Anybody have an old Win98 USB mass storage device driver? I've set up an real Win98 box on the machine that used to be door.murkworks.net - it's a P166 from 1996 and accordingly hilarious. I have USB running on it, but not drivers for USB disk drives, and I want that working, in no small part because the non-lulz non-vintage-games part of this project is having a (the?) last working 5.25" floppy drive for PC-DOS/MS-DOS diskettes.

(I like having the ability to read all antique media. Need anything off a Commodore PET floppy? In theory, I can do that for you, as long as it's double-density or less, and yes, they had a 1mb PET floppy at one point.)

The machine is named Blue, drive D is named Purple, and it's registered to Amélie Lacroix and the password is oneshotonekill because of course it had to be. Also, the desktop starts out with weapons and such but turns into widowtracer art because we all know what's really going on here.

It's also much quieter now, particularly for a machine from 1996, as I've replaced all the fans and improved the venting. Two of the fans were outright dead - the CPU and GPU fans, so that's terrifying. (I think the CPU fan may have worked occasionally, but don't hold me to it. Also I had already improved the venting some, even with the old fans - I just improved it more now.)

A couple of power supply capacitors should be replaced too, they're bulging a bit, and I had to order them - VetCo had none of the right caps in stock. Ah well, I tried.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.

It’s a Roland SC-55 MIDI Sound Canvas from 1991! I can now make all the noises you heard in any videogame in the 1990s.

Cheese Factor Five, Mr. Worf – let’s see what’s out there.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but honestly not much of one. I got it from Ben Deschamps via his internet yard sale, for, as he put it, “a six pack.” XD I also had to fix it after it arrived damaged in shipping – I’m pretty sure the post office punted it here from New York State, given how quickly it arrived and how the left side of the front panel was punched in.

But hey, now I can say I’ve repaired a potentiometer. Not replaced: repaired. I did that because it’s custom and weird and was in three pieces. (Also the metal frame was bent, some parts got disconnected and also bent, a bit of the motherboard broke off but I’m pretty sure that was just a little bit of grounding pin and it’s already grounded. And I fixed all that, so it’s all good.)

Anyway, it’s a Roland, and my A-30 MIDI keyboard is also a Roland, and turns out, they know each other! Such a small world. All those useless buttons suddenly do things!

There is also a thunder and rain setting. This is hilarious, mostly because there’s really only one thunder effect, so I can use it exactly once ever. I have no plans to do so, but don’t push me, I got thunder.

not me. okay, kinda me last night. but not really me.

Honestly, though, while I expected mostly to be using it for things easy to get right (bells, chimes, simple pipes, synthy-effects, etc), this is 1990s pro gear. The strings and horns, while definitely cheesy, are much less so than what you find in, say, Garage Band today. With the right tweaking and careful, careful playing – it respects key velocity, aftertouch, all those cool tweaks on my keyboard – I might be able to use more parts of it than I expected, maybe even for the swing jazz version of Lisdoonvarna. That’d be awesome.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Not as much time this year at Folklife as usual – no particular reason, really, other than I wanted to spend a couple of those days working on the album. But I did have a lot of fun jamming with Alouest on Sunday, doing the Quebecois trad thing. Sarah Kellington from Pinnpied made it too, and a good time was had by all.

I also picked up my customary New Noisemaker. See, I collect noisemakers. I have a whole shelf of them. Wooden train whistles, weird little rings you blow into that make sounds, bells, clackers, spoons, shakers, all sorts of toys. Sometimes they end up on other bands’s recordings!

Every year at the Folklife percussion tent, I play with what got brought this year, and see if anything makes noises I don’t already have.

So look at this crazy monster:

Is that awesome or what? It was in the discount bin for $7. The decorative bits were broken – the vertical slats originally went down further, some of the wicker wrap is missing, nothing that affects sound. So I trimmed, glued, and bound it at top and bottom – flutemaking skills, ahoy – and it’s sorted.

It makes a great, heavy, shlunk, clacky and interesting. You can also turn it to get a continuous falling-pebbles noise, and some other sounds too. People were asking me about it all day, hearing me play with it while walking around.

Normally that would be my only purchase. But not this year!

I’ve been thinking about a particular flute I didn’t buy last year for a year, which is a pretty good sign that I need to buy it. You might remember a year and a half ago or so, the abortive show trip down to Portland? One of my gear bags wandered off after our car broke down, taking with it a lot of gear and a couple of instruments, including one of my hand-built flutes, Popcorn.

Popcorn was my favourite flute, the one I carried around all the time, a bamboo D piccolo I’d make probably ten years before. I’ve never seen a flute made by anyone other than myself which sounded like it, or let me do a half-step-below-tonic trick like I could on it, and so on. I’ve been wanting to put together the flutemaking kit again ever since, to build a new one, but haven’t had time.

Well, these carbon-fibre flutes made in Oregon? They sound and act exactly like Popcorn, only with a better second octave. I can even do the half-step below tonic trick. It’s a little heavier because of the headstock, but that makes it tuneable. It’s amazing, and I’ve been wanting one since I didn’t buy one last year.

This year, Anna said “Carbony is here again, you should get that flute.” So I did.

I’m thinking of naming it “Kettlecorn.” Sound fitting, you think?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

The World’s Largest Bluetooth Speaker is a Dalek.

I thought this was going to be kind of weak and lame, but to my shock, it’s actually pretty well thought out, and kind of cool.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Whelp, the CD burning robot seems to have packed it in pretty good this time – doesn’t respond to commands, does randomly flail tiny arms around… I’ve managed to revive it before, but it’s never been this random.

I’m thinking of getting a multi-disc stacked CD duplicating controller and some CD burners – I was looking at this controller and this case (which appears to be fine as long as you don’t get a dodgy power supply with it) and a bunch of burners.

The problem is that SATA burners are all multi-layer and Blu-Ray (and thus expensive), while PATA/IDE burners are exactly right and cheap, but PATA controllers are hard to find, particularly given that Amazon has started blowing off search terms like SATA and LIGHTSCRIBE, because apparently they just hate everyone now.

Or I could buy this off of eBay, assuming it actually is five burners and Lightscribe – since the description does not match the title which may not match the photo (the photo looks like Sony Optiarc burners which lack the Lightscribe logo), I’m not sure!

Adventures. Any thoughts?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Finally – finally – back to recording and doing some music; Sunnie’s in today for what should be a pretty short session. Also, I did some comping work last night, after the latest round of carpet cleaning. (I’m about to admit surrender and call professionals in early on the sealed-off areas of the Lair. And I thought supervillainy was evil!)

I’m going to PAX this weekend. I have unpleasantly mixed feelings about that, partly because of Gabe’s assholishness, and partly because of the whole long-term ramp-up in misogyny in gamers, which really pisses me off. But the way I look at it is this:

I was here first, you fuckers.

And I’m not yielding this ground. Not nearly that easily. So I’m going, because of All That, because Fuck You, No, I Was Here First, and I have the artefacts to prove it.

And hopefully I can forget all that and have a good time, because I’m sick of everything having to be a political act of defiance.

Well, that escalated quickly. I’m planning some shows, too, btw, but can’t talk about them yet. How’s your Wednesday?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

You know how all those white plastic electronics – computers, game systems, lamps, just whatever – start to turn yellow after a few years? And no amount of cleaning will fix it, not even bleach, which tends to just hurt the plastic a bit?

A few years ago, some antique computer collectors – particularly of old Amiga, Commodore, and Atari white plastic computers – did a lot of experimenting around and came up with a solution. It’s known generically as Retr0brite, but you can make it yourself. Essentially it’s a kind of oxidation – a bromine solution is added to the plastic as a fire-retardant, and over time a hydrogen atom gets replaced by an oxygen, which rotates the molecule just a bit to expose the bromine, which looks like this:

UV light makes it worse more quickly

All this means that eventually the 1990s-era trackball that used to live in the sunroom looks like this:

Yep. That’s yellowed.

This is an old Microsoft Intellipoint trackball from the 1990s. I have four of them, one still new in box. It is, for my hands, the single best pointing device ever made. Needing to take it apart to scrub it out inside got this whole thing started.

As you can see, it’s got quite yellow over time, thanks to that UV-triggered bromine exposure. Retr0brite triggers the release of the aforementioned hydrogen, and re-replaces it with oxygen, reconfiguring the molecule just that little bit. You’re actually restoring the plastic with this process, rather than damaging it further.

Mixing up Retr0brite is actually quite simple. The only difficult part is getting the right mixture of artificial mucus, to use as a physical stabiliser. You need one, to keep the Retr0brite on the plastic, rather than running off into the tray.

Minion Paul had to leave the room

It’s just corn starch, relax. XD

I was able to get a reasonably-pure 12% hydrogen peroxide solution locally, but if I had the option, I’d go up to 15% or even 20% – just because by the time you get the artificial mucus into the mix, you’ve diluted the peroxide/TAED mixture further, and unless you have more UV than we have around here, that’ll slow down the reaction quite a bit. More is not always better – in California, this might’ve been too strong a mix.

But! After a day mostly in sunlight – result!

Not all the way back, but close

A stronger mix or a second day of sun probably would’ve finished the job. That’s against 92-brightness white paper, which actually means slightly blue; Against the brown workstation table, it’s almost shockingly white. But you can still see a difference between inside and outside of case, and I think they should be the same.

So: yay! It works! If you do this, USE EYE GUARDS, SERIOUSLY: once you add the TAED, it can get a bit fizzy, and you do not need this shit in your eyes. I can’t stress that enough. But otherwise, it’s pretty safe.

Here’s another before/after shot – sorry the second one is fuzzy, I didn’t realise until I’d put the trackball back together:

Oh, otherwise, the plastic feels unaffected. If anything, it feels a little smoother, but I think that’s just placebo effect. And if you can’t deal with the mucus, another solution is to throw out the gel entirely and make enough primary solution to submerge the plastic. The only problem there is that the plastic will float, so you’ll need to weigh it down.

So yeah, a fairly easy and effective DIY restoration project. Break out your Commodore 128s, kids, it’s time to make some old-school look brand new. :D

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

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On the Clipper ferry heading to Victoria! I’m not as fond of the Clipper as the other ferries; it’s not bad but it… it’s kind of airplanish. Not as bad as an airplane, not at all, but there’s no lounge or anything like the train or the peninsula ferries.

My head cold seems to be letting up, so I might do an open mic at Cornerstone Cafe, but no promises. I haven’t played since Monday, between replacing hard drive – we’re up to five, honestly, what is this – and this cold, and the post-convention cleanup.

Oh, and I managed to get Ubuntu to reinstall the 3.2.0 kernel, and this time it worked! So I’ll be putting that through its paces as soon as I get home, but in initial teating, we look pretty good. Most importantly, my weird hardware is still working. The funny part is that the more modern version of Jack sees, complains about, and reports the device enumating things wrong – the problem which crashed the 2.x kernels (!) which prompted the 3.1.5 install to begin with.

All of which means basically nothing to anyone! Except that it means things should work better in general in production. And I can use other plugins I couldn’t use before, which is awesome. I’ll be downloading those on Monday. :D

Anyway, have a good weekend, everybody! Anybody going to be at the Le Vent du Nord show tomorrow?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.

I’ve been talking about this idea I’ve had for an electric instrument; a bass-type fretted set of strings across the top bar – a stick-type bass – and a panel of deep harp strings coming off the bottom of that which could be finger-plucked, all with electric pickups and stuff.

It just struck me as something an elfmetal band should have, and I’m semi-serious about getting a luthier to make one at some point. It’d look like kind of a wedge bass, but with a bunch of extra strings and pickups on it. The top bar could also be fretless, but that’s more a jazz thing than metal.

Somebody beat me to an acoustic version. They have the harp strings on top, and it’s all acoustic (which is NOT THE SAME) but it’s still the same basic idea.

(photo Long & McQuade, Surrey, BC; h/t Pauline McDonald)

I still want my bass electric version. But… yeah.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.

You have failed me for the last time, Admiral Shack

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.