Our oldest clematis has grown dramatically this year. I think it has nearly doubled its blossom production since last year. I put several photos of it and one of the younger ones on my flickr site here.
Announcing Ronin
It’s baa-ack…
Now available at the Audio Damage website is Ronin, our modular delay and filter plug-in. This is an update of a product we released quite some time ago but sidelined for awhile due in large part to the complexity of producing an Audio Unit version of it. We always kind of missed it, though, so we decided to dust it off and bring it up to date. Ronin sports the same delay algorithm that we used in DubStation but provides even more control over its wondrous capabilities. Click that link to read about it, listen to some audio demos, and grab a copy for yourself for only $49.
MIDI-CV Converter
I recently finished a MIDI to Control Voltage converter I’ve been working on for awhile. Here’s a photo of it before I installed it in my synthesizer’s cabinet:
(That’s a flickr-hosted photo so you can click on it to find a larger version.) I thought I’d put this photo up not because it’s a stellar example of my DIY skillz–it isn’t–but because I was amused at how it inadvertently ended up being a little showcase of circuit-construction techniques. On the right we have a PC board I laid out and had fabricated by BatchPCB. You may recall having seen this PC board on my blog previously. If you look closely at the photo above you’ll see that the chip labeled “HDAC” has been removed from the board. That was the quad 16-bit digital-to-analog converter I was going to use for pitch CVs. I don’t know what happened but I burned up two of those chips (at about $25 a pop) before giving up. I don’t know whether I made a layout error, whether my power supply was bad, whether I had overlooked some key piece of information in the spec sheet, or whether I just plain had bad luck. In any case, after the Magic Smoke came out of the second chip I decided to try a different DAC.
Random Stuff
Mid-July already? Inconceivable. It’s been busy around here. Here are some random bits of recent news:
I’ve been mired in the AudioUnit version of Audio Damage’s new product. Actually it’s not entirely new; it’s a reissue of Ronin, one of our earliest products. We shelved Ronin several years ago because it pre-dated our current methods for building plug-ins, and this meant that updating it for AU was more trouble than we felt it was worth at the time. We never felt entirely good about this decision, however, so recently we decided to dust it off, give it a face-lift, bring it up to date, and do the AU port. There’s a screenshot and Chris’s usual flamboyant commentary here.
Maddy’s Fine
The vet who first saw Maddy after we found the first lump just phoned with Maddy’s lab results. Dear little Madeline had an Eosinophilic Granuloma. You can google that if you’re really curious, but the short version is that it’s an unusual auto-immune system reaction often brought on by an insect or spider bite. She may be prone to these in the future, but if we find them early enough they can probably be treated with cortisone.
We are greatly relieved, needless to say.
Is Gravity Different In Your Neighborhood?
We bought a cheap digital scale recently for weighing Zed. Zed’s on a weight-reducing diet and we wanted a means to verify that it’s actually working. The scale came with a better-than-average instruction manual (better than the average instruction manual for a cheap Chinese-made product, that is) which contains one very strange paragraph, which I will reproduce here verbatim without sprinking it with the “[sic]”s that it merits:
CALIBRATION
When to calibrate – calibration is almost never required.
Rough Day
Wow, yesterday was a doozy for unpleasant news. In reverse order of the arrival of the news:
Michael Jackson died. Okay, yes, the guy turned out to be pretty weird, but he was one talented guy–maybe the most talented guy in pop music/entertainment, ever. He could sing, he could write songs, and man could he dance. As entertainment icons go he was as big as they get, then or since. I suppose if you are younger than about 40 you don’t remember what it was like at the peak of his career, when Thriller was busting records and Michael Jackson essentially defined pop music at the time. Consider that Thriller is still the best-selling album ever, which means it has outsold any album by The Beatles, Elvis, U2, or anybody else. It’s particularly sad that he died just when things were starting to look up for him: he had 50 sold-out concerts lined up.
Time-Lapse Videos of Tokyo, Photos of Japan
There’s a rather gorgeous time-lapse video of my favorite city here by a fellow named Samuel Cockedey. He has a website here which has a number of gorgeous photos from Japan. His “Streets” collection makes me–well, homesick isn’t exactly the right word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. There’s also another time-lapse video on his site here using music which is *cough cough* borrowed from the Solaris soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, my favorite film composer.
Photos of Flowers
I just posted a dozen photos of flowers from our yard here. These photos span a month or so and hence include both early iris and more recent peonies.
Someone Else’s Cat Video
Yes, sooner or later I’ll get around to posting something other than videos of cats. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen today, however.