 So, is Simon here? Simon? Yep, hello. So, yesterday in the Lightning Talk, Simon showed us paper tapes with music... for the music box, right? And that made me want to talk to you about paper tape and music as well, but quite the opposite. Well, not the opposite. But let me just show you that. A few years ago, well, ten years ago, I studied engineering at the University of Sao Paulo. It's very famous that there was a computer designed there in 1971. It was, for a time, considered the first Brazilian computer. Afterwards, they discovered that there was... some people discovered that there was a computer ten years earlier designed in Brazil as well. But this one is pretty famous. It's called the Brooklyn Dublin Computer. It's called like that because the Navy was planning to have a computer designed by another university in Brazil. And the Navy one is called the White Swan because that's the name of the... That's something related to the Navy. So the people from the University of Sao Paulo decided to call it the American Navy. Like, just the cheapest one. But it worked, and the other one didn't happen. So this one was pretty pioneer. So what does it have to do with music? Well, and graphics. So these are paper tapes that were used for storing the computer programs. And this is a scan of a manual of the assembler that they developed for the machine. And I got some of these paper tapes. This one specifically I transcribed just by looking at the image and what is a whole is a one. What is a lack of a whole is a zero. And by reading that, I could see a tiny example program to run on the computer. By the way, this was all emulated on name. They moved to your machine emulator, a free software project for historical preservation of all computers. So we can run it on the browser. So this here is a JavaScript build of name running on the browser. Running that program from that image. Launching the emulator and downloading the image of the punch tapes. And it's going to run here. Not sure how long. So this is the program running on the computer from 1971. What does it have to do with music? This professor designed a synthesizer in 1975 and the other professor convinced him to add digital control interface to the synth so that the computer could send commands to play music on the synth. And he's got a web page with photos of the synthesizer and the story and the modules and you could insert your waveform manually over there with the sliders and save that to a bank and then use that sound. You could also upload this kind of waveform through the data tape, the digital interface using the computer. And these are some example programs and he's got a box full of paper tapes. So we were trying to digitize these paper tapes as well but doing it by hand, looking at the holes is very hard. So I was trying to find ways to read that. One of the ways was to write a program to use OpenCV to analyze the image and compensate for the handle of the tape and it kind of worked. So I have a video channel on YouTube and it's in Portuguese, sorry, but sometimes I have subtitles in English where I talk about all this stuff and here it shows the program running. So this is the OpenCV program. You load an image and it removes color and then apply a Gaussian Blur to reduce noise to the circle detection transform for detection of circles of a specific range of radius that I expect them to be and then once they are detected some of them are not detected. You can see that it failed for some of them but as I know the average distance I can fill the grid with the ones that were missing so it's capable of filling the gaps and here you have all of them and then with that I can extract the data dump from the tape. But this is nice, it works but it's not very practical because you have these paper tape rolls that you would have to be scanning just like a book. Every tiny bit of the tape is a page and a book so I went after trying to build my own reader for that but it's a very finicky hard mechanical thing to build with those light sensing devices pretty well aligned and it's very tiny so it didn't work well but I had the luck of finding a real reader from 1974 so there's this museum that is being set up at the University of Sao Paulo and they found this box that was donated to them and it's basically a paper tape reader from 1974 from the same lab that developed the computer and it was just hanging there so I opened this and it came with a technical manual describing all the electrical signaling and protocol and I was able to make it work with an Arduino to read the data so this is the machine reading the tape and now I would like to play the songs that the synthesizer used to play we've got the source code in assembly language in some tapes we also have the binary executables in other tapes, binary tapes and we also have data tapes with the music sheet for all of the voices the instrument was monophonic so you only hear one note at a time it only plays one note at a time but you can record several passes so it would play one kilohertz control reference signal in the left channel and in the right channel you would have the actual sound from the synths and then you would play again with a different data tape using that one kilohertz signal in the interrupt pin of the digital interface so that it would interrupt the CPU a thousand times per second and then the interrupt handling routine would make sure that the second voice is playing in sync with the first one and you could do it several times with overdubbing and they just did it four times the fifth voice would be crappy because of the amount of noise that would get added up after each new recording so the professor has got in his website mp3 files that were generated from real cassette tapes that were recorded back then so this is the real thing it's not an emulator this is the real thing that's it, thank you I've been doing it all my free time during the last two and a half years but there's lots of documents scanned and published to the Internet Archive because I got all of the master thesis from all of the professors because each one worked on one module like there's core memory there's whole thesis about that and then there's the CPU design and the IO interface each block of the system was done by a different professor back then like a master's student so I digitized everything and published on the Internet Archive as well I can't read anymore I'll send them to you it doesn't mean you'll want to read them though but how much does this ugly duckling computer cost? it must have been like 15 billion passators or whatever they were using at the time so this was a really expensive piece of music we just heard, that's fabulous I should appreciate that but it was probably expensive back then the project was designed by students in the master's program the professor was from Syracuse in the US he was an IBM specialist who came to Brazil to teach at the University of Sao Paulo and he had this digital design computer digital design course where he taught how CPUs work how computers work and an assignment for the students was to design a computer, a CPU and so there were several designs and the best one was this one and then when the director of the engineering school was informed by the fact that the Navy was going to probably do a computer with the other engineering school there was this challenge to do it faster and the students did it we just got to pay for them to build the real thing so they did it another question is apparently you started out doing this to be able to run the programs in your simulator but do you have a simulator for the synthesizer as well because this would be in the missing next step to actually regenerate the music so the professor I built a replica of the computer a panel, a laser cut I actually drawn an inkscape, laser cuts and so on with toggles, switches and lamps to be able to run the emulator inside of an Arduino or Raspberry Pi the emulator right now just runs the computer code but not the synth simulation because I don't know exactly all the details about the synth but the professor, I showed him this replica and he provided me two notebooks of his own with all of the designs but it's not complete there are several sketches made on pencil all the circuits and so on but there's no official documentation of what was really, really built but just a couple days ago he emailed me asking for the notebooks back because it's with me, I'm still scanning them not enough time to scan them all so I gotta give it back to him but he's interested in that because he's going to present this synth in a conference for weird, old, rare electronic equipment it exists and I asked him does it work, he said well, I tried to turn it on a while ago and I kind of did not work so I gave up they say how long ago, 20 years ago but now, two days ago he said to me that he actually tried again and it's kind of working there are some portions that are but it plays so he's going to showcase this next Saturday in Brazil if anyone wants to show up yeah, I'll try to record some videos and have English subtitles I'm Frank, I'm the lead developer on Fontforge and when I say lead that doesn't mean that there are a bunch of people following me it's a pretty small crowd but anyway I just wanted to give a brief update on all the stuff that's happened with Fontforge the last six months basically I merged some pull requests things have been a little behind I've had a lot of stuff going on but I just wanted to talk about the next steps and I'm always trying to look for low-hanging fruit and I always like to be efficient with things and so how many people here use Fontforge on a regular basis right now? Fontforge that sounds like a no okay so of you all how many of you if we added support for variable fonts would actually use that okay and if we added support for color fonts how many people would use that? right, that's what I thought and as it happens color fonts are a little bit easier to implement than variable fonts so anyway that's sort of on the agenda for this summer depending on how my schedule looks but you know you never want to do things twice and so I'm trying to see how other people do with this I know there are a lot of different models with other type-based design packages who knows it may even not stick the second time I hope it does but so we're going to wait on that see how it goes I don't know if you all remember it there was this great comic strip about 10 or 15 years ago it's a terrorist training camp and there's this guy with an explosive jacket on and he's telling his students now watch closely because I'm only going to do this once and implementing variable fonts and font forges is definitely one of those things you know like there's certain things you don't mind doing twice like sometimes I eat lunch twice because I like eating lunch but this is not something I'm doing twice so where's the out goes I thought you know since we have some time does anybody here have a pull request or a problem or a question that has been unresolved for over six months I can fix other pieces of software too but um yes what's that yeah lots of things have broken in a homebrew that we didn't there was no regression in our code base but working with homebrews become more and more difficult um and I'm not a Macintosh user like if you go go to typo labs there I'm probably the only person there without a Macintosh I come here they're like one or two and so I know that's a big part of our user base and I'd like to support it it's just it's not the platform I'm on every day and we really need if anybody wants to help out we'd love to have a homebrew expert to you know get that work as much as possible the GUI will never work again with homebrew as far as I can tell but you know we'll definitely like to support that I mean best or worst case you could run a virtual for headless stuff running a virtual machine isn't that bad is it okay I guess it's pretty bad but anyway so that's on my list but it's just it's so hard to get to things sometimes you know I've got a class reunion coming up and um you know which well no it's awful because then you you know you know everybody else is going to have a fancy new car particularly in my high school so you have to buy a fancier new car and then you show up with a Rolls Royce and still somebody shows up with a McLaren so I've got to do a lot of build you know paid work and everything before then but this is on the list um let's see what else I thought I had more to say I it really shows when you haven't got anything done doesn't it anyway um that's all I have I'll so yeah what who how are we so we are all students at the Arthes University of Arts in the Netherlands where Ruhl teaches and gave a presentation on that yesterday and I'm Einar and this is Emma yeah so uh and then there's also Marius but he couldn't come um for different reasons um so we're kind of like a pipeline collective sort of trying to figure things out group of students uh we got together because we were almost told to I guess with the project for um the the open source software review because we had to work in groups um but we found that to actually be quite productive so that's why we've kind of stuck with it and formed a club um so the thick club pub is the project that we worked on um with the open source reviews so the whole class would get together and do these reviews um from like a quite an eclectic range of um programs that you guys here did um and yeah I don't know yeah and then the new project we were working on we're gonna talk a bit about this sort of the working title is the long tail slash the deep spider web which we'll get to later on um yeah I think we start talking about thick pub uh yeah so thick pub is a multimedia platform um that has sort of a collection of reviews on Floss software um created by a student but as the project is also open source anybody can contribute and read the reviews and we thought of this idea that the publication can also reflect the software so software that is only available online you can only read in the web version while software that you have to download and install can only be uh printed and the same as for platform so software that only works on Mac you can only view on Mac and software that is only on Windows you can only view on Windows etc but as everybody in our class had a Mac OS everything works on our computer uh but you guys might see see it a bit differently um oh yeah and then there was this whole discussion in about this free Libre versus free beer discussion so software that is free as in software you can uh you get like a true PDF that you can edit and mess with the web version that you can really like highlight the code or the text while the free as in beer software the PDF schedule bitmap so you can't really copy or change anything from it and in the web version you can't really highlight anything I mean you can go into the developer console and steal it but that's all um as I could just claim that there are things that are wrong in the reviews because we didn't write them all so if you find something that you get offended by that's not our fault um so that we also brought one of the publications with us which you're welcome to kind of pass around take a look at um there we printed out all of them but this one is for Mac specifically because that's what we've got with us um okay and then yeah maybe sort of on technical sites we used most of this was developed through Python 3 what a website we used yinya to templating engine um to make the print we originally attempted with la tech which went horribly wrong um ah shit we removed the USB ah it's in there and then we used vc print and image magic and pdf unite uh to make the print version so now on to our more recent adventures that's a long tail slash deep spider web we might just start with sort of a video introduction we can see the smallest so this project is kind of originating around looking at different types of digital media so um and like digital culture so for us we were quite interested in I think it's quite hard not to be interested in these videos um and then like other people are doing works um looking at I don't know um what's Catherine doing she's doing the yeah like cam girls as well so there's quite another like a neclectic range of things um but we were interested in these for a lot of different reasons first of all I guess like why why do they exist like what are they doing and how much impact are these having on the watches also like they're getting millions of views so we were curious like is it for bots is it made by bots like how many children children are watching these and kind of trying to understand it is near on impossible so we we're trying to look at different uh writings about it so looking at um the capillarity concept and then also um that uh like writings from people that seem to think that they know what's going on um but yeah I really like we've watched tens and hundreds of these videos and I really wouldn't advise doing that um don't do it and so what we've tried to do so far is kind of map out what we think we're seeing so for example looking at the characters and tropes um Spider-Man and Elsa are very much prominent in this um and then also looking at these sort of different ways that these videos are being created so whether that's 2D uh 2D worlds 3D worlds or sort of stop motion or even like real life actors all of them sort of fit in the same bubble of this yeah this we've got deep spider web thing um and then I guess from that we're trying to figure out how best to describe it further or kind of get our heads around it um so I think we're looking at using the language that these videos um sort of title themselves with these sort of endless strings of um hashtags in a sense which is also what these videos are they're kind of like visual hashtags like you put a spider-man with an Elsa and you're gonna get like 10 million views um so so now we're trying to scrape through YouTube um the titles and the descriptions of each of these videos and then try and use these words in order to kind of talk about itself in a sense um and like looking at the textures as well as super interesting because it's also the same character like the same models but it's like mods in a sense because of this um yeah I don't know there's so much more maybe to explain a bit what you were seeing so yeah the first was um a graph on the tropes and characters we found in videos this one that is really laggy and this is sort of a visual mapping of the environments that exist in and then this was a field guide to spider-man on YouTube and sort of the environments and styles of spider-man you can find I mean you can find him in the wilderness recognized by a more basic rendering of textures, cliff, wild animals battling each other, twisted and unpredictable store lines play out there stay alert yeah thank you for listening if you have any confusion the long question Yeah, we tried first with sort of these net generators but they weren't really fitting on paper as we wanted to make a poster in the time frame we had to work with. Any more questions? So our class as a whole reviewed all the software but each individual reviewed I think four softwares. Together we have like a hundred reviews. Okay I just wanted to show you a little project we had in Switzerland and it's related to community work but also generative design. So I basically just came up with the presentation today and with the idea of having a talk so it's really low tech so I basically go just through the slides. So that was the vision we had so like every second year either way in Germany or in Netherlands there is a like a Hecker community camp and we wanted to have something similar in Switzerland. They are usually really big like they are thousands of people and we knew we have like a very diverse situation with groups and people in Switzerland so we first needed to gather them somehow and bring them as a community to work so we thought in a much like smaller scale. So we came together a couple people to organize this Hecker camp and like with the target like of uniting the community. So and for that reason we had to basically do design somehow to communicate so couple friends we came together and did the first like sketches like really rough and this was all made like in a traditional way just like putting stuff really quickly together. So and then we thought yeah let's like somehow here we have this like Hecker coding style we wanted to go through and a friend of us came up with like the idea he wants to do something with cellular automata if that's the correct English term. So we started like from these really rough sketches we started direct go to like to code so to have a different design approach so that it is not like this static generation like where we have to draw by hand or like operate with a normal layout or software where we had to deal with like manual work especially with this idea of this cellular automata. So we basically defined some structures what what's the design about so this is like the website and this shows like this cellular automata idea so the corporate design was really like basic so we had just like this cellular automata with two kind of characters and two colors so and because it's about communication you should probably also have some type so yeah actually yeah it's hard actually to see something but yeah okay let's switch colors yeah let's do it like in white so you see it better so it's like this very simple monotype grid and with this 3D shade kind of thing just by stancing out knocking out the one line of characters okay and so basically everything like the collaboration happened on the on the GitHub and we shared code and like try to like develop the design with together with the code so and like on the community side in the meanwhile we organized to like to raise some money we basically sold tickets ahead so that we were able to like bring it to life and rent a place and everything so we even had like Mitch Oldman like from the hacker community or like maker community to participate at our camp and so it's it basically went on and on so from this like first generator we made first stickers and the generator came basically more and more to life so and we realized so we were just like a small team of of enthusiasts and most of the people of course were not graphic designer and they had nothing to do with graphic design at all but the the need for graphic design was kind of high because we had to bring all these groups together and so they started to fiddle around with this system so what you see here is is a kind of a letter a person did and I did they wanted to to send it out to to people like that and we were like yeah probably we just do a little bit like like like how how to like do it proper in a proper way so that you basically also are able to print it without like using all the ink so we we kind of helped them like using the generator and and do it in a in a little bit more proper way but the key was so we basically just like had this generator I show you later and we were just able to pass that design on as a link so the the whole design is encoded as a link so you are basically able to really easily share it also with social media you can just like type something and and send it off so if you have something like that made for your your your organizers then you can just send them and they can just change the text so there are like many of these requests we had to fulfill so there was also like a batch like for for the name tag so they they produced PCBs and for the PCB it's looking more or less like that these are LEDs with with buttons on it so you can do like this this batch thing with with animations and stuff so and they had to package up and they came with this with this design oh let's do it like that that was like again yeah probably we can I mean they already I mean these are not graphic designers and they even though they are not graphic designers with this generator they were able to get there so that's already like a huge step but then you can help them and you probably suggest a little bit a different design and then they are kind of happy because they just can print it out from the website or do pdf and in the end the package was just looking like that so same for ticketing so that was the first ticket I received and the guy was just like oh I really set it up this amazing pre ticks system to sell the tickets this is how the ticket looked like and then you have to jump in and probably like say yeah well can we talk about it and what what are you you're like like what are you technically able to do and then he told me yeah he can just put a pdf in the background so all right so why don't we put that one in the background and then he was like yeah well I can put that in the background but then I have to place the text still on it and then well good I do that for you so I had to send him his own configuration so I just did it blind and it worked out pretty well in the end so the the final ticket was more or less like that so we still had the Helvetica Arielle thing in it that was too hard for him but at least it looked a little bit better than like before like that one was the original so in the end we had like after many iterations we had like basically this editor and I'm going to show you quickly this is basically the editor we handed out to all the people who needed to do some stuff graphic wise so yeah basically I mean it's a little bit it's not like for everyone but it's it's the system is pretty simple you just type if you do a new line you get also a new line and it's like with all these it's it's kind of randomness and so you can basically have different seats so then you can like see detail you think yeah that's okay you can have different rules for the for the pattern in the background you can also apply these different styles we had before so for printing for black and white we had also at one point like some kind of problems with with and why the mental obligations so we also did one for like like in green so to to make them feel a little bit more welcome when we had to send in the proposal and so on and so on so there are many parameters you can just like tweak and can do it according to your design and if you are all set and fine you basically just go to print it and it should more or less look like you want to do it okay so that's basically it and in the end we really had this camp we're like a hundred participants many young people were there and signage everything was more less according to corporate corporate design with this idea I also came up later for stuff for me so everything for example here I I made a little label maker so everything what you see is like encoded in the URL so I don't have to take care about hosting or anything so it's just easy to like send it off or print it or whatever yeah that's about it thanks to the people who helped there so hello my name is John so I'm one of the game developers and I'm Ariam and we are Zuma team and we will presentation our project and people ask us ask us what is how how is it going this month project so yeah we presentation a little so I don't know if many of you know about this project we presented a few years ago actually in the graphics meeting so it's a movie and we are working on it and we don't present it again to not be boring but so just like a statue because people ask us for statues we are actually working like all same on this so it's it's it's more than just a hobby project it's but we are kind of alone and Ariam is drawing everything alone we'll show you some stuff like so that I will show you the teaser when when we originally presented actually I can make some sound so so this was when we originally presented that was design change since then it's a mammoth you know what mammoth is yeah that's why we change the design sorry yeah yeah yeah it's a groundhog yeah yeah okay but so since then we we have been working on me I try to develop and I fix game and everything and yeah my main goal is to have can be like very stable and everything so to be used professionally like that's one of the first stuff I did one was like when I started contributed because I fixed some crashes and stuff like that which one and so let's so how it looks like now okay it's let's walk in except of work some walks in progress so wait this project is all throw fully made with the free software and I throw with a gimp and some scene I composite in blender for some cuts and now I this one is a gimp motion which is a plug-in to do to do animation and yeah now I'm using this gimp motion to line test animation you know like exposition shit x shit so stuff like that so it looks like an x shit basically and every layer is like one kind of layer of the animation if you have ever seen like Disney like these machines when before when they were used to draw when they would do a movie they will still also do frame by frame but then they will have like transparent papers and they will put them one on the other and have a camera on this and photograph frame by frame that's what the x shit is so we keep this concept but it's on computer so yeah I'm like yeah I can show you like this kind of stuff for instance you know it's when you make an animation is kind of a step by step process you do like the storyboards and you do the animatics so here's the animatics looks like it's basically an animatic is when you take just you scan the storyboard and you put them side by side and you can do some very simple compositing and that's more it's not finished but that's like a walk in progress with animation so that's supposed to be a timing change tell it also yeah so what do I have okay so yeah and yeah actually I really miss is regularly you can raise a mouse okay give focus like we have like YouTube channel use fine Lila the Marmot Lila is name of the we make this in the context of a nonprofit association but professionally so we crowd found it which makes salaries and everything not much right now but and since we use free software and Libra and everything because the goal is also the movies as to be released you know as creative commons by essay and everything so if you you can find this kind of now she does regularly videos it's like it's not videos it's just see seeing her walking so some of the videos are like eight hours because it's live streaming of just seeing him walking and sometimes it's it's can be boring also like because you just you know yeah because you just you just it's you know it just I started it because I just wanted to notice I'm still work on this project yeah so some people maybe want to know that yes you if if someone which is crazy who watched all the other video then they can found I make really many mistakes on there it allows you to have like direct preview so it's like it's really good for line testing so yeah so yeah basically I think that sets it sets to show a little bit how what what we have been doing and yeah basically a lot of a lot of drawing and for me so as a coding and everything and yeah we basically we just complete with some time do other projects because we don't have a lot of crowdfunding for this a lot of funding so yeah we did like a board game oh yeah yeah like like this is rather printed stuff and it was for another association and some cards and you know yeah yeah on the box of course is printed I mean Laza Laza cut with scape also you know it's like yeah that's so yeah we do this kind of stuff but mostly we do mostly we do the mammoth and just show you some links if you ever want that's another talk somewhere okay just show you the links so so yeah yeah that's if you want to or follow us and everything and food always help us if you want if you can that's it if you have any questions well every every year every year we say this year so no this is crazy so I imagine bigger because when you do like background image you need to have bigger because the film the render is in fridge is that what you were