I first noticed the squirrel when I heard a magpie squawking. I followed her gaze round a parked car and saw a squirrel in the road.
He was gasping for breath and leaking blood. 2 cars went over but moved to avoid him. Sam had joined me by then and we both went over. I felt I needed to kill him, so I put my heel over his head and started pressing down. He writhed as he felt my shoe, and in that split second I realised I was going far too slowly. I pushed down fast and killed him. Then I swept him into the gutter with my shoe. Sam picked him up and dropped him over the fence into the communal park.
Writing this now is bringing back that shaking feeling. Immediately afterwards I felt really shaky and needed to spend some time meditating. I felt instinctively the need to end his suffering, but also felt that it was a terrible thing to do.
That evening we went back and made a little ceremony and buried him with some bits of fruits and nuts. We played him a song and I thought of Hafiz poems. I felt bad about kicking him out of the road. I’m glad Sam was there to give him some more respect.
My feelings about this are tied up with my belief that life is precious, that I respect life and death, and that because I respect life I don’t want to end it.
Killing the squirrel was not easy. My feelings validate my ideas about veganism in a vivid way. I don’t want to kill animals unnecessarily.
these have been in the wild for a while now, but I thought I’d write it up in a spare moment.
I like the idea of squirreling away useful or tasty things in London. So I made some urban stash boxes.
First I found the most supreme tupperware available – lock and lock boxes. These are so good because they have a seal that works, and they are bendy (not brittle). Amazing it took us this long.
Then add the magnets…
…by taping them on with gaffer tape (I couldn’t find glue that was strong enough to hold them on, and flexible enough to deal with the bendy boxes)
Then sand (important or the paint will chip off too easily) and spray the whole thing lamppost grey – to fit in with the urban environment
I’ll post some photos of them in the wild. People just do not see them – they are very safe!
I got my wiimote to connect to linux yesterday!
linux
- compiling the bluetooth network support as modules. I needed bluetooth, rfcomm, hidp and l2cap. I’m using a thinkpad t42 with builtin bluetooth. The bluetooth adapter is connected to the usb bus, so I also needed hci_usb.
- installed bluez-utils, then with the wiimote on and in discovery mode run ‘hcitool scan’; finds the Nintendo wiimote!
ping:555:$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:0A:3A:6B:BD:71 n/a
00:14:51:8C:C4:78 core
00:19:63:1B:15:2F Me
00:19:1D:30:06:CE Nintendo RVL-CNT-01
pure data
Jack + pd + wiimote + freewheeling = remote controlled looping!
Then I started freewheeling and connected that to pd using jack. I controlled the freewheeling overdub button with pd to test and it all works! So that is proof of concept of a wiimote controlled loop setup.
future…
- I’m going to hack up volume control with the wiimote over the weekend
- I want to control master out granular filter
- I want to find out is whether I can get freewheeling to give me status (maybe as a midi message or unix socket) back to PD so I can control the blue lights on the wii to give me status (like if overdub mode is on). I imagine that would be cool for any control surface.
are microphones you put in contact with a vibrating surface to pick up the sounds. Some examples are
a contact microphone is a piezo transducer. They can be plugged straight into guitar pedals and amplifiers, mixers and such, so they are really easy to use.
They are very cheap, around 70p.
Electronic stores like maplin (link to product page), farnell, rs etc sell them.
They come in different sizes with different resonant frequencies, so get a few and try them all out for your application.
- remove the original wires
- lightly sand the gold part so it holds the glue better
- resolder some new wires (about 2m long) in such a way so I can glue them down firmly
- use an epoxy resin to hold the wires (strain relief)
- solder a 1/4″ mono jack plug on the other end.
there are lots of ways, but a really good one is to use magnets. These can then hold the mic tightly to a surface, but allow easy repositioning. They make very different sounds depending on where they are placed.
http://www.muzikaktiv.com/contactmics.html
