Apparently whether you can be a great violinist resides in large part in your left pinky finger. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that makes more sense once you read it, but who knew? I wonder how many serious violinists and fiddlers can’t do that. I’ve always had a large amount of “yeah? go fuck yourself” to “you can’t do that,” so I wonder whether this is one of those brick walls I’d throw myself against.

Tho’ not literally, because I have that left pinky finger property. Which clearly in and of itself does not make you a great violinist, because “Doctor, will I be able to play fiddle once the cast comes off?/Yes, yes, you’ll be fine!/That’s weird, I couldn’t play the fiddle before!” I guess you have to study and practice and stuff. But I do have the viLOLin – the $36 violin I picked up at a pawn – and I do want to learn to play sometime.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Too many pieces, too many parts, too many things to learn in not enough time. For me, it’s a bunch of music things, and languages. Now there’s a brick wall I throw myself against – I’m great at grammars, my accents are too good (in that people assume I’m fluent or even native-speaker and firehose at me), but I can’t learn vocabulary to save my life. As in, I’m so bad at it, my secondary school let me out of the language requirement, as long as I just kept trying.

Really, that’s what I need the brain enhancement for: memorisation. Particularly of language vocabulary, but not just that. If I could stick a chip in my brain and fix that? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

Should that be a poll? “What enhancement would get you to try it?” That might be fun. Suggestions in comments, if you got ’em.

We’re having all kinds of weird and random problems with YouTube and Google-hosted stuff. This mostly isn’t a big deal, just really annoying – I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, so.

But it is a thing. and it’s not just lagginess – if I go to YouTube and try to switch accounts, it says I don’t have multiple accounts, then it lets me try to log into my other one, then that fails with a bad password or no response at all (often the latter), then suddenly I’m logged in to both accounts, except one isn’t available, except when it is, and then I can check analytics… unless it just decides not to load. Then I may and may not be logged into both accounts anymore.

Videos sometimes load perfectly and sometimes just never load at all. It’s across browsers and machines, and I’ve rebooted the hardware router. We can’t detect a pattern yet, other than it’s only on Googleplex sites. Everybody else is fine.

To wit: whut?

eta: oh ho, maybe it’s not just us:

Problem loading Google+

There was a problem loading the Google+ CSS. Please double check your network connection and try reloading in a few minutes.

For some reason, I feel like talking about photography.

Here’s a shot I took from Butchart Gardens, outside Victoria, weekend before last:

The Inlet

I was going for that kind of 40s or 50s-holiday feel, an older boat, a dock that’s actually pretty new but looks older because of the sepiatone, and all that. I’m pretty happy with it. It has a 1930s feeling that I get from looking at land photos from the era.

But all of that was post-photo, because this was originally a shot with different intent – an intent that didn’t work. At all. Here’s the original:

(Technically speaking, that’s the next shot, but it’s pretty much identical.) I was trying a couple of experiments that failed in the same way, but I didn’t delete the shots from my camera, and ended up with the sepia faux historical.

In terms of mechanics, getting to the above from the below was all in iPhoto, but it works the same in Photoshop. iPhoto has a lovely biased centre-of-brightness tool they call “Shadows,” and another one biased differently called “Highlights.” The first makes shadows brighter, the second brings down highlights, and in both cases, they’ll reveal lots of lost detail if you crank them way the hell up.

The problem with this approach is that no matter what, you’re missing a lot of colour data. You just don’t have it – at least, not in usable resolution. The resulting images often look washed out and/or really grainy. This original, treated thusly, looks really washed out:

“Shadows” and “Highlights” cranked way the hell up

…which is where monochrome comes in. I went with sepia/amber here to invoke a mood, but standard black-and-white would’ve worked about as well. If you merge the colour data to a monochrome palette, you get back to a similar amount of intensity data as you’d’ve had if you’d shot the image in black-and-white to start. It looks natural, within the artifice of photography.

I’ve pulled out a fair number of concert shots this way, and night crowd shots. You get this old-school newspaper/disco kind of look. I’ll even turn up the graininess on purpose, to drive that home. And with that, a shot that looked lost can be made vibrant and interesting again.

C.f. this crowd shot, at Strowler Nights, a few years ago:

That was basically a black rectangle with highlights, on my camera. But play with the levels, edit out a stray arm in the lower left, take out the colour, and: result!

If I’d left it in colour, it would’ve been – at best – a washed-out mess with hints of colour. But taken to monochrome, and kicking up the grain so it looks intentional, and you end up with a textured crowd portrait.

Which I guess really means I didn’t want to talk about photography, I wanted to talk about art, and intent. To wit: a lot of things you think of as flaws or problems can become assets, if you just turn them up to the point where they look intentional, then fine-tune them a bit. Not everything, gods know. But a surprising number.

If you’ve done something like this, post links or descriptions, eh? Share your mistakes-turned-successes. It might be fun. ^_^

We haven’t done a proper postmortum on the Leannan Sidhe album project yet, partly because of time, and partly because it’s not through mastering. We’re pretty much done, though; principal recording is over, and Alec has done all or nearly all the mixing; I just ran a set of 50 pre-mastered discs for Shanti this weekend, to take to Arkansas for a festival.

Despite that, I have made a few notes and workflow changes. For one thing, I’ve always known regions – which are windows onto recorded tracks, like snippets of tape, but adjustable – had names, could be renamed, and those names were somehow inherited. But it’s only now I’ve actually started using that, naming them by take numbers and such. It’s made compiling composite takes much less confusing.

But hang on, this is a DIY post, promise

But we did have one problem that cost us seven or eight takes during the process.

We do all the recording in isolation headphones. The performer hears the playback in them, as well as what they’re doing, and none of that gets into the mics. Every so often we stop and listen to what we’ve done on the studio playback speakers. (The “monitors.”) Then we’ll go back to recording.

And all this works great… unless, of course, you forget to turn the monitors off, which we did. Several times. In isolation headphones, we can’t hear the speakers, so we don’t necessarily catch it.

Meanwhile, speaker selection has been a little weird – the amp has “A” and “B” buttons, and “B” went to a three-way box, because I had four total speaker sets. And there aren’t any indicator lights.

Or, rather, there weren’t any indicator lights.

My first idea was “can I make something that’ll flash when there’s speaker activity?” I wasn’t planning on changing the speaker setup or any of that; I just wanted to piggyback onto what I already had. I came up with a simple solution – literally just a resistor and a diode, pulling off 0.8% of the output circuit to cause lights to flicker at loud volumes. It’s not everything I’d like but it’s as close as I’m getting at the moment.

Separately, I’d decided I didn’t like the “amplifier on” light I’d jury-rigged up before, with those little green rectangle nightlights on an extension cord, and figured I could put both of those into one box with like four cords running to it. Seemed a bit excessive, but worth doing anyway.

So I went looking for an experimenter’s box to hold all that. I wasn’t really finding a good-sized one, when I stumbled across an old Radio Shack audio-video selector box.

I found a picture of the same model, elsewhere online:

Switches audio left, audio right, and composite video

The left side of the box is just blank space. The box is that wide only so there’s enough room on back for all the plugs. While I couldn’t find a “before” picture of the insides online to show you, there’s just not a whole lot inside, either; it’s four switches on a single circuit board.

And that’s when I decided I could change the speaker setup so all four speakers went through one box. No more A/B and external switcher: one box. And that box could have a couple of indicator lights on it for signal. Perfect!

Except this is one of those projects that turned into kind of a science-related mimetic disorder episode. I had an idea, I came up with a circuit, I figured out I could make a way simpler version… then I fiddled with that and improved it again… then I realised I could add another bit of functionality over here… then I realised I could add another piece of functionality… until I ran out of parts. Then I got more parts and realised I could add something else… and I didn’t take any pictures for quite a while. But I have a couple.

In this photo, I’ve already done some work; those resistor pairs are replacements for lower-watt resistors of the same value. I didn’t really need to do that; they’re just buffers to prevent capacitance buildup in disconnected pins, and are out of the signal path.

It’s right about here that I really realised this wasn’t an audio switch, it was an audio-video switch. And I wasn’t using the video. And if I could isolate the video portion of the box… I could run a few volts of power indicator on those connections.

Which can also mean lines for speaker select indicators, because these switches are switching both audio and video circuits….

And that’s how these cascades get started. Follow along, eh?

Now, before you try to do this, it’s really, really important that you know you’ve isolated all parts of the video circuit from everything else. Including the ground line. Even if you’re only running three volts of DC on it, the speaker signal is AC, and speaker circuitry does not like DC. You can and will damage your speakers. I had to scrape away part of the circuit board to isolate the ground half of the video circuit; you probably will too!

Now by the time I’d started taking pictures, I’d already done a fair bit of work. Here’s the faceplate, with holes drilled for power, left signal, right signal, and speaker selection lights:

I thought I was done here, but that was a lie; I was just out of parts.

Here’s the faceplate, back on the board, with most of the LED lamps mounted. (See again: out of parts.) Here, I’ve also isolated the video circuit from all the others, while still leaving it connected to the switches. That resistor on the lower right is attached to what had been the video ground, and it’s the buffer resistor for the LED power circuit:

Now, with my multimetre, I’d figured out that the lower two posts on the left side (as seen in these photos) were the posts for completing the video circuit on each switch. Now they’re power switches, so let’s start connecting them to the LEDs!

Now here, I’ve built a return rail. Each switch is connected to an LED input, then all the LED outputs are connected together on that rail, and the rail connects back to the ballast resistor. If you’ve seen this circuit before done in isolated wires like this before, well, welcome to vacuum tube amplifier construction, circa 1956.

You might notice that we don’t have the power light attached, yet – because, again, out of parts.

Next up was to put in my tiny signal detectors. It’s nothing more than a high-value resistor and an LED. Remember: LEDs are diodes. You don’t need two separate parts (diode and lamp) if you have enough ballast to let the LED itself do the diode job:

The ballast resistor and LED are connected in series, picking off the signal line from the inputs, and going back to the grounds. I wired left and right grounds in parallel here… really just for symmetry’s sake. They’re the same ground. But as long as the signal side of the diode is isolated, you won’t get any signal intermix.

Note that I’m picking up the audio signal from the switches, like with the DC power. This is just for ease of access – there wasn’t a good place to pick up the signal anywhere else. Those were the input pins for each channel, so always on.

Now, overnight, that LED pickup bothered me. I couldn’t complete the box without the extra parts – this is when I was tweeting WHY ISN’T THERE A 24-HOUR RADIO SHACK IN THIS TOWN? SCIENCE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR NEED FOR SLEEP! – so the design was still foreground in my brain. And while it isn’t a big signal hit, every time that LED lights up, I’m picking off a little bit of output signal.

So I decided that I needed to add a “defeat” switch, to be able to have those LEDs out of the loop for ordinary listening.

I did that by taking the two returns from the signal-detect LEDs – the leads heading towards ground – and running them through an on/off switch. Easy-peasy. The most difficult part was a switch that would fit – I wanted to use a rocker switch I have several of, but it simply wouldn’t physically fit on the faceplate. Instead, I went with a push on/push off.

As soon as that ground is lifted, the circuit is isolated, and we’re all done.

To be honest, I don’t really hear any difference one way or the other, but I still feel better about having included it. ^_^

And, separately, I ran leads for the power indicator light. The way I wired it, it dims when a speaker is enabled. That was an accident, but I like it.

Finally – this piece of Radio Shack kit was built for line level signals, not speaker level signals, and I wanted more metal on the rails for the thicker signal. I’ve already been using a piece of kit a lot like this, but it bothered me more here. I ran that on the opposite side instead:

I was a little nervous about having the parallel rails – a tiny one on the top of the circuit board, a proper one underneath – but I did the time math and the difference is going to be inaudible to anyone. We’re talking less than microseconds.

So here’s what it all looks like before being put back in the case, with no power:

And here it is all connected up. One video connector is used for +3V input. The other video connects are filled with hot glue, to make sure nothing ever accidentally gets plugged in there. The left amber light is amp-has-power. The two red LEDs (which are brighter and less red in this photo than in real life) indicate strong speaker signal. The green LEDs indicate which speaker is selected. It is possible to have none selected, which is nice:

So. The old speaker-selector box is pulled; this replaces it. The old blue-rectangle amp-is-on power indicator is gone; this replaces that, too. The “A” and “B” switches on the amp can mostly be ignored. There are now lights to indicate which speakers are on, and there are loud-signal lamps which flicker as an additional layer of warning.

Hopefully, now, we’ll finally not have to worry quite so much about accidentally leaving the monitors on.

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

I used to do a lot more flower photography than I do anymore, but I was in Butchart Gardens a couple of weeks ago, so of course I took a lot of photos. So here’s today’s flower picture. You may get more of these over time if people like them.

Checkers

You know how all those white plastic electronics – computers, game systems, lamps, just whatever – start to turn yellow after a few years? And no amount of cleaning will fix it, not even bleach, which tends to just hurt the plastic a bit?

A few years ago, some antique computer collectors – particularly of old Amiga, Commodore, and Atari white plastic computers – did a lot of experimenting around and came up with a solution. It’s known generically as Retr0brite, but you can make it yourself. Essentially it’s a kind of oxidation – a bromine solution is added to the plastic as a fire-retardant, and over time a hydrogen atom gets replaced by an oxygen, which rotates the molecule just a bit to expose the bromine, which looks like this:

UV light makes it worse more quickly

All this means that eventually the 1990s-era trackball that used to live in the sunroom looks like this:

Yep. That’s yellowed.

This is an old Microsoft Intellipoint trackball from the 1990s. I have four of them, one still new in box. It is, for my hands, the single best pointing device ever made. Needing to take it apart to scrub it out inside got this whole thing started.

As you can see, it’s got quite yellow over time, thanks to that UV-triggered bromine exposure. Retr0brite triggers the release of the aforementioned hydrogen, and re-replaces it with oxygen, reconfiguring the molecule just that little bit. You’re actually restoring the plastic with this process, rather than damaging it further.

Mixing up Retr0brite is actually quite simple. The only difficult part is getting the right mixture of artificial mucus, to use as a physical stabiliser. You need one, to keep the Retr0brite on the plastic, rather than running off into the tray.

Minion Paul had to leave the room

It’s just corn starch, relax. XD

I was able to get a reasonably-pure 12% hydrogen peroxide solution locally, but if I had the option, I’d go up to 15% or even 20% – just because by the time you get the artificial mucus into the mix, you’ve diluted the peroxide/TAED mixture further, and unless you have more UV than we have around here, that’ll slow down the reaction quite a bit. More is not always better – in California, this might’ve been too strong a mix.

But! After a day mostly in sunlight – result!

Not all the way back, but close

A stronger mix or a second day of sun probably would’ve finished the job. That’s against 92-brightness white paper, which actually means slightly blue; Against the brown workstation table, it’s almost shockingly white. But you can still see a difference between inside and outside of case, and I think they should be the same.

So: yay! It works! If you do this, USE EYE GUARDS, SERIOUSLY: once you add the TAED, it can get a bit fizzy, and you do not need this shit in your eyes. I can’t stress that enough. But otherwise, it’s pretty safe.

Here’s another before/after shot – sorry the second one is fuzzy, I didn’t realise until I’d put the trackball back together:

Oh, otherwise, the plastic feels unaffected. If anything, it feels a little smoother, but I think that’s just placebo effect. And if you can’t deal with the mucus, another solution is to throw out the gel entirely and make enough primary solution to submerge the plastic. The only problem there is that the plastic will float, so you’ll need to weigh it down.

So yeah, a fairly easy and effective DIY restoration project. Break out your Commodore 128s, kids, it’s time to make some old-school look brand new. 😀

I didn’t really plan to go offline most of this week – it just kind of worked out that way. Nothing’s wrong, really – the biggest news is that we wrapped up recording on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love a couple of days ago, and the mad scramble down at Alec’s to get the last few changes merged in to the mix is underway!

The funny part about doing a lot of this via Dropbox is seeing all these files change. Every time something big happens I get a flurry of file updates, and I’m all HI I SEE YOU WORKING. XD

Also, I’m doing some duplication work today. MAKIN’ MONEY MAKIN’ CDs, which actually means I did fix my robot and the fixes … appear to be stable! It ran okay overnight, anyway, and I have a nice stack of lightscribed CDs waiting for the master disc, with more printing.

So, yeah! HI, I’M BACK. MISS ME?

Seriously, the last few weeks? Digital audio workstation. Webserver. External storage drive. Backup server. (Well, that’s replaced, not fixed; the old one worked, just really slowly.) CD-burning robot.

This week? I have the replacement transformer for my field-modded-by-somebody SM58 microphone. That should be easy to fix, and then it won’t buzz in the presence of phantom power anymore. Damn, that was annoying.

But mostly, I’m doing a lot of cello recording – final work on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love. And Betsy’s cello, Godiva, gets pretty fierce? And lo, securements come off and my studio reference monitors say WELCOME TO BUZZTOWN!

Yes, Betsy’s cello broke my speakers and made me upgrade them. SONIC ATTACK GRAR!

But that’s fixed now. At least, as fixed as I can make it. These little x77s – if you can even call them that anymore, I’ve modded them so much they’re less than half original – can only take so much bass no matter how much fiddling you do. Right now the biggest source of buzz is at very high volume and from inside the sealed tweeter assembly. I can’t fix it, I’d have to replace it, and ribbon tweeters are kinda spendy.

To wit: maybe I shouldn’t turn them up quite that loud. But it’s tempting, because it’s kind of cool being able to shake the floor with 20cm high bookshelf speakers.

AND NOT BY DROPPING THEM jesus you toons. C’mon.

Anyway, back to music mines. But first! Anna’s new book, Valor of the Healer, is out! She’s got a post up on the official Carina Press site, talking about strong female characters that aren’t physical badasses, and wants to hear about your favorite strong female characters who are strong without the physicality part, because that’s kind of her lead character in this trilogy – strong, despite physical weakness.

Eleanor from The Lion in Winter comes to mind, for me, and if you haven’t seen The Lion in Winter yet, go watch it right the fuck now, seriously.

Anyway, clickie and read and comment. And tell your friends – Anna’s new book is out! 😀

eta: Did I mention there’s a book giveaway involved? No? Damn. Well, there is. Clickie!

So there’s a song by Vixy & Tony called “Thirteen.” It’s on their Bandcamp page here, and there’s cellphone video of a live performance here, at nwcMUSIC 2012.

And I realised a while ago that this is the same number as canonical Doctors – not now, but possible. 12 regenerations, 13 doctors Who. But nothing ever really came of that, until this popped out of my head. And I want to get it posted before we know anything about a 12th doctor, because parts of this kind of play off not having one, and rumours are floating about, so now is the goddamn time, apparently. XD

Thirteen
(Music Vixy & Tony 2008, Lyrics me, um, a couple of weeks ago. March 2013. Creative Commons 3.0/noncommercial use-derivative works allowed-attribute.)

Well I went for a walk on a rocky beach with a storm-tossed sea and a sky of grey
Saw a big blue box with a funny man, he called, “come with me, child, and fly away”
Said “count by the minutes and count by the hours, we’ll see the future that you never knew”
“But the path’s all covered with the blood of strangers, Raggedy Man there’s too many of you”

One and one and one and two and three
Timelord, won’t you take pity on me
Original show only counted to Seven, so
tell me what do you mean?
Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen

Timelord tell me all your stories, timelord tell me I can play
I never believed you could come up empty, I never knew nothing never went your way
Reborn twelve times ’round this console, set back up until they shut you down
Nemeses come in gold and silver, but someday the Valeyard’s gonna steal your crown

One and one and one and two and three
Timelord, don’t you take pity on me
Original show never counted on Seven
Tell me what could you mean?
Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen

Timelord tell me where you goin’ / Timelord tell me where you been?
Eight went and died on the stroke of midnight, Nine was the soldier who did him in
Ten went too far in a TARDIS, twelve’s still the man who can never sin
But thirteen’s a wrap and thirteen’s a final and thirteen’s the doctor who can never win

One and one and one and two and three
Timelord, won’t you get clever for me?
Original show only made it to Seven, so
what’ll be your last scene?
Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen / Thirteen