PHD Researcher, and regular visitor to the Bega Valley, Tim Mahlberg (https://au.linkedin.com/in/timmahlberg), has co-authored a compelling ‘state of the nation’ report on coworking in this country entitled ‘Coworking Spaces Australia’.

The document is available to the public here (http://sbi.sydney.edu.au/coworking-spaces-australia/)

The report is choc full of data-based determinations, anecdotes, insights and commentary on the diverse range of coworking spaces that have been springing up all over Australia for almost a decade now.

The team at CoWS Near The Coast are deeply honoured that Tim and his co-author, Kai Riemer, saw fit to feature CoWS as an archetype of ‘genus’ Townhall Terminal. They sum up one of the chief drivers behind our space very well when they say ‘ the locals are fiercely proud of what this space stands for: taking the local economy into their own hands and not waiting for government or corporates to lead the way’.

As the very first ‘hand-cranker in chief’ of the high profile NAB Village in Melbourne Docklands, Tim Mahlberg is one of the most qualified people in Australia to chronicle and comment on Coworking in this country. His strong links to the activator community, those poor burdened souls who do much of the heavy lifting to create the spaces, makes him a popular figure, keynote speaker, and frequent panellist at coworking events and activities in both regional and metropolitan areas nationwide.

Thanks Tim and Kai for the acknowledgement of CoWS Near The Coast, one of the first ever regional co-working spaces to be set up in Australia. We wish you every success in your future endeavours.

The centrepiece of this upcoming coding night is an exciting project…and will be delivered by Steve Ryan. Please read Steve’s description below…it’s a terrific project….

Hey all,
so having met Scratch for drag and drop programming I wanted an easy way to enter longer pieces of music as Scratch blocks so I could integrate animations with the music.

http://abc2scratch.2pihosting.com/ is a javascript app (https://github.com/syntithenai/abc2scratch) to help by taking abc notation, rendering as music notation and offering export to scratch blocks.

http://abcnotation.com/ describes the text based ABC format for writing music and provides heaps of examples.

I’m running a demo next coding night taking an ABC tune from the web, adding parts and animating it in Scratch.

I’ve recently aquired a Lego EV3 and I’d love to connect scratch and coreograph dancing robots. I’m having trouble getting s2bot working to extend Scratch to provide EV3 blocks. Any experience out there?

Having had trouble with quicktime playback of midi, I’ve included a pure javascript midi playback solution using soundfont files. (currently broken but I have had it working – pull request on git anyone?). Scratch seems to do timing well when playing generated notes but not so well on the timing of playing back recorded sounds. Any experience ?

If anyone is interested I’d like to arrange a Scratch band by combining a bunch of musical sprites into a composition. To get the ball rolling I’m calling for musical sprites

• The must in the key of C so all the sprites overlay in harmony (more or less). Mostly this means that the sprites last musical note must be C.
• The sprite must be 1,2,4,8 or 16 bars length.
• The sprite must be categorised (in it’s filename) as rhythm, bass, harmony and melody. Typically a melody part would be 16 bars.
• The sprite must have costumes indicating active/inactive that are shown when the music starts/stops. More costumes or other animations throughout the musical fragment are encouraged.

For those with skills in music notation, another project could be a 12 bar blues.
C C C C
F F C C
G F C C

cheers

Steve