Hey, weekenders! A present for you. Somebody knows their golden-age musicals inside and out – this is some great goddamn selection and editing.

Anna has been rebuilding the website of a science-fiction club we were in when we met, back when I was out east for school. The club is still around, meeting monthly, doing things, but their website – which we’ve been hosting – was still pretty firmly stuck in 2001 – at best – so Anna has been throwing everything into a more modern WordPress environment.

They’ve had this old logo – their club name (LexFA) in a state-of-Kentucky graphic – but countries and territories, being irregularly-shaped blobs, are not exactly a design element, and there wasn’t really a place for it in the new site. So I decided to play with it to see what could be done, grabbed some NASA starfield and nebula imagery, and came up with something kind of interesting. (The star with the points is both in the original NASA photo and locates the club.) But it’s still pretty useless as a standalone element, even with added text.

So I started poking around with it as a background element, and, with translucency, realised I could take advantage of LCD screen technology to do something kind of cool.

I can’t screencap the result, since the effect relies on the way LCDs physically work. But I can photograph it, even if the photography introduces moiré patterns which aren’t visible to the eye.

Here’s what a typical page looks like, looked at straight on, or from higher than the screen – the usual screen arrangement:

Normal view

And here’s what it looks like if you tilt the screen (or laptop) back, or just look at the screen from below. Again, that’s minus the moiré pattern seen here, which is purely a camera artefact and not visible to the eye.

The Kentucky has you, Neo

Once you know the graphic is there, you can see it at the normal angle too, but it doesn’t get in the way. And it fades to black as you go down from the header – the version I actually have online has more stars below the state outline, and fades to black, so I don’t have to tile anything.

I’m pretty sure the only time anyone will notice – if then – is if they put their laptop down on a table in front of them and then lean back in their chair or on a couch.

Anyway, it’s kind of a silly trick, and will be less and less effective as LCD technology continues to improve. But it’s fun for now. ^_^

Over on Medium, Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn writes about how the Bitcoin experiment has failed.

One of the issues I’ve had with Bitcoin is that there is a 50% threshold of calculations which essentially allow any individual or allied group to take control of the currency processing if they can throw enough hardware at it. At that point, they can do pretty much whatever they want – they have functional control over the currency.

Two groups immediately came to mind when I heard about it – the American NSA and the Chinese government – but there are several groups so capable. And, well – perhaps predictably – that threshold is now hit 100% of the time, according to the article.

And that’s only one of the several extremely serious problems all hitting at the same time.

It’s a good piece, and very much a cyberpunk set of problems, really, with lots of drama, personality clash, censorship – the right author could write a really good novel around this. If you’re interested even vaguely in cryptographic currencies, give it a read.

Today’s an errands day. I’ll be out an assortment of hours, so have a frost picture from last week’s shrine visit.

Detail

Check out this monstrosity of a 1980s synth:

No wait, that picture is missing the speakers, this will make what’s going on more clear:

Yes, it’s a synth with a built-in boombox. Or a synth built into a boombox, or a boombox with a built-in synth. It’s the legendarily goofy Casio KX-101, and I had never heard it it before Torsten Adair pointed it out to me on Facebook a couple of days ago.

You can play along with the radio, or with cassette playback, I think. You can’t record your music to that cassette, though – the synth uses it as a datacassette.

Like this, only DM1200. YES THIS THING COST LIKE 1200 DEUTSCHEMARKS.

Why a datacassette? So you could store your sequences, of course. YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT IT IS ALSO A SEQUENCER. Why, gods, why?

ALSO FOR SOME REASON IT WILL PLAY YOUR CASSETTE TAPES IN RANDOM ORDER IF YOU WANT. Yay let’s randomise the setlist! Nothin’ says “pro concert experience” like each song being separated by 60-something seconds of tape-seeking noise as it randomly picks and seeks to another spot on the cassette, am I right or am I right?

Synthtopia has a 2009 article on this monstrosity. Here’s a video:

You’re… welcome?

Found this in our webserver logs, from a CCC IP address:

(We’re far from the only one, it’s going around…)

Check this printed toy out. It doesn’t look like all that much for the first minute but the thing actually moves.

Recorded “scratch tracks” for “Supervillain For I Love You” yesterday, prep work for the big show at Conflikt in January. It’s basically so the other people who will be in the band for that show can learn it.

Also comped the bass tracks for “Thirteen.” This time bass tracks doesn’t mean multiple bass lines, tho’ you certainly know I’ve done that before. This time, it means one “dry” (no-effects) track and one “wet” (effects) track, which I then mix together in a ratio.

Normally the “wet” and “dry” are in one track, generated live via plugins. But in this case it’s actually two separate performances, because the effects I’m using – a really crunchy bass amp, an overdrive box, a little bit of old-school chorusing – are all external to my computer. So I’m treating the recording of that external-effected performance as an effect in and of itself, putting it in a separate recording track, and mixing with the “dry” bass guitar recording.

One neat side-benefit is that since once they’re both in the DAW they’re basically just two recordings, I can edit how long it takes each individual note’s instance of the “effect” to show up. It’s kind of like being able to set the pre-delay on a per note basis. I’m not doing much of that because in practice it’d be weird to do so, but there are a couple of places where it makes aural sense to loosen and tighten up the crunch timing. So hey, extra work, but bonus nonetheless!

Best part of this bass line tho’ is – well, there are two things. One: first recording of the Godin A5 Fretless that Anna got me for Bassmas last year. Two: crunky as fuck. Okay, so, three. Three things. Three: So goddamn deep. I am using all of this fifth string. Seriously, this entire bass line is being played on the bottom two strings of a five.

aw yeah. deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep bassing.

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

I grabbed this sign out of an office remodel a while ago – hey, Seattleites, guess where! – and added it to my studio door at the Lair last week:

I may be taking it a little too literally. These are picks after a couple of takes each of “Thirteen” today:

How many of these things am I gonna have to make to record this song?

I may have to upgrade my picks. I may need something a little more ruggedised, maybe something a bit more metal, like these:

Seriously, are those shiny or what? They’re from the GuitarPickCollection Etsy store. I’m not affiliated, the lead dev on Ardour just pointed me at them today and they are very, very pretty. He has a couple and reports they’re really smoothly polished, and are actually playable.

I think they’re kind of amazing. Not something I’d actually want to use; reviews of other metal picks say they’re great for lead work, but I need more flex than these would have. Even so, they’re amazing to look at.

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album. If you’re with the academy, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Fred showed up for Second Thanksgiving from Oregon with a MOUNTAIN DULCIMER BASS. I did not even know this was a thing. I sat around playing metal basslines on it. I want to hook it up to like three overdrive pedals and rawk out.

I posted proof of concept video on Tumblr, go check this thing out, it is hilarious and awesome. 😀

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Check it out – it’s a sample-based synth, right? But it lets you snip and select subsets of the waveform live, as you’re playing. Sure, there’s nothing here that you can’t do now with a DAW and mics and such, but as an interface? This is really, really slick.

It’s a prototype only at the moment, which is too bad. Love to play with this.

(h/t spazzkat and gizmodo)

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