Latest Posts I’ve Wrote

  • May 2025

    Housing

    At the end of April, we realized that the 110 year old cast iron sewer line beneath our house had collapsed, so May’s project around the house will be cutting through the basement slab and trenching in a new sewer line from the front to the back of the house.

    Synth Building

    In April I got the circuit board for the Melodic Orchestration module I designed and assembled them. So far it seems to be working fairly well, with a couple of minor flaws that I can probably kludge on to the circuit board to get it working as intended. My first program that I want to code is a Roland J-6 emulator, which plays arpeggios and chords.

    I also want to get the circuit board design underway for my YM3812 synthesizer, which I’ll base off of Tyler Klein’s design, and will leverage some of the same circuit design as the Melodic Orchestration for the display and control interfaces.

  • Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality

    This isn’t a dead city. There doesn’t seem to be much creativity at the top. It seems to me that Toronto has a split personality, a civic schizophrenia. On the one level there’s the spirit of individuals and small groups who do things, what you might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal and genius, quite romantic and full of fun, a great deal of fun but it seems to me the official spirit of Toronto is, ‘Stamp out fun.’ Pompus, impressed with mediocrity if it’s very, very big and expensive.

    Jane Jacobs, 1969 CBC Interview
  • April 2025

    Housing

    In March we replaced the lighting in the basement with some nice LED fixtures and removed all the old T12 fixtures. My next project is to drop off the large collection of burnt out T12 bulbs at the dump, and then organize the workbench in the basement so I can start using it as a workspace for electronics.

    Synth Building

    After prototyping all the various subcomponents of my new melodic orchestration module, I finished the PCB design and sent it off for fabrication. Once I get the circuit boards around the middle of the month, I’ll assemble the module and hopefully start coding.  The first project will be write a program that emulates the arpeggios and chords of a Roland J-6.

    Synth Music

    Now that the weather has warmed up again, I’d like to start shooting synth videos outside again. Hopefully we get some nice weather in April so I can get restarted with this.

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