I feel that this residual prana, if it is fed by perpetual habit, seems to take a mind of it’s own. To call these energy ‘demons’ also helps me to de-identify with these energy and it help me evolve without feeling bad about myself. My resent explorations of Shamanism also brought these idea of entity that are external to my energetic body. Reading Impeccable warrior of light felt a bit weird at first. I wasn’t accustomed to the word demons and entity – for me it was all part of myself. Bu by the end I realized that there was a benefit to externalize these entity and my practice benefited a lot from that new perspective.

In short talking about my own created demons create an external idea that is easier to manage. The fact that they have a mind of themselve also help understand a lot of the pattern that are created. What feed these demons? Same as what feeds us, but also a lot of lighter and subtler elements.

Senses Kundalini & prana

In kundalini yoga, senses are a foundational structure of the whole system. Senses carries prana, receiving and sending prana. Because where the mind goes the prana goes, if your eyes are attache to an object, that object receive your prana, if you ears are bound to a certain sound, you prana flow toward the sound, if your taste buds are attached to salt and sugar then your energy goes toward that.

As an example, when you listen to a musician and your ears a delighted by the music, there is a thread that is connecting your sense of hearing, your prana and the prana that the musician receive. Thus the performer can offer more and a cycle is created. That is quite a positive use of senses, prana and creation for sure. Directing the sense help us directing our attention and our energy. But most of the time our senses are abused by the ever growing Multi media and multi senses attraction of our time.

Salt and sugar abuse are a good example of this abuse, as well as Movie and pornographic industry. Not to say that all media and food are bad, but the addiction to these create quite a lot of complication in the process of liberation.

So what is the link with demons ?

What I have seem is that these residual prana living on me, feed from my sense as well as my mind (which is a sense in the kundalini system anyway). A simple example would be that if I have the habit to indulge in food, then feeding the habit will make it stronger, until the habit becomes hard to deal with shear will. So why would these be called demons instead of bad habit? What I have observer often while offering healing session is that some part of the body store redisual prana. Once these area are released, there is a smell that come with it. It seems that the more ingrain the residual prana is the stinkier it gets. So these so called bad habit have become near physical entity living on the body and even having an odour. On another level I have also seen how the senses, mostly of sigh, could be taken over by these redisual energy. So how I use my sense would feed (or starve) my demons.

Every action, though, speech and use of our senses are accountable for where we want to go. All these action can feed our demons, or starve them. Even our though will affect our path, as well as other people around us. Senses are gateways so it’s an integral part of liberation.

So instead of blaming yourself, you can blame your bad habit, and see how the relation can transform. Feeling bad about myself never helped me bringing quality in my life – so changing my perspective on my bad habit, my little demons really helped me moving forward. I still have some demon laying around my life, some are still quite scary but some are ready to leave and I am sure somewhere my ego will miss them and feel a bit more alone, but more light will come in from that letting go!

Last week I went to do a presentation to a k-12 school here in Crawford Bay. Since I started learning processing I realized how helpful that could be for the new generation to learn an easy way to program. Learning processing (and programming in general) also merge all the mathematical knowledge you have, with a solid foundation in problem solving and computer usage. I feel that if programing was re-introduce in school, it should build on processing.

I started programming on vic-20 and never really wanted to learn programming language until I discovered Processing. So I tough that giving a presentation to a k12 school would be really interesting. Like many k-12 school in small villages, there is not many students, and keeping the school alive becomes quite a problem compare to urban schools. To remedy this, the director of the school, Dan Rude, and the teachers there decided to open up the doors for Mentors to come and help inspire the kids. I grabbed that opportunity to present Processing and Arduino, with a quick overview of pure:dyne and how can kids benefit from open source technologies.

I presented most of my project that I posted here on ponnuki, from the fish pond, to the spaceship game, to the video cam project to controling processing with a Nintendo DS (upcoming post about that) and creating a video animation with processing and using the arduino to do a laser show. I wanted to give an example of all the inputs that can be used in processing to give a solid foundation about all the possibilities that opens up when learning a programming language.

The video you see here is an integration of audio in processing using the minin library. As you can see the music is not too much in sync with the sketch ~ it’s probably due in part because of my computer power (yes I will get a more powerfull machine for your eyes pleasure in the spring) and also processing is not optimized for audio.

In the future for project that binds audio with visual I will research more about pureData feeding osc into processing, for that presentation I didn’t have much time to come up with something visually appealing. You can see that I added some Penrose system and snowflake (the green structure growing from the center), two example that are part of the main processing installation.

audio – processing integration from Geoffroy Tremblay on Vimeo.

It was great to see the kids enjoying the presentation, and I hope I will be able to mentor one or 2 of them in a video game/ multimedia creation next year! Meanwhile I continue my Processing quest!

As you know from previous posts, I built a prototype of the mixer with and Arduino Board ~ connecting to processing, hosted on a puredyne machine. This was all working fine and would have been good enough for my needs, but arduino send serial signlas over USB which isn’t understood by audio software. A driver needs to be built or a ‘host’ software needs to decode the serial and transmit midi. I could have used pureData or processing to be that host, but in the end it would only slow down the signals. So I needed to find a way to create midi usb device.

I found out that Doepfer (a German company that build Analogue Moduar synth (like the Dark energy that you can hear in few of my tracks) also sells DIY kits. One of their kit is called USB64 and it is a USB Midi controller card. In short you can build your own usb and/or midi controller with this card. But be warned it’s not for the beginner ~ it’s not an arduino type of DIY, you need some good thinking and some soldering skills.

The USB64 has,of course, 64 midi signals connections. These 64 connections are mapped on the bottom of the card in cluster of 10 pins, 2 of which are the 5volts and the ground. My first learning experience was to realized that all the singnals pins need to be connected to the ground or the 5 volts when not in use. So there was no shortcut to try out the card, I had to ground all these connection. With my really limited electronic knowledge I try to bundle wires all around the 10 connections with only massive failure. There was nothing to do ~ I would connect the card to the computer and there would be a constant stream of midi signals being sent to my computer – I had to resolve to soldering!

Ok I have’t solder in the last 20 years of my life – I am 31 – so last time was when I was 11. You can deduct from that my skill level. Luckily I had some spare boards around, one of them had some sort of bread board layout which helped a lot in the soldering of the board. I had to split the 8 cluster of 10 connection into 64 line of 3 connection (signal, 5v, ground). With a bit of thinkering and a load of led I ended up creating something that worked. I I knew how to draw schematic I would do it right now – but it’s also part of the fun of figuring out how to do it ;) If you need more info I can send you better picture of what I did.

So long story short – I had to create a boar in between my doepfer USB64 and the sliders and hub – I also had to sue jumper to ground all the unused connection and when all that was in place I could connect to Mixxx. To my great surprise, Mixxx detected the card properly and I could simply run the midi detection wizard to assign all the knobs and fader to the software interface!

You can see it all in action in this video (filmed with my new camera ~ enjoy the better sound and video quality!). My next step being to create a project box – or the body of the mixer to be able to carry around – which will be another great experience in the world of the unknown of building my own usb audio mixer ! Stay tuned !

I am using an eyetoy – the web cam for the playstation2 that I got on ebay for 99c, and running the project on pure:dyne. In order to use video on processing in linux, you need to use an extra video library gsvideo. It’s a really great library that work really well and that is really fast. I read previously that video on processing in linux could be hard – but it is really easy and fun.

Here is the code ~ it’s created half randomly testing rotation, pop and push matrix,a dding some structures in 3d:

import codeanticode.gsvideo.*;
GSCapture cam;
float a = 0;                 // the variable used for the rotation

void setup() {
  size(800, 600,P3D);
  cam = new GSCapture(this, 320, 240);
}

void draw() {
 background(0);
 camera(-1000+mouseX*6, -1000+mouseY*6, 800, 90.0, 50.0, 0.0,  0.0, 1.0, 0.0);                   // camera controled by the mouse

  if (cam.available() == true) {
    cam.read();
    filter(DILATE);  //some test on filters - I wasn't too sucessful yet
    translate(320,240);

    pushMatrix();                  // here is the construction of the
    rotateY(a*PI);                  // video - a bit a random trying to create shape and mouvements
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    image(cam, 0,0,320,240);
    image(cam, 320,240,20,40);
    image(cam, -620,-340,80,70);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    stroke(255,0,0);
    noFill();
    box(120);
    rotateX(PI/2);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);

    for (int i = 0; i < mouseY/20;  i++){
      image(cam, random(0,(width-164)),random(0,(height-48)),64,48);
    }
    popMatrix();
    pushMatrix();

    rotateY(a*PI+PI/2);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    rotateX(a*PI+PI/2);
    image(cam, -320,-240,320,240);
    rotate((-a));
    box(80);
    popMatrix();

    a = a+0.01;   // for the rotation
  }
}

And here is an output of the video. The movement is controled by the mouse

The ESI UL24 Xl is a really nicely built external sound card. To my greatest surprise it works out of the box with pure:dyne (I would assume it works out of the box with ubuntu in general or linux). What I was looking for is a usb powered sound card to use when I mix music ~ then I realized it has a S-pdif in and out – which is also on the VS-1880. I wasn’t sure it would work to bring digital in for linux. The analogue in work perfectly but I had to play around a little more to get the 24bit digital in. For some reason you have to lower your input volume to zero in alsa mixer to make it work. I

So in short – open terminal, type alsamixer then you will see all your input and output, move to your esi (that is automatically detected normally) then lower the volume of the input to 0. Fire up audacity or other recording software, select the card as an input- 24bit 44khz then hit record.

So now I can do a little spring clean up and empty all the recording I made during the winter. Beware it’s nothing final or anything. Just jaming around with my new tools – tenori-on, microkorg xl – minikp – dark energy and the great noise making ef-101! I am posting everything on soundcloud to test their system and might be putting all these audio clip together in some sort of an album to close that chapters and start creating new track!

Here you can listen to some of the track I created! happy listening!

Bhabhabha by damaru

Forest jam by damaru

Tenori MiniKp by damaru

The main part of the experiment was to link the mixer to output to the computer. The first layer is the physical knob, then the arduino chip then processing. For the processing – arduino communication there is already a library. You can load a firmware in arduino (firmata) that helps the communication. Then in processing you can load the arduino library. By the way, the default library you can download from arduino site has an error. The library is named Arduino.jar, which gives you an error if you try to load it. You have to rename it arduino.jar, without the capital in order to make it work. (using pure:dyne I got an error renaming the file, I had to rename it to something else first then to arduino.jar – the file system assuming that Arduino and arduino is the same thing it wouldn’t let me rename the file!)

Here is where you can get more information about the arduino processing http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Processing. Make sure to rename the library in processing ~ there was a problem at first with the arduino library having a capital letter at the beginning…

Once that is installed properly I tried an example program and then modified it to my need. I wanted to have a visual that would translate a better more the knob feeling. It’s also a very simple example of popMAtrix and pushMatrix and rotate function. Here the push and popMatrix are used to prevent all the knob to be affected by each other rotation – while it was kind of fun to rotate the whole canvas!

import processing.serial.*;
import cc.arduino.*;

Arduino arduino; // new arduino object

void setup() {
  size(470, 280);
  smooth();
  arduino = new Arduino(this, Arduino.list()[0], 57600);

  for (int i = 0; i <= 13; i++)
 {
    arduino.pinMode(i, Arduino.INPUT);
 }

}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  stroke(255);
  strokeWeight(10);
  noFill();

  for (int i = 0; i <= 5; i++) {  //cycling trough the 6 analogue input

    pushMatrix();

    translate(60+i*70, height/2);
    rotate(arduino.analogRead(i)/30); // Rotating with the analogue in

    ellipse(0,0,60,60);   // Creating the knob
    line (0,0,0,30);

    popMatrix();

  }
}

Here is a simple video demo of the mixer in action, next step is to try it out with puredata just for the fun of it and soon will be the test with the USB64! The Doepfer usb64 seemed to be quite a challenge at first (I haven't done soldering for years - I think the last time I did I was around 12 !!) but I finally got a hang of it ! Stay tune for part 3 of the DIY usb audio mixer!

We left our home in Riondel in mid afternoon to take the 2pm ferry. We drove to Kaslo (charming town) and decided to cut trough the mountain to get to New Denver. The road trough the mountain was really beautiful and few miles before getting to New Denver we saw a sign for an Historical village called Sandon. We decided to go visit that place to start our tourist vacation ;)

Rolling down the dirt road, I have to admit that there was a strange feeling ~ some sort of theatrical deja-vu where young people go visit a Ghost Village and get abducted by the entities residing in the village! I was wondering why I didn’t bring my tanto (short Japanese sword) with me ~ a man should never leave home without his blade… and other random stuff like that went trough my head. I have to admit that when we go there ~ it wasn’t that much reassuring.

It was a ghost town from a early village that seems really prolific from the gold rush. One of the first building was a brothel and there were 10 or 20 tramway lined up in the center of the village. You could feel the intensity of a village born from a gold rush – now dead and empty. There seems to be people still living in the village which added to the spookiness of the place.

Coming back from the village we went trough New Denver and ended up getting to Nakusp. So we got to our first hot spring. From the outside Nakusp hot spring is nothing impressive. I wasn’t to sure about visiting a commercial hot spring but I was positively surprise by the quality of the water and the nice view. We were also quite lucky to travel in the mid season (skiing season just finished few days ago) so the pool were empty. Going back to Nakusp ~ staying in a hotel on the lake enjoyable and simple.

Next day we wanted to visit Halcyon hot-spring, but on our way we realized that St-Leon hot spring was just up the road. We drove there, in a dirt road – we had to stop before getting to far because of too much snow. Walking for 20 minutes on the road then in the forest. At first glance the place is not too impressive – a little refuge built in a blue tarp remove a bit of the charm, but once we got in the water it felt like heaven. Hot spring bathing in the wood is one of the best experience ever. The St-Leon hot spring pool as been built in concrete (nothing professional I assure you) and circled with rock, there are 2 other pools on the side of the mountain that are more naturally built. The top one which is also the warmest one, is create in the cleavage of the rock, so you sit directly on a slanted boulder. It feels really good and again we had the place just for the 2 of us. We left when more people showed up ~ we also inquired about half way which was the next hot-spring on the map – but the road condition wasn’t good enough to get there, so we continued to Halcyon.

The Halcyon resort is a small size resort. We weren’t sure to stay there at first so we ate at their restaurant for lunch… and that was the deal breaker. The food there is really good and the water that they kept on serving was really nice. The hot-spring is known for it’s healing properties and is one of the only hot-spring that you can drink the water directly. We rented one of their luxurious little cabin spent the night there – enjoying the hot pools, in the end the food was the best attribute of the resort.

Leaving Halcyon, we went to visit Coyote hotspring which is located about 100 meters away from Halcyon. We didn’t realize it was that near until we got back to Halcyon trough a gravel road that was crossing Coyote. We couldn’t find where to go register or where the pool where – and couldn’t but feel a bit sorry for this nice holistic healing hot spring center that seemed to not get the attention it deserved.

So we continued out trip ~ Heading toward Revelstoke! The view was splendid on the road – and the ferry landing was so gorgeous! It felt like a hidden treasure all that beauty. Getting near Revelstoke we saw really nice canyon and couldn’t help but going for a small hike. To our surprise we saw a trail marking and then some rope tied to the cliff. Quite excited about that adventure we went down there to realize that it was a rock climbing heaven! It was so beautiful with the cliff right on the river – and some installation already install for rock climbing. It was really nice to see how clean the place was even if there seems to have a lot of rock climbing activity there.

Revelstoke was quite an highlight of the trip. The ski season just finished the town was really quiet and serene. From hostel to cafe and sushi restaurant – we stayed there for 2 days enjoying the place (and the water slides and rock climbing wall in the public swimming pool!!). After an inspiring yoga class at Tap Root yoga studio we continued our trip ~ not too sure what was next.

Our first stop was a < a href="http://www.northernlightswildlife.com/" > Northen light Wolf center ~ it was really interesting and I will talk more about it in a next blog post! But it really worth the while to stop by and say hi to these great people. It was really touching and a really good reminder about caring for the ecosystem that we live in.

Then we went toward golden – wanting to visit Radium and Fairmount hot spring but we ended up in White Swam hot-spring after a whole day of driving by. I guess we were a bit out of luck – but there was nothing notable in golden and other village. We also got turned off by Radium hot spring when we read it was pumped, chlorinated, heated, radio active water ~ that was too far from natural hot spring for us. Then Fairmount – there was supposed to be some free outside natural hot-spring – but it was dried out for some reason. And the whole Fairmount resort development seems also a bit too much for us. While traveling we came across a heard of Ram and stopping to take picture of them a man told us about the beauty of the Withe Swam hot spring.

So that is how we got to the last hot spring ~ around 7 at night, the sun was setting – the road condition was pretty good for a dirt road – but once we got there – Ho my God ! It was so great. Even if there were a lot of people in the pools (well 10 of us is what I consider a lot ;) it was so sweet. There was also a small river that flows by which add to the charm of the place! Sleeping in the van re ran back to the hot-spring first thing in the morning to warm up from the cool night.

We then drove back home, passing by Kimberly, a nice Mountain village – stop there for a morning burrito. To finally get back home to our beautiful cabin on the lake. That was a really nice trip ~ and I was really glad to stay local and just see what is happening around. The region around here is really magical and healing !

Again it’s not a complete game, just a learning tool or a proof of concept for a space shooter scrolling game. I was happy to create my first pixel art creation ~ the subject of the game, my spaceship ;). I used a processing library called gifAnimation which enable the use of animated gif. This give me some inspiration to create more games based on some gif sprite. Searching around the net I came accross this mini rpg sprite based game which is really fun and simple and also came across the pixel joint, a lair of pixel junkie artist that makes a lot of video game inspired graphic!

Explosion and laser beam was also something I explored in this project. You can fire the laser with the mouse click but shooting doesn’t do anything. You can even hold the mouse to hold the laser beam ~ again it doesn’t do anything ;). Explosion are also tricky because you want the ship to disappear and the action to stop yet you don’t want the main draw loop to stop. The explosion I ended up doing is really basic and lack refinement, but serves it’s purpose for now.

Also to simplify the creation of the floor and the celling I used a Perlin noise generator that create a semi random value that create a natural behavior to the randomness.So no more talk for now and play the game – there is no lives or score or counter of any sorts which remove any competition ;) Click here to play the game!

Just a simple recap about China – a communist country, that has a lot of business ties with the rest of the world. Keep in mind that China is a country, but also a huge company, any other company that China acquires becomes part of the China company, coined as China inc by Ted Fishhman . The big merger from few year ago, where times, warner bros, aol and other major company merged to become huge entity was probably brought about from China inc starting to buy many company. With it’s huge buying power, mergin many company together makes a lot of sense and create a better control over productivity and media. As you know China is also manufacturing everything we purchase, not to mention a lot of the food too.

So in short, China is the Pimp, all the other business are the hoes, Google hoes doesn’t like the pimp to play in her panties when she is not with other client, the hoe complaint ‘hey you pimp, don’t like you anymore; I quit being your hoe (with a lot more swear)’ then go daddy hoe sees google hoe leaving China pimp and say the same, ‘we hoes, stand together, and we leave you mister pimp (with a lot more swear to it too)’. But which pimp will these company will get cover under ? The US pimp ? Well, sorry the US pimp is waging war all over the place, no time to protect more hoe under it’s umbrella!

What is hard to foresee is what happen if the pimp gets mad. China is already in control of most of the world economic. As long as we keep on consuming and use chinese owned business China will be happy. Once we start protesting against China, the country that feeds all our need and desire, that could start something nasty. I find it quite cute how the United State pretend to be the world dominant power – Chinese and asia country has thousands of year of wisdom about war and strategy, they can wait while the new comer run out of breath and just buy them out. ‘Ho poor USA here let me buy you out – don’t worry it won’t hurt’.

Anyway – I have a feeling that if these event start a wave that would become the third world war, it will be a lot different type of war. China, even if they seems barbarous with what they did to Tibet, has a lot more wisdom about war than USA or even Great Britain – or probably any other country in this world. It wouldn’t take much for them to choose to dominate the world ~ and I guess it’s already too late – better start learning chinese soon!