shinyhappyrainbows

So many charlatanesque self-help books bang on about visualisation - "Imagine what you'll look like when you're rich and famous, see the lovers hanging off your arm, the Ferrari and HumVee in your garage..." It's nausiating bullshit... But is it? Athletes use visualisation. From seeing themselves, how they move on the field, how they'll hold themselves on the podium, how they'll scoop up a ball and pass it, how each stride will fall in a marathon. I've never been an athlete, but I've been a commuter cyclist, as well as a cycle tourist, and athletic visualisation has helped me get up at 4am, for a 5am work day start, and hammer down the main drag on 2 wheels, 5 days a week, rain, hail or shine. It's helped me visualise the downhill at the end of a climb, the big meal at the end of a 100km day. Visualisation works. I recently discovered that I am a little bit of a graphical artist. I never was for most of my life. To quote Mel Brooks, I could ...

A friend needed a new coffee table, their current one is too big for the space. I needed to find a project for the plywood from an old shipping pallet (a hard rubbish find) and a wooden chopping board discarded from the kitchen. The solution? Use the ply and laminated timber chopping board to create a 2-tier, rustic school desk "conversion!" The ply, as you'd expect from life as the top of a shipping pallet, looks, well, lived in. Likewise the chopping board. The ply also tends a bit ruddy when clear coated, I've used this type of pallet before. So I've mixed a tiny bit of green acrylic art paint with the sanding sealer to create a mid brown hue. Some of the green kind of globbed around the screw heads, countersunk 2mm below the surface but, a bit of elbow grease with sandpaper and PVA plus sanding dust filler, the green is a tinge like a copper screw corrosion stain. That really speaks "old" eloquently. By the time I finish the sanding and lacquering,...

Having just watched this before getting up and having breakfast... As a lifelong scifi fan, I've consumed a tonne (well, a fair few kg) of this kind of story in my time. Until now, I've just revelled in the legends, but watching this, I've realised there is an ethical problem with "generation ships." Consent. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were volunteers and knew the risks. Collins went back as commander of Apollo 13 and got first hand experience of the life threatening risks. Space is treacherous and still largely unknown in Earth's perihelion (a wanky word for orbit), let alone beyond the heliopause, the end of the Sun's domain. What business do volunteers to crew a generation ship have, committing unwitting future generations of crew to such unknown?! It's one thing to risk your life on a tall ship to make a months long journey to another land, like has happened in previous centuries and generations, but how thoughtless and selfish do you have t...

Free education reduces GDP. Accessible health care reduces GDP. Equitable employment and freedom from exploitation reduces GDP. The only thing GDP fairly presents is, if a politician supports GDP as a metric, they're in the pocket of somebody like Elon Musk or Gina Reinhardt. GDP is, in short, a scam.

In my recent post about how a MIDI guitar controller could be made by using the frets and strings as a matrix switch, I talk about measuring an analog signal off a divided pickup to generate velocity. It's occurred to me that the velocity value, The "loudness" of the note, should be measured at 90° after (based on wavelength of the detected note) the fretting of the note. For low E, a guitar's 6th string, this is a measurement delay of 3mS. This is the time taken for the very first peak of the note to rise from 0 volts to its peak. Don't fret, it's just a hand picking on a defenceless string. Now, this isn't really the peak of the note's first oscillation, it's the click of the plectrum, but for a loud note the plectrum hits the string harder and faster than it does for a low note, so that click is still likely a good measure for velocity. MIDI uses velocity as the label for its loudness parameter of a note-on command because MIDI was designed fo...

"So, the build is now a bit harder and more time consuming, but note to MIDI conversion, on a simple to program Mega Mini inside a 3D printed, aluminium reinforced guitar body and neck, built from 5 or 6 "laminations" slipped over the reinforcement tubes/conduits and glued with epoxy... EASY! Also, make it in carbon fibre PETG? Sexy, dark grey, matte finish! Sweet!" In response to the fact that my YouRock MIDI guitar is an aging, irreplaceable curio, and is permanently stuck on the default MIDI channel, because the manufacturer closed down shortly after launch and the support app was never updated, I've been looking at my options for replacement. If I were still playing professionally and using the YouRock, I'd probably buy a JamStik Studio. These are an "axe" about the equal of my Ibanez Blazer "super Strat" or my Haze Telecaster with a low latency, divided pickup system similar to the older Roland system, except they put out MIDI and U...

Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple have been allowed to expand their wealth and influence to the point that they’re effectively nation states, and should be reported on as such. Ed Zitron - " Where's Your Ed At? ". In reference to the way technology is no longer developed by "nerds" trying to solve problems, rather, the nerds are herded into corporate cattle pens to code apps that only allow you to do the least you're willing to pay for, yet force you to pay more for critical functions that used to be considered basic functions, yet still drowning you in ads and bait and switch tricks. I highly recommend people subscribe to understand what the problems with modern technology really are . And make no bones, I reckon this is a wholesale enslavement and theft of everything by the "one percenters."

Made Today For Christmas, the missus gave me the limited edition Lego record player. Yes, you can build a 1/4 scale(?) model record player out of standard lego bricks and other bits! It needs a home in my creative space. A shelf near my lego Mars rover, Perseverance. Close to my guitars. (Real ones!) The studio/workshop already has more amazing stuff than Willy Wonka's factory, ranging from power tools, through the electronics workshop, camping and cycle touring gear storage, racks of components. Then, into the studio, there's a burgeoning collection of EDM gadgets, including a modern reproduction of a Roland TR-606 "analog" drum machine (it's mostly digital electronics tbh), a Korg Volca Bass (sorta Korgs answer to the Roland TB-303), may aging Alesis SR-18 digital drum machine. My wall of guitars, my compact, 1550 watt, compact, double three-way audio system, my red tolex Australian designed, Chinese built, Strauss guitar amp, clad in red tolex, that screams ...