#eurorack

weeknotes 25: b12

6 days ago weeknotes boardgames factorio eurorack cadence unihiker b12 sick algorhythms

Post by @apaleslimghost@cathode.church

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completely out of commission almost all week. definitely some kind of flu-like thing. absolutely horrible. played a lot of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and a lot of Factorio. tried implementing Codemirror support in Cadence. tried designing some kind of handheld computer shell thing for a Unihiker M10. no focus for any of the above. slept at lot. read False Value (2020) and Amongst Our Weapons (2022). i missed Algorhythms. 😕

thursday i drank one (1) can of Relentless and felt mostly normal afterwards. there's a lot of overlap between the list of flu symptoms and the list of vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms. my working theory is something mild and sinusy made worse by not drinking enough energy drinks while sick. no really. i should probably be taking supplements.

went to the office on friday, helped the team to a cool 49.8k on the daily Timeguessr, our best yet. saturday i went to the studio to build a Vostok Atlas and noodle on the Big Eurorack. it's getting there.

we've been looking for a Nice Beer Garden for a while. the Angel Oak is alright but feels a bit barren. we'd never even heard of The Herne Tavern which is just the other side of Peckham Rye but it's got good vibes and a trans bartender. food's only alright though.

saturday would have been the regular King's Dilemma but not everyone could make it. we played Oath which is pretty cool. it's legacy-ish but not really; similar engine-building and territory control vibes to Scythe. the first time you play it, the deck is set up in a specific order and it runs you through everybody's choices for the entire first round. it's a really cool way to teach a game, i'm surprised i haven't seen it before.

we'd kind of messed up packing it away last time so we couldn't do the legacy setup properly. we spent a good hour tediously resetting the deck to the out-of-the-box state and running the first game again.

the game itself was fun, although we'd misinterpreted the rules about when warbands are killed, which meant the relic i'd burnt all my secrets on recovering wasn't working at all, and i had absolutely no economy left and couldn't do anything at all for the whole last three rounds and i left grumpy and kind of soured on it. next time though.

weeknotes 24: river goddess

14 days ago weeknotes beach cornwall paradise park eurorack music bbq work inlaws aws sick

i am Mildly Sick. headache, fatigue, aches, temperature. i keep thinking i'm fine then making the mistake of standing up. i have stuff i want to do. i'm running out of summer weekends.

a final few days in Cornwall, went to Portscatho to eat mackerel from the Hidden Hut and find out who is the best at beach (it's Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew). made a sandcastle with a tower and a moat. couldn't get the moat to hold water so i had a brief stint as a river goddess. love watching hydrology happen right in front of me. then the tide went out and my— uh i mean, the river's— water table got too low. got in the sea. sunburnt my legs under the water. 10/10 would beach again

then Paradise Park, a childhood staple for the inlaws. it's a little bird sanctuary in Hayle, great fun. saw a red panda get fed then sleepily climb forty feet up a tree. yes i know that's not a bird. ate a Philps pastie; went around the little train a couple of times; didn't get landed on by a sun conure during the free flying bird show, although the pram in front of me did. hornbills are straight up dinosaurs.

that evening a barbecue. Matt invited Choo. Choo brought her entire family. Molly caught wind of it and brought Olly, Martin and Akira. Akira brought Max. and so a low key outdoor family dinner turned into a Get Together. i had fun at least! Matt and Meli had fun once everyone left and we could chat around the table and watch the satellites fly past.

the drive back was surprisingly tame; no Adorable tantrums, did it in under six point five hours which is pretty good going with two stops. finally dinner with the father- and step-mother-in-law where i even said some words.

thursday, drove to Royal Albert to drop off the car then drove the DLR into the City for the office. back to work not with a bang but with a whimper. in hindsight maybe starting to come down with whatever it is i have now. a day full of provisioning AWS services which was in fact fun. ate a Shake Shack korean BBQ burger which tastes exactly like a Burger King bacon double.

been gradually working on getting the Good Sounds out of my big eurorack case. i picked up a Ziqal Dimension Mk3, a gorgeous little wavetable synth voice that does MIDI polyphony and sounds incredible.

like that adage about engineering teams being immutable (you can't add or remove team members, you can only create a new team with an additional or removed person), every time you get a new eurorack module you've got a whole new instrument. it's starting to feel like an instrument that makes the kind of music i want to make. i really really need to practice more.

sorry it's portrait i thought Youtube would recognise it as a Short and bestow it portrait video status oh well

weeknotes #5: varnish hotbox

4 years ago diy eurorack keyboards secrets weeknotes

1. oops where did three months go

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