new case who dis

(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