I’ll be at Penguicon again this year (April 28–30). But instead of just sitting on a few panels and mooching a lot of free drinks, I wanted to do something extra special. So this year I’m spending the entire weekend building something extra special for you to experience and interact with—and for the Slinkies to finally be heard.
Won’t you join me—and the Slinkies—before it’s too late?
Continue reading “Experience the Power of the Slinky Sound Forest at Penguicon 2017”
Ugh! I haven’t even hardly finished wrapping everyone’s Passeastermasadan presents.😱
(via my friend Mary Beth; thx MB!)
A reader recently asked for audio samples of a few projects from my first book, so I made this quick lil video:
(Daaaaamn does that fuzz tone wail—and it’s literally ~$5 in parts!)
You might need headphones to hear the detail on the straight tremolo, but the throb becomes really pronounced at the end when I chain the two effects together.
In the process of uploading that demo video, I stumbled across this guy’s build of the Single-Chip Space Invader synth from my most recent book. Oh, man, do I love that Star Wars lunchbox he used as a case! So rad!
Any of this look rad? You can download a “jam pack” of complete projects drawn from both books. Click here now to get your free Junkyard Jam Pack PDF!
… I’ve always love the goddamned Monty Hall Problem, and there’s not a damn thing you can say that’s ever gonna change that.
South Park was fucking with me in 2007 and none of y’all told me? What the Hell, people?!?
I don’t give a shit about Elon Musk, so I’d largely ignored Hyperloop, but now that I’ve taken even a cursory gander—
😂
Y’all are shitting me, right?
Just to punch one hole in this mess:
The train will take folks from LA to San Francisco (~350 miles) in 30 minutes. It can reach these hella crazy high-speeds because it’s a bullet train traveling through a vacuum maintained in an unbroken, direct-shot tube. Based on their own experience with their ~1 mile long test track, we can expect that it would take 200 to 300 hours to evacuate the air from this LA-SF bullet train tube[1]. i.e., it could make the run between those two cities in 30 minutes, but only do it once every 10 days? And how much energy does it take to create that vacuum? And how much money to maintain a pressure vessel orders of magnitude larger than any other ever created?
(Also, FYI, in their test track they expected to hit maybe 80—not 800—miles per hour, but actually maxed out at 60mph. My dying Prius—henceforth, the HyperCar!™—exceeds that every single day on Michigan’s crumbling roads.)
Continue reading “Elon Musk’s “Hyperloop” is a Load of Snake Oil and Bullshit”
I love, love, love(!!!) seeing and hearing the projects my readers build, and sharing them with folks thinking about how they want to tackle these same projects. First up is Jason Jaknunas’s take on the Bleepbox 8-Step Analog Sequencer (Project 16 in Junkyard Jam Band)—which is easily the best version of this I’ve ever seen (it totally leaves mine in the dust, and I designed the damn thing!)
Everything is just so sweet and just-right here: the knobs, the brushed aluminum label, the wood cheeks, the grommets padding out the LEDs, the labels—but also the little things, the visual balance among the elements, the use of different sizes of knob on different functions. Give it a look, then give it a listen. So rad!
Arthur Lacomme in Brussels, who I’ve linked before, sent me a link to a rad lil Single-Chip Space Invader (Project 15 in Junkyard Jam Band) he built. Click thru to hear this bad boy; such chiptune joy! Arthur and his pals have plans to hit an upcoming “wild carnival” with some noise-enhanced clothing. I look forward to seeing and sharing video!
Keep seeking out the Good Noise! Keep sharing what you find!
… an aristocrat straight out of The Aristocrats is inaugurated President of the United States. Sad! 🇺🇸🔥
Girl totally rocks the original “Super Mario” medley (complete with coins and power-ups!) on a sheng, sounds like she totally belongs in the Mos Eisley Catina Band:
A robot plays a pop hit (I love the rhythmic element that the robot’s motors and gears bring to the song):
Props to Arthur Lacomme for pointing me to this one featuring “Mr. Curly” (which is the instrument, not the dude playing it). I love that watering-can clarinet Pollack demos around 1:45!
(Arthur also recommends the open-source Rakarrack software package, which he uses when he rocks his Mr. Curley.)
This one is pretty interesting if you stick with it; what you no doubt initially take to be a precursor to the 8-track is playing cartridges loaded with ribbon-based analog records(!!!). The macro-lens bit at around 5:20 gives you an example of both the sound (pretty damn solid) and the mechanism (OMFG! Wünderbar!) Hilarious remote control, too.
And then there’s this guy:
(FYI, that caption was Wordpress’s suggested—and I love it!!!)
o_O The thing that makes this one, for me, is how the strings are anchored in the eye sockets(!!!) The Met has several of these—from different generous donors and almost certainly different artisans—and they all use the eye sockets and brow ridge as a saddle and bridge. Humans, amiright?
N.B. that, according to current expert opinion, this thing—which is indeed from Central Africa, where it was crafted in the 19th C by a native artisan—was produced for no other purpose than to sell something fantastically “primitive” and “savage” to European tourists/anthropologists (and thus inform European opinions of these nations and, in all likelihood, form the foundation of the moral justifications for brutal colonialism). I invite the reader to meditate on their own how this might mirror our current situation with imported polarizing/fake news, and who the greater savage might be: The supplier who makes the ersatz evidence, or the customer who furnishes the demand and shells out the cash?