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FraKtus

177 karma · joined March 25, 2012

Software architect, fascinated by music visualization. http://blog.fraktus.com
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FraKtus··on Dropping Acid
E2-E4 was a breakthrough. It's descendent of the Berlin school of electronic music of the 70's. It's difficult to place that track in a genre, for me it's just electronic music. The long guitar solos of the B face is not something you will find in Acid/Dance music. It's one of the first releases of the "Inteam" record label that Klaus Schulze created after failing with his first "Innovative Communication" label. Schulze and Göttsching were exploring new musical directions there. They definitively were having fun!
FraKtus··on CEBIT Hanover to be cancelled
Yes, that's my memory of it in the 199x, you had to sleep with peoples renting a part of their apartments. That was weird to me at that time because it was the only show where that was needed. My only memory of CEBIT, bad hotels :-)
FraKtus··on Brain.fm: Music to improve focus, meditation and sleep
Seems to work fine, could you consider having a perpetual license? Or a nonrecusing one year? I don't like to have recusing subscriptions. Too many of them already.
FraKtus··on Hacking Christmas lights (2010)
Not sure about the original LED used there, but with the popular LED tapes built on the WS2812, you should be able to drive at least 200 of them within 20 milliseconds. That gives you the idea, then yes if you want to run more LEDs then use more outputs and drive them in parallel.
FraKtus··on Hacking Christmas lights (2010)
For Christmas lights, the final frontier is two wires LEDs. We could reverse engineer the protocol to use them but not the protocol to program them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeA2jnb4K3g

Because there is no data in - data out in the LED, it has just two wires; you need to assign it an address and that part is not explained by the Chinese producer. Could anybody crack that one?

FraKtus··on How to Design Software Good
I also had the same reflection; maybe the original writer is not using English as his native language. It's true that you then start reading the page with a lousy apprehension.
FraKtus··on Making Bitmaps Using a Visual Programing Language
The link gives me a 502 on iOS.
FraKtus··on Making Bitmaps Using a Visual Programing Language
The best for me is artmatic: http://www.artmatic.com There are presets of trees that makes it easy to generate fine visuals and the primitive themselves are finetuned to generate impressive results. This is catch with that type of generators, giving the right sets of primitives, if you are too detailed it can take lomg to implemente something. Eric Wenger, the author of artmatic, is both an artist and a coder, there are not many creative peoples like him.
FraKtus··on Milkymist: VJ on an FPGA
There are amazing ideas popping on ShaderToy.
FraKtus··on Generative art: New and recreated vintage art, made with code and imagination
The link does not work for me while the top one is. I am on iOS.
FraKtus··on C considered dangerous
How do you know that developers working on those used tools such as the Clang Memory Sanitizer?
FraKtus··on C considered dangerous
Don't you think that with the tools we have now it's easier to control the quality of code produced (Clang memory sanitizers and so on)? I feel more at ease to ship C code today after instrumenting it than a few years ago...
FraKtus··on Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
I wish I could use that to better understand the beat of Pink Floyd hit "Money" that was composed in 7 / 8 ...
FraKtus··on Projects: Back to C
I write small cross-platform applications in plain C for the same reason the author gave. I use Nuklear for the GUI; one nice thing is that it's header only, see https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear With that, I can write small apps that run macOS, iOS, Windows and Android while sharing the same C code. On macOS, iOS, and Android I use SFML to manage windows and events. Works like a charm for me and I produce lightweight apps that are fast to deploy and have no dependencies. I compile the subset I need of SFML straight into my projects.
FraKtus··on Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller
There are DMX led strips, but they are more expensive and more fragile because they have more components on the strip.
FraKtus··on How can you treat someone who doesn’t accept they are ill?
My family (in Poland) is in that situation with a member denying, going to hospital, coming out, avoiding medication and the cycle starts again after a few months. We feel hopeless and at this time wait a judgement could force that family member to take a medication once a month...
FraKtus··on Vkvg: Vulkan vector drawing, trying to stay close to Cairo API
I am a Cairo user that wants to port some code to the GPU. Really interested to hear succes stories on macOS and windows...
FraKtus··on Show HN: An online drawing tool that lets you change colors via MIDI controller
That's great! I would like to see somebody using this solution while being synchronized with the beat of the music.
FraKtus··on Why punk keeps connecting people across space and time
When you have that spirit, you enjoy connecting with other punks. I was a guitar player in a punk band in my twenties and we self-published our music. When I had the idea to create a company at the end of the nineties, I had that punk attitude to move forward and create a company even if the business around it was new and full of question marks. All my friends recommended not to create that startup, and in a true punk spirit I didn't care and moved forward, I can now say 25 years later that it was a great decision. Even today I keep that punk spirit when I make my decisions, if you feel you're doing something right you should just trust yourself even if you are alone on the market, avoid beeing a follower.
FraKtus··on Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
And that is also the final push for Quartz Composer...
FraKtus··on MacOS 10.14 Wishlist
Give a little love to OpenGL. Sure Metal is great... but...
FraKtus··on Ask HN: Do I place the fan so that it blows air inwards or outwards?
Exactly what I do, use a standard temperature sensor, load your system, make the CPU and GPU cry :-) and see how it goes with cooling the inside of the system.
FraKtus··on Libui: a portable GUI library for C
I work for many years with FFMpeg that has no documentation and no code sample, and it's okay for me. I prefer that the developers keep their time optimizing the code rather than writing documentation that needs to be maintained and become a problem when not in sync. My state of mind is that if it's open source then just read the code.
FraKtus··on The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)
I never installer homebrew on any mac I develop. When you see all the possibilities to customize projects, it's just ridiculous to want to build something with a one-liner and expect it will take thousand of decisions for you.
FraKtus··on Working Lego pinball machine built from 15,000 bricks
Same here, I showed her the web site, and now she wants to submit her creation. It's fascinating to see her building a dream house and to see how she wants to have it. Last time she put a pool close to her bed in her bedroom :-)
FraKtus··on Apple starting to alert users that it will end 32-bit app support on the Mac
Two basic APIs are not available in 64 bits: Carbon and QuickTime. Steve Jobs promised to port Carbon to 64 bits when macOS X was introduced. So many of us developed for Carbon, and a few years later Carbon was deprecacted, and Apple announced they would never port it to 64 bits. Even software from Apple such as iTunes was built and Carbon, and it took years for Apple to remove the Carbon code out of iTunes...
FraKtus··on Linux Raw Sockets
"libtins depends on libpcap and OpenSSL, although the latter is not necessary if some features of the library are disabled."

Would you know something lighter to play with RAW sockets?

FraKtus··on Honey, I shrunk the MP3 decoder (2007)
He also recommends checking this one that is a clean re implementation, not the extraction of FFmpeg code: https://github.com/lieff/minimp3
FraKtus··on Generating artwork with Haskell
His work is based on the Cairo library. It has a big potential for vector drawing but still it's very easy to use and has a very permissive license.
FraKtus··on Shaderoo: realtime ballpoint effect
It's a project that wants to push further than shadertoy. Here from the project documentation:

My goal was to make something similar to Shadertoy but with some extra features. Having a fixed and simple set of functionality always helps in the creative process to focus on the goal itself rather than on the several methods available to achive the goal. Therefore i didn't want to overdo it with new functionalities and only implemented features i was missing most in shadertoy. Some basic main shadertoy functionality is there, but some features are missing.

Shaderoo is based exclusively on WebGL2, so WebGL1 is not enough (unlike shadertoy, which has some WebGL1 fallbacks). check webglreport.com for compatibility.

Shaderoo uses Ace as web-editor. See here for the keyboard shortcuts.

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