Every so often I need to cut through clutter and reset things. My clutter tolerance threshold is actually pretty damn low – most people wouldn’t’ve called my studio cluttered, but it hit that NOPE! point for me and I had to reset it.

I know a lot of people thrive in clutter, particularly creative people. That’s never worked for me. I wish it did, I’d spend less time resetting studio spaces.

On the plus side, it was a good time to change around art. I rotate pictures and such in and out so I don’t get too tired of them. Korra and Toph survived this round, and even got frames, and the Utena art I found at ECCC finally made it onto the wall. Plus I built a little shrine to our favourite Russian Jaeger pilots. 😀

Bigger pictures at Flickr, like usual. Mostly useful for the panoramas, of course.

the usual shot

the far side shot

the shrine, in sepia, because the colour came out weird

underlighting makes everything into art deco

Plus there were actually a couple of things that needed repair, like one of the lamps turned out to have some bad insulation (if “missing” counts as “bad,” which I think is true in this case) so I fixed that and its stuck switch.

And those horizontal lines on the sound baffles? Those are part of the new wall anchoring system. I had a baffle come down while trying to put a speaker away, and that sucks, so I fixed it. Plus, that let me put like three support legs into the closet, opening up more space and getting rid of distracting visual noise. Here’s an comparison to the previous reset, with the above panorama cropped to match.

 

It’s not a big difference, but people other than me notice it when they walk in, so it’s enough for that. Other than the art, it’s mostly corners and shelves, really. And the closets. Those got a good straightening out. Really, if anything actually needed it? It was the closets.

A piece of costuming that I use for some gigs – mostly Leannan Sidhe gigs – threw one of the ring-type beads that are used in tying up the front. It’s just flat gone – no sign of it – so I need a replacement.

I think they’re shell. I’ve been a few places trying to match them with no joy and with the stores not having anywhere to suggest. So… any crafters or beaders out there seen these recently?

Failing that, anybody have a similar? I was thinking maybe niobium – but I’d rather keep what’s there now if I can. (Also, I haven’t seen any that would work.)

I had already queued this post for today, back on Monday. Intel’s announcement on Tuesday – see previous post – made it even more appropriate.

♪ What do you do with a broken hard drive? ♪
♪ What do you do with a broken hard drive? ♪
♪ What do you do with a broken hard drive, ♪
♪ once it eats your data? ♪

Well, thanks to Boris L. on Facebook, I know know that you can turn it into a microphone. I don’t even know what to think about that. XD

Courtesy the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, enjoy a lovely history of recording through 1950. Lots of sample recordings you can listen to, including essentially-hifi recordings made live on 78s towards the end of that technology cycle. (Did you know a 78rpm live-recording shellac disc could record 14khz tones? Neither did I. That’s about where FM radio tops out, for comparison purposes. SURPRISE)

There are a couple of illustrative mp3s showing the difference between purely-mechanical recording and “electronic” recording – the move from acoustic horns to microphones, basically. Still no tape or ability to edit; throughout this entire era it’s still horns-or-live-mics-to-etched-master-disc. But the appearance of electric microphones in 1924 changed everything, and to be able to hear it on from-the-era recordings is just amazing.

(And if you’re seeing this on Livejournal or Dreamwidth, the Korra icon I’m using with this post is basically one of the kinds of microphones they’d’ve been using in the early electric recordings, preserved here. Cool. huh?)

Some months ago, I discovered “Class T” amplifiers, and also discovered that they have pretty good reputations and can be had for astonishingly low prices direct from manufacturer. They’re mostly used in automotive audio, but I’ve had some thoughts on converting my passive main speakers to active main speakers, so I acquired one.

I finally built a test harness for one of these boards on Saturday night.

Damn right I know how to party

Result: it’s worth building a better harness, and, most particularly, use a more suitable power supply. I basically grabbed a 15v DC adaptor out of my I ♥ You Power Supplies box of random salvage, and really, that’s a pretty shitty test transformer.

But even with that, it worked, as in, it functioned and sound good enough to give it a proper go. I didn’t get the low end out of it I’d’ve liked to, but, again, radically underpowered supply voltage, and one of the places that shows up is in lack of low end oomph. I’m hoping that’s it, because if it is, I’d be able to upgrade a lot of old kit on the seriously cheap.

And that’s not a bad thing at all.

How was your weekend?
 

This post is part of a series on restoring infamous vintage stage monitors. Spoiler: they made good, in the end.

I’ve updated the Press page with new about Dara and about Solarbird the Lightbringer links, replacing old ones I never liked. Basically, the difference is that one is supposed to be OOC (the secret identity) and the other is in character.

Like there’s really a difference, am I right?

Hopefully it’s less confusing this way, though. If you want to read those and give some feedback, I’d appreciate it.

I still need some proper, professional head shots. I’ll get that done soon and probably replace the pictures currently being used with these pages. Consider the ones there right now to be placeholders.

Amazon has been working on adjusting Kindle Unlimited – their streaming-service equivalent for writers – for a while. A fair number of people have been worrying about what that would mean. We’ve known for a while that the author money would come from a fixed-size pot – and that pot would probably be small. But we didn’t know for sure.

Now we do. Surprise! Pseudo-streaming for writers means the same thing as streaming means for musicians. Payment schedules which are somewhere between a joke and an insult.

I don’t know enough about the writer side of the world of things to know exactly how terrible this is, but given the zero-sum gaming of the system, and Amazon’s market dominance in the epub world, I’d have to say it sounds pretty damn bad – possibly even worse than for musicians, even if the actual rates are higher in some ways. The numbers being thrown around involve phrases like ’60-80% cut in royalties.’

Anyway, writers, you’ve been warned. Anybody with a better understanding of the book world want to chime in?

Guess what finally showed up in the post:

I’m happy with the chrome instead of the black I’d originally wanted – I worried the chrome on the frame wouldn’t match that on the vehicle itself (because I have seen it in different colour temperatures) but yay, that worked out fine. ♥

Rehearsal today. Getting ready to head out for shows again soon. Yay!

So here’s what the Second Doctor sonic screwdriver I built and carried around at Anglicon looks like on the inside. It took a few goes to come up with the best way to do things – or should I say, a functional way to do things – since everything had to fit in a 9mm diameter tube.

I took a few approaches, but eventually I went back to just using the original pen light’s switch – a spring which is compressed to close a very simple circuit, which used the metal housing itself as the return power conduit. So all the various elements ended up being shaped like short AA batteries, with power contacts at each end.

This involved occasionally making casts for new parts, to hold the active elements against each other. I made them out of epoxy glue, with forms made of various items, sometimes tape, but whatever was appropriate.

I ended up having to cut that form down a lot, after it was done, because it was too big. And I needed to keep some space from the other side of the speaker, so I built a spacer out of a wooden dowel, and glued it all together, then wrapped in heatshrink.

The rattle/buzzer is similar. Obviously it has to be longer, because the actual driver is an offset motor, the sort of thing used in phones. The big difficulty here was that there’s an actual physically-spinning offset piece, and I needed a way to allow that to be pushed down upon without jamming. The original piece was a bit of plastic on only one side of the spinning element, but that turned out to be inadequate, so I surrounded it with a wooden tube.

Plus of course in both cases the wiring had to be moved so there’d be positive on one end and negative on the other, so all these cast elements had wire grooves in them. Here’s one of those ends, nice and visible.

And so, I ended up with this totally modular thing which will let me swap out modules – even, say live – and have functionality change. I already know my next module, if I can make it work. It’ll be hard, given the tiny size, but it’ll be fun to try.

Here are two videos of the sonic in operation: Noises emphasised, Light effect emphasised. Even though it’s just an LED, I really like how the lighting works.

And stills:

Sonic, Idle

Sonic, Lit

Sonic, Light End

Screen Accurate

So, yeah! Second Doctor Sonic.

Raptor emergency supplies compartment is all sorted:

A Well-Stocked Raptor is a Secure Raptor

Tho’ honestly, it’s good to have an emergency kit if you’re going out on long trips – for me, road trips for shows – and this vehicle has a place for a rather substantial one in back, as long as you don’t mind many shallow boxes. It’s hard to see in this photo but all this is in recessed divided sections, underneath the cargo floor, which is really nice. Nothing slides around or gets in the way.

The red box is a basic first aid kit, to which I’ve added a few extra supplies; the other boxes are as labelled. Under this layer there’s another separate compartment, with a toolkit, basic repair supplies (fuses, tubing, etc), spare tire and tire repair kit, as well as flashlight, things like that.

If you like putting things away in neat little boxes (even if the supplier changed their labels mid-stock and you ended up with two different labels, aheh), this is a pretty good vehicle to have. XD