Happy Halloween

Halloween’s almost over so this post is a little late, but I still wanted to put up this photo of the front of our house:

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The spider’s name is Hank. Hank first appeared on our roof last Halloween and was something of a hit with the local trick-or-treater crowd. This year, though, Hank hasn’t had much to do. Aside from Brooke, our next-door neighbor, we’ve had only one costumed youngster dare to make his way past Hank in search of handouts. Brooke has declared that this is her last year of trick-or-treating, so poor Hank might be quite bored next year. I, of course, am forced to eat all of the leftover candy. read more

Nifty PIC-Based Synthesizer Modules

There’s a fellow with a website here that documents a clever idea for building LFOs and ADSRs using PIC microcontrollers rather than the usual handful of analog components. I’m quite sure that this would be a less expensive way to build these modules, and one could build exotic things like DX7-style rate/level EGs instead of plain-vanilla ADSRs. He even provides his source code for the firmware. I might build the ADSR on a breadboard just to see how it performs. (Personally I prefer AVR chips to PICs, but hey, if all I have to do is assemble somone else’s code and burn it, I’m not gonna complain about his choice in CPUs.) read more

Naughty Apple

It seems that Apple isn’t above monkeying with its stock options to polish its financial image a little. There’s an article in the NY Times here that says while current employees have been cleared of any wrongdoing, the investigation is still in progress and Apple will have to restate its earnings. Nope, it just never looks good when the CFO has to resign from the board.

Good Old Weird Al

Here’s a great video of a recent Weird Al song. It’s nice to see that he’s still as brilliant and funny as he was 20 years ago.

Somewhat fittingly, Tracie found this video just as I was on my way out to the garage to work on my retro-arcade game controller, and I’m typing this on my ergonomic keyboard…