When I originally re-deployed Morpsetek.com the idea was to keep project logs and be kinda a central hub to everything I do online. The last few weeks a flu totally knocked me on my ass and I haven’t been writing up as much as I should. I’ve got about 3 posts on the back burner and as soon as I get them written they will go up. That said, apparently I got indexed by Google and now I’m getting comment spam like you wouldn’t believe. I gave up and got a Akismet key. Here’s hoping their filter is as good as it’s claimed to be. Somehow with all the sites I run I’ve gotten by without really having to setup spam filters.
So, lets talk about comment spam. This crap is usually automated and has little to nothing to do with the content of the post. The spammers depend upon the comments either being unmanaged or poorly managed to the point that their generic postings get through. To anyone taking a moderate amount of time to read the comments they are obvious. Lately, some of the newer ones have been getting better, the comment itself is still generic, but usually very complementary. I’ve seen several along the lines of ‘I love your blog’ and ‘that’s so helpful’. Frankly this blog isn’t big enough to have a following like that, there are what? 5 posts? The give away on these is the commenter’s name, that where is ad is. They are getting smarter, but for spam to work the link HAS to be there. And if the link is there then it’s usually a dead giveaway. Still, I make no claims of perfection, I think I even let one though.
Point is that I do moderate the comments, and yes, that means that besides spam I’m also going to block trolling and other stuff that I don’t want to see on the blog. Don’t read that as a challenge, it’s just the way I want to run the site. Just disagreeing with me probably won’t be enough to make me trash your comment, but at least have a good reason. I actually like it when someone can intelligently argue a point and preferably provide a link to where they are getting their data. That’s one of the reasons I like reddit, I don’t much agree with the politics of most of the posters but at least they usually link to the data/story/video they are talking about.
I’m adding a contact form as well, so if you have something burring you have to say, but you also know that I’m never going to approve is as a comment then you can see it that way.
This weekend I decided to take a break from the controller to work on a few other projects. Besides cleaning up the lab a bit and changing from a “dueling workstations” to a “command center” styled layout I decided to build an OSGrid region. I used to find Second life to be an interesting platform to play with. Most of the time it was simply a 3d chat room, but with the scripting and building aspects of the ‘Virtual World’ as it was called (I’ve been criticized for calling it a game in the past, people get bent out of shape over weird things) you could do a lot more with it than just hang out. There were always small time games and art projects to explore, but doing anything myself was difficult because of the restrictions placed on people who weren’t giving Linden Labs a lot of money.
I don’t begrudge LL’s business strategy at all, running servers can get expensive quick. And I did pick up and hold quite a bit of second life land for a while. However, OpenSim is getting to the point now where it is a usable alternative to Second Life. Besides the obvious benefits of not having to pay for using the service, I enjoy the idea of an open source 3D world server. However much a few major software companies will disagree the internet runs on open source software. If we didn’t have Linux and Apache getting a web server up would be incredibly more expensive. The major closed source competitor in the web server market is Microsoft’s IIS, and with no alternatives out there we’d have to increase the hosting costs for any server out there by the cost of a MS license. Also, MS has a history of licencing per seat. I don’t want to think about the cost of running a server if you had to pay MS a user licence per visitor. Because several open source alternatives are out there that forces them to keep their pricing more reasonable. Now I’m hoping to see the same thing happen with OpenSIM and Second life. More after the break.
TL,DR: I setup a OpenSim server, hooked it into the OSGrid and got voice working with Whisper. Open source software is good.
I’ve managed to get all the parts I want from this mixer. Tomorrow, I start on the case.
I didn’t get as far as I would have liked last night on the mixer. This has 3 primary causes, chief among them poor impulse control. This is followed up by a project for work that I was having a bit too much fun with and then Dystopia. If you haven’t played Dystopia, you should try it. It’s free (assuming you already have any source engine game like Half Life or Left 4 Dead), fun and has a good mix of ways to play. That said they game can be hideously frustrating (think Counter-Strike frustrating) as well.
Anyway enough of that, more mixer tear down. The de-soldering braid works really well, allowing me to extract the 2 remaining slide pots and several regular pots off the board. I was also able to get 2 micro switches off. Pics after the break.
I had gotten this old DJ mixer off ebay several months ago. I worked OK but was really `fuzzy` and I think it needed much hotter signals than I want to work with. When I mess with audio it’s mostly coming from a computer and sound cards just don’t put out that hot of a signal. I’m not about to invest into preamps, so this mixer got thrown into the parts bin.
Now, for this controller I’m working on, I want the middle of it to have a set of faders and frequency cut off knobs. Since what I’m building is basically a bunch of buttons and knobs tied to an Arduino that then passes midi signal to a midi-to-usb converter board it really doesn’t matter where I get my parts from. I was kinda hoping that I could extract the potentiometers and leds from this mixer without completely destroying it, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able do to that.
So far I’ve managed to extract 2 1/4 inch stereo jacks, 1 slide pot, and 31 LEDs from this mixer. I’ve also got all the boards free from the housing and most of the hookup wiring removed. That’s all I’ve been able to get using just the soldering iron. I’ve since picked up some de-soldering wick and found my heat gun. Tonight I’m going to take a stab at getting more pots and maybe some of the header pin sets removed. I can reuse the header pins later in the build to make the new controller as modular as possible to allow for later tinkering.
Pics after the break:
Let’s try this again. I dunno how many times I’ve formated and re-installed the blog, but I’m going to try one more time.
Apparently I’ve a very boring person, because I keep setting up this blog and then not posting anything. It could be that I’m just too busy to post anything, or maybe I’m too paranoid to write about my self, someone could use that information against me after all. But really, I find myself boring and don’t think that anyone could possible be interested in the mad ramblings of a lone technologist. After all, how many tech blogs are out there now? The idea of the personal blog died with the rise of facebook and twitter, no one needs to maintain a personal blog that’s just for their friends anymore, instead they can post on Facebook and let someone else own all their data. Go figure.
I do have some projects that should get posted here. Priority 1 is finishing the lab rebuild. I’ve gone through several revisions of my lab and never really finished any of them. The current arrangement is getting close, maybe in a week or so I’ll have it done. Some people build a computer desk or battle station, me: I need a digital dojo. But that’s not the reason I resurrected this site once again, the reason is the midi controller I’m working on. I’m going to use a couple of Arduinos as the base of the unit, tearing apart a old (crappy) mixer for pots and leds, and a whole big whack of arcade buttons. The thing is going to be interesting to say the least.