Buffer overflow

An Arduino microcontroller and a breadboard with an even smaller chip, a bunch of sockets and a rotary pot, all connected with colourful jumper leads

Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with …

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Best of 2023

Books

  • Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
  • The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson
  • In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis
  • The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
  • Letters from Amherst, Samuel R Delany

I read …

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Merry Christmas

The second half of 2023 was pretty hectic, between work and health issues, but I did get a chance to play with the synths: this is my first stab at a sequencer running on an Arduino Uno and sending out control voltages through an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC.

I also …

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Looptober

A modular synth case with yellow, red and green patch cables. The modules on the left side are different shades of grey, the ones on the right are coloured cyan, blue and purple. The case has a label "NiftyCase" in a retro-modernist typeface

I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around …

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Plex

Early this year I finally got weary of dragging my collection of mp3s from one iTunes installation to the next. I'd worked out a fairly nice solution where I had the library on a 2TB SSD connected to my laptop's dock, so the music collection didn't take up any space …

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Modular

A photo of a white modular synth case in its packaging with some packs of colourful patch cables on top

I picked this up from the music store this afternoon and discovered that I don't have the right kind of USB cable to plug my keyboards into it, but I have managed to get one (1) annoying buzz out of it.

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Matmos

I know it's bad that Epic have bought Bandcamp, and when that was announced I made sure to download a copy of everything I'd bought there, but I still rely on their emails to not just let me know what's new but also what's old. It seems that I should …

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Retro

On Friday mornings I run up Talavera Road and along a footbridge under the M2, down the bike track through the Lane Cove National Park to Brown's Waterhole, back up again and then back across Macquarie University, where I studied in the late 80s and early 90s.

Photo of a vinyl album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' name and logo, and the album title UNLIMITED LOVE in lurid neon, lying on damp green grass

This Friday I …

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Looptober 2021

At the start of September this year I applied for a new job at the University of Sydney. After a Zoom interview and a coding exercise, I found out at the end of the month that I'd got the job, but I didn't get a letter of offer for a …

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