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Portable Ice Cream
Often in the evening we'll bring ice cream to the park: walk there, play for a bit, eat, play some more, walk home. It sounds simple, and it is simple, but the key thing is you want to repack the ice...
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Two Jammer Ideas
I've been playing around with my jammer a lot lately, and I wanted to write up two ideas I tried: one that worked and one that didn't. Idea 1: when you play a notey tune, it's common that you're...
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Furnace Battery Backup
If our power went out that would mean no heat: our furnace burns natural gas but needs electricity to run. We don't have a fireplace or other simple heating backup, and our normal approach if our...
View ArticleHome Solar Resiliency
Lots of houses around here have solar panels on their roofs, due to a combination of subsidies, falling solar costs, and high electric prices. You might think this would be really good to have if...
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Backup Power
I've been thinking about power in situations when the grid is down. Some things we'd be sad to miss: Heat: we have forced hot water heating, which needs electricity both for the boiler (electronics...
View ArticleSynth Brass
I've been continuing to play around with multitracking using my jammer and breath controller. For an accordion sound I've been fine with a basic free one in fluidsynth and using the breath controller...
View ArticleWhole House Fan + Evaporative Cooler
In dry climates it's common for people to use evaporative ("swamp") coolers; same idea as sweat evaporating off your skin cooling you off. The downside is that they increase humidity in the air, and...
View ArticleHow to parent more predictably
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think...
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More fun with multitracking
With the house in somewhat reasonable shape and the kids asleep I took another try at making some music by layering multiple parts. Looks like I last tried this five years ago. Since then I've figured...
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Trying a Breath Controller
So far I've been using the AXIS-49 like a keyboard: it's velocity sensitive, so this works reasonably well. Here's an example of me imitating an accordion: This isn't as expressive as I'd like,...
View ArticleIncreasingly OK with Singular They
Six years ago, in 2012, I wrote a post where I made a continuum of examples of singular 'they' usage. Selections: unspecific ungendered: Someone has their head screwed on wrong.specific ungendered: I...
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Game Controller MIDI
Expression controllers can make synthesized instruments sound much better, but they're generally pretty expensive. For example, the breath controller I've been playing with cost me EUR 132. There's...
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Floor Mouse
Update 2018-07-20: my wrists have calmed down some and I'm worried about hurting my knee, so I've switched to mousing lefty but still "clicking" by using keys on the keyboard. Update 2019-11-07: about...
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Virtual Wind Instruments
I've been thinking about what I want in a virtual wind instrument and how it differs from a keyboard instrument. On a keyboard there's: Which key did you hit?How hard did you hit it?How long did you...
View ArticlePredictable Parenting
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) In my model of parenting, one of the most...
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Dance Weekend Update
A few weeks ago I posted that I was thinking about organizing a contra dance weekend in Boston. A lot of things are still up in the air, but here's what I have so far: Signed contract for the...
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Rearranging Axis-49 Keys
As I wrote before, the Axis-49 comes with a Harmonic Table layout, but I want to use it with Wicki-Hayden. I wrote some code to remap the keys, but the colors on the keys now made no sense. I decided...
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Handwriting for math etc
I don't have very tidy handwriting, and for most things this is fine: there's enough redundancy in language that it will be clear from context what is a t and what is a +. When writing calculations,...
View ArticleReading to Kids
There are a range of ways people read to kids, and I think it's good to have variety: Reading in an entertaining way, trying to make it as fun as possible for them. Voices etc.Leaving pauses for them...
View ArticleIndex Funds: US vs International
I think the efficient market hypothesis is basically right, in the sense that I'm not not going to be able to beat the average return, and so I'd more or less like to hold an even slice of everything...
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