Week of Patching
Community Event, 2026
Trying to log each day, the latest is on top. To learn more about #WeekOfPatching, head over to Paloma Kops’s and check out what the others have been up to.
Day 4 and 5—Syncing Midi over Network
With little time left between the usual chaos, I wired up the cables.gl patch to not only take MIDI but also act as a server or client for WebSocket packages.
The image above is taken from the demonstration video on YouTube. On the right-hand side, the server is receiving MIDI and sending it to the window on the left over a socket cluster (WebSocket) connection.
Day 3—Speed-running the DVD Logo
Combining two community projects at once: Determined to submit something to the cables.gl Discord challenge with this month’s prompt “Beat the Clock”, I came up with a little patch idea that I tried to build as quickly as possible.
I tried a new way of documenting the patch inline for the monthly meetup on Discord and the week of patching. The patch and documentation are publicly available, and you can poke around; no login is needed. Head over to cables.gl and edit the patch. 
Day 2—Fine-tuning, test driving
I took a few minutes to refine the style of the reaction diffusion rendering. I keep the normal mapping to emboss the organic lines but removed the colors for now.
Day 1—Connecting Cables.gl and Mixxx
I’m a sucker for such community events, so I just have to join. Combining my noodling in the free and open-source DJ software Mixxx and the ongoing cables.gl reaction diffusion patches.
This reaction diffusion is now an optimized version, based on my previous exploration the last days and weeks. It is now using only 8-bit RGB color textures for the composite and feedback loop, instead of the very GPU-hungry 16-bit RGBA textures from before.
This optimization left room for rendering the resulting texture as a normal map, inspired by the master of real-time reaction diffusion on the web, Karl Sims—RD Tool. But I have to take a lot more time to refine this technique.