Safety Valve

(Originally posted on Google+, Jul 18 2018.) Old school bleep with Moog Werkstatt, LittleBits and Ableton. Testing the gate input modification (blue wire), courtesy of https://synthnerd.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/moog-werkstatt-adding-a-proper-gate-input/

(Originally posted on Google+, Apr 5 2016.) Been quite annoyed lately with the crap digital TV box we have. Or, in particular with the remote control. It was glitching a lot, only reacting to about 20% of keypresses - felt like the keys were giving up or the IR circuit was flaky. To switch channel, you had to press it repeatedly and swear a lot. Well, technically, the swearing was optional. And actually, it was my wife who was most affected by the problem, since she's the one who watches TV in this house. I was mainly being annoyed by proxy and because I'm the one who has to try to fix the problem. Today, I tried again. I checked with the camera on my phone that the IR lamp seemed to work - and I noted no glitching. It reacted immediately to all keypresses. So I cleaned the front of the TV box to make sure the receiver wasn't being blocked. Then I tried it out - and it worked surprisingly well. No problems at all in fact. It behaved just as when new (still a crap box, b...

(Originally posted on Google+, Mar 24 2016.) If you've played the classic point-and-click adventure Grim Fandango, you probably remember the Department of Death building where the game starts out. But did you know that it was based on a real building? The place is 450 Sutter Street, San Francisco, and it is covered in Aztec Art Deco, for real. On my recent trip to SF, I had the opportunity to check it out. Was not disappointed. Would have been nice to be able to go up to a skybar or similar though. Preferably with the option to go onto the roof and feed the pigeons while carrying a balloon animal looking like Robert Frost. For more details, see http://grim-fandango.wikia.com/wiki/Department_of_Death Also, I always thought that the hidden elevator (spoiler warning) in the pavement in the alley behind the DoD was a contrived idea that someone made up just for the game. But these are actually common in San Francisco - see the last picture. They are used to bring stuff in from d...

(Originally posted on Google+, Oct 15 2015.) Got myself a new mug to match that keyboard.

(Originally posted on Google+, Sep 30 2015.) So I got myself what has to be the nerdiest bluetooth keyboard in the world: http://sinclair.recreatedzxspectrum.com/ Quite expensive too, for a bluetooth keyboard. But build-wise, it's a perfect replica of the ZX Spectrum we know and love. Feels exactly right and has the correct key labels. Which means that used with a decent emulator, it recreates the feeling of typing on a real Speccy (without resorting to blind hunt-and-peck which is generally the case if you use a PC keyboard). And after some fiddling with figuring out how to unlock the full bluetooth QWERTY mode as well as the Speccy-specific mapping, I can confirm that it works as advertised as a generic keyboard for Android, iOS or Windows. I only had to ask myself, "can I think of anyone who's a more suitable target for this product" to realize that I really had to get it. It's certainly not for fast touch typing, but programming on a Speccy was more ...

(Originally posted on Google+, Sep 30 2015.) Wow, someone put up a video of running my old Speccy emulator on an Amiga. :-)

(Originally posted on Google+, Jun 22 2015.) Bricckkkkssss!

(Originally posted on Google+, May 10 2014.) Did I mention that this town is built on clay? A lot of clay. Over 80 meters deep, around where we live. And you only have to dig about 2 meters down to find it - pure clay, looking like you could just scoop it up and start making pots. As seen on these pictures from just across the road where they're making foundations for a couple of new buildings. (2018 update: We're now in fact living in the building that got built on this site.)

The Erlang runtime environment is more similar to an operating system than to a traditional language runtime library. An Erlang "node" is an Erlang instance started with the flag -name (or -sname, for "short names" if your network does not rely on DNS). For example: $ erl -sname foo will give you an interactive Erlang shell with a prompt like this: Eshell V9.2.1 (abort with ^G) (foo@rocka)1> and you can see from the prompt that this is running as a "node" with the node name foo@rocka . In practice, this means that networking is enabled, allowing Erlang processes on this node to communicate with processes on other nodes, either on the same host machine or on other machines, through the ordinary Erlang message passing mechanism. Working with multiple nodes If I open a separate console and start another node  bar@rocka  in the same way, I can then connect these two and start doing interesting multi-node stuff: (foo@rocka)1> net_adm:ping(ba...