shinyhappyrainbows

This came across my YouTube feed today... I'm often proud of boasting that I have left social media behind, but I do still use YouTube for how-to vids and discovery of new (or new-to-me) music, so I also get a lot of algorithmic choices laid on the virtual table. The thing about "the toobs" is I have very limited parasocial connection on that medium. Fave artists, challenging thinkers, gifted designers, yes, but I don't call them friends. At most, I have a relationship like I might with an adult education instructor, but to a lesser degree. I publish videos infrequently, I have 28 subscribers and 38 videos and have had my channels since 2005 or so. It's my antisocial medium :-D So, the above video... There is a strong "lefty" contingent on YouTube, too, or the algorithm is leading me to believe so. These are my people, and the linked video (you really should watch it, dear reader) reinforces with evidence, some of it actually peer reviewed, a thing I ...

Among my many happy follies, I've started setting up to make some electronic music. I've been an electric musician for most of my life, but EDM isn't something I've dabbled in a lot, despite loving the sheer power of it. In all modern genre's, the synth reigns supreme! I'm particularly interest in trying it live and without a computer as my digital audio workstation, a technique known as "DAWless." It's more performative than using Logic Pro on my Mac, the latter a process that feels like being back at work, sometimes. Using drum machines, sequencers and synths is mostly just a matter of turning on the power and pushing a few buttons. That's the theory, anyway. The trouble is, I'd also like to record the good performances, too, but also still have the ability to tweak the knobs on the front panels in a way that fundamentally changes the tonal qualities of the sounds. Not just volume, EQ and pan, but timbre, voicings and transposition. Thi...

Sometimes the internet is wonderful and the search engines just provide what is asked for, a veritable (if not always verifiable) cargo cult of bounty. Then it sometimes isn't. Take this formula, for instance, it calculates the note number for a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) Note On or Note Off command from the pitch of a note. Deriving the nearest MIDI note number from a tone of a given pitch. (Source: Google Search.) This is all well and good if you're talking about theoretical pitches, or working with a high end, high speed microcontroller that can measure a frequency quickly and spit out a MIDI command, but I like my microcontrollers low cost, like the venerable Atmel 328p. You can measure pitch with one of these, but you have to convert the wave's period to pitch, because the processor isn't really up to having a built in frequency counter. The way to do this is to measure the wave's period directly with the pulseIn() command, like so... byt...

My primary printer, an Ender 3 Pro mk2 that's been an exercise in sunk cost fallacy, Is now running a stock Creality 32 bit board, the kind the E3P mk3 runs. I'd tried an SKR mini E3 but one of the downsides of open source are the manufacturers building with project branding but cutting corners, like using double sided sticky tape instead of a double sided heat transfer adhesive and no heatsink on the heater mosfet! Jesus!!! The board went buggy and started crashing the firmware, board cooling fan never stopped screaming, trying to shift the heat but couldn't. I've completed 5 prints on the new board and 3 of those have been done at 200mm/s! The fans work hard during intensive jobs, like perimeters or top and bottom layers, but infill, even high density, everything calms down and I'm printing at 200mm/s, twice as fast as I've ever got this beast up to! There is another factor to this speed, the linear rail mod. My $250 printer has had another $300 spent on it ...

In 1909, 116 years ago, E. M. Forster published the science fiction novella, "The Machine Stops." It tells the story of a future that, having had the story read to me, ironically by a Youtube content producer, is terrifying and already here. It's scarily the most broadly accurate dystopia! While it very much simplifies the world to a single machine that houses and connects humanity, yet runs with little or no human intervention, the priciple of the story is very much the world in which we live in. Lecturers (Youtube content creators and other social media influencers) and their audience of students (fans/followers/tweeps) communicate via what we in the 21st would immediately recognise as "Zoom" calls, live in isolation in single rooms, deep underground. All their food and other needs are shipped to them by the Machine and person to person contact is considered common, even coarse. The Lecturers deliver their "ideas" to their audiences or work on lectu...