Saving webcam images from a website?!

Saving webcam images from a website to do kiln logging, using a bash script on your Mac (or other UNIX based systems).

My wife is an artist and uses several large kilns in her studio. As the studio is not next to our house, she needed to get over to the studio every time she wanted to check the status and or temperature of the firing program of the kilns. So to spend less time and energy on traveling back and forth, I got my wife a webcam and programmed it to send photos of the digital kiln controller to her website. So now she has a kilncam 🙂

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Use the Wii Nunchuck as a MIDI controller

Some weeks ago Wolfgang Gaube (a composer, musician and and sound designer) wrote me an email asking me, because I had some experience with the Wii and MIDI, whether it would be possible to use the Wii Nunchuck as a MIDI controller (hardware or software which generates and transmits MIDI data to MIDI-enabled devices). That’s how our cooperation started, we exchanged gear and setup details and started to work. Some research, scripting, trail and error resulted in a slick script for GlovePie…

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Guitar Hero World Tour Drums to MIDI

Last month I received a couple of e-mails from readers asking me whether I had a script to hook up their Guitar Hero World Tour Drums (GHWT) to MIDI. Although willing to help, I wasn’t able to pull this one of myself as I don’t own (such) a drum kit. So I wrote them back that I was willing to help, but that I needed their help as well. Happily someone called Fonz replied to my request, willing to help me write a script. So I wrote several scripts and Fonz would test the scripts whether they were working or not. This collaboration payed of… Although the scripts are not completely finished (work in progress), the results are MIDI recordable :-))

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Using the KORG nanoKONTROL 2 in Qtractor

As a musician and part time audio engineer I recently bought myself a bright white KORG nanoKONTROL 2 USB controller as an addition to my mobile Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) setup. Setting it up and running it within OSX went smoothly, but I prefer Ubuntu Studio as Qtractor is my DAW of choice. So I connected the nanoKONTROL to Qtractor using Jack. I clearly saw midi events coming in, but nothing happened. This is where I started my search for enabling the nanoKONTROL in Qtractor. After reading many articles and blogs (special thanks to Jeremy!) I was able to reconstruct a working Qtractor control file (a .qtc file :-).

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