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That’s a close-up of one end of the spring tank in my TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb. One detail that surprised me a little when I opened it up is that the transducers appear to be symmetric, i.e. the part that feeds audio into the springs appears to be the same as the part that picks up the resulting signal. I’ve never opened up a spring reverb before but somehow I expected the drivers to be different than the receivers.

Subject says it all–137 years of Popular Science magazine can now be browsed and searched online. Click here to go there.

I just put up a lengthy description, with photos, of how I modified a Frontier Design Tango (older 20-bit version) ADAT audio interface for DC output, allowing it to be used with software such as MOTU’s Volta and Expert Sleepers’ Silent Way to control analog synthesizers. It’s able to control my VCOs over nearly a nine-octave range, so its performance is much better than the MIDI-CV converter I built awhile ago. (Somewhat ironically I submitted the artwork for having the PC board fabricated for that project the day before Volta was announced.) This project consumed several consecutive weekends, and documenting it took nearly as long, so I’m also quite pleased to have it all finished. I went to the lengths of making a demonstration video to cash in on the Expert Sleepers Silent Way bounty demonstrate how well the system works. The video is embedded at the bottom of the page.

I’m trying to log into my YouTube account, and it’s not accepting my password (even though I logged into the same account from a different machine using the same password a few minutes ago), so upon the advice of the help screen I asked for a password reset. Partway through the process I was presented with this:

Wow. ‘Fraid I can’t answer that, Google. As much as I’d like to be able to read questions presented in Japanese, I can’t.

Thanks to Richard, I’m now the proud owner of an old spring reverb, specifically a TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb. He warned me that there seems to be something wrong with the input circuits but I’ve been too busy to even plug the thing in to check it out. However, I was able to locate a copy of the TASCAM RS-20 Owner’s/Service Manual, which you can download by clicking this link. Since Google turns up almost nothing about the TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb, I’m going to mention the TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb and the TASCAM RS-20 Reverb Owner’s/Service Manual several times in this post in hopes of providing search-engine fodder so that anyone with a TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb in need of the TASCAM RS-20 Owner’s/Service Manual will now be able to find it.

Thanks, once again, to our friends Richard and Rafael, I recently sampled another one of the mysterious special-edition Pepsi products from Japan. This post is rather late in its arrival since it covers a product which is no longer in production. I confess that I sort of forgot that I had the bottle tucked away in the back of the refrigerator until I noticed it recently.

It’s called Shiso Pepsi, and it’s a nice shade of green:

The label says “Japanese Refreshing Flavor” and that’s pretty accurate. It’s refreshing and it does taste oddly Japanese. It has a very herb-like flavor and is somewhat sweet (as you’d expect for a soft drink). Imagine if you’d rarely or never tasted an herb like basil or oregano, and you tried a beverage sort of like 7-Up flavored with basil or oregano–that’s pretty much the impression that Shiso Pepsi gave to me. It was quite good; I understand why Richard wanted a case of it after he tasted it.

A quick consultation of Wikipedia reveals that my sense of taste was not off the mark. Shiso is the Japanese name for Perilla, an herb that is in the mint family (along with basil and oregano) which also sometimes goes by the name Japanese basil. The article says that in Japan it is “used as a flavorful herb in a variety of dishes” which probably explains why Shiso Pepsi reminded me of Japan: I’ve probably tasted shiso while eating there.

Here’s some text from the other side of the label:

I’d be delighted if anyone could translate this for me and leave the translation in the comments.

Strange but true: Barbie has a new career as a computer engineer:

Yes, this looks like yet another Photoshop job, but it’s the real deal. Barbie’s 125th career, determined for the first time by public vote, is as a computer engineer. The press release doesn’t say whether she’s in hardware or software engineering; her shirt seems to have suggestions of both.

[From Gizmodo]

Here’s a pair of essays that go together nicely: author Charles Stross examining the widespread misinterpretation of the phrase “information wants to be free” and dangers and fallacies therein; and songwriting legend Paul Williams reflecting upon a specific instance of these dangers.

Case in point here.

There’s a nice animation here that illustrates the size of Earth relative to the rest of the known universe. I should say that it attempts to illustrate that, though, since the scales involved are rather beyond our comprehension. Watch it in full-screen HD if you have the bandwidth.

(Thanks go to Chris for this one.)