Archive for the ‘diy’ Category
I need this. I need it like burning. It’s a device that basically turns anything, and I mean anything, into a percussion instrument.
I see how it’s made and I’m kind of thinking, y’know, maybe I should build that.
Then again, maybe I should stop adding new projects and finish ones I’ve already started. Maybe that.
(Thanks to Klopfenpop for the link.)
The other set of LED tape lights arrived. Initially they had less impact when tested; the window behind the baffles in the left on this photo don’t go as high as the baffle, so the top lights were a bit hidden. So I tapped in a bit of wood to raise it.
Here are four configurations I’ve already found I like quite a bit and am actually using at their appropriate times of day – the idea is that if I don’t have BRIGHT DAYLIGHT LIGHTS on at 2pm, I won’t look up and go “oh look it’s 3:30 and I have to be up at… eight!”
Click to enlarge in a separate tab.
The pictures are colour-manipulated a little to try to get at least in the neighbourhood of the correct colours; this was as close as I can get. The white areas around really the colours you see near them, not white. The orange is more orangy, the green is more greeny, the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Exactly like snozzberries.
But yeah, $35 in LEDs – including the controllers and remotes. That doesn’t include power supplies; I had one already and paid $10 for a second one that can handle the full input requirements of the longer strand, so I do things now like put that one on cycle and leave the other one steady if I want. Just because I CAN.
Mood/time-lighting LEDs are awesome. 😀
While I was opening the computer to add glowy bits and more importantly a case fan to support the new graphics card, I noticed the wiring inside was a bit of a mess, and cleaned things up a bit.
While doing that, I noticed that the cable providing extra power to the USB root-hub card I’d previously installed 1) used an utterly unnecessary adaptor, and 2) had a loose piece. As in, one of the wires – the yellow one – was basically just reseting against the connection point, rather than being clamped on properly.
Now, things have been working reasonably well lately, but I have been getting a sudden hard bus error about once a day. Ardour crashes, JACK reports a hard bus error but restarts successfully.
That the yellow pin was just resting against its intended contact might explain that problem. Even if it doesn’t, that’s not okay, so I yanked the adaptor, used one of the extant four-pin power connectors in its place, and went on my merry way.
I have had exactly zero bus errors since making this change.
It’s still too early to claim victory – I’ve had error-free runs before – but it’d be awfully, awfully nice if installing a case fan and glowy lights actually lead to solving a known problem.
After all the hell involved late Friday night in getting nVidia drivers running under Linux (a.k.a., “Hi, I’m Running A New Kernel Now, Ask Me Why!”), I thought it’d be a good idea to get a case fan. I got the quietest 92mm fan they had at Fry’s, clocking in at 14.6db. I also picked up some hum-dampening silicon bolts for attachment.
Installing it proved I was right in deciding I couldn’t possibly afford the noise of a graphics card with fans onboard. Even the whisper-quiet-as-such-things-go case fan required me to throw some sound absorption behind the box to get it back to inaudible in the recording space.
…and okay maybe I couldn’t resist grabbing a case light while I was at it. It was only $8, so why not? 😀 But behind the case, you can see that I’ve attached some leftover sound baffle material to the wall – it’s just a single layer, but that’s okay, since fan noise is pretty high-frequency and easy to scatter.
In addition to the visible pieces, there’s another attached to the underside of the shelf that overhangs the case. It’s just out of frame above this picture. That piece catches some of the sound bounce coming out from the back which isn’t picked up by the wall pieces. The reduction is enough to hear, close up.
This baffling brings the case noise back down to the same level as it had before, without the fan. It’s nice to be justified in my card choices, but I wish I’d been wrong – the GT520 chipset isn’t bad, but I’d really kind of like, oh, a 750 TI. But… not today, not in this machine, not in this room.
What do you use for GPU temperature monitoring? Given the temperatures of everything else, I’m confident I’m fine, but I wouldn’t mind monitoring the card itself for a bit. Windows or Linux is fine.
Oh, and! On Internet Skyrims Elder Scrolls Online, I’m Starbird the Fleet, username Solarbirdy. Still in starting environment at the moment, breaking out of prison – and getting used to PC controls again after a long time being a console gamer only – but I’ll be out of that soon. Look me up.
I decided I liked how the LEDs looked where they were in the photo from yesterday, so here’s how I made a more permanent version using 100 year old knobs from knob-and-tube wiring!
The turns are knobs, pulled out of a 1911 house. The supports between long horizontal sections are foam core. To show a bunch of the colours, I decided to try panorama mode on the phone while the LEDs were in colour-cycle mode. It kinda worked, but really does more “look where Apple takes its samples” than describe how it looks in person. Still, it’s kind of cool:
And here’s what it looks like with the baffles put back into place. Only, not actually rainbowy all at once like this, it’s cycling through each of these colours as I pan the camera. Still, you can see how the shelf underlighting section works:
Finally, here’s a still shot, with only one colour, in this case GREEN! It’s actually greener in person than this, but my cell phone amps that up to white because it does and I can’t stop it.
People asked in comments yesterday how much power it draws. Well, it depends upon the mode. The green above is drawing about 10 watts. It draws as little as 5 watts while on, and 1.2 watts when “off” but listening for remote. At full brightness white, it draws nearly 40 watts. The colour-cycles draw anywhere from 18 to 38 watts, so that probably averages around 28.
Make sure if you do this that you’ve got a power supply capable of handling that 40 watts, and test it – the supposed 52-watt Radio Shack 12V power supply I had on hand blew out in 10 minutes! Badly done again, Admiral Shack! This one seems better, despite being rated for less.
I definitely want to order more of these, they are awesome. And they really do set a nice mood. If they blow up, I’ll be sure to post about that, too. 😀
I may already be addicted to these. I want more of them. SO MANY MORE OF THEM.
They also do normal colours like radioactive green, daylight, warm light, and OH GOD I LOVE THESE THINGS HOW CAN I PUT THEM EVERYWHERE?
They’re pretty bright, too. I am not disappointed on that front.
I’ve got this strip colour cycling now (fade/slow transition) but it can be set to specific colours and and yeah these are awesome. They’re like $16 for five metre lengths with controller but without power supply. I have plenty of power supplies sitting around, so that’s just fine by me.
Honestly right now I just want to put them everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
I’ll be guesting with Leannan Sidhe in May and June, in Oregon and on the Washington dry side. In Oregon in particular we’ll actually just be a duo, which is kind of taking it to extremes, but nobody else in the band is available(!) due to Many Reasons.
Which means doing the little things, like wrapping some picks in fabric so my zouk loses a lot of the high-end harmonics and sounds superficially more like a guitar. I tried felt picks, but they just didn’t feel right, or sound the same. So it’s DIY, ahoy:
Wrap in double-sided tape, then fabric, then trim with scissors. Doesn’t actually take long. I’ve used these with Leannan Sidhe before, but not in a while, because normally her guitarists are actually around, and then I don’t need them.
Got some decent mandolin recording last night, on Some for a Free Court/Anarchy Now. Also had some interesting discussion with Anna, whose books these are (and who has a new book out now, by the way) about future timelines and worldbuilding.
I love being on this side of the spoiler wall. Sure, Rebels of Adalonia is getting all the attention right now, but Free Court… this – all of it? It’s gonna be good. 😀
Well, it’s official: my music has enough fans to be worth pirating. Yay?
They’re both in Russia and they’re probably going to be 128kbps preview-grade streams (or worse – one’s lifted from YouTube), so yeah, have fun with that. I’m kind of flattered. I mean, to keep copyright I’m kind of required to protest (hence this), but lol yeah like that works. XD
But still, if you like my work, throw me some coin, eh? Stuff costs money. 😀
Any of you hit any weird milestones like this? What’s the weirdest milestone you’ve ever hit?
Some of the problems I outlined in the afternoon post yesterday are cleared up, or at least accounted for – plugin status being saved and loaded is working, the asterisk cycling thing is seen by other people and also can be made to go away, loss of synchronisation when changing playlists during playback has been reproduced by dev and they’re interested – but the plugins are still problems. But I can work with this now.
Which means, I finally got to hear some percussion being done by one of our guest artists properly embedded into a mix, and wow, I am totally excited about this track in ways I wasn’t before. 😀 I left some space intentionally for this to be brought in, but knowing ‘a thing will go here’ is not the same as ‘an awesome thing is actually here.’ And the awesome thing that’s awesomeing around in this mix now is pretty awesome.
Because it is. 😀
Also, lots of Norwescon stuff, including this year’s new stage banner, which still isn’t huge but is the largest we’ve had – and we’ve never actually had a dedicated stage banner before, we just reused the concert directions. I thought I’d fix that.
Now if I can just fix those damned plugins…
Here’s a copy of the the problem summary I posted to ardour.org. Good news is the playlist switching has already been reproduced, and isn’t related to the plugins; also, the strange asterisk behaviour has been seen by someone else, too. But the other problems? Not yet. Help?
A problem I thought was project-specific isn’t project-specific after all 🙁
I have multiple problems that all appeared at the same time, after getting MIDI going in Ardour. I don’t know that getting MIDI running caused the problems; I also did an apt-get update/upgrade that brought in newer versions of Calf plugins which does not preceed the first occurance of the problems but does seem to be involved in some way.
First: on loading many projects, I get a nontrivial pause, during which time disc space is shown to be 0h 0m 0s remaining, and the title bar project name alternates between askterisked and non-askterisked. This cycle of asterisk/non-asterisk appears to repeat the same number of times as I have Calf plugins plugged in across all tracks. So if I have an assortment of tracks N and a total of 10 Calf plugins across all tracks, it will cycle 10 times.
Pulling all the Calf plugins and plugging them back in again (same places, same setting) with LV2 versions makes this problem go away.
ALSO: projects with tracks with Calf (LADSPA) plugins don’t play, and LADSPA Calf plugins seem to be misbehaving; I get anywhere from muted to noise to distorted play. Replacing them with LV2 Calf plugins (I think – the ones not marked LADSPA) makes this go away as well. (Note: I have two copies of most of the Calf plugins (and have for some time – honestly I don’t know why, but the old ones go back to Ardour 2), some with (LADSPA) after the name, some without.)
Swapping plugins out is a bigger project than it may seem, because I have never, ever had presets load for me, despite having the subscriber version of Ardour. Checking the store, I see that the presets are _saved_, but they don’t get loaded. I don’t know why.
Now, once I do this, and have things playing and sounding right again, and no delay at startup, in these projects, I have very slow response to the record button (1.5ish seconds) and swapping playlists on tracks while playing results in that track going silent for 1.5ish seconds, and then resuming play, delayed from the rest of playback by the same amount of time.
[Video of example removed; it was resolved/won’t fix]
That video quality is pretty weak; I can record it again with a desktop video recorder. But since Ardour is running output through my external interface and everything else uses the built-in motherboard sound, it wouldn’t be as useful for this case, because of no sound.
When playing that video, note the fiddler dropping out for about a second and a half, while the other playback continues; then the fiddle comes back in, picking up immediately where it left off, delayed from the rest. I did it twice; the fallback is cumulative.
On projects not (…yet…) affected, and until a couple of weeks ago, I could change playlists more or less instantly; I would do this to audition phrases and the like during comping.
This collection of problems has rather kicked my workflow and progress on my current projects in the knees, so … anybody? Help?
THE NEW SINGLE
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