DJ's Without Borders

DJ Cyberpunk at Necto for Factory 18

Posted on August 8, 2022 | By Engine | No comments

Last Monday I was once again privileged to spin Factory at Necto for the 18th anniversary of the night.

Set list:

Dead Stars (Version) – Covenant
Lack of Sense (Razormaid Mix) – Tribantura
Dream Machine – Lazerhawk
Avernus Dorsa – Vector Hold
Disappoint (Negative Format Remix) – Assemblage 23
PUPPETMASTER – REIN
Citizens (Shinra Remix) – Randolph & Mortimer
Le Disko (Ferry Corsten Mix) – Shiny Toy Guns
Onslaught – Alex & Tokyo Rose
Take the World – She Wants Revenge
Circling Overland – Front 242
More – Odonis Odonis
Wild Animal (Aura Shred Remix) – Hante.
Demon Chaser (feat

… Read the rest

The VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer, Part 3

Posted on April 19, 2022 | By admin | No comments

Virtual Machines.

Turns out I can emulate a raspberry pi in software using QEMU. QEMU is not for the faint of heart, because it’s all command line and you have to start on a Linux system. Should I have splurged for the UTM Mac app? Probably. But if you’re going to do this, here are useful links.

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-run-the-raspberry-pi-os-in-a-virtual-machine-with-qemu-and-kvm
The doc is rotting, change the “buster”-specific stuff to a Bullseye install.

To get around the fact that libvert is fucked:
https://computingforgeeks.com/use-virt-manager-as-non-root-user/

Still no joy.

After all that, it’s still no good, because the Versatile Board used in the emulation has a … Read the rest

The VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer: Part 2

Posted on March 18, 2022 | By admin | No comments

Getting it working.

TL;DR: I extended an API I found on GitHub to support the pigpio libraries.

This was an exercise in updating a C++ API to support a library now shipped with newer versions of the Raspberry Pi. As mentioned earlier, I found and forked a GitHub repo as a place to start.

That API supported a specific Broadcom chipset used on older Raspberry Pi boards, but I have a Pi 3B+ and a much newer 64bit OS, so I needed to go another way.

The pigpio libraries and dev libraries are available as Debian packages, so installing … Read the rest

The VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer, Part 1

Posted on March 17, 2022 | By Engine | No comments

1. Initial steps.

On little more than an impulse, I purchased a VM205 Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer shield off eBay for thirty bucks. My thinking was that if I could reverse-engineer the remote control protocol on a cheap LED ceiling light, I could build some sleazy Teensy hack to control the light colors through HomeAssistant. The VM205 gets its own entry because it’s a project in and of itself, and looks to require some porting, especially if I want to run the latest OS. Fallback, of course, is to run an OS and kernel recommended in the VM205 docs.

The … Read the rest

Trial by Flame

Posted on February 17, 2022 | By Engine | No comments

Making the most of a 30-day trial of Autodesk’s Flame.

Flame is really the ultimate badass in finishing work, where all the elements of a TV show or commercial, or even FX shots on a feature film come together and get baked out in all the different resolutions and formats required to deliver it to a client for broadcast, stream, or theatrical release, or whatever else they can think of.

To that end, Autodesk lets you drive it around for 30 days before they hit you up for a subscription, which is substantial, so if you’re attempting to learn it, … Read the rest

The Peel Sessions

Posted on November 4, 2021 | By Engine | No comments

Peeling 30-year-old tape off 40+ feet of boat (both sides and the stern) is an onerous, tedious task, and the temptation is always there to use something to make it go more quickly, even if that something could damage the surface under the tape.

I didn’t go there. Not worth it. But I did manage to make some progress on the red pinstripe above the rub rail. The tip about using a heat gun to soften the glue and return some flexibility to the tape was dead on: Every so often, I’d get a nice long strip of old tape … Read the rest

Prostar 190!

Posted on October 15, 2021 | By Engine | No comments

Since I knew what they were, I’ve wanted one of these. I learned to ski behind two different family fish-and-ski boats, each with just about enough horsepower to pull a skinny kid out of the water on two skis, and then with some difficulty, one big wooden ski found in the garage of our then-new home in Michigan. At one point, I graduated to a 1974 Jolly Roger with a 125hp Johnson outboard, a low-slung runabout purpose-built for hooning away the day on the lake with beer, friends, and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the 8-track.

The Jolly Roger was capable of … Read the rest

Zynthian: Fun with Dexed

Posted on October 15, 2021 | By Engine | No comments

Over the weekend, I had a wild hair up my ass to buy some kind of FM synth off of Reverb.com, because I needed a multitimbral sound source to get some use out of the 8 MIDI tracks of my Octatrack, which I powered up after a long work-filled hiatus. I wanted the FM sounds of the early 80’s

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s we had a Yamaha TG33, which was a multitimbral, digital FM synthesizer with a joystick for doing vector-based modulation. Like its cousins of the time, the TX81z, the TG55, SY77 et al, it … Read the rest

Sesame Street Trauma

Posted on July 19, 2021 | By Engine | No comments

Some of you are old enough to remember the OG Sesame Street. And some of you will remember this:

This was part of Jim Henson’s live-action “Numerosity” series, and for some reason, it popped into my head today.

Now, this is an old, old, memory. According to the wiki, it was produced in 1969, and without giving the scrapers any real personal information, let’s just say this would have been before I started grade school.

Now, the weird thing is that back then, I absolutely remember not finding this funny at all, nor did I get any educational value or … Read the rest

VEX and Attribute Subscripts

Posted on May 20, 2020 | By admin | No comments

So many things about Houdini can trip you up, then eat your face off while you’re down. Today’s example is the VEX dot operator. I haven’t ridden the VEX horse into battle in a very, very long time, and like any horse, if you’re not paying attention, it’ll do what it wants, not what you want.

I’m a visual person. I see stuff and make choices based on that. So what I see in Houdini’s Geometry Spreadsheet are columns with headers like this:

P[x]    P[y]     P[z]   direction[0] direction [1]  distance

P is a vector with 3 components. Any time you … Read the rest

Menu

Last Monday I was once again privileged to spin Factory at Necto for the 18th anniversary of the night.

Virtual Machines.

Still no joy.

Getting it working.

TL;DR: I extended an API I found on GitHub to support the pigpio libraries.

1. Initial steps.

Making the most of a 30-day trial of Autodesk’s Flame.