Cyber Monday always makes me think it’s basically HELLO CYLONS time, but hey, who am I to stand in the way of a good robot uprising? I mean, let’s face it, nothing says “discounts now!” like an old-fashioned cybernetic apocalypse.

So in that spirit, here, have a discount code for anything – including physical goods – on the Bandcamp site. Bandcamp is the best because they let you download lossless files, and also because you can actually get physical media if you want, and get them signed and such. (Just be sure to tell me you want that!)

Enter this code at checkout:

cyber2015

…and it’s 20% off everything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, having played Christmas Capitalist, I must now go conduct some experiments on brains. Possibly my own, possibly using bleach. You know – the usual Monday.

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Hello, Atlantic Canada and American East Coasters! There is in fact a Cyber Monday post coming. Yes, I’m doing it too, I’m calling it Cylon Monday. It’s queued for 9am Cascadian/Pacific time, so if you’re looking for such things, come back then.

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

What with the power outages and then going out of town and and and things, I totally forgot the raffle! OK! So! Um, entry is extended to Wednesday! Either Like THIS POST on Facebook OR Click HERE and leave a comment to enter – make sure you have a valid contact email in your comment – and I’ll draw a winner on Wednesday morning.

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

On my digital audio workstation, I run two monitors, and I do it in xinema mode. This is because Ardour – like the overwhelming majority of apps ever – wants all its windows to be on one desktop. xinema mode is how Xwindows does that.

It’s great for Ardour. I have mixer on one screen, editor on another, it’s lovely.

But a couple of system updates ago, a lot of apps started getting “better” ideas about where “centre of screen” is, by which I mean, instead of getting centre of monitor, they were getting centre of desktop.

Which means that many applications now start split in half across two monitors. Including, annoyingly, Ardour’s startup menu and open-file menu; it remembers opening positions for main windows but not startup dialogues or splash screens.

This is incredibly annoying.

So is there a way for it to get, idk, “monitor centre” when it asks for “screen centre,” or to set a default location for unspecified-position windows, or… stuff? Because yeah. Annoying. So annoying.

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Short notice show! I’m playing with Leannan Sidhe at Shoreline Community College’s Black Box Theatre on November 6th. It’s part of the Express Yourself Showcase. I don’t know what the rules are for audience admission – as in, whether it’s students and faculty ID required – but if you’re around, come watch the fun! There are lots of groups performing.

We’ve made some progress on the Lair’s wifi situation, particularly on the lowest level. We’ve gone from really quite a mess to something a lot more reasonable. To wit, enjoy some signal-to-noise ratio maps:

Minionland and Chudville had Really Bad Wifi

Minionland and Chudville have Much Better Wifi

Colder colours are noisier, blue is pretty bad, unevenness is generally not good. I’m showing signal-to-noise maps rather than raw-signal-strength maps because as long as you have enough signal to use, S/N ratios are much more important than raw signal power. A full-strength signal that’s 30% garbage is useless; a weak but audible signal that’s clean is just fine. So.

There’s less yellow super-hotspot area now, but you’re not going to get much throughput improvement between those strong green levels and the yellow. The evenness of field should help with reliability, of course – that’s lots and lots of yellowish green, which is pretty solid.

And most of all: no more blue. Blue in this software means problematic levels of noise. I was seeing S/N headroom numbers as low as 20db, and regularly in the low 20s; that’s not disastrous, but it’s not good. Now we’re reliably in the 40db range, which is a huge improvement. dB is logarithmic, so that’s not twice as much headroom, it’s 100 times the headroom. It’s a lot.

To get here, we’ve done a few things. One, we got seriously started on the RF noise suppression in the wiring through liberal use of filter units and ferrites. There’s still lots to do, but it’s a start.

Two, we moved the primary lower hub so that it’s as close to above the downstairs repeater as I could get without tearing into walls. (The location indicators on the display are wrong; it’s the software’s best guess, and it’s inaccurate sometimes.)

Three, I built a reflector for that primary hub to spread the signal around better on the ground level, the non-CHUD half of which is shown above. (The CHUD half is a secret.)

Also, we had to repurpose a functionally-useless AirPlay receiver as a second repeater, one level up. That repeater is not shown. It’s so that the main level would have somewhat reasonable coverage from the lower network, which is useful for people going up and down stairs.

So, yeah, there’s that update. It’ll be a couple of days before the next set of line filters arrive – I burned through most of through my useful stock – but that will hopefully help with the noise a bit more.

Then I’m going to poke some at the upper network – officially the “west” network, though both “up” and “west” are true – to see if I can get some better south-end coverage out of it. It’s unlikely, but I’ll try. Mostly, I’m happy not to have done it any measurable harm by adding yet another transmitter to the lower network.

Will this solve all our problems? I doubt it. I’ve already found that we shouldn’t be using our upstream provider’s DNS servers. Our servers don’t use it, why should our workstations? So I’ve gone back to using our own, and that’s already helped. But the big job, I suspect, is getting IPv4/IPv6 concurrency sorted. We’re running some IPv6 now, on workstations, and I’m pretty sure some of the stacks are… not entirely ready. And I’m not sure what to do about that.

So much overhead in running a lair, I tell you.

If you’re looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominees, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

I’m considering using rafflecopter for a couple of promotional giveaways – not just to give and end-of-the-year boost to Bone Walker, but for the next album, once it’s out.

(Which means once it’s recorded, which means once it’s planned… hey, at least it’s written, right? That counts for something… XD)

Anyway, has anybody used this thing? Is it any good for getting notice? What kind of results have you had, if you’re the one running the raffles?

Over on Facebook, Boris L. tagged me on a link to this instructable on making a steel can microphone. I don’t care much about steel-can microphones (though they are apparently a thing?), but I was curious about the actual pickup element inside. That pickup turned out to be this balanced-output piezo contact microphone, which comes in a kit form for reasonably little money.

The assembly instructions for it are online. As I’m reading, hanging around in the back of my head have been these pressure zone microphones (generic name boundary microphone) that I’ve performed with once, and have seen discussed several places. They’ve always struck me as kind of interesting to play with, but never enough to justify purchase.

You can probably see where I’m going here: the outdoor versions of these PZMs look a lot like contact pickups attached to sheets of rigid plastic, suspended in air via a cord framework. I can certainly build that.

I’m considering a couple of designs, but this is my thinking: since this element is a piezo, it works best with direct contact with a resonating body. That could be a sheet of rigid lightweight plastic, much larger than the pickup, to gather sound and resonate. Hang that sheet-plus-attached-pickup from a rigid outer frame, using some form of elastic suspension. Low-density foam might work, for example, like with a speaker. Then that can be hung anywhere.

That’s the simplest of the ideas I have, and makes sense in that sniff-test kind of way. It’d be large, but every mic of this type I’ve seen has been large, so that’s fine. Depending upon what happens, I could also poke around with hanging it on walls, as is the usual use for boundary/pressure-zone microphones.

So, yeah! I won’t get to it immediately, but when I do, I will of course post about it. Mostly, I’m hoping I don’t have to build some sort of multi-layer frame around the large plastic pickup plate. That’s one of the more complicated designs. I could do it, but the more complicated these things get, the worse they tend to sound.

If you have any design knowledge of these sorts of things, share some knowledge in comments! I haven’t seen other attempts at DIY PZMs using this approach, which kind of surprises me. That might mean it doesn’t work at all, but it might also just mean nobody else has thought of it. Piezo isn’t generally very well regarded outside of instrument contact pickup applications. Maybe it could turn out to be a thing.

Bone Walker and “Kitsune at War” are in play for Grammy awards.

I don’t mean that in some sort of abstract everything-that-gets-released-is-eligible sense. I mean as in a member of the Recording Academy has nominated both for consideration – Bone Walker for Best Folk Album, and “Kitsune at War” for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella.

These awards are given by The Recording Academy. Like the World Science Fiction Society and the Hugo Award, any voting member of the Academy can nominate any work for consideration for a Grammy. But unlike the Hugo awards, said nominations to go a jury for review, and unlike WSFS, TRA has qualifications for joining – it’s not like the Hugo awards where anyone can pony up their $40, become a WSFS member, and be involved. So there is in fact a higher bar here.

I don’t know what happens after the review jury, because I’m not a member. But six copies of CDs were requested for the jury, have been sent, and are now in the hands of the Academy. I have also seen some very strange play patterns on Bandcamp the last few days. These are probably coincidental. But they might not be.

Insert a million tiny eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee o/ here.

Don’t confuse this with being on the shortlist; it is not that. This is just one person doing a thing, albeit being a person who is a member of the actual Recording Academy tossing these into the actual ring for actual jury consideration for an actual industry award.

It is certainly true that the odds of getting past this stage are low. I mean, who the hell are we with our homebrew recording studio and $90 microphones and everything-is-DIY aesthetic, right? These are industry awards. The odds of making the next around – whatever that round might be – are very long. I know all this.

But it is also true that those odds are a hell of a lot shorter than they were a mere three weeks ago. While still very long, they have shortened dramatically. And even with those odds, it is further still true that, regardless of the probabilities involved…

…Bone Walker and “Kitsune at War” are, at this moment, actively in play for Grammy Awards.

Holy shit, you guys. Grammies! O.o

see also

I have this big tall sound baffle I call “the monolith.” It was the first one I made. I play into it, and have people play into it, to minimise bounce when recording.

After Bone Walker was recorded, I moved it back towards the wall a bit to free up more space. Around then, I also noticed the monitor speakers sounded a little weird, a little… hollow? It was hard to describe. Failing to add two and two, I wondered if my monitor amp needed more work or something, but put it aside to think about later.

A couple of days ago I helped somebody with a sound engineering homework assignment on standing waves. Which made me think about this.

Today I finally did some math and HEY putting the monolith were I had originally put it, just because it seemed like a good place? Totally fixed a room mode problem^*.

Let’s put that RIGHT BACK WHERE WE HAD IT then, shall we? And never move it again. Perhaps I will nail it down, as a reminder.

*: Two near-double nodes! One pair at 203 and 207hz (not actually so bad), another pair at 274 and 276hz (fairly bad). Moving the baffle back to the old location disrupts both.

Sometimes you buy gear, sometimes you make gear (particularly if you’re a DIYer like me), sometimes you just find gear.

Leannan Sidhe’s lead singer had an old black leather purse she didn’t use anymore because somebody got paint on it. It was passably renfaireish before that – at least after she’d put on a metal decoration on the front to distract from the modern clasp – but since the paint accident she’d put it aside. And that’s how I found it at a rehearsal.

paint not shown.
(it was mostly on the strap)

Now, at renfaires – her band does a lot of renfaire gigs, and these days that includes me – you can sell CDs and stuff. But you want to keep them and your sales gear out of sight, since those are obviously very much not period. Talk about it at your show, of course, but don’t carry a big cardboard box from Memphis around. The illusion is tenuous enough as it is.

So when I looked in this old purse and saw it had CD-width dividers built-in, I said, “Oh, is this what you used to carry CDs in before you got that awesome wooden box you use now?” And she looked at me and said, “…I never even thought of that.” And so she gave it to me.

The paint was just latex. It came off with a mild orange-oil-based adhesive residue remover (De-Solv-It) that doesn’t even need gloves to use. And so now I have a renfaire sales box – one compartment for CDs, one for download codes (and an extra CD, because it fits), one for money and Square for charge cards and a pen and there’s even room left over. Keep the big stock in your tent, refill between shows as needed, carry 10 or so CDs to a set, everybody wins.

I didn’t even have to make this thing. It already even had correctly-sized dividers inside! I just had to recognise what it was, and clean it up. So yeah, sometimes… you just find gear.