Alex McLean

A reminder that we were almost on the timeline where nintendo released a knitting machine peripheral for the NES. They did make a prototype, things could have been very different if it had reached production.

Quoted (but not named) in this guardian piece for posting about some freezers on reddit.. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/feb/18/the-sheffield-supermarket-going-viral-for-the-symphonic-sound-of-its-freezers

Submitting to an academic conference and once more am completely amazed that people who call themselves academic technologists use LaTeX to make PDFs to communicate their research. This is by far the worst widely-adopted software I've ever used, and I really hope I don't ever use it again. Awful nonsense, which I think is only still in use for the purposes of gatekeeping other disciplines away from interacting with computer science. #rant

Anthropic are now casting live coders for ad campaigns showing how great Claude is for pushing beyond their capabilities. Not sure it's quite there yet..

Hi @tidalcycles@social.toplap.org + @strudel@social.toplap.org people!

If you'd like to support + encourage software and community development of Strudel, Tidal and sibling projects, now would be great time!
https://opencollective.com/tidalcycles

This software is shared as free/open source with love, and created and supported mostly through volunteer work. Donations help support grants towards development, community projects and infrastructure around them.

We will never be able to repay all the work poured into these projects but this is a great way to say thank you while helping support activities around it.

With this call for donations we hope to double the funds we currently hold, to support an open call for mini grants in the new year.

The fund is administrated by @iriss@post.lurk.org @dktr0@social.toplap.org and myself, and we do not benefit financially from it.

One-off donations and regular contributions are both very welcome.

Please note that you are not required to make a contribution to the open collective platform while contributing. Please click 'edit' to adjust or remove their 'tip' if you wish.

(For historical reasons the URL says tidalcycles but this is now a community fund for strudel, tidal and all uzus!)
https://opencollective.com/tidalcycles

Thanks for your support + happy xmas + holidays !
#tidalcycles #tidal #livecoding #strudel #strudelcc #algorave

The solstice TOPLAP stream is still going strong with excellent live coding performances, 13.5 hours left ! https://live.eulerroom.com/

Lovely presentation by Bernard Bel on the Bol Processor - a huge inspiration for @tidalcycles@post.lurk.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLHzKUQKLPY

The @toplap@assemblag.es live coding organisation was born at the end of 'changing grammars', the first international live coding meeting. It'll somehow be the 20th anniversary of that on 14th Feb 2024..
https://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de/MusicTechnology/609

Sheffield! A patterny algorave is happening in you on the 28th September 2023 https://patternclub.org/sheffield/

The events list on https://algorave.com was looking dead so I searched the #algorave tag on instagram and added some recent/upcoming ones I could find.. there were *loads*, it's a bit overwhelming. I spent an hour adding some but so much missing. It would be lovely to have something like a complete list of events but having someone search around while fiddling with a dodgy wordpress event plugin is not the way.. any ideas/volunteers ??

I really wish there was a culture in free/open source software of actually telling the person who made the thing when you do something good/interesting/cool/weird with it, used it in a workshop/teaching. It's super nice+motivating when I hear about tidal being used on a course or something, but it's generally only by chance.
I guess it's another case of people adopting the at-a-distance customer-supplier relationship of commercial/proprietary software, when free/open source _should_ take a friendlier approach