Snowpocalypse 2010 - Surviving the Blizzard

So after signing a new lease, breaking up with my gf and ordering a new MacBook Pro I thought that my week contained enough excitement but I was completely wrong. Apparently we were destined for a lot of snow and so I had to pull it together.

As the first flurries were falling I was scrambling to get the bare necessities moved into my apartment (desk, chair, futon and kitchen stuff) while also getting a stash of anime from Video American and food stocks from the store.

Moved in, stocked up, cable and internetless, I spent the weekend holed up in my third floor apartment watching the craziness unfold from my window.

The first thing I noticed is that despite large amounts of snowfall, the gay bar across the street didn't bother with closing, they kept at it. Troopers they are.

Second, the people that leave their houses during a blizzard tend to be in good spirits and rather jovial about the whole affair, I thought it was awesome.

Third, if you take photos of cop cars, they will come out and interrogate you. Thanks Osama Bin Asswipe.

All in all, a great weekend to break in a new apartment.

Fluxus - Live Coding with LISP

Building a Portable Guitar Amp (The Smokey Amp)

It was a while ago that I purchased my Smokey Amp and it was always a reliable amp only because it was always in my guitar case and ready to play.

Unfortunately, from the moment I purchased it I've had the desire to rip it apart and see how it's built. Well, given two and a half weeks of vacation time I finally did so and after pulling it apart and googling the parts I found the schematics for the circuit which could've spared my poor smokey amp.



Well, before I knew it I was off to Mouser.com and had the the parts ordered which to my surprise arrived quickly.

Basically what you need (and it's available at radioshack) is a speaker (1watt 8ohm - 3watt 8ohm), a 1/4" stereo jack, two 47uF 16volt Electrolytic Caps and one 386 op-amp chip. That's all there is too it, you can put a pot in there for volume control if you like but really, there's no need.

So now I'm at the point where I need to mount it in a project box and call it done. If you have any questions about building one of these, feel free to ask me questions, it's so simple I'm sure I could do so!

FYI the parts I ordered were:
253-CE502-RO
550-22302
75-515D476M016JA6AE3
513-NJM386D

Ernest Hemingway on Productivity

New Year’s Sausage and Sauerkraut

Just finished this years fixin's, that's all.

-Peace

The Art of Modifying Guitar Pedals

So this is only the second pedal I've worked on but at this point I'm starting to get the hang of things and wanted to share my thoughts.

First, working from a kit is awesome and makes diving into these projects really accessible. Two sources if you don't know of them: Monte Allums and Analogman. Kits are nice because the step by step directions are clear and provide they all the parts for you.

The other option is to do it yourself, which as you might imagine is more difficult but can be more rewarding because you can dial in YOUR sound to just how you want it. For this I followed a lot of guidance as laid down by this guy but in the end a lot of the final decisions were up to me.

If you want to go this route I recommend starting off with the Schematics of your pedal (if you can find them) as that will help you map out the board (IE identify where volume, tone control and effects happen). Here's a number of guitar pedal schematics and many more.

Next, if the pedal uses cheap wiring (my big muff did) then go through and replace all the wires, one at a time and check the pedal each time. It's a tedious process but I had a problem with the original wires falling off while working, replacing them helped. For this I used 24AWG solid strand wire, it was stiff and soldered well.

Next, get a pile of components and sockets, by sockets I mean something like these little guys. With the sockets you can easily begin to swap out resistors and capacitors to see what happens to the sound. The idea is simple, experiment until you like it, then solder that part in.

And that's it, there's a lot of resources out there, I recommend you head on over to DIYStompboxes.com for more info on this topic and to get started. Have fun and don't break anything too badly.

Time-Lapse Video of this Weekends Blizzard

Love snow.

Piano Gloves by Scott Garner

Piano Gloves from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

I just love what this guy has done with these gloves, check out the link on Scott's website.

Happy Holidays from Baltimore

So 34th street in Hampden (Baltimore) goes crazy during the holidays and really does it up. I love it.

Happy holidays and merry Christmas.

PS Apologies for the lack of blogging, I'll be better, I promise.

Data mining example. How to figure out how many users Digg has by scraping some info.

As I've been reading and working my way through Ben Fry's book Visualizing Data I'm starting to understand how simple it is to collect some really interesting data. One instance that comes to mind is John Graham-Cummings exploration of how many users digg.com has.

I obtained this number by finding random Digg users and extracting their user id. The user id is in a hidden HTML form input field on each Digg user's page. The Digg user page also gives their date of registration. Using this I was able to plot every month from December 2004 (when Kevin Rose registered) up to this month.

What I haven't been able to discern is if he did this by hand or by code. I would assume by code in order to get a reasonable large enough sample but then again if digg is indeed auto-incrementing their user id's then perhaps by hand would be enough. Regardless, I would be curious as to what a script to scrape this kind of data would look like.