Button Mashing: The Monome 40h

Chris — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:14:20 +0000

Last year I went through a phase of interest in the grassroots movement of DIY control interfaces for software. One in particular caught my eye: the monome. The monome is basically a grid button interface that you can use to control things. People mostly use it for music, but i’ve seen it used for video, lighting, games, etc. All sorts of stuff. The beauty is that it’s infinitely flexible, only limited by your imagination and programming skill. Sadly, this is the same thing that killed it for me. The program used to control it primarily, is Max/MSP, though it does support other apps using OSC, it’s primary method of communication. Max is difficult, and expensive. You could run all sorts of patches built by the monome-ing community, but in the end, the things that you missed were things like a good save/recall system for presets, and all the hoops you jump through to get it up and running. I found myself messing with getting patches to work, rather than any actual music being made. That being said, it’s a great performance tool. I had the original 40h, then a 64, then a 128. In the end, I sold it because it just took too much time to do something useful, so it ended up being a really cool decoration in my office. My philosophy about gear is always that if it’s not getting used, it needs to go to someone that will, so I sold it to a nice fellow in California.

Now since then, Ableton has teamed up with Cycling ’74, makers of Max, and developed a Max4Live, that allows you to run Max patches right inside Live. This has been the tie in that everyone has been waiting for, and now has once again piqued my interest. I think this time i’d like to build one though. Here’s one of the original videos that sold me on it:

Here’s a bit of work I did when I had mine:

Flickr Batch Download

Chris — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:42:40 +0000

Most of the time when I go grab something from my Flickr account, or something from the Creative Commons search, i’m contented to just download them one at a time. Every once in a while though, I come across a situation where I need to download a whole set of images, say, for a media project or for prints or something. Flickr doesn’t really have a great way of doing this, so usually i’m forced to do it one image at a time, which can be time consuming. It has a batch upload, but not a batch download. Recently I found that someone had developed a program that’ll let you authorize the app with the Flickr API, and then download your own images in sets, which is FANTASTIC. It’s a quick download, quick set up, and you’re off and running. Tell me if you like it

FlickrDown

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Button Mashing: The Monome 40h

Flickr Batch Download