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Bolted Down

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Making a concerted, pre-spring cleaning effort in the studio/workshop at the moment. Was going well today until I got to my "inheritance," 4 big toolboxes worth of metric thread machine screws, nuts and assorted supporting hardware. I say "inheritance" because they were on a deceased estate, nature strip, hard rubbish pile and the brother of Splodgenoodles (not her real) name scored them for me. Once I find a proper home for the collection, I may never need to buy threaded hardware ever again. At least, not M4 to M10. But OMFG! I'm broken! Half, no, two-thirds of my day has been wrapped arounf sorting, collating, bagging-pending-a-new-home and stacking what feels like a hundredweight of ironmungery from buggeration to buggery and this ballast still doesn't have a permanent home. Sure, the M6 bolts are now sorted to length. AFTER 10 HOURS OF SODDING SORTING!!! M4 and M5 are yet to be sorted. M8 to M12 are sort of only a couple of handfuls, but I have no ide
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Rust Never Sleeps

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Go brought me to a shuddering stop. I think I may have had some environment issues because I had some early install problems. These seem to be tricky to fix, so I may come back to Go later. Meanwhile, I've been trying Rust, learning from " The Rust Programming Language ", AKA "The Rust Book." So far, the experience has been as easy as Arduino and C/C++ was when I started that journey 8 years ago. Challenging, but steady progress. And in sorting out a problem with my Rust installation, I may have hit upon the solution to my Go installation issues, too. Looks like Homebrew language installs might be a little problematic. Maybe my Homebrew install is buggered. Will come back to that, too, but after my Rust learning. So, I'm as far as Chapter 2, "Programming A Guessing Game," where the reader is guided through constructing a command line guessing game. It has been a surprisingly easy experience. Rust has a syntax like C but feels... "easier."
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Removing Ollama From My Mac

The AI experiment in my "laboratory" is over. I've been running Ollama locally on my laptop, as in:- an 8G, local, offline language model, running on local, offline command line software. Don't get me started about the carbon pollution environmental disaster being created by serverside queries to AI like, "Does my partner really love me." The local-only model seemed like an affordable and accountable approach and my M1 Mac is energy efficient fast enough that even really tricky queries were sorted way under 2 minutes. The thing is, I never got a single, useful response to a query. Not one, that was fit for purpose, anyway, out of Ollama's "mouth." I figured that between my ability to describe a problem, and its probable solution, architecturally and simply, might result in useful code fragments for my various microcontroller coding and OpenSCAD design tasks. Not one. The work required to make anything useful was at least as much as designing i
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Refusing to Give Up - Here I Go... Again

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I can't help it. The state of social media, its centralisation, its blatant disregard for all but the thinnest veneer of "privacy", the manipulation of the proletariat. I simply can't give up on creating some form of timeline-based microblog that is peer-to-peer, has persistant data for as long as the user keeps it live, serverless, securely encrypted and addressbook based. My programming skills need to level up a long way from where I'm at, though. Enter Go, Google's language, but open, standardised, apparently low-level capable and as cross-platform as C, yet simpler than C or Javascript. Early playing around with it has been very interesting, it doesn't break my brain, like JS, it seems to, by way of its module achitecture ("libraries"), less arcane and less aimed at professionals than C and seems to have broad support, but I still have a long way to go, and to that end, FreeCodeCamp just dropped a beginners Go course in in my inbox. Fingers
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Embarking on a Long Time Dream

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I've wanted a fretless bass for years. I have my double bass, sure, but it's kind of the bassist's equivalent of a piano, furniture rather than practical. Considering my studio is half of a mid century, single-car garage and my workshop is the other 40% and the laundry is the remaining 10%, there's not a lot of space to keep it within cooee of a microphone, either. So "Baby," as I call her, lives in a decorative corner of the guest room and is kind of hard to even get to for practice. Furniture. IKR. My dream working instrument is a fretless bass guitar, with just enough fingerboard radius to cross over into upright playing style without hindering my amplified playing style. It's a chambered body, rather than hollow, to minimise feedback-inducing, stray resonance at a gritty overdrive volume. It needs a fully telescopic pike, for upright use, that also folds away completely for guitar style use. It's made of sustainably sourced, plantation grown, Aus
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New Profile Logo

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I've started back into my fretless, headless, semi-acoustic bass project because I found a way to make the neck from scratch . See this video for details on that, but meanwhile, there's more to a bass than the neck. To this end, I've started doodling about with the body design, more importantly, the custom f-hole that will reflect, well, ME! That's it on the right. It's an upside down bass clef, which makes a C for Crunchy, it's how people sometimes perceive me, upside down and crunchy. It's what I do, I play bass. Well, guitar, too, but my music career was mostly as a bassist. That is all.
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Combining Two Projects and Staging the New Project

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The "Cheap Yellow Display" development board that will be my metronome and sync Babel fish. (image source: Random Nerd Tutorials) For about 3 years now, I've been doing "research" into the technology behind various old and new school tempo sync techniques and, in parallel for the last 18 months, a metronome. I've decided, they're probably the same tool with different interfaces. The advantage, as I see it, is a device to rehearse my parts with a metronome that's simpler than my drum machine, but can then sync my DAW, "stripe" a track on my digital multitrack recorder and sync my drum machine via USB MIDI, DIN Sync and serial MIDI, respectively. Then, for playback, has the recorder as Master (via DinSync) to sync the metronome, the DAW (via USB MIDI) and the drum machine. (Via Serial MIDI.) Foot tap as a sync master, too, is also in the scope, hence "MIDI Babel Fish." Not to mention keeping my looper in lockstep with the DAW, drum
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