Category Archives: Uncategorized

General blog stuff.

Troubleshooting Siglent’s Bode II Oscilloscope Utility

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In hopes of saving someone from some head-scratching: if you happen to have a Siglent oscilloscope, and a Siglent signal generator, and you can’t get the two to communicate over USB while using the Bode II measurement feature of the oscilloscope, check the “GPIB” setting on the signal generator. It needs to be set to 1. For reasons unknown, it was set to 18 on my SDG 1025. Yes, it doesn’t make any sense because GPIB is a different interface standard than USB, and this particular signal generator doesn’t even have GPIB, but before I figured this out my SDS 1104X-E ‘scope would always report that it couldn’t find the signal generator. I looked for any setting at all in both instruments which seemed to be relevant, and finally set the GPIB number on the signal generator to 1 simply because 18 seemed like an unlikely value. After that everything worked. read more

Mic Check

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No promises, as usual, but I’ve been thinking about blogging lately.

One thought was inspired by my cousin Jesse, in his recent, last post on Facebook before deactivating his account. I can’t quote him verbatim because deactivating an account, for better or for worse, causes all posts made with that account to disappear. (This brings up a related thought, which I’ll get to next.) The gist of it–and I hope that he’ll correct me if I’m misrepresenting his statements–was that Facebook, in the final analysis, just isn’t a good thing, and there’s only so long that a person with good intentions can continue to participate in it. As to why that’s the case, well, that’s a question for sociologists, which I’m not. He went on to say that seemingly we’re better off finding other ways to communicate with each other, convenient as Facebook may be, particularly decentralized ways such as personal blogs. read more

Stay At Home, Still

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DENVER, CO – APRIL 6: Colorado Governor Jared Polis delivers an address from the governor’s mansion on Monday, April 6, 2020. Polis said that the state of Colorado will extend a statewide stay-at-home order from April 11 to April 27 due to coronavirus. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

That photo captures the moment. Polis is delivering an address, alone, from a table in what looks to be an improvised setting The cameraman is wearing an improvised cloth face mask.

We’re all in new territory, at home.

Signs of the Times

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Colorado issued a three-week “Stay At Home” order a couple of days ago. For posterity, or something, I pulled together a collection of some of the public-service graphics that I’ve seen go by on the Boulder Office of Emergency Management Twitter feed recently. (I became familiar with this Twitter feed back in September 2013, when a flood hit Boulder. That was the last time a state of emergency was declared here.)

A picture is worth 1000 words, they say. Strange times.

On Not Blogging

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Obviously the horoscope in that last post didn’t lead me to suddenly blog more often. I had a fundamental realization a couple of years back, when I was thinking about how I blog less than I used to. It was this: Living my life is more interesting than writing about my life.

As the saying goes, there are only so many hours in the day.I live a full life. There are many things I enjoy doing, including writing, but in the end, writing a blog entry gets lower priority than many other things that I either need to do or want to do. read more

Blogging as an Act of Rebellion

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This was my horoscope a few weeks ago:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

Because of the onslaught of the internet and social media, lots of people no longer read books. But in 2020, I highly recommend that you not be one of that crowd. In my astrological opinion, you need more of the slow, deep wisdom that comes from reading books. You will also benefit from other acts of rebellion against the Short Attention Span Era. Crucial blessings will flow in your direction as you honor the gradual, incremental approach to everything. read more

Introducing Quanta

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As one can easily see from the date stamps below, this is the first entry I’ve made here in years. It’s also the first entry in even longer which constitutes more than something of the form “here’s a photo”. I wrote a few paragraphs rambling about why this is the case, but they ended up seeming silly and unnecessary. Long story short: there haven’t been posts for a long time, but here’s a post now, and there may or may not be more soon.

The main point of this post is to mention that we (Audio Damage, that is) recently released a new software synthesizer called Quanta. It’s a sort of hybrid of granular synthesis and subtractive synthesis, with a bunch of unusually versatile modulation sources, full MPE compatibility, and a lovely UI. Here’s our video advertisement, thanks entirely to Chris:

There’s much more information about it on the Audio Damage website, of course, as well as a free demo version. We’re quite proud of it, and other people seem to like it, too: it set a new company record for initial sales.

The Coolest Thing I’ve Seen in a Long Time

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This page contains a video of something every science student has imagined, but very few see: the demonstration that, in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same speed. Usually you learn of this demonstration and are left to imagine it, since setting it up is somewhat complicated. On rare occasions, this demonstration is actually carried out with an evacuated cylinder of glass containing a feather and a bullet or some other dense object. I’ve never seen such a demonstration, and I’ve certainly never seen it carried out on the scale documented in this video.

Related: how on Earth do they pump the air out of that chamber?