Top: Eva Hesse, Metronomic Irregularity II, 1966
Painted wood, Sculp-Metal, and cotton-covered wire 121.9 x 609.6 cm; each panel 121.9 cm (materials via)
Bottom: IBM "plugboard" accounting machine, circa 1948, photo via Ken Shirriff
Previous iteration of this pun (Pinterest scraped my sharpened image of the Hesse piece -- which I scraped from "the internet" back in the day -- the difference being I didn't lock the image behind a subscription wall)
Actrons posted a critique of Richard Stallman that manages not to say what he objects to about Stallman or what he believes in opposition to Stallman.
The subject appears to be a large schism in Linux over the GNU public license. Actrons' evidence that Stallman is in the wrong appears to be that Stallman was inordinately cranky in a YouTube interview.
From Wikipedia and hints of content in Actrons' post, this apparently relates to mudslinging between "open source" and "free software" advocates over the license. Somehow the pendulum has swung and the free software group (Stallman) is seen as obstructionist and capitalist and the open sourcers are somehow not capitalist. Last I read about this, open source was a corrupted version of free software ideals because it allowed a proprietary system to borrow what it needed from unrestricted source code without giving anything back. Now it appears the GPL is impeding the open sourcers from doing something they want to do. Just thinking aloud -- more study is obviously required.
Actrons has done a good deed by offering a modified Windows 10 that doesn't report all your home activities back to the mothership. No link, since Actrons isn't linking to it from his blog -- spread by word of mouth, i.e,, bulletin board (hat tip rene)
"Dance Pastiche" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]
One four bar sequence follows rapidly on another four bar sequence...
Composed on the Elektron Octatrack with some additional mixing in Tracktion's Waveform DAW, running on Unbuntu Studio. A final gain boost was done in Ardour using the threshold control in LSP's stereo limiter plugin.
This Octatrack has a growing .wav collection of Dance Sounds From The Last 20 Years (40 if you count one much-recycled breakbeat), tossed into this track like fruit salad. However, the "hook" comes from Loopmasters, which provided a sample pack for the Octatrack, about 5 years ago. Possibly that counts as vintage now.
Ken Shirriff notes a bit of corporate self-puffery by Steve Jobs, back in '05, regarding the development of the Macintosh computer.
Jobs claims the first Macs had multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts because of a calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college.
Shirriff reminds us that the Xerox Alto computer, which Jobs saw in the late '70s, had these features.
Here's a detail of Shirriff's photo of the Alto he's been restoring, with Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford, where the "calligraphy" brag originated, typed in multiple, proportionally spaced fonts:
And Shirriff's detail from the above photo:
In fairness to Jobs, Shirriff adds that "[o]f course, Steve Jobs deserves great credit for making desktop publishing common and affordable with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, something Xerox failed to do with the Xerox Star, an expensive ($75,000) system that commercialized the Alto's technology."
