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A piece of the advice from the Tumbleweed workshop we went to in April 2013 is: While we tiny house builders can build most of the house ourselves, certain things are best left to experienced craftspersons, if you can find one. They suggested the top of this list is the door, which needs to be sturdy, weather-resilient, and fit (it’s smaller than any standard sized house door).  Hopefully also stylish. Marc, a maker from Toronto, is making our door! There may be some fun details to this (more on that later). Here are some pictures he sent from his work on it yesterday.

 

 

Turntable Mixxx Session 110211 by ywwg

For various reasons, I finally got off my ass and recorded a new mix session. This is my first posted mix using digital vinyl control instead of midi controllers, and there are still a couple train wrecks but nothing too bad. The sound quality should also be better because the version of the Mixxx software that I used includes the linear interpolation sound code that I wrote. This code eliminates a lot of the weird hisses, pops, and static that older versions of the program exhibited.

The tracklist represents the harder end of the stuff I like now: slammin’ Berlin Techno. Make sure the subwoofer is turned up.

1. Atomuhr – Ghost in the Shell (Minimal Dub)
2. Ness – Diagnostic Function – Original Mix
3. Perc, Passarella Death Squad – Temperature’s Rising – Original Mix
4. Raiz – Keep Secrets – Jerome Sydenham & Funktion Remix
5. Octave – Hyper Ego (Tom Hades Remix)
6. Tony Rohr – Eli Odd Hows
7. Traversable Wormhole – Exotic Matter – Terence Fixmer Remix
8. Elysee – LSD – Original Mix
9. Substance – Gestalts – Original Mix
10. Silent Servent – B
11. Silent Servant – Elmar
12. Raime – This Foundry (Regis Version)

Steps to achieve my daily dose of future shock:

1. Read interesting article on Goddard’s Breathless
2. Realize I haven’t seen it yet
3. Check netflix streaming, just in case
4. Discover it’s there
5. Watch the movie

Qwest was right. Oh, what do I mean? Try this self-reflexive link

Despite my existential angst that all modern music applications created since Winamp 2.8 suck, I have to play my music with something, so I’ve been using Banshee because it’s Good Enough. But I put up with crap, like, recently I noticed that there were dozens of duplicate tracks listed in banshee’s database. So if I queued up an album, I’d get songs repeated occasionally. Very annoying. There are other people out there with the same problem, but the only listed solution is an out-of-date plugin.

Luckily Banshee’s database is an open sqlite database ((I can’t even find a link to a description of the iTunes library format)), so I poked around a bit (the database is in ~/.config/banshee-1/). Sure enough, I found duplicate entries in the CoreTracks table. Interestingly, though, there’s another table called Tracks that didn’t have the duplicated entries. And the tables are related!

So this is the command I used:
DELETE FROM CoreTracks WHERE CoreTracks.TrackID NOT IN (SELECT TrackID FROM Tracks);

This solved my duplicate tracks problem. As always when messing around with databases and the “DELETE” command, use extreme caution. I recommend a little gentle testing with SELECT commands first before you do anything stupid. Or, smarter still, back up your database first.

After a couple months off, I’m back with another mix. Most of the energy that would normally have gone into mixing went into hacking on the software Mixxx itself. Modern DJ software has a feature that lets a DJ use a special vinyl record to control the software. So instead of having hundreds of records, a DJ just needs two special timecode records, and a laptop loaded up with mp3s. This feature in Mixxx was incomplete and buggy, so I spent a lot of time rewriting it.

But now most of that hard work is done, so I got some new tracks and started mixing again:

Mixxx Session 100409 by ywwg

1. Frozen Border – A1 – Original Mix
2. Insideout – Artificially Sweetened.mp3
3. Alexi Delano – Adjust the Frequency – Original Mix
4. Glutamate – Deep blue
5. hermetico – nueva formula
6. damolh33 – follow me
7. By By – Paul Bee
8. mehmet umut soy – usul usul
9. Akira Tanaka – Tuetano
10. Cio D’or, Donato Dozzy – Limone – Original Mix
11. Tommy Four Seven – Surma – Original Mix
12. eavesdrop – caribe
13. Akira Tanaka – Die Formel (R-Stark Rmx)
14. project swirl – forehead
15. damolh33 – of an hour
16. sowing paranoia – anomalistic month

I seem to be living on the edge these days! I was bicycling on the BU Bridge, which has been reduced down to one lane in each direction because of construction. Because of the close quarters the traffic was backed up, so I was in the stop-and-go with everyone else. Suddenly:

My chain slipped a couple times, and then rear wheel locked and the bike stopped. Things were under enough control that I was even able to make a “I am stopping” hand signal so the car behind me wouldn’t run me over. I got off the road and discovered the situation above. The rear dropout basically snapped off, so the derailleur jumped around and got caught. The chain broke, but didn’t actually come apart. The whole system was actually stable, so that the rear wheel didn’t just fall off.

Because the rear wheel was locked, I had to carry my bike to central square (1 mile), get on the T, and then carry the bike home (.6 miles). On the plus side, my arms are pumped now!

And on the double-plus side, I guess I simply must buy a new frame.

Some of the more weird, spooky, dark tracks in my collection

1. Dintun – Llano (Sr Replicante Remix)
2. Julien Piacentino – Kosmonote
3. Kaive – Smile
4. Trinity & Beyond – The Fat Man
5. JPLS, Ambivalent – Frontstab – Original Mix
6. Danny Costa – Hellishness
7. Jan Hendez – Processing
8. Jan Hendez – C’est Dur a Dire
9. Gabriel Damen – Toy
10. Justin Martin, Claude VonStroke – Beat That Bird – Original Mix
11. Noid – La Otra Cara de la Moneda
12. Colombe Beau – Basification Des Acides
13. Schniner – llega en el momento menos pensado
14. Winx – Don’t Laugh – Extended Mix

Spooooky Mixxx Session 091031 by ywwg

Via blizzard.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

I thought briefly about aiming my cell phone camera at myself, and then realized that this is exactly what cheese is for.

This meme has resulted in a boost to the local economy — I need a hair cut.

Lastly, yes, that’s Totoro in the background with a sox batting helmet.