first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.
everything hurts.
that was sunday.
i uh. i did a v4 grade? which was surprising. there's a large hole in one of my climbing shoes and i bought some replacements, except there are two types of climbing shoes:
cute ones
ones that fit
and, fuck everything
i made a synthesiser, for my dad
well okay so i made one in december for him for christmas. it was built on stripboard in an altoids tin, and looked like this:
and got it printed by a company in Shenzhen. because it turns out you can just, do that. and it's just a bit of soldering, and troubleshooting, and working out the headphone amp you added never would have worked because of something something capacitance something phase inversion. and now it looks like this, which is a real thing, that i made, i can design and make real things:
(sorry, this bit's pretty nerdy, skip on if you don't care)
i built a new eurorack case. this one's designed to be a portable live techno set in a box. it's massively inspired by the mylarmelodies Suggested System video with the same premise, except:
rhythms and modulation are handled by Pamela's New Workout and the 6eqencer. no external clocks here
mylarmelodies uses Percall for a bunch of mixing, muting and drum envelope duties. i've got a Pico Drums and my own Mallards for that
the main voice is a Knit (a 6hp Plaits clone) which has a built in decay envelope so no envelope/VCA needed
i managed to get a μBurst in there. i love Clouds derivatives
the box is actually just straight from Amazon. i happened to find one with internal dimensions that are exactly 58hp × 4u. it's pretty cramped inside; the deepest modules are but millimetres shallower than the case itself, so i had to get creative to make the power bus and all the cables fit.
just need to learn how to play it now.
i gave two surprise presentations on thursday
by "surprise" i mean "i forgot they were happening until five minutes before". still a disaster ✌️
i talked to the Engineering Enablement group about Tool Kit. EE is the part of FT Technology that makes stuff for other parts of FT Technology. my team is the bit of Customer Products that makes stuff for other bits of CP. we've been working on completely rethinking our shitty ageing unreliable developer tooling, and EE was like "owo what's this". it went pretty well!
our Tech Director, Anna, has been meeting with all the tech leads in the group to relearn how all our tech works after being on leave for a while. my team owns most of the weird old stuff in the group, so we had a fun hour chatting about what we could do about that and what the future might look like.
speaking of old weird tech
my team did another mobbing week. this time we were learning how the FT.com Fastly configuration worked. we started the week not knowing anything really about how VCL worked, and by wednesday were asking each other questions like "if this request is always doing PASS and then restart how would we ever cache that response". i love my team.
we also spent an afternoon drawing architecture diagrams. in person, on a whiteboard. god i miss whiteboards.
it's feeling kind of like spring
okay it fuckin WIMDY out there as i write this but yesterday my brain presented me with a strange new emotion that i eventually realised was "lack of seasonal depression". we're almost there, lxds.
a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that
i have a studio space
on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there's an iceland. above the iceland is this 70's pebbledash concrete box. i don't know what it used to be, it's a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.
i've put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it's really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.
it's a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.
some of the things i'm making there
i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they'll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it's so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.
from left to right, top to bottom that's:
Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you're either going "why is that useful", to which i'll say if you're live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you're going "holy shit i want one" in which case hmu
Ants: (probably) the world's smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it's tiny, it's like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
a bootleg black panel for Pamela's New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. "rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face" also describes a PCB
a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them
this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay
i have a new line manager
and it's Alice! hello Alice. you're fantastic already
i'm feeling a lot better. here's another web page that makes pretty sounds:
it's a mesh of evenly-spaced random dots (poisson-disc sampled). they're connected by very loose springs in a Delaunay triangulation. a handful of dots are picked to each play one note of a stacked A minor 11th chord.
if a dot moves, its note gets quieter. and the dots are always moving: every 0.4 seconds, a random dot gets thrown in a random direction, and that ripples across the whole mesh, causing unpredictable pings and dynamics effects in every note. you can also drag dots around.
i've promised myself i won't write a library for common things i end up building for these until i've done at least five of them, which is very much playing against type for me. guess i've got more to do
i'm sick and when i'm sick i always try making web art and this time i made something i'm proud of and want to show people:
it's a simulation of lots of little planets doing gravity at each other, and when they collide they say "blong" in a C minor pentatonic scale. that's it! it looks like this:
and you can click that to hear what it sounds like too.
holidays always throw my habits entirely out of the window. i also managed to gate posting my next weeknotes on having edited my photos from camping, which was a terrible thing to do to my brain.
2. whistlestop tour
went camping
went and saw my parents in Yorkshire
went and saw my in-laws in Cornwall
went to the welsh borders and bathed in a hot tub watched by sheep
went camping again but this time it was sort of a festival
3. what if solvent fumes, but too much
when we renovated our kitchen in 2017 we got solid oak worksurfaces, for some reason. never get solid oak worksurfaces, you’ll spend the rest of your life oiling them and they’ll get waterstained anyway. this weekend i finally cracked, bought a tub of the varnish they use in pubs and basketball courts, and spent saturday with a headache.
4. cute keyboard alert
it’s a Corne Cherry v2, with hotswap sockets, gateron green switches, and a cheap etsy knockoff of DSA Hana (but in XDA profile).
the keyboard shop sent me the wrong kit; i bought the cheaper, non-hotswap version. that version was also through-hole soldering; this one is surface-mount.
i’ve never done surface-mount soldering before, and it was way easier than i expected, and now i want to buy every eurorack kit i’ve dismissed because it was surface-mount, and also start designing surface-mount PCBs.
5. things i can’t talk about yet
there’s this one thing, and this other thing, and they’re both really exciting, and maybe i’ll be able to talk about them in a future weeknotes. ggggggggggggg
last week i made some cold brew. two litres of it in a big Kilner jar. an entire bag of peruvian coffee from a three month coffee subscription my parents bought me for christmas.
today i poured some and it smelt kinda bleachy and there were floating white things. an entire litre down the sink.
i just barbecued some smoked mackerel fillets and oh my god. then they got rained on and we ate them in the car
last time we came here apple maps navigated us to a dead end seven miles away and then said “you have arrived”, very clearly nowhere near the pin on the map
imagine being gaslit by apple maps
this time we got it to give directions to the pub in the village
we put a kettle on and almost immediately ran out of butane. and then it got rained on
i love it here
2. i sold a lens to a friend of a friend
i basically never sell anything apart from to CeX
the whole deal was struck via twitter dm, it was very civilised
i spent half an hour scouring the office for a box of the right size that i hoped might have been abandoned on March 12th 2020
eventually i found an amazon box for a logitech mouse. thanks gallal
3. did another minecraft “speed”run
with gallal and rowan and luke and chris
i’m on my phone can’t be fucked with hyperlinks sorry lads
i tried to solo the nether again and died, a lot, this time
next time we’re instituting a “no villages” rule so most of the group don’t spend their time camping
im not salty i just died a lot okay
4. my small eurorack case is dead
idk what happened one day it just didn’t turn on
i tried taking it apart and it turns out epoxying the power supply to the case isn’t helpful maybe
i broke the bus board clean in half. lol
i can rebuild her. stronger. faster. I have the technology
5. i am trying to write this on my phone and wow is it bad
1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends
once a week, on a sunday afternoon
we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we're mst3k via Slack
they're actually pretty good, even the bad ones
also i'm spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
speaking of which:
2. i've been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)
Hi, I'm Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉
that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
last time i played this game i didn't let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i'm making my cars look as cute as possible
3. i've also been playing a lot of Minecraft again
we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer "speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like "place a live fish in the End"
i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat
4. i went to a technical leadership workshop
it was okay. it was exhausting.
a lot of it was things like:
"if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code"
"here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*"
one hour of Business Horoscopes ("StrengthFinder 2.0")
i'm glad i didn't pay for it myself
5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird
she's never done that before
it was terrifying
i was getting dressed, i couldn't do much about it
i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
she walks in, i assume she's injured or something, i look down and there's this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it's a female blackbird
it plays dead but it's still breathing, heavily
Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there's another option. it probably won't survive itself.
it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
i've gotten weirdly good at self-administering a lateral flow test
Kara Brightwell: skilled at scraping her own tonsils, and inserting things too far up her nostrils
imagine showing that my to myself eighteen months ago
she'd probably go "oh okay so, uh, 'Kara', i see, that's a thing we did, okay. wanna make out"
i had a desk assigned to me, and it was by a window, and it was in a building that isn't my flat, and i got to go there and not be in the same 46m² forever
i saw like. twenty people. in an office that has capacity for like fifteen hundred.
i had a burger, a real burger made out of cow, from a fast food restaurant, with cheesy fries
it was so normal!
this is genuinely the best thing i've been able to do for my mental health during the entire panettone
i'm going back like. twice a week now, fuck it
2. trying not to burn out
even though i quit therapy a while ago it turns out i have a tiny simulated version of my therapist in my head now that says things like "be kind to yourself" and "what makes you say that" and "you don't have to feel like this"
so last week when i wrote "holy shit i'm burning out" it turns out that wasn't a self deprecating joke, and i actually need to do something about it?
which i noticed immediately after writing that post, and requested access to the office, and a bunch of fridays off
doing normal things, which i have not done in some time, is helping reset my brain
also taking time off and not giving myself pressure to achieve things(? what), good for my energy turns out?
and i'm going camping in two weeks now and not having any internet and cooking fish on charcoal
3. i made a music
it's an accidental homage to Ambient 4: On Land by Brian Eno
serendipity and coincidence and taking ownership of your surroundings
recently i outgrew it, and also little portable case obviously needs to be for generative ambient, so i started planning a bigger desktop case in like November
e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc5 Nf6 4. Ng5 d5 6. exd5 Nxd5 7. Nxf7 Kxf7 8. Qf3+ Kg8 9. Bxd5+ Qxd5 10. Qxd5+ Be6 11. Qxe6# is the only correctgame of chess. every other game is a shitty imitation of that
im actually kind of bad if you don't cooperate with my Fried Liver Attack or Stafford Gambit okay
