IDEA MACHINE FACTORY.

My name is Antony. I'm 21. I originated in Chesterfield, now I am somewhere else. I study Civil Engineering. Science is cool. Currently listening to: Alexisonfire, Boards of Canada, Every Time I Die, Mount Kimbie, El-P, Glassjaw, Nosaj Thing, Radiohead, Aesop Rock, Moneen, Sunny Day Real Estate, Aphex Twin, Atmosphere, The Strokes, Million Dead, Lapalux, Forss, The Mars Volta. The TV I watch: Breaking Bad, Wilfred, Drawn Together, Dexter, The Simpsons, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Burn Notice, the Whitest Kids U' Know, American Dad, Nip/Tuck, 30 Rock, The Wire, Archer. Games: Counter-Strike, Terraria, F-Zero GX, Killing Floor, Skate, Majora's Mask, Solar 2, FFVII, Resident Evil, Cave Story, Metal Slug. Politics & Philosophy: Social Liberalism, Legalisation, Tabula Rasa, Ethical- Altruism, Hedonism, Environmentalism, Agnostic-Atheism, Egalitarianism. Other things: Programming, web design, the computational method, art, being human and making mistakes, being fucking lovely, caffeine, writing music, CD & vinyl, the snow, summer evenings, chilling the fuck out, keeping busy.

[anttt]

pilelebet

I recently made a website, Pilelebet, for a dude named Cem. He wanted a website made that displays coloured squares and plays sounds for digits of pi. He also wanted it to last forever, that is if you went on the website after the "start" of pi, you would begin at a some decimal place of pi instead of at the beginning. So yeah I made that happen.

Each digit of pi represents a sound in the scale of F# minor, each tone is played in a range of octaves. The colours for each digit are based on the album cover for Brian Eno's Drums Between The Bells. It was intended to sound a bit dark and slightly haunting, and it begins tonight (9th May 2013) at 9pm British Summer Time; we're both very happy with the finished product.

Initially I started by making a simple JavaScript function that made squares appear depending on random numbers generated every 5 seconds. At this point the squares were brightly coloured, his initial idea was to have pi in base 12 but we decided it wasn't really feasible. Later we would go on to just keep pi in base 10 and have spookier feel to the site, as it probably wasn't going to sound happy anyway.

The function was modified to start creating rows of squares that moved up automatically as the screen became full, and instead of generating random number reading a string of digits. The HTML and CSS files were modified to give the site more of a rigid structure for the squares and the icons that would be there eventually.

HTML 5 audio elements were added, initially I used some simple sounds I found on the internet. Each square was now playing a sound when it appeared, which was cool. Later Cem made some sounds to replace them that were a bit more dense, and decided to make them last for a longer duration and fade in and out, to get the sounds of different digits layer over each other like chords. To accommodate for longer lasting sounds I created rotating audio channels in JavaScript to allow the same note to be played twice.

At this point I had to figure out where pi would come from, Whether it would be calculated in advance by me or done by the server or by the user. Seemed much easier to calculate the digits of pi in advance and just save them somewhere. I used a program called y-cruncher to calculate 315 million digits of pi, which at a digit every 5 seconds is about 50 years of pi. Try opening a 315MB text file though, doesn't happen. I wrote a program in C# to separate pi into a couple thousand text files because it also seemed like it would be nicer on the server.

Interestingly, there are 131072 digits of pi in a text file. I originally wanted 50k digits of pi, but for some reason it always came out as forty something thousand digits in a file instead. The first digit in the start of the second file was still correctly the 50,001st digit (well actually 50,000 because of the decimal point) but there were numbers missing at the end of each file. I can't recall my rationale behind it, but I decided to choose a number that was 2 to the power of something and for whatever reason it worked, so I decided to just go with it.

I wasn't sure how to keep track of the current digit of pi though, or whether to have some counter going even when no one was on the site. I decided to use PHP and Unix Time to find the difference between the arbitrary "start" of pi and the current time, and search the text files for the relevant digits of pi and echoing them to JavaScript in batches, creating the illusion that it was still going.

Then made it so if the site was being viewed before the "start" of pi, the eventuality would be accommodated  If pi hasn't started yet, X's get sent back until pi would start. For example if you went on the site a minute before the start of pi, the pi string would be 12 X's followed by a bunch of digits of pi. Then it was just tweaking and making look prettier, I was surprised at how easy some of the colour fading was to do, JQuery is amazing and made it so much easier.

The name Pilelebet was made by Cem, he also dedicates the site to Archimedes of Syracuse. The site was a lot of fun to make, I've spent a lot of time now listening to what pi might sound like, and stared into the squares endlessness for hours after nights out. Although I've tested the site and bar something terrible happening there's no reason why pi shouldn't start at 9pm, but for some reason I'm still terrified that it might not.

We hope you like it.

[officerserpico]

https://bleep.com/boards-of-canada-tomorrows-harvest

[anttt]

preordered

[anttt]

These are exciting times.

[gobblechopstv]

[prettycolors]

Pretty Colors is back! Submit your own now!

[realisenothing]

[snowfaerie-deactivated20130322]

[anttt]

a few nostalgia tracks

glassjaw - black nurse // the exam period for the second semester of my second year at uni, june 2012. I heard this once and then nothing else for a long time, when I was walking anywhere every time it finished I'd keep pressing the previous track button every time it ended til I finally hit the repeat button. It felt relevant to how I felt about people at the time. This song accompanied me to two out of four exams, barbecues, nights out, nights in, a fire in a park, a house party that got shut down by the police, entire days in computer clusters and all the other things I imagined I'd be doing when I was a student. 

kings of leon - closer // car journeys to nowhere at 2am on school nights from october 2009 to february 2010. My friend had a variety of terrible cds in his car, this was the opening and title track of the only cd I liked. After a really shitty house party on halloween he picked me up very late in the night/very early in the morning. I had no idea where I was but he and his girlfriend somehow found me after driving around for hours, and my phone dying. I still remember seeing the headlights coming down this baron country road I was on. This was the first song that was on in the car.

sage francis - makeshift patriot // spring and summer of 2011, the second semester of my first year. Everyone had finally warmed to each other and everyone wanted to be in the sun. I overplayed this song because I generally put it on if I was in the position to put a song on and I didn't know the people very well in an attempt to display a more varied musical interest than my appearance might suggest. Lots of people liked it though, and so do I.

norma jean - a small spark vs. a great forest // wasting my teenage years playing maplestory, but at the same time meeting people I wouldn't want to never have met. Staying up and watching the sunrise and sneaking out for cigarettes. The intro makes me shiver every time.

math the band - why didn't you get a haircut? // summer was in its final week and third year was starting, in came back to manchester a week early and my mate was here too and we spent a full week doing nothing in particular, he showed me this song. I was broke, but I felt a freedom I haven't since. It was an amazing week and I felt a stronger connection to him afterwards. I remember we kept singing "good enough isn't good enough". The weeks that continued were eventful and anything felt possible.

[nevver]

Seeing spots

[anttt]

I can numerically measure my current laziness by how many unread emails I have on my phone.

[logan43000-deactivated20150721]

[fuckyeaharchergifs]

[deactivated58373]

[anttt]

[anttt]

I remember doing A-Levels, we had to have a folder for each subject and keep them organised and presentable and all that shit, but now at Uni it's like "wow you have a folder? You must work reaaally hard."

[dvdp]

[nevver]