Posts Tagged ‘music’
nerd nite 19: masheeeens
Masheeeens, more commonly called ‘machines’, are widely used these days, in everything from this to, well, that.
Our three speakers will amaze and enthrall on subjects related to these remarkable man-made objects, on Monday November 18th, at the Hotel Bristol, 6pm*.
As always, nerd nite is a FREE event (with 2 for 1 meal specials, hooray!), so bring yourself, your loved ones and your nemeses.
See you there!
Note: speakers are not necessarily listed in order of appearance.
—–
As always, we want to hear from you if you would like to speak, hear a talk on a specific subject, or volunteer someone to speak.
* Speakers start at 6:30pm, but beware trying to find a table/seating if you cut it too fine!
—–
Click to enlarge to full, printable size (for your office, school etc
Sticky Buds And Bootsectors
Adam ‘metlstorm’ Boileau
Just over 25 years ago, the most successful DOS era-virus started its rampage around the world’s IBM PC XTs via 5.25″ floppy disks. Stoned, the classic boot-sector infector virus, went global; shipping from the factory on Seagate hard disks as late as 2007, but from humble beginnings – right here on the corner of Cuba and Manners. This is the story of Stoned; perhaps Wellington’s most successful tech startup.
Bio: Adam ‘metlstorm’ Boileau is a security consultant with Insomnia Security, organiser of Kiwicon, and news pundit on award-winning podcast Risky.biz. In his spare time he owns and operates a unix beard.
—–
3d printing a 3d printer
Tim Rastall
3D Printing: You can print Guns (only a darwin award candidate would use). You can Print busts of Master Yoda. What the hell else is it good for? Well, it’s pretty good if you like designing and building 3d printers.
Tim Rastall is a Wellington based project manager, parent and tinkerer, he’s also got a bit of 3d printer obsession….. OK a lot of a 3d printer obsession. A year an a half ago, for reasons that are now quite vague, Tim embarked on a project to build a 3d printer. 6 months later he had one. Sadly it wasn’t quite as awesome as he expected, so he started making some upgrades. A Year later, he’s still making changes to this ever evolving device that prints it’s own upgrades. What’s more, along the way, Tim learned enough to start designing a new printer, using the original to produce parts for it’s successor.
Tim is going to bring one of his current printer projects in for a show and tell, and will talk about the thriving international community of makers contributing to the rapid evolution of open source 3d printing technology and provide some idle speculation on what the likely developments in the field will be over the next few years.
—–
The Art of Looping
Jacob Lister
Since the age of recorded music began there’s been the possibility of the loop – taking a slice of recorded sound and playing it back in repetition alongside and in time with the current performance. Loops can be built up layer upon layer to create a thick chorus of sound, from either a single instrument, or one person playing multiple different instruments.
The first modern loopers as we know them started appearing in the 1960s and 70s; magnetic tape recorders were modified to place record and playback heads a distance apart, with recording tape then literally ‘looped’ around reels. Nowadays the job is done with electronics, in stomp-box effects sitting at a musician’s feet, or with software running on laptop computers.
Jacob has been looping for years, and while not writing software for a livelihood, hacks away at his own software-based looper which runs on the linux operating system, and strums, picks, thrashes and shreds away on his various guitars. For nerd nite, he’ll explain and demonstrate the basics of looping in its various forms.
Posted in nerdnite wellington | 
Tags: 3d printing, adam boileau, IBM, jacob lister, looping, maker, music, PC, stoned, synthesier, tim rastall, virus | 
1 Comment »
nerdnite wellington 4: of sheep, art, sci-fi and music (or, all the good things)
UPDATE: videos available here
28 February at (new venue!) Bodega in Wellington
We’re back for another evening of geekery!
Nerdnite Wellington #4 – Of sheep, art, sci-fi, and music (or, all the good things)
When: Monday 28 February 2011, from 6pm ’til we’re thrown out
Where: New awesome venue! Bodega at 101 Ghuznee St.wendy
Sign up: Facebook page or @ us on Twitter if you can make it.
As if you needed any further incentive to refuse all other invitations to be doing something on Feb 28th, we’re extremely proud and happy to be announcing our speaker line-up for the night. And wow, but it’s a stunning one.
In a very particular order, then, may we introduce our speakers:
The hardest job in the world and how it got easier
Wendy Allison
Whether we like to admit it or not, New Zealand’s culture was founded on the back of the sheep. These days, even though they still outnumber us ten to one, you’d be hard pressed to find more than one in ten Kiwis that has actually touched a sheep, despite what the Aussies might tell you. Yet there are still people out there who make their living manhandling woolly critters to divest them of their supposedly obsolete fibre. And the burning question in everyone’s mind is “WHY?” In an attempt to answer that question, Wendy Allison will take you through historical and modern developments in sheep shearing technology and explain what manual labourers have to do with high-tech geekery.
Wendy could be described in a lot of ways and has done a lot of things due to a tendency towards being a hedonistic experience junkie. She has been known to shear the occasional sheep.
The secret life of graff
Jan Thomas
Graffiti is highly present in our modern cities and lives, design, fashion etc, but there are many aspects of graffiti that the average citizen doesn’t know about – which is what Jan shed some light on. His talk will cover subjects such as the type of people that do graffiti, what their lives are like, how the graff community works, the legal side of things and the de facto omerta (code of honour) that exists among graff peoples.
Jan’s day job involves being a Project Manager/Business Analyst for web companies, while his night job involves, well, all sortsa interesting things. Also, he’s German: a fact about which he’s got used to being consistently teased.
The Tea Hypothesis
Geoff Palmer
Geoff will consider the hypothesis that “If programmers are devices for converting coffee into code, then writers are devices for converting tea into text”. Using his latest book as an example – Too Many Zeros, published by Penguin, January 31 – he will present detailed data on the process and include a number of escritorial insights for the algorithmically inclined.
Geoff Palmer is a freelance computer consultant and Qantas Media Award winning technology writer based in Wellington. You’ll find him in the pages of NZ PC World, blogging as Tux Love on their website, and in Wikipedia masquerading as a former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
A Succession of Repetitive Beats: The history and culture of electronic music
Will Marshall
Electronic music has been around since the early 1900s, and has become in a variety of forms the dominant type of music produced today. Will will (heh) discuss some of the technology important to the development of modern electronic music, the basics of rave/festival culture, the relationship between DJs and Producers, and the history and musicology of modern electronic music.
Will is a psybreaks and tech-funk DJ, a producer, a festival organiser and stealth raver. He’s a member of Enspiral.com and has been known to write software for money.
——————-
Remember, all, we have a BRAND NEW venue! With space not only for your friends, families, enemies, favourite ETs and other animals, but for your kitchen sink, too! (Although that last is not an absolute requirement, of course).
And, because there is such a thing as goodness in the world, the event’s still free. Come drink with us!
Or, in the words of the unofficial nerdnite tagline, “It’s like the Discovery Channel…with beer!”
Have questions? Get in touch with us on Twitter or fill out the Contact form and our nerd monkeys will pound on a keyboard and get back to you.
Posted in nerdnite wellington |
Tags: art, electronica, Geoff Palmer, graff, graffiti, jan thomas, music, nerdnite wellington, nerdnitewell, publishing, sci-fi, shearing, sheep, wendy allison, Will Marshall |
Comments Closed