School is out so I have a bit more time on my hands now. I've been slacking in my own field as my time has been consumed by random mexican studies and other stuff. To make up for that I started experimenting with Equalizer, and today I managed to get a simple OpenGL-thing rolling.

See the video. It's dead simple and currently running on my Asus eee 1000HE (hence the slowness!), but it could easily be running on 4 separate computers connected to projectors (for instance).

School started two weeks ago. Took way too many courses about Mexican history, political situation, art, etc.. and one photography course from Diseño Gráfico. With all the web-stuff and artsy-mlab-stuff I'm really keeping myself busy. I guess I'll just flunk a few of the courses since I really don't need the credits.

Yesterday I was walking around my hood Colinas del Sur and noticed how here grey can be counted as a color! It really stands out among the violet, pink and green houses! Itä-Pasila would be a truly unique barrio here.

Next week: salsa lessons + hiking up a mountain

I'm starting to feel old. Not physically, but mentally. Maybe it's the fact that I'm probably among the oldes alumnos in the school. Anyway wednesday was my birthday and I got cake! Actually two. The first was bought by my nice spanish teacher, who also made the class sing mañanitas for me ("happy birthday"-type singsongs). The problem was that we couldn't finish it during class and I had to carry it around the uni. Fortunately the people at the international office accepted it as a donation. The second cake came from my mexican family mom here. Also very tasty.

Yesterday, after a visit to Teotihuacan, we went to Condesa to celebrate. Was fun, but ate too many tacos.

After around three weeks here, I feel confident to say that all the food I've had in Finland under the adjective "Mexican" is a lie. I knew it wasn't correct, but had no idea it would be this far off..

First I want to introduce the most important food for me so far: tacos. Especially Tacos al pastor, which could somehow be described as a delicious kebab (real - Turkish, not Finnish) meets Mexican spices and other ingredients, such as Tortillas. Normally you savour them with a selection of different salsas, lime, etc.

Then a few quick fixes:

• the tortillas we have in Finland (and presumably the rest of the Western World) are arab tortillas Locals here are not as big, but there are arab versions available if you want (this also explains why they are common in the east).
• fajitas are a joke.. original meaning here is the pieces of meat that don't get used. Not a food here.
• burritos are not Mexican. Invented in the U.S. (perhaps by Mexican immigrates).
• quesadillas do exist. They are tortillas filled with cheese and other ingredients.
• nachos also exits, but I haven't yet encountered nacho plates that they serve in "Mexican" restaurants outside MX.

Of course México is a huge country (compare to central Europe) and I haven't been outside D.F. yet. I might have more complaining to do once I've visited other places as well :)

Took a turibus to see the city, got a few museums on my todo-list, ate in an expensive restaurant (was 12e with a drink), learned more spanish, started coding with clutter to do a project of sorts, etc.

just bought a movie ticket for a movie I don't know in english and can't remember the spanish name anymore :). It'll be spoken in english with spanish subtitles, so it won't be that stressful. Was $49 - expensive for locals, 1/3 the price in Finland (which is also expensive for locals).

Also bough a cafe mocha-frappe-ice-with-cream-on-the-top-"coffee". Was $48...

the movie was "persecución inminente" (crossing over) and i'd give it an eight out of ten (i.e quite good). the theaters here don't have marked seats so you can just pick one. in my five'o'clock show there were about five people, so there's plenty of room..

last night was my first tacos al pastor -experience. served as a nice, more light replacement for "kännipitsa" after a night out with the frida compañeros. now suffering the aftereffects of a small hangover combined with the ~2400m altitude.

Need to write these down somewhere... random notes and experiences from the past days:

• saw a neongreen headed punk dude with a face painted in white riging a unicycle in zona rosa ("downtown") pie a random gigolo bloke. everyone thought it was hilarious except the gigolo (who did not catch the punk). if in downtown D.F. and you see a guy riding a unicycle and carrying a pie, procede with caution..

• finnish phones do not work here directamente. i guess there are no cooperation plans with the networks. even after you buy a ''telcel'' chip (i.e. SIM, prepaid) you'll need to "register" your phone. for that you need your new number and identification (copy of passport was enough in my case). only one place does this, and that is in Paseo de la Reforma #222.

Arrived to México yesterday. Instead of the requested family accommodation I got placed into a hostel. Not a major drawback.. location is ok and the room is nice. First drawback was that my phone does not seem to work here.. I guess that's the perfect "excuse" to buy that Android phone that I've been thinking about.

First classes of Spanish are behind me. Nice stuff. I'm placed in the beginner B group, but I'm sure I'll be promoted in a few days :)

And the price level! This is one of the cheapest places I've been to. Prices so far: beer $12, bus $2-4, pastries from bakery ~$15, bottle of juice from store $6 (prices in pesos, not dollars. 1€ ~= $19).

México greeted me with a nice hail shower (el granizo). I'm sure the taxi car has some permanent marks of it.

blogging from iceland during the Raflost festival. Reykjavik is cool (in both senses of the word). We're building artsy stuff with people from very different backgrounds. It's fun and a valuable experience. You can't get much further than putting dancers and nerds work on the same project :)

I'm now following a lecture. Can't stop playing with processing...

ok. so. update. i was accepted to study at the university iberoamericana in mexico city next autumn. i'm signed in as a graphical design student even though my "application" mentioned interest areas as industrial and spacial design.. doesn't really matter - i guess i can move rather freely between departments.

the bigger issue is the need to learn spanish in advance. i was planning on taking a course in spain during the summer, but many people directed me to a more better approach of taking a course before the school starts in mexico city, so now i'm hunting for a course there. at least i'll save the airline tickets and won't pollute, but i would've wanted to visit spain as well.. some day..

in addition to this i needed to buy myself a laptop since the macbook pro i'm now using is from my work. so i got myself a eee 1000he.

only comes with XP, so the first things after i got the wireless up was a visit to www.getfirefox.com and then www.ubuntu.com. the new 9.04 netmix runs really nicely here.

the size, keyboard and battery life are really nice. flash is such a resource hog that some more highres flash sites are slow. otherwise all seems ok. the price is less than 400e so i don't have to be extra careful with it either (good thing in mexico city..).

the idea to buy this i got after our lovely visit to berlin with aino. almost bought a samsung x360 instead, but then came to my senses.. macs are good too, but something is driving me away from them.. maybe it's the fact that i have deal with them everyday in work/school. anyway berlin was excellent. i'll have to write a post on it once i have time to implement map embedding in this blog..

I'm just taking the realtime visuals workshop here in TaiK and while playing around with Isadora (the app we're using) I started wondering if there's something for Gstreamer that does the same.

Live Cinema is basically about modifying video clips and effects in real time. A lot of these apps rely on sets of patches (another example would be puredata), which usually are a set of components relying and transforming the data before it ends up on the screen.

Gstreamer does this on the low-level. You can do these "patches" even directly through the command line. These include effects. I figured there has to be a gst app for these things, but there isn't.. the only one I found was Gstreamer Editor).

I think it would be cool to create one. This could also result in a lot of new effects available for gst. Perhaps one could use Clutter for the UI :).

So the Helsinki Medialab demoday came and went. It was great. Again a chance to see loads of mlabbers in one place and a variety of inspiring projects.

This time I had something to show as well. A simple idea based on photo compositions. In short I created scripts that downloaded all the mlabber photos from the net, analyzed them and created copies of them by composing all the images together. Then I created a Processing visualization using some of the OpenGL stuff it provides. Below is my image composed.

I also wanted to play around with electronics. Had a very hard time trying to think of a clever way of using them with this composition project and in the end didn't come up with one. Instead decided to create a simple UI to the visualization.

The end result was the magical milk can. Rotating the can controls the rotation of the images, moving your hand towards the bottom of the can makes the images fly faster. Simple, useless, confusing but a lot of fun to create and use.

Interface Design with Electronics is one of the best workshops Mlab offers. During a five day period students get a very hands-on experience with Basic stamp microcontrollers, various sensors and other electronic stuff. As always the workshop ends with a group project.

We did "Mothman", a strange audio-visual "installation" that reacts to ambient light and distance from viewer. We used Pure data, Processing and Basic Stamp with an ultrasound and light sensors. It was a lot of fun. Now I'm trying to come up with a new project idea that would involve sensors..

Get the code and graphics here. Sound excluded due to big size. For a glimpse see the presentation we held.

Long time since last post.. things have accumulated in such fashion that I'll have to do this one braindump.

First off if someone was wondering the weird Turkish pages that replaced all index-pages on sokkelo, the reason was that our webhosting provider was hacked by some Turkish script-kiddies (damn kids). Apparently they got in via a hole in their software (not a direct attack against sokkelo). Luckily only index-files needed replacing.

Secondly I've posted my first processing experiments here in case someone is interested. The sketch in question takes photos via the webcam and allows you to draw over them with a laser pointer (or mouse, if you can't project the image anywhere). Kinda works like the Graffiti Research Labs Laser Tag system except we don't do perspective correction and they don't do photos. The thing was used in our official MLAB-party that kicks off our studies in HelsinkiMediaLab. Our Flickr MLAB-feed is now cluttered with "art" created by people at the party (we had automatic flickr uploading through a python script).

Here's one work just as an example. Download the sketch here. Let's say it's licensed under GPL.