For the theme of this issue, Birth, I was asked to illustrate an article by up-and-coming funny man Harry Vale that goes on to detail his experience of doing stand-up comedy for the first time:

It’s a torrid tale about losing my virginity, punctuated by the revelation that it was brutally robbed from me by my own father. There are gasps, groans, and then finally laughs. Worry not, dear reader, my anal virginity is still intact (and available for a modest fee); it was just the truly awful and hackneyed opening joke of my first ever stand-up comedy gig.

You wouldn’t guess it from the extremely high quality of the magazine, but it’s all self-financed and published by apparent geniuses Jon Bounds and Danny Smith who have, to my knowledge, never ventured into publishing territory. It very much fits in with the zine ethos, especially as they make a point to give each contributor as much freedom as possible and steer clear of advertisements.

Go grab a copy now!

They’re also looking for contributors for the next issue, so support your local publishing scene and get in touch.

Somewhere in late December 2008 I was frustrated with the apparent lack of a local hacking scene. Luckily a few other people felt the same and in January 2009 fizzPOP was formed.

I once had all the time and energy in the world to pump into helping to organise events such as the fizzPOP Howduino, a visit from Mitch Altman and, and Theremin Day, but unfortunately now I have very little time to dedicate to fizzPOP.

In short: I’m leaving fizzPOP

Although we’ve stressed that fizzPOP isn’t a group run by a single person over time a few key people have stepped up to take on extra responsibilities and have even organised their own events with us. If fizzPOP is to continue to exist and to grow into something more it’ll need more of these people who can maintain and build the community. Feel like you could help to build a hackersapce? Make yourself known to fizzPOP and get involved! I recently wrote a blog post detailing some of the areas that fizzPOP needs assistance in, but we’re open to all offers of help in any kind.

Just to clarify, my departure from fizzPOP as an organiser (I’ll still attend when I can) does not mean the end of it. It just means that the extra responsibilities that I’ve undertaken over the years will have to be covered by someone else.

GLI.TC/H is an international gathering of noise & new media practitioners in Chicago from September 29 thru October 03, 2010! GLI.TC/H is a physical and virtual assembly of artists, hackers, moshers, dirty mediators, noise makers, circuit benders, p/h/i/l/o/s/o/p/h/e/r/s, and those who find wonder in that which others call broken. GLI.TC/H seeks: Realtime + time-based performances (audio/video), utilizing broken/bent technologies/strategies. Workshops, sharing knowledge of hardware/software hacking, cracking, breaking, kludging, piracy, & tool building. Artworks and Projects, artware, videos, games, films, tapes, code, interventions, screen-captures, systems, websites & installations. Texts, lectures, essays, code, articles, & hypermedia.

I’m really excited to be attending the festival to meet other glitchers and hackers. If you’re in the Chicago area or otherwise just interested in keeping up with the festival I highly recommend keeping watch of the GLI.TC/H blog for info of events and exhibitions happening at the festival

The main events of the festival kick off on September 10th with the Film Night at The Edge and continue until September 12th with events such as zine printing workshop and a picnic in the park.

We’re also having ongoing exhibitions at Urban Outfitters (which opened tonight) and a Postcard Exhibition at The Framers, which opens tomorrow (September 3rd) at 7pm.

You should all go and support the local independent publishing scene and perhaps even start your very own zine!

August was a particularly quiet month whilst I sorted out many things, including redesigning my website. There are still a few pages to reformat, but if you notice anything wrong please let me know.

Lots of news coming soon!

Stenchival 2010 took place in Leicester on the 7th and 8th August. The festival was held at the Fabrika Independent Arts Centre in the heart of Leicester.

The first day saw us all at a workshop where we made our very own Atari Punk Console. At a past fizzPOP event Jimmie Rodgers brought a few of the kits to make these with him but unfortunatley I was spoilt for choice by all of the other kits and didn’t get to build one. The instructor for this workshop was Stu Smith, better known as ASMO (Anti Social Musik Order), who is a well known circuit bender from Leicester.

My soldering skills weren’t quite up to scratch and I even managed to work on the wrong side of the veroboard, but luckily a lot of help was at hand. After a few hours I produced this finished Atari Punk Console. Thanks to Circuit Ben for providing the box that I’ll soon fit the device into properly

The evening was filled with VJ performances from some very talented people. I’ll let the video do the talking!

The second day started with a VJ workshop, although it seemed less of a workshop and more of a skills and ideas exchange. Tony from The Lab provided quite a good in depth overview of VJing without using laptops, which seems to be the norm recently.

Sean Clark of Cuttlefish also showed how he VJs using Max/MSP. This really interested me as I’d used Pure Data (the open source equivalent) for a while and was interested in how I could use it in live performances.

Unforuntaely I was unable to stay for the final performances of the evening but Sean did suggest that we make a habit of meeting regularly to discsuss and share our VJing skills. He recently set up the Leicester AV group on Facebook, which I hope to attend as long as it doesn’t clash with GLI.TC/H

Overall I was really glad to have gone to Stench. Whereas my past work tended to lean towards traditional media my more recent output involves more performance and video and so learning from VJs and other performers will benefit me greatly!

The results of trying to take a screenshot using Shutter whilst spinning the desktop. See more on flickr.

Just from these tests I can see the opportunities that using video presents, especially when using audio. I can definitely see more of my work being like this

As you may have seen from my previous experiments in vector databending it’s totally possible to manipulate vector files. My original method for creating Dataface was to save each glyph in the Liberation font to an SVG file and then go through the process of glitching it for each file. Obviously this would’ve taken me a long time, hence why there was very little activity between my original announcement in January and when I started work on it again a few weeks ago.

At this time I thought about writing a script to do this for me. sed is a great command-line utility for Linux that essentially does the same as using find/replace on a character. As it’s command-line it means I can do a lot of automation with it. So, I wrote this simple script that attempted to solve the problem

#!/bin/bash
rand=$(($RANDOM % 9))
sed -i s/[0-9]/$rand/g fontfile.svg

The only problem was that it would replace all numbers in the file with whatever random value was chosen by $rand as the script was executed. Not only is this bad because it would result in a lot of strangely similar glyphs but also because it would modify the header data of the font file, thus rendering it unreadable. I soon remembered that recently the SVG Font specification was finished, which aided my cause by putting all of the glyphs in one big file, but I still couldn’t find a way to efficiently randomise values in the file.

Thankfully fizzPOP came to my rescue. I’m glad that hackerspaces have people with a range of abilities in hardware and software, as I was soon presented with a solution to my problem by GB. After a few revisions he created a script that would replace only specific values in the file and wold even let you specify how much it should be randomised. You can download the finished script and source files and have a go for yourself. Simplified instructions on compiling the script:

• Unzip the file in a clean folder. This will give you three files:Font_Sample_-_Liberation_Sans.svg, glitch.l and makefile
• Type “make” into the command line (without the quote)
• If you haven’t got make, type:

  flex -t glitch.l >glitch.c

  gcc -o glitch glitch.c

in either case, you will get a program called “glitch”.

Please note this has only been tested on Linux, requires Flex (available in the Ubuntu repository) and it is designed to work on SVG font files. I only know FontForge that is able to create these fonts files. To run the script do the following

./glitch 0.50 <fontfile.svg >outputfile.svg

That tells the script to glitch the file by 50%. I have noticed that sometimes you get errors if you put in 1.00 or more.

Once you have generated the file you can import it back into FontForge to save as a .ttf, .otf or whatever font type you choose!

(I still hate Comic Sans)

Here’s everyones favourite Comic Sans glitched at 50%

If you know your way around jpdftweak or other imposition software you can even combine it into a rather awesome poster!

Speaking of zines, I’m helping to organise the Birmingham Zine Festival that’ll be taking place in September. If you make zines you should get in contact through that website.