whowatcheswho or German police uses private flats for videosurveillance

Whowatcheswho is a title of an installtion I show in my upcomming exhibition but reality beats art again: The German conservative newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt has an article about the local police who uses private flats in the neigbourhood Schanze (Schanzenviertel) for videosurveillance. Schanzenviertel used to be a creative neighbourhood in the 80s but lost it appeal due to recent gentrification. The police say they need to observe some of the new upperclass-shops to prevent further vandalism and decide to ask around if they can use private flats.

The German article even has a poll on videosurveillance without notice.

microblog at Twitter

You can now chase me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/herrsteiner

Evolver editor for Linux

Alex Norman started an open source editor for the Dave Smith Instruments Evolver. So far it works with the monoversions only but maybe you can jump into that project and code support for Polyevolver? Read more at

http://www.x37v.info/projects/evolver_editor/

Low latency audio with Linux on Acer Revo

I am preparing the hard and software for my forthcomming exhibition with Urban Units. Some computers received an major os update and I prepared our new Acer Revo (We are all Revo) to run well with Linux too. But it took me a while to get it running well with low latency audio, first it seems that the Revo couldn't run audio without xruns at all. I tried several distros like Ubuntu Studio, Debian and Fedora Planet CCRMA, compiled my own low latency kernel but no avail, it wont work. I was about to blame the NVidia closed source drivers, but wanted to run on that computer to benifit from the hardware.

Finally I discoverd the reason, it was actually the wireless driver which disturbed the sound. When I switched it off, it runs very well with the build in soundcard and the binary NVidia drivers. No interrupts anymore, even on heavy load plus OpenGL graphics.

Marije Baalman was in the simular situation and descriped her adventures on her blog:

http://www.nescivi.nl/?p=111

This German discription helped me to get started because its a while ago since I compiled a whole kernel on my own:

http://www.ubuntufreunde.de/forum/p189/vanilla_kernel_mit_realtime_preemption_rt_patch.html?highlight=preemption#post189

DIY modular synthesizer from Hamburg

Found an interesting blog on an DIY modular synth, also located in Hamburg. Not much information but nice sounds:

http://elektrolandmusik.blogspot.com

PPG at Myspace

PPG founder Wolfgang Palm has now an official site at Myspace and runs an interesting blog about the history of his company and his synthesizers.

http://www.myspace.com/wolfgangpalm

Interesting are also the comments to the blog providing even more insider knowledge.

Tribute to Geisterfahrer at Myspace

On Murdochspace are now some tracks from the 2006 tribute CD to the Hamburg elektropunk pioneers Geisterfahrer available for your listening pleasure:

http://www.myspace.com/hierkommtderleisetod

For instance the track Android I submitted as Notstandskomitee