Being a lover of the Death Metal — that’s, a-lover of the Death Metal — it took a flamed board in red and black to make me buy one, but buy one I did. I present unto thee the Diavolino, from Evil Mad Scientist Labs. With this diminutive yet diabolical development board I shall attempt to ascertain if there is an advantage to using an Arduino-based platform for prototyping, or if it is just more advantageous (even sensible) to always design and build from scratch. Don’t start, okay? I want the practical experience. And – well it’s got flames on.
Who knows, I might become a complete convert. Already my little head is all a-swim with plans for development boards of my own design… V shaped control of your Hair Metal music making project, Flyingvino! Put your Gaggia on Twitter with the Cappuccino (ehhhh it’s nearly over). And for all(?) your minimalist music needs I present… the Brianino. That one’s got an aeroplane on it.
I was supposed to be generating precise timing using an AVR ATtiny2313 but realised I didn’t have the correct components for the external oscillator. So, I invented a musical genre instead.
A fairly lo-fi field recording of the Tyneside Bar, made on the 4th of June, 2010 at 13:37. Can you listen to all of it?
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Wednesday the 14th saw me out and about and at 25sg (25 Stratford Grove) in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, for a workshop on making bioplastics in a domestic setting, led by Dr. Brian Degger (@drbrian). Also in attendance were the artists Carole Luby, Lauren Healey (@laurenkhealey), Paul Grimmer, and one half of Sonodrome, Jim (@Sonodrome). It had been so long since I’d sat amongst a group of people that I thought I might have difficulty communicating, however I was made to feel very welcome and quickly found our minds were all on or around the same wavelength. Words came easily, making it a great pleasure to listen to and talk with these insightful people.
Last night I decided to see if I could use the output signal from my Bugbrand Postcard Weevil (PW) – a wonderful audio generator created by Tom Bugs at Bugbrand – to generate patterns on a television or monitor by feeding it to a composite video input.
At first I tried connecting directly to the television. As I hoped, once the PW output signal voltage had reached a certain level* – sorry I don’t know at this point what that level was as I wasn’t monitoring during this impromptu experiment – flashing bars, then some very complex and interesting patterns began flickering on the screen. The size, brightness and scanning of the screen made this almost unwatchable so I switched to laptop + video capture device.
On the 19th of September, 2008, walking my way to the bus stop (like a mechanical duck, frankly), I was passed by the Google Street View car as it made its survey of the Whickham ‘burbs. Surprised and a little vexed by this – I would have liked to have been ready – I went straight for the cell phone camera, hoping to activate it in time for the car’s return from the cul-de-sac. Looking at it, I wish I’d been brave enough to turn around and record the car head-on but something stopped me. Perhaps it was my inner film maker deciding it best to let it appear from over my right shoulder.
Back in the day, before the word ‘blog was invented, I fastidiously kept an online journal, covering a wide range of things like Web technology, music and relationships. Sometime around 2002 I stopped writing and began a long, slow and at times painful process of disengagement from what was then known as “cyberspace.”
Over the past year or so, largely through involvement in the “blogosphere” (how did that happen?) as a technical assistant to my fiancé, I have been thinking about starting a blog to record all the things I can’t say within 140 characters on Twitter. I’ve looked at many blog systems, written a basic one of my own, gone off the idea, gone back to the idea and finally decided it’s something I want to do and — as the majority of you already know and perhaps have known for a long time — found WordPress is probably the best of the out-of-the-box blogging platforms around. Geeklog is also very impressive but for a few reasons I won’t go into here, WP holds my attention a little better, not to mention the major plus of finding a ready made layout design I am happy to use without modification.
“You cen beleef iht!”
I hope at some point you find something of interest here. Please feel free to leave comments or send email if you’d like to get in touch with questions, ideas, revelations or hare-brained schemes of any kind.
