Spring was definitely in the air today. We woke to snow… But by midday it was in the 50’s and the roads were turning to mud. The real spring surprise was that their of the huge springs that help open our garage door snapped. I had the fun and surprisingly easy job of replacing them.

I spent The rest of the day trying to catch up for the coming week. I have a ton of stuff to take in for work and it’s all adding up. I have a 6 inch stack of stuff to read. For some reason, I’ve never learned to read technical stuff on a screen.. Not on a laptop, not on a reader, tablet or phone . I still need paper to hold on my hand. Funny thing is … I don’t have that trouble when reading fiction. Go figure

Around 11:30 I got tired of pretending to work and I did a few minutes of recreational programming with the kinect I’m borrowing. I’ve got it hooked into my laptop using a piece of code called synapse . That translates the kinects model of the human skeleton into OSC messages. OSC stands for open sound control. It’s used to get audio and visual devices communicating. I created a very simple video theremin by grabbing the messages relating to the movement of my left hand. I mapped the left right position to musical keyboard. Then mapped the up down position to. Musical instrument . It only took a few minutes to get it working. Here’s the kinect

And heres the screen of my laptop. You can see my max/map program and the synapse window with its idea of the positions of my body parts

And here is a completely unedited video of me making music(???!?) with the device. Still not musical., but everything’s working… Fun stuff !

Ok… It’s late. More tomorrow

Nite All, nite Sam
-me