may begin, possibly by the end of Jan 2013.

Edgeryders. Living On The Edge 1, not 2. There's some very good people, of all ages, in Europe and beyond. 2013 should see more of that. Not that I have huge hopes, but if not us (all, or at least many) then who?

3D printing and hackerspacing. Cool. Nice projects in the oven around here.

Music. I've seen beautiful growth, & admitted personal limits. I know where to focus. My own solitary craft. More soon.

I've been looking at the world til it hurts, and focused on not doing stuff.

Helped a bit with the hexayurt project, lended a happy hand to SCIM Greek translation, and taught mindmapping to a fair number.

Open Source Ecology has been good to watch, but what could I actually do?

2013 scares me. Which is why I've been resting. And why I won't be the one to say "let the show begin".

See ya all!

Maps to change the territory

We all know the map is not the territory, and yet we also know changing our minds helps us change the world ... Not all the world, mind you, but just the part within our sphere of actionability: from the edge of your finger-nails towards the center. Yeah, that's where your keys, notepad, screwdriver and phone are.

Maps ... Over the past few weeks I've been talking to people about mindmaps, which has forced me to learn a few things about them (maps and people). Specifically when someone who's tried teaching her kids told me she didn't know what to do when they started growing very large branches, with ideas connected to ideas in an outward spiral, with no end in sight ...

Mindmaps are about self-control and balance. It's (apparently) not the kind of thinking you do when meditating, in which (I've been told) you stick to the center (your breathing, your mantra, whatever) until (again apparently) you're concious of conciousness itself (or something of the sort). It's also not the kind of thinking you do when you explore further and further away, like this lady's kids did, going from content to content to where external stimuli (aka "distractions") will take you. With mindmaps you grow a few central branches, you grab them, and you sort-of fish from them: you stay in place and throw the line, grab the fish, pull the line, throw the line again.

Mindmaps are also about reusable templates - where each template is defined by its main branches. You want recipies? Use the ingredients-tools-procedure-presentation template - useful for any recipe. You want to describe a novel? Use the location-time-characters-plot-style template - useful for any novel. You want to look at people opinions? Use the each-person-their-opinions template (issue as the center, main branches one for each person, secondary branches for each person's real views) - useful for individuals and even countries.

Mindmaps can also help with creative thinking, maybe using two simple questions: what's this an example of? What's another example of this? (I've seen this refered to as "chunking up" and "chunking down".) The simplest example is the car: it's an example of transport, and other examples of transport are bikes and shoes and airplanes. So, sometimes, in a mindmap - or at least in a corner of a mindmap - you start with the leaves (specific ideas) and work your way up to the branches (general concepts), and down again to more leaves (more specific ideas).

So, what's my currently favourite template? My "reusable template for changing the world" (a bit)? Simple: area-wants-haves-cans-first steps.

1. Let's say we pick a small area of interest, like (this was talking with my friend) we want to improve education in our geographical area. We put that as the center of this specific map. (Have other areas of interests? Do other maps, later!) (Please note: not "(narrow) goals", but "areas of interest". Narrow goals are bad for you: you end up killing for money, etc.)
2. What would we want to see, our wants? Maybe we want to see more people learning general future-proof skills, or people teaching what they know to others, or people learning faster and with less effort whatever it is that they must learn to pass their compulsory tests. And we certainly want to enjoy the ride itself, too.
3. So what is it that we have? We know some teachers and some students, and other people who might have resources. We have some links to places students might use to get information from. We know how to use mindmaps, even with software. We may have some room (or, again, know someone who does have room).
4. Next is, what are some things we can do? Maybe we can grow a business (wild idea), or write a blog entry (nice and simple), or create a group of people who might be interested in exploring this kind of interest (I started with one person, and then a few more). We might start from our own learning needs, or from stuff we can teach, or from people's needs if we see a mismatch between what is needed and what people do know.
5. Finally, we look at first steps. All those possibilities - we really don't have time for all of that, do we? So what would we actually do, that's within our sphere of actionability? One or two things at most. Doable soon? We go for that, because - to be honest - all we wanted is to gain a slightly better understanding and then actually do something - and do another map at some other date in the future.

I'd like to do this big time. Maybe with 20 people and a 10 meter x 10 meter mindmap or, ok, maybe a smaller surface. For, you know, some area of interest: one of us invites, a number of us join in, there may be several maps/invitations. In ... 2013? So ... my first step was to write this blog entry. ;-) Then, maybe we can show how this is done in, say, some EdgeRyders' (or "Friends of EdgeRyders") meeting? Or should I start smaller and document that? I'll keep you informed!

Of course, none of this is doable unless enough people (one or more) want to. And if enough people want to, the specific tool may not matter much. But, if enough people want to, then the simpler the tool, the better. What do you think?