Here are some pictures from last Saturday’s Ottawa Synth Meetup. It was an evening of conversation about gear and technique, along with much making of odd noises and even a smattering of actual music. 🙂 Mostly it was an opportunity for some of us analog synth nuts to get together and realize that there really … Continue reading “Ottawa Synth Meetup”
Here are some pictures from last Saturday’s Ottawa Synth Meetup. It was an evening of conversation about gear and technique, along with much making of odd noises and even a smattering of actual music. 🙂
Mostly it was an opportunity for some of us analog synth nuts to get together and realize that there really is a scene in Ottawa. It was a ton of fun.
Btw, if you’re interested in getting involved in the next one, you should join the Ottawa Synths Facebook group.
One person brought two analog modulars, one for audio (at the back) and one for video (in front). See the last photo for an example of the video synth in action.Someone brought an Arp Omni and a Korg PolySix. Classic sounds, that were instantly recognizable!Awesome tube powered drum machine, crazy synth in a wooden case, plus a very nice, beats focused eurorack machine.This is what I brought: Pittsburg Modular, MiniBrute, MonoTribe, Monotron Delay and a Qunexus controller.Monde synth ribbon controller controlling a eurorack setup. I got a chance to play with this, but I need to try it again in a less chaotic environment.This was a very nice eurorack setup, plus an Elektron Machinedrum and keyboard controller.The video synth driving the projector.
And there a few others that I didn’t manage to get pictures of.
I didn’t really need another ereader. I have numerous tablets in multiple sizes and a phone with a retina display, all of which have reading apps for every ebook store out there. I even have a Kobo Touch, which is a perfectly reasonable e-paper device once you figure out how to get all your content … Continue reading “Mini Review: Kobo Aura”
I didn’t really need another ereader. I have numerous tablets in multiple sizes and a phone with a retina display, all of which have reading apps for every ebook store out there. I even have a Kobo Touch, which is a perfectly reasonable e-paper device once you figure out how to get all your content onto it.
But I had seen various reviews (like this one from Engadget) that said good things about the Kobo Aura, so I went down to the local Indigo and checked them out.
I must say, they really are every bit as nice as you would expect for a $150 device: light weight, solid in the hand, easy to hold onto with a textured backplate, a brilliant front light [pun intended], and a capacitive touch screen. For me it was this last point that was the deal maker. I’ve never liked the feeling of “reaching past the bezel” of the Kobo Touch (or any of the IR based e-readers) to touch the screen. I’ve always found it error prone both in my targeting and the device’s ability to consistently register the interactions. Unlike IR based devices the Kobo Aura has a perfectly flat front face, and in addition to just being more responsive and accurate, I suspect the move to the capacitive screen also helped them get the overall size of the device down — the Aura is significantly smaller than any other reader I’ve seen with a 6″ display.
Anyway, as I noted above, the deal was made. I ordered an Aura from the Kobo store and Canada Post even got it to me undamaged, in less than a week. Time to go to bed early and catch up on my reading. 😉
… doesn’t mean you should. I bought a Philips hue starter kit a while ago. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a system for controlling the colors and intensities of LED lightbulbs remotely, via a wireless base station connected to your home network, which in turn speaks the Zigbee protocol (I believe) to the … Continue reading “Technology! Just because you *can* do something…”
… doesn’t mean you should.
I bought a Philips hue starter kit a while ago. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a system for controlling the colors and intensities of LED lightbulbs remotely, via a wireless base station connected to your home network, which in turn speaks the Zigbee protocol (I believe) to the lights. Essentially, it allows you to do stuff like this:
There are actually 3 lights in that picture, red and green ones visible, and a blue one lighting the top right corner.
Anyway, my thinking when I bought the kit, was that I was going to use the (very cool) RESTful API it provides to do some interesting web hacking of my the lights. Of course, I haven’t had time to do that — I don’t know why I thought otherwise — and so what I have effectively done, at this point, is replace a perfectly functional light switch with an app on my phone. I.e. enter room, get out phone, start app, tell lights to go on, put phone away. Not a win.
But wait, I think, someone must have built a light switch that will control a hue setup. All it would have to do is tell the lights to go on when the switch is flipped. Well… this may exist, but I couldn’t find it. The closest I could come was this:
The WeMo Light Switch
So, this is a light switch that, in addition to doing what it normally does (i.e. switch the current to a light on/off), also talks to your wireless network. That, in itself, wouldn’t solve the problem, but along with the obvious feature of giving you yet another app that can control your lights, the WeMo switch also interfaces to the brilliant site IFTTT (a.k.a. “if this then that”).
IFTTT is a website that lets you set up simple rules based on a trigger (i.e. “this”) and an action (i.e. “that”). It behaves exactly as you’d expect: when the trigger happens the action gets executed. There is quite a range of triggers and actions — it’s worth checking out — but the operative detail here is that WeMo light switches can be triggers and hue lights support several actions including turning on and off. Can you see where this is going?
The sequence of operations is this:
Hit WeMo light switch
Light switch connects (over the internet) to IFTTT.com
IFTTT tells all (3 of) my hue lights to turn on.
Room lights up
Unfortunately, aside from the completely gratuitous use of the internet to control something entirely within my home office, there are two real problems with this:
One of the 3 hue lights is connected to a wall sconce that is physically switched on/off by the WeMo switch. Because the power to that light is interrupted when the light is turned off, when it turns back on, it comes on white (i.e. it loses whatever color setting it had before).
Although IFTTT does get the other two lights to turn on, the time between when the switch trigger happens and the resulting action is fired is… variable. Often it’s only a couple of seconds, but I have waited as much as 15.
Oh well. The end result is I can now almost turn the lights on and off again, and I have learned an interesting lesson in the limits of technology.
(Oh, and my lights flash when someone blogs about Orion. 😉 )
After 17 years, our old backyard deck had had enough: the wood was rotten in several places, the dog nails had shredded several of the boards, and the stairs were failing to the point where they were starting to get dangerous. Since we really do use the deck a lot in the summer, we decided … Continue reading “Pics of the new deck.”
After 17 years, our old backyard deck had had enough: the wood was rotten in several places, the dog nails had shredded several of the boards, and the stairs were failing to the point where they were starting to get dangerous.
Since we really do use the deck a lot in the summer, we decided to get it replaced. Here are some pics of the new one.
We’re very happy with the work that was done, and as you can see, the results are stellar.
And now, a bonus picture. We also had our garage door replaced. Here’s the new one:
