The history of civilization is the history of watering deserts.
Jeez. I've been naming files more than forty years.
I'm not claiming expertise, just experience.
Now I start all file names [1] yymmdd because:
But by far knowing how to meaningfully start a name is the most important reason. Naming things is hard and starting to name them is the hardest part. Certainty goes a long way...
...for me. Your mileage may vary.
Waves and particles are models. Maybe the best models we have, but still models. Wave-particle duality is another model. Again, maybe the best model we have, but still a model. Like all models they are useful and maybe not wrong in a way that can be proven within the limits of human understanding.
I lack the hubris to ignore the "limits of human understanding" condition of knowledge because Kant changed my life. Not necessarily for the better. Not necessarily for the worse. How would I know? 30 years and half a lifetime from philosophy school...that's what writing gets me. Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton.
What's 30 years? The Greek is performative erudition with the low effort Google makes possible. A typical collage. But this time I actually read the cribbed wikipedia article and learned that the phrase isn't from Socrates via Plato. I've been misinformed for forty odd years. Ever since I got the tee-shirt with the Greek upon it.
Was the tee-shirt 1980 or 90? Doesn't matter. It's a fact that has no social impact to get wrong. It's a tiny world that would know what I am talking about and not a fact worth verifying. It was before philosophy school (there's an interesting-to-me fact about how my life unfolded)?
Here's a model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sages_of_Greece
Sequencer: The EA-1 is a two track sequencer with 64 steps. Each sequencer track is one MIDI channel wide. Each track operates on its own MIDI channel.
There are a pair of independent monophonic synthesizer engines, one synthesizer engine per sequencer track. Thus, each engine has its own MIDI channel and it's own sequencer.
The combination of track and synth engine is called a Part. So there are two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. They are identical. Except each comes out of a separate 1/4" jack on the back.
Each track can store a motion sequence a single synthesizer parameter from the Oscillator or Filter block of each engine. It can also store motion sequences for the effects block of each synthesizer engine.
Synth Engine: The synth engine has two oscillators:.Oscillator 1 (OSC1) and Osciallator 2 (OSC2). OSC1 and OSC2 are not identical.
OSC1 has four wave shapes: saw, square, triangle, and Audio In (more about Audio In later). It does not have modulation.
OSC2 has only three wave shapes: saw, square, triangle.. It has three OSC Mod's (modulations): Ring, Sync and Deci (for decimator), The modulation can be turned off.
Each engine has it's own filter section. The filter is low pass with resonance.
Each engine has it's own Amp envelope with a combined attack+decay knob (EG Int) and a dedicated release knob labeled Decay. It's called "decay" but it effects the release phase of a typical ADSR envelope.
Each engine has it's own effects section with two effects. There's a signal flow diagram on the EA-1's playing surface, but it doesn't go into these details.
I was thinking about dogs.
Walking dogs in particular because I do a lot of it.
Have for many years.
Walking a dog involves getting the dog to do things.
And not do things.
And the same for the dog getting me to do things.
We go down the road shifting between forbearance, negotiation, and violence.
Less and less of the last because I am learning.
My best is the best I can do right now.
I know that barring dumb luck, in the future my best might be better if I keep learning.
I'm ok with my best right now being not as good as it might be in theory.
I'm ok with working hard and still doing it badly.
That's what learning feels like.
Doing doesn't feel like shopping.
Doesn't feel like planning.
Doesn't feel like success.
Even though it is.
The economic order breaking down.
I should worry about inflation.
China and other countries
(the usual suspects).
Trump.
Biden.
The border.
The title race.
Musk.
GWoT.
AGI.
Sea level rise.
Privacy.
Viruses on my computer.
Viruses in my brain.
Wave
How much of it can I know?
How much of it can I see?
What's new?
Wave
Now it looks like work.
Smells like work.
Tastes like work.
Wave
My fingertips eat
My screen glows
I lie in bed.
Wave
I'm high and listening to Plasticman. And working. I remember when the internet was a single thing. When it had 2D edges. Before the internet folded back on itself. Back when the topology was a human teleology.
How-much-about-it-do-I-know was my first way of engaging. That hasn't gone away. The internet can be intellectually interesting. Depending on what the-internet-is is in that case.
I got me some social vision, One what-the-internet-is is a place to understand human behavior. It's a thing with no edges.
In a graph edges connect. On the prairie our edges are barbwire. We stand on a page where graphs have been drawn.
Edges in time connect, Edges in space partition. Making edges is what people do. Our own edges are this-is-water.
Ferrari's aren't fair either.
Good luck.
A Eurorack system can show much of its causality in the physical domain. Wires, knobs, and sliders create a Rube Goldberg legibility. With the modules, they create a notation.
Plugging, turning, and sliding a Eurorack system is a way of writing music. Writing the first draft on a Eurorack is slow. Editing is not because there are no incidental abstraction layers. That's the appeal of it to me, I think.
My current system has few abstraction layers. There are digital abstractions at the front end; a Qunexus and an SQ64 for input and there's digital recording at the back end. But there's no black box in the middle. The modules are all analog.
Nothing with a screen. Nothing with menus. Just wires, knobs and sliders. Just observable causality.
The history of civilization is the history of watering deserts.
There was a Eurorack case for seventy bucks. It came with a power supply. It came with distribution cables. I pressed buy it now. I thought oh shit.
Behringer makes cheap modules. I've been buying them and hooking them up with cheap aux cables I buy in bulk.
I appreciate the precision German engineering of Doepfer's design. But HP. HP is a problem. It doesn't make sound. Four bucks an inch is the low going rate. Without power supply. Without power distribution. Even from Behringer.
I bought an eight dollar craft crate from Walmart. Pulled part of it apart. Glued the pulled off parts back where I needed them. The first batch of wood screws came from China. Came from Ali Express. They looked cool with their allen heads. But allen heads are friction. I bought two hundred brass screws from McMaster-Car. They don't look as cool. They work better.
Crafting grates modified for purpose, and handmade cables gets me down to about a dollar an inch. Twenty cents an HP and it's good enough. I've got four now. Over 200 HP worth. They are good enough. Maybe better than good enough. Small cases give me meta-modules. Another abstraction layer. Place a voice in a case. All I need for a quick experiment. Sometimes.
Yes, cheap cases are better than good enough. Ten bucks adds a case. I bought a 914 fixed filter bank. For cheap because HP and case space is a fetish.Someone wanted the HP rather than the capability. I'm looking for a second to do it in stereo. Daniel Fisher made a video for Sweetwater. He knows synths. It's a good idea.
When I run out of HP, I can buy it at Walmart at 10pm on a Tuesday within a hundred miles of anywhere in the US. That's engineering.
Mine is a digital version from about 2010 as best as I can tell.
It is an awesome electronic music drone instrument.
But it has two quirks:
1. The sample loop isn't seamless and every so often (on the order of minutes) there's a brief discontinuity in automatic mode. Running it through a delay effect mostly masks it, so that's what I do.
2. When running only on batteries (without wall power) it only works in automatic mode. The strings cannot be played manually.
An Imagined history
I've seen the CDX-1's electronics described as an SP-808 with a CD-RW drive instead of using ZIP discs. But unlike the SP-808, the CDX-1 is designed to produce a CD recording. It was marketed as a digital recorder with sampling to guitarists, etc.
As best I can figure, the CDX-1 was released in the summer of 2001. Then 911 happened. By the time the dust settled multi-gigabyte hard discs were cheaper and Compact Flash cards were an option.
There was no direct follow-up product line but the CDX-1 got a few firmware updates (but never a 2.0 version) and Roland focused on the Boss BR product line as the solution for guitar players looking to make a demo CD.
MEDIA
FIRMWARE
WORKFLOW
I found the CDX-1 to be very usable but it has limitations.
Good
A.
It's not that multitasking is a bad idea.
Computers usually do it pretty well these days.
Mostly because computers are fast and humans are slow.
Occasionally because some computers use their cores in parallel for something humans care about.
Thinking about my actions in terms of multi-tasking muddles concurrency and parallelism.
I can only focus on one thing at once.
That's not among my many moral failings.
B.
Juggling is not multitasking.
Juggling is juggling.
Things are juggled.
It's acceptable when the balls fall on the floor due to outside influence.
C.
Managing is attention to people and their needs.
People are not things to be juggled.
People are not activities to be mulittasked.
D.
Getting better at doing the things I do is not a matter of learning to multi-task.
It's a matter of getting better at the things I do.
It's a matter of learning to do the things.
A matter of time and experience like all learning.
E.
I have a heaping plate.
I think, "I need to multitask."
The heap just got higher.
Power
AC wall power
Device power
Audio
Loud Speaker (headphone)
Networking
Vector 1
Virtual Acoustic - Audio Domain
Sound modules - MIDI In
The past is never dead. It's not even past. (Faulkner)
The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. (Gibson)
It's always endless September somewhere.
Bad dog
Not from here
Untribed
Drunk
Fat
Clueless
Lazy
Angry
Rentabum
Now
I'll try nice
Food labeling exists because supermarkets are full of food that's made by companies that know their food creates health problems for many many people.
Not to protect their market share from plucky new-comers.
Each time I make a something
it becomes Sol's own satellite.
All we orbiting objects
Squeeze suggests:
Charging enough to compete on price is the only sustainable way to compete on price.
It seems paradoxical but it ain't.
Because I used the word "sustainable."
If your normal price doesn't provide good headroom, discounts equate to loss.
A fictitious person is not a person.
The pronoun of corporations is "it" not "they."
The psychology of corporations is the psychology of groups not the psychology of individuals.
It can be interesting to explore why an individual is primarily motivated by money.
A mistake to assume a corporation is motivated by anything but.
]]>What is the best subject for a beginning painter to paint?
Next time you think about building something.
Stop thinking.
Start.
The choice of project doesn't matter.
If it is worth doing, it will probably fail because things that are worth doing correlate with things that are hard to do.
So maybe it's better to pick something that isn't worth doing.
To pick something of manageable size.
Because an uncompleted important project is less important than a completed unimportant project.
What is is.
Haecceity.
If you just want to know how to set up a French Easel, here are two videos that show the way French Easels were designed to be set up.
+ Quick visual overview of the sequence:
+ Practical instructions for setting up a French Easel in about 45 seconds:
In writing:
In this ten minutes of fame right now, a photographer has declined a prestigious award because the picture was made using AI.
Please don't ask me which photographer? which picture?, which award? which AI? because I don't know.
I read the headline and it more than quelled my interest.
Then I saw another headline about it.
And another.
Lots of them in fact, that's just the nature of my internet news stream. Most of the headlines I see, no matter how many times repeated, aren't worth my paying attention to.
I am not saying they aren't worth your paying attention to. The story I didn't read might seriously change your views and I mean that in all seriousness. Not for me doesn't mean not for you.
What struck me about the story of the photographer, the picture, and the award was how much more traction it had than news about traditional methods of making art.
Statistically, news stories about new paintings are Spockishly "vanishingly improbable" to which I would assign a causality of "because statistically no one cares."
I'm investigating using floppy disks again.
Not exclusively of course.
But when I want to reify small data and that data is not text.
Someone says "But single micro-SD can hold all your small data And all your other data too!".
That's the distraction of metadata management in the form of a labeled file hierarchy not a feature. I don't need to wrap my head around as many layers of abstraction.
When a floppy disk is fast enough and big enough and durable enough, I think I might rather have its mechanical feedback.
I realize I'm ok with having some ambitions that will fit on a floppy disk, and I'm ok with admitting that to myself. For me 120k-what-will-I-do-with-all-that? is still a bit truthy.
YMMV
---
Appendix 1
Things I did not say:
+ I did not say I am buying a Mavica to replace my digital cameras that use SD cards.
+ I did not say I don't use SSD's.
+ I am not saying I don't use cloud storage
I only said what I said.
[Old man yelling at the surf]
Notes:
I toss my notes in a shoebox and stick the shoebox in a cupboard. [1]
Eventually, I stumble on the shoebox, look at the notes and throw them out.
Ideas:
"Idea" is a four letter word.
I start on the thing I am thinking about or I let it go.
Ideas that I am not acting on aren't worth holding onto.
Knowledge:
I remember where to look should it be useful.
Or I Google it again.
---
None of this was true when I was younger.
Back then, I behaved as though my notes and papers would go to an archive in a prestigious museum. As though ideas were valuable and rare. As if there was a multiple choice test on the-material on Tuesday, the 25th.
I made these things ends in themselves.
Now I just make stuff instead of taking notes.
This makes it clear whether or not an intellectual interest is an entertaining rabbit hole or something I can act upon.
The hard part is to accept that there are many many interesting things that I can't participate in. Like compiler internals, space exploration, and DIY sawmills.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34880402
[1]: Boxes are better than notebooks and file folders. Each of which is better than bits.
In November, I eBay'd a "For Parts" Yamaha QY100, and yesterday I got around to finishing up the repairs by adhering [1] new conductive rubber pads to each of the 52 silicon rubber buttons. It still reflects someone using it until twenty plus buttons had worn to failure and the headphone line out jack was wobbly and intermittent.
But it now plays great, even though it won't win a cosmetic award.
Rather I would say it plays great in the way Yamaha's instruments are genius. But the Yamaha approach to sequencing/MIDI recording just doesn't work well for me, even though I wish it did. Yamaha's design aesthetic falls more toward the planning-thinking end of the spectrum while I sit more toward listening-reacting.
The QY100 interface is great at creating a composing experience and most of the time, Usually my spark is wanting to jam and although the QY100's amp simulations might make it attractive solely as an effects processor, the interface isn't ideal for that.
It's all buttons and menus and zero knobs.
Sure I could MIDI program one or more controllers to allow listening and reacting in real time. But programming MIDI doesn't feel like making music to me. I've learned from hands on experience needing MIDI programming is not a limitation that drives my creativity. Once I go into the wouldn't-it-be-cool-if headspace, my listening-reacting experience dries up.
Wouldn't-it-be-cool-if doesn't feel like one of my flow states. [2] Programming MIDI is the wrong kind of problem for me. When my MIDI programming doesn't work, it doesn't work in the wrong way for me. It doesn't create a sound I can listen to. And when it does work, technical contingency and interintendency create a fragility that means it works in the wrong way for me. MIDI programming requires me thinking in the wrong abstractions.
How I programmed the MIDI is not an interesting story. It's a non-musical metatext.
For me, I think the same is true for the DAW. The story of making music with a computer doesn't interest me. Mostly because computers are fungible. I mean creating music with a Raspberry Pi or Ableton is mostly an interesting metatext in proportion to Raspberry Pi or Ableton interest level.
The story of computer abstractions takes up space that might be occupied by musical abstractions. I think DAW's are cool. Just not right for me. It's a high impedance paradigm. I high impedance interface.
I get more out of the abstractions of hardware.
[1]: cyanoacrylate after using a primer for cyanoacrylate.
[2]: repairing things is a flow state though.