log

Everything that happens in Tim's life

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2021 - A new beginning

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2020 Goals recap

2021-01-27

I can’t believe that 2020 was what it was when I started to write the things I want to accomplish. As it turned out, the title “Get my shit together” (2020) was very accurate, even more than I would have imagined. Who am I kidding, it was fucking beyond my own universe. But let’s see the results of my 2020 goals:

Understand me

In December 2020 I had the first interaction with a Psychologist, which was a huge step for me. I’m waiting for the first “get to know each other” session, but my hopes are low to actually get a therapy based on this, as the waiting list is very long. But as I started, will continue.

Improve health

Family vacation

We were not really able to do any family vacation. First reason is that FaPi and I are not in a romantic relationship anymore, which shifted our focus a lot. And the other reason was Covid-19, which forced us to cancel all vacation plans. We spend a lot of time together in the house and in our garden, but it was no vacation where we actually where at a different place. But that was not a bad thing at all.

Get in contact with my family

I couldn’t manage this at all. I want to try this again this year. Get in contact with my aunt and grandmother. More contact with my parents. Any kind of contact with my brother.

Writing habit

The only thing I wrote was the list of goals for 2020, nothing more. This will stop with this new format.

Sell 10 Konekti subscriptions

We were not ableo to sell 10 Konekti subscriptions, but we were able to set the right direction for Synoa and for our product Konekti. I stronlgy believe that 2021 will be our year.

Read 1 x book

Instead of finishing the book “Neuromancer by William Gibson” in time (I didn’t even finish 1/3 of the book), I spend most my vacation to play the game “Cyberpunk 2077”. The book is awesome, I just didn’t invest time to actually finish it. Instead I was playing a lot of “Heros of the Storm” on my computer, even after I stopped smoking weed. This will also change this year. I want to finish the book.

Write 1 x song

I wasn’t able to create a song in 2020, I only started to look into rust-loop-drop almost exactly 1 year after I wrote “How to get started?”. But this year I will create at least one song that I enjoy, it might not be with rust-loop-drop.

Explore Machine Learning

I attended one workshop at CODAME “Make Art with Machine Learning” in which I learned some basics on the topic, but I didn’t dive deeper. I also bought the book “Practical Machine Learning in JavasSript” and I want to read it this year to get more into the topic.

First steps with a robot

Didn’t use my robots, will use them once my children are more chill with things. I guess then this will be super fun.

Use modV 3.0

In December 2020 I was able to finally switch to modV 3.0 (every other gig in 2020 was still using modV 2.0). But this was last minute, as only the very last gig (the New Years Eve Party together with 2xAA) was using modV 3.0. But I made it and I’m very happy.

Sam Wray and myself also made it a habbit to have a fixed modV pair-programming session every tuesday evening, to further improve and build modV. My dedication for modV is more strong than ever and I want to invest a lot of time to make it as perfect as it can be.

Become a better VJ

Run the “Visual and Light Workshop” at least 2 times

Thanks to Covid-19 all our plans to do the workshop in combination with gigs with LiveJS were doomed. The last possibility Sam Wray and myself had was to do a workshop for CODAME’s JOYNT Festival 2020. We had the honor to be selected for the festival and created a workshop dedicated to modV 3. The workshop was super cool, about 15 people came. We had a major problem during the workshop (some users were not able to use audio-routing inside of modV because of permission problems in macOS). We were not able to fix this during the workshop, but the next day we found the problem (permissions in Electron). But overall the workshop was super nice and we loved doing it.

So yeah that’s it for the recap, I’m not sure if I should create a list of goals for this year? But let’s see what my next log entry will bring…

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2020 overall recap

2021-02-04

Besides the goals of 2020 I had a major “theme” (if you want to call it like this: “Get my shit together”. I had no idea HOW hard this kicked in, but here comes a short summary:

The end of my romantic relationships means multiple things:

After all of this I tried to get more contact with AnFe, which was not successful at all. This made me super sad as first (as I’m still in love with her), but in came to another conclusion when I played Cyberpunk 2077 for 2 weeks by the end of 2020: In 2016 I made the decision to not fight for our relationship. The consenquence is that AnFe is in a new relationship and I can’t enforce that this can change. There is no save game I can load to alter my decision.

So today I’m happy that she is happy in her relationship. I have accepted that we will not have contact as close as we had it when we were in a romantic relationship. I will not limit myself into beliving that at some point in time we could be in a romantic relationship again. I will live my life and do the things that I love.

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First schickmalzwo session since 6 months

2021-02-06

Last year we were not able to setup any online version of our schickmalzwo sessions, as we were lacking any audio streaming server. On 2021-02-05 I finally managed to sit down and create such a server for us, so that we can practise again. Here are the details:

In the end it took us 1,5 h to set everything up, so around 22:30 on 2021-02-06 we had a 1 hour session. This was super nice and we can use this setup in the future. Hopefully next time with live streaming on twitch.tv/NERDDISCO.

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#anydayshaders with ISF Editor

2021-02-13

Last year I stared to write some shaders on shadertoy and then copied them over to editor.isf.video in order to parameterize them, but this year I will create all my shaders in the ISF Editor from the start. As I have no idea about the community on isf.video, I also want to share my shaders using #anydayshaders (thanks to ilityha for creating this ❤️), so my process will look something like this:

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RainbowGridWave

2021-02-14

Inspired by ilithya & Eliza after watching their curisouslyminded session 3 I wanted to use mod in GLSL to create some kind of grid in combination with noise. My resulting #anydayshaders is called RainbowGridWave and you can change all its parameters using the ISF Editor: https://editor.isf.video/shaders/602831b6df59c70014cdc55f

Video 1

RainbowGridWave / Video 1

Property Value
gridAmount 15
gridAmountX 1
gridAmountY 1
gridWaveAutomatic true
gridWaveFrequency -
gridWaveFrequencySpeed 0.5
gridWaveExtreme false

Video 2

RainbowGridWave / Video 2

Property Value
gridAmount 30
gridAmountX 1
gridAmountY 1
gridWaveAutomatic true
gridWaveFrequency -
gridWaveFrequencySpeed 0.43
gridWaveExtreme true

Video 3

RainbowGridWave / Video 3

Property Value
gridAmount 13.16
gridAmountX 2.6
gridAmountX 1
gridWaveAutomatic true
gridWaveFrequency -
gridWaveFrequencySpeed 0.19
gridWaveExtreme false

Video 4

RainbowGridWave / Video 4

Property Value
gridAmount 21.38
gridAmountX 2.6
gridAmountX 7.3
gridWaveAutomatic true
gridWaveFrequency -
gridWaveFrequencySpeed -1.16
gridWaveExtreme true

Video 5

RainbowGridWave / Video 5

I would like to get the same effect as you see in the first column, but on the whole screen. So I think my next shader will be using these parameters as a starting point.

Property Value
gridAmount 9.63
gridAmountX 64.8
gridAmountX 4.9
gridWaveAutomatic true
gridWaveFrequency -
gridWaveFrequencySpeed -0.45
gridWaveExtreme true

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schickmalzwo & Mc Proper on Twitch

2021-02-21

schickmalzwo & Mc Proper - Visuals

Exactly one year ago schickmalzwo hosted the dnb floor of an art event called Hybris, which took place in the old building (altes Jobcenter, Rodelberg) of Peng in Mainz, Germany. We had a massive line up and the party was amazing. Then Covid-19 kicked in and we had to cancel all further parties in Peng and in general.

In order to think about this awesome party and show everyone that the lockdown is already ongoing for one year, we wanted to have another dnb party close to this date. This is why schickmalzwo had a live stream yesterday night from 9 pm until 11 pm in collaboration with Mc Proper. As the lockdown is still ongoing, we had to come up with a setup to make all of this work.

The base setup (as we already tested this with the last schickmalzwo-session):

The difference now is that we also had to include Mc Proper:

With this basic setup, we were able to get the music in sync with the Mc and then with the visuals as the final result was streamed from my computer to twitch.tv/schickmalzwo. My desktop looked like this in the end:

Tim's setup for schickmalzwo & Mc Proper

And in order to communicate with the team, I also had Signal and Telegram open all the time. On another computer I had the stream open to also interact with the crowd.

The gig itself was super awesome, we only had some connectivity-problems between Mc Proper and the audio-server after about 1h. This resolved itself at some point, but I need to investigate why this was the case. I saw that butt was constantly loosing the connection to the Icecast-server. PaTa was not losing his connection, so I think this is not related to the server itself, but some local stuff from Mc Proper.

I was able to see this as I had a TeamViewer session open to Mc Proper’s pc, but when the problems came I closed the connection. Maybe this was related?

Anyway, what we did was awesome and I really want to do it again.

The final video is not released yet ;)

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Audio Reactive Shaders

2021-02-22

While running on Sunday I had the idea to write a new talk related to the stuff that I learned in the last 6 months: Audio reactive visualsations using shader.

Ideas

Description

By using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) we can create shaders in the browser that are executed directly on the GPU, which gives us the power to create high quality visualisations. In this talk we will cover the basics of shader programming and explore the different online communities (Shadertoy, isf.video, CodePen, Observable) around them to create our own shader. We then make use of ISF (Interactive Shader Format) to parameterize our shader and to be able to change it’s values without changing it’s code. The ISF shader can then be used in an Electron-based visualization environment to turn it’s parameters into audio reactive awesomeness. Wouldn’t it be nice to also have some live music served with the shader in the end? Lets find out.

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Spending time in Hamburg: Improving health + music skills

2021-03-06

Because of Covid-19 my social interaction with other people is very limited. I usually spend time only with my family as they live in the same house as I. In order to meet other people, they have to be strict in terms of contact with other people, as I otherwise fear to get infected.

One of these persons is my friend GrAd and I had the pleasure to visit him two times already:

I take vacation days for both Friday and Monday, as then the 540 km drive by car to Hamburg can be done easily and without any traffic jams.

When I’m with GrAd I always have a super awesome time because of various reasons:

Besides these there are also two other reasons that I want to dig deeper into: Health and Music.

Improving health

In order to keep fit, even when not leaving the flat because of Covid-19, GrAd has created fitness plan that can be executed alone. It consits of a simple warm-up and two workouts (full-body & abdominals + lower back muscles) for different parts of the body. Each workout takes roughly 14:05 minutes and consists of 7 different rounds (with a different exercise each round), which are repeated 3 times (= 3 cyrcles). Each round takes 20 seconds where I do as many of the exercise as I can. Between each round there are 10 seconds of rest and after a full cyrcle another 2 minutes.

When I’m done with this I also try (if the time is fine and I have enough energy), to do as many push-ups as possible in 2 mintues. This is already getting better (increased the amount from 25 to 40 in 2 months), but was very hard in the beginning as I was doing this wrong my whole life. GrAd showed me the real deal and it works out pretty good.

In the best case I would do such a workout 3 times a day (morning, noon, evening), but in practise I usually can do this once a day. It feels super awesome, I already see and feel the result after doing this for 2 months.

What I also adapted from GrAd is to reduce the consumption of white sugar to (almost) zero. (This was one of my goals last year anyway, but now I’m seeing more clearly how this is connected to my health and weight). I love it, I have even more energy now that I don’t consume sugar AND my teeth are in a better shape then ever before.

The last thing I adapted from GrAd is intermittent fasting, where you only eat in a specific time frame (for me it’s 8 hours) and don’t eat or drink (only water) anything. At first I was shocked about this, as I was used to eat at least 3 times a day. After a few days the feeling in the morning to eat something was gone, as in the end it was just a feeling and I was not really hungry. This has a huge impact on my weight (I already reduced it by 5 kg) and on my overall energy level. I can do more, my head is working way better and in combination with “no sugar” I have more power than ever before. From Monday to Friday I start the day with a tea (even when this is “not allowed”, but I’m not strict with the starter-drink, as this gives me enough power in the morning to actually wake up) and the first meal is lunch at 12:00 am. Then I can eat until 08:00 pm. On the weekend I start with a breakfast at between 8 and 10 am and stop eating between 4 and 6 pm.

When there is something special happening (like a party or something), then these rules don’t have to be applied, as I still want to have fun. But overall it makes sense to follow along.

Music skills

A long time ago (when I was at the age of 10) I started to play drums for a few years. I stopped when I started to study information science, I even sold my drums. A few years later I got an e-drum, but my dream always was to actually create my own music, not just play one instrument.

When doing shows as LiveJS we always do lights, visuals and music. One of our musicians is DESTROY WITH SCIENCE and he is using a lot of different synths in combination with rust-loop-drop (a software to control the synths without a GUI). Using synths and some custom software sounded like a good idea to me, so I started to buy some synths in 2020. By the start of this year I finally managed to actually use them in combination with loop drop together with GrAd. And it was a big pain to get anything working :D

It literally took us 2 days to get a basic setup running where everything was in sync with the MIDI clock (provided by RK-006), but in the end we were able to create some music.

Another big PLUS about this was that GrAd is already very experience in producing music, as he did this as a hobby a few years ago. So he could provide me with some basic knowledge:

After coming back from the first session with GrAd I created this at home:

NERDDISCO / Getting Started with Loop Drop - 1

NERDDISCO / Getting Started with Loop Drop - 2

NERDDISCO / Getting Started with Loop Drop - 3