djempirical shared his desert island discs yesterday. Here's mine - like his, it's the sort of thing that could easily change frequently - I'm sure this list would be different were I to post it tomorrow...

• Depeche Mode - Violator


• Front 242 - 05:22:9:12 OFF


• The Cure - Seventeen Seconds


• Meat Beat Manifesto - Subliminal Sandwich


• Section 25 - From The Hip

Pocket Piano Arduino Shield - I saw this when it was first announced, but now it's available for sale.

Of course, I just spent a bunch of money on everything I need for the Sound Lab Mini-Synth PLUS, so it's gonna have to wait.

But next month - it's on.

The Berwyn Spindle has been taken down to make room for a Walgreens.

Current Mood: annoyed

Tonight: Dinner, going to go see Missile Command at the Phantasy.

Saturday: ESI run (highly likely). Some small projects based on outcome of ESI run. Go see C. Randolph C. at The Language Foundry.

Sunday: ???

Electro-Music 2008 - August 14-16, in Kingsport, TN.

Heck, If I took two days to get there, I could visit family in KY and/or WV.

This is worth a consideration, maybe.

WANT. (ok, arguably I could make something cooler sounding with a keypad and an Arduino, but this thing is Kraftwerk branded!)

And I learned last night that infowidget had one of these in her childhood. We're going to see if it's still around.

• Michigan has some terrible highways.
• Managed to get bleakenigma to the con just in time for the panel he ended up on at the last minute.
• My Arduino presentation - This somehow got truncated to an hour - the description says two hours, but yet there was a presentation booked in the room after one hour. Luckily no one seemed terribly interested in building/hacking anything, and after my ten minutes of slides turned into a discussion that I think went ok.
• Singing Tesla coils are awesome.
• The Mountain Dew clone tastes like chalk
• I managed to lose my Brazilian Beef ticket sometime Friday.
• Being in the overflow hotel was a bit of a bummer. The half-mile walk wasn't bad, but I only did that once each way, since I was usually laden with presentation equipment.
• Saturday lunch at the Mongolian Barbecue was pretty good, though I think running the Blackberry's GPS on the ride kind of killed its battery.
• Circuit-bending/ribbon noisemaker workshop:
  
• There was No A/V, so slides were pretty useless.
• Ballroom C was not a great venue for a workshop. With everyone hovering around the stage during "craft time", it was ok, but somehow using the Ballroom B with all of its tables would have been much better, but then the LAN party folks probably would have freaked.
• My live attempt at probing didn't work as well as I hoped it would. I blame nerves.
• People at least seemed to dig the ribbon controller kits.
• Some guy brought an SK-5 which was lots of fun to probe.
• This almost got cut to an hour as well, when I then informed the 5-minute warning person that this was in fact a two-hour presentation. Then when things were winding down (4:30 or so?), the three of us left were then eminent-domained by somebody who seemed to be in dire need of a space since there "were only three of us".  We then adjourned to the LAN room, where bleakenigma and I recorded our new band's first album, while the other two guys continued probing the SK-5.
• Free Oberon is pretty awesome (actually, even non-free Oberon is pretty good too) Actually, I'm not positive it was Oberon (it said Oberon, but it didn't quite taste like I remembered it). No worries.
  
• Wandered the room parties with some people I met. Talked to Vernor Vinge (ok, all I said was "no, I don't recognize any of the names on this flyer either.")
• Both sets of slides will be on Glacial Communications sometime soon.

Current Mood: tired

infowidget found this gem at the library yesterday: The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983. It's probably not for everyone, but I'm thoroughly enthralled by it. Maybe it's just that the KIM-1s they used remind me an awful lot of the Arduino, only less powerful. If anything, it's certainly spurring me on...

I'm picking up this disc of old-school electronic music by high school kids at the MBM show on Monday.

And are bleakenigma and I going to do a semi-impromptu performance at Penguicon? Remains to be seen, but we've made the sort of vague plans that might make it happen.

Numbers Station Bingo. And now that the DEMF lineup is mostly announced, get ready to play DEMF Bingo, which I whipped up in a frenzy the week after DEMF last year.

Decoder - I mean, what DOESN'T this movie have?

And while I'm talking about movies, the Blade Runner über-cut at the Cinematheque Saturday was FANTASTIC.

And for something completely different, Clevelanders looking for model kits, trains, rockets, or a little tracked robot chassis (as I was) should check out Depot Train & Hobby on W. 130th.

...are over here.

Bullet points, since I'm not sure I can write in a proper manner at this time:

• My presentation went pretty well. Did have a problem when my Arduino-powered MIDI sequencer failed to work right, but otherwise everything worked. It even got covered on Hack A Day. I'll get slides online soon. And of course, this nice little Arduino hack gets published today. Though that could come in handy later...
  
• I have been properly chastised into getting proper soldering gear. Now to make that happen.
• At least a few people used the Twitter hashtag aggregator I set up at atea.us. I think I'll switch it for Penguicon use next week.
  
• Jam Session: Much more cohesive than last year. 0% Green Day, though some Collective Soul popped in for a minute (guitarists...). Neat things included a pickup-fitted violin, this cool use of an XBox 360 Guitar Hero controller (brought by the developer), and the return of krue's avrsyn. And bleakenigma didn't come to rock the vocoder, even though he specifically requested it.  He was probably busy, y'know, running the Con or something. Once I make some edits it'll probably get aired.
  
• Sessions (I unfortunately ended up missing a TON of sessions)
  
• Jeri Ellsworth: I missed half of it due to teardown from my presentation and finally checking into my room, but what I saw was really cool. It was also a lot of material I got in the Computer Design Lab class I took way back when (we did VHDL->FPGA stuff).
  
• Virt: Lots of good info on FM. Makes me miss my DX27 a bit. I should SonicBirth up a little 2-operator FM synth to play with.
• Pete Edwards and Fred Owsley: Lots of good information. I ended up working with them on their hands-on workshop (in part since I had tools and they didn't). Fred's breadboard-expanded TR-707 is made of awesome. I think I'm going to have to take another crack at the Buddhist Digital Jukebox.
• The semi-impromptu 4k sound presentation by BarZoule  was pretty cool as well.
• Blockparty
• Ok, my photo entry was kind of lame. I had this idea of doing something with HDR, but haven't had the time to even try doing it. Instead, I trawled my iPhoto library at 3:30am and found something that at least looked "nice".
• Streaming Audio: EPIC FAIL (but not on my part - it basically got lost in the shuffle of getting submissions sorted since partymeister had issues getting up and running) - If nothing else, the debacle has given me a foolhardy idea for Wildcard next year.
  
• Hirez: I did it for the lulz. And they were indeed epic. "Snow" was added in Gimp at 3:30am. Actually, all my entries were finished up at 3:30am.
  
• Oldschool Audio: complete standings aren't out yet that I can find, so I don't know where I'm at in it. Just not 1st-3rd.
  
• Needed more rickrolls. Had a special secret one ready to go, but partymeister's failure to run made a surreptitious upload more complicated. infowidget (who had the idea to begin with) and I decided to skip it. Keep a close watch on NEOelectro. Maybe you'll find it ;-)
  
• And I still believe a demo should be in the demo category regardless of platform(ok, Windows, OS X, and Linux), but that's just my opinion.
• Whoever un-bent the bent "That was easy" button in the NOC by tearing off the potentiometer kind of sucks.
  
• Yum Cherry Guarana Bawls. Yuck Cocaine Energy Drink. Like carbonated Pixy Stix, but worse.

Best one I've seen:

Current Mood: amused

For one or more of my super-seekrit projects, I kind of needed some kind of enclosure. After poking at some possibilities online - all of which were going to be either semi-costly (with shipping) or plastic or made in China.

It suddenly hit me that there was a place I could go and get decent wooden boxes of approximately the right size for next to nothing. I went out to the local cigar shop and asked if they had boxes they were getting rid of. They pointed me in the right direction, and while avoiding choking to death (tobacco shops are one of the few businesses in Ohio where one can still legally smoke indoors), I found three decent boxes and bought them for a dollar apiece.

Lots of super-seekrit projects are moving along. Lots of fronts. Need a 30 hour day, but I think I'll manage.

Why the hell not? We've had this Tofurky in the freezer for a while and I wanted to use it up.

Consisted of:
-Tofurky, made per the box with potatoes, carrots and onion in the dish.
-Stuffing (made with vegetable bouillon and olive oil)
-Trader Joe's Potato Medley
-Country-style gravy (pretty much the recipe on the Tofurky box, though I substituted more garlic powder for the onion powder)

Not a complete thanksgiving dinner, but hey, it was tasty.

My only regret was not getting cheddar cheese curds today, because there's plenty of gravy left over, and I could make some killer poutine with it...

I have this dead Microtek Scanmaker 3600 scanner. Just stopped working a while ago. Wall wart is fine, just the scanner itself is dead.

My current plan is to cannibalize it into as many projects as I possibly can.
-The chassis is going to become the frame for a Sound Lab Mini Synth, once I get the PCB and accumulate necessary parts for that.
-I'd love to use the glass as the faceplate of the Sound Lab, but I feel that path is almost certainly fraught with peril and shards of glass entering my hands. I'll have to figure something else out for that. Any takers? Ideas?
-The stepper motor is going to become a wind turbine. I did preliminary tests on it last night, and it does generate voltage when you twist it fast enough.
-The metal rod that the scan assembly slides along? Not sure yet. Some vague thoughts, but I'll have to think about it some more.
-Other parts - ???
-Unfortunately, the cold cathode broke while I was taking it apart, so no fun there.

Obituary here.

"I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" (scroll about halfway down)

Today's xkcd is way up on the win scale.

In its honor, I shall start reading The Zen of Zombie. Seems appropriate.

...or terminal boredom or something. I dunno.

So, ask me anything. I'm not guaranteeing a direct answer, though. Depends on what's asked. I might reply to the comment, reply in a new post, reply personally, or just ignore it.

Comments are screened, anonymous is ok, even encouraged.