収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Over on Livejournal, where this post is echoed, lj:blues_kun asked:

Would you mind posting a recording of that funky thing? Also what the hell is it called?
 

…I actually have no idea what it’s called. It’s called Seven Dollar Bin. Or “that shaker with the seed pods.”

Seven Dollar Bin

But I imagine it must have some proper name. Anybody know? I don’t.

However! I can be useful in other ways. Recording? Sure thing! This is me doing several different things with it – schlumping it over in the air, turning it on its side, turning it shakers-down, shaking it, spinning it around, tipping it into (and back out of) my hand, things like that.

The weird breath-like sounds are not me. They’re the seedpods rubbing against each other. SO WEIRD. Check it.

Seven Dollar Bin Noisemaker Makes Freaky Noises

Technical details: recorded on a single Oktava MK319 large-diaphram condenser microphone at close range so the preamp wouldn’t have to be turned up. (Neighbours were running a woodchipper and I didn’t want that included.) Recording was at 44.1Khz mono, exported dual-channel mono and encoded into a 320kbps-maxed variable-bitrate mp3, because there is no twinkie I cannot sandblast. It sounds reasonably like it did when I was playing with it, at least on my reference headset, so there you are.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Over the last few days, I’ve realised there’s a studio toy I really want, but can’t quite find. If I can’t find it, maybe I can build it – or maybe that should be the other way ’round, eh? Regardless, maybe some of you guys can help.

One of the many cool things about midi is how you can have arbitrary controllers in variety of functionalities. You can, for example, buy banks of knobs and sliders. And all they do is send MIDI signals. This is great, because then you can assign them in whatever software you’re controlling to any function you want controlled. There are also banks of buttons, and so on. More commonly, you get mixed devices.

drool pad not included… or needed, really, but I would like this one or this one

I want that, but USB (or wireless-to-USB), and sending user-settable keyboard character combinations. I want a small remote pad that I can set up to have one button send a space, another button to send Shift-R, another button to send HOME, another to send END, and so on. Ideally, it should be able to send any button combination from a 101-key keyboard.

There are two reasons I want this.

One: If you’re surrounded by drums and mics (just for example) in my studio and you want to enable record and start the virtual transport, it’s difficult to do so in time to sync up with the pre-existing tracks you might be working against. Not that this was driving me crazy over the weekend or anything.

Two: Ardour is FULL of keyboard shortcuts. No, I mean full, like every goddamn key on the keyboard does some damn thing. If you’re reaching over something to get to some key or other (say, SHIFT-R, to enable master record), or in the wrong mode (which this mostly won’t fix), it is really easy to either hit the wrong key(s), or hit the right keys, but have them do different things, because not only are they loaded, they’re overloaded.

overconfidence not included

Basically I want a control panel that isn’t so overloaded, and I want it to go anywhere in the room.

I’ve thought about getting a minikeyboard, maybe a wireless minikeyboard, and hax0ring it. I may well do this, because I don’t want to build a USB interface and I don’t want to build a keyboard interface for that USB interface, and besides, I might want to add some more buttons later. But I worry about how easy (or difficult) it might be to send numeric keypad keys specifically, and how reliable soldering to surface pads will be, since I want to move this thing around a bit and it will get knocked about.

Now, there are some gamepads out there that might be good. The cheaper one I found doesn’t actually let you reprogramme what keys the pads send, and as annoying as I can find Ardour’s spaghetti of hotkeys, I don’t want to change them. I might want to use someone else’s workstation at some point. The ones which do let you reprogramme the pad’s keys are a bit spendier, and tend to be large and/or weird. But more importantly, they appear to require external software. This may just be for the purpose of changing key assignments, so I could run it once on a different machine and forget about it – but the data pages don’t make that entirely clear. If someone knows for sure, tell me?

Also I’d need to take a hacksaw to parts of it because of all the do-not-want.

Really, do I need to go all Arduino for this? I don’t want to. Anybody got ideas?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

What's the correct word for the metal edge reinforcement used on trunks, anyway? (And why do all the photos I find in google only have metal on the corners? Or are the edges just darker metal?) My old trunk - now used to hold the Hugo award exhibit trophies between Worldcons - had metal all along the edges, and that's what I'm planning for the mandolin case.

Failing that, anybody know a good place for thin brass metal strips? I want something thick enough to take an impact (once cornered, anyway) but think enough that I can hammer it into an edge piece, lengthwise. I have a bench vise so it won't be difficult, just tedious.

I need a window glazier who can replace the glass in a single-pane 1908 wooden window in Seattle, after someone kicked in both panes last night at murksouth, apparently for fun. I was trying to fix it myself but I can't get the tacking strips up without doing damage to the outer frame, so I want a professional. Does anyone know someone appropriate?

eta: I got a rec from someone in my neighbourhood association. Hopefully it'll go well, but I'd still be interested in recommendations. These guys are more expensive than I'd prefer rly. ;_;

vixyish points her readers to two more cases of people without health insurance; Cheyenne Wright, the colourist for Girl Genius, who recently had an "alarming" hospital stay (without insurance), and, worse, an SCA fan whose family needs help with funeral expenses following his death, a result of loss of medical coverage and job. (Diabetes+inadequate money for meds=dead.) I don't know the family of the deceased - I'm not in SCA - but I do know cleothyla through fandom.

I also don't know any of the details of Cheyenne's hospital stay. But I can tell you that over the six years of medical hell Anna and I went through ending in 2009 (touch wood), we did have insurance, sometimes through me and my self-paid business coverage, sometimes through Anna's employer. It wasn't bad coverage; some pretty high deductibles at times, but we didn't have to go to war very often with the insurance companies or anything. (Mostly billing fuckups, but nothing with intent as far as we could tell.) During this time, I got hit-and-run by a car while out biking, Anna had two rounds of thyroid tumours followed by breast cancer, and a few other things.

Our co-pay cost - the chunk we had to fork over - was over $100,000. That's just the "patient responsibility" portion (tho' it does include premiums) - the hospital stay portion alone of just my bike accident was over $150,000. That doesn't include physical therapy (some significant portions of which I delayed, to my detriment, for cost reasons), meds, and things like that. We've paid all of the direct expenses off; we have about $8,000 left in accumulated other debt we stacked up while shovelling money at hospitals. If you do the math - and I of course do - that balance is entirely from interest payments, not money we actually spent on things.

Cheyenne doesn't have health insurance. Whatever his total bill is, he's looking straight at it.

So. If you can, go clickie and throw a few bucks at people. It won't help fix the system, but it'll help some individuals, and that, at least, is worth doing.

Go help annathepiper repro this annoying bug. Details at the link.

[Poll #1393504]

Anybody have experience with the M-Audio Nova studio condenser mic? I found a pawn shop with a couple. Reviews on the internets think they're good for the dollar, but in this field I don't know who are real reviewers and who are shills. Clues, anybody?

Hey, anybody in LA know of an open venue in late April? s00j and yuki_onna haven't been able to nail down a location for the last stop of the Palimpsest book-and-music tour yet, and they really want to hit Los Angeles. S00j is accordingly looking for venues there akin to the one she describes in this post. If you know of a useful venue of the right type, please go over there and let her know.

So if I were to buy a new HD to dual-boot an existing Windows machine into Windows+Linux so I could run Ardour or Rosegarden instead of Audacity and as a result need a soundcard other than the lulzblaster built in to the motherboard, what would you suggest?

The M Audio Delta series comes suggested on the Wiki, and this is one of the cheaper ones. The box I'd be using it is a 1.8Ghz Intel machine so it shouldn't have the click/pop problem people report on slower machines. But that's still $150. I like that this model has the actual A/D interface outside the PC unit, which should reduce noise.

(And yes, I'm going to continue to go ahead and record a demo of sorts using Audacity on my laptop, but the clicktrack functionality is so unsuited to what I want to do that I'll end up re-recording all this stuff on something else. I'm torn between GODDAMMIT I NEED A DEMO NOW and BUT I WANT TO DO IT RIGHT. Wibble.)