Something Unreal

I got a second-hand, old-style dot matrix printer whose print head that needed cleaning, so I decided to quickly record this while it was out of the printer.

I’d love to see this with a proper high-speed camera.

[Watch in HD]

Or: How not to solder / How to annoy people by saying “can” as many times as possible.

These Superex Pro-B VI studio headphones from the 1970s belong to my grandpa, and sound amazing, but only when they work. Which, unfortunately, was not very often. I looked around online, and it’s apparently fairly common for the capacitors to die with age. So I replaced each (0.0025 uF) with the closest value I could get hold of (0.0022 uF).

[Watch in HD]

Let-down noticed after a few hours: It didn’t fix the problem. But at least that’s two components that should last longer now. But if it’s not the capacitors then it may well be the custom-wound transformers in each ear, which are obviously not made anymore. Oh well, it gave me an excuse to make a casual camcorder/chatty video for the first time in a while.

I noticed a GIF was playing in-sync with a MIDI that was playing on Bawami, and then this happened. I had no intention of the video turning into this.

[Watch at YouTube]

Neither the GIF nor the MIDI were made by me.

The flip is at 01:34. No, we don’t give her drill bits to play with – I was working on a project and heard this sound behind me. Perhaps she likes the sound and the way it rolls along.

[Watch in HD]

This is my brother’s cat. She’s about 2 years old.

If you couldn’t access my site a few days ago, this is why! I was given the final push to give my old server a break for eternity and switch to a quieter, faster computer that’s in much better condition, and which used to be my main computer before I upgraded to a quad-core a couple of years ago.

[Watch in HD]

I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL

…And on that note, my site is finally back up (including this blog)! Thank you for your patience, everybody. It’s now running on what used to be my main computer, before I moved to a quad-core. I’ll upload a video with some more information and showing a few dust bunnies in the old computer’s case. For the curious, here are some quick comparisons between the old and new servers:

Actually, I will need to take it down on 2 occasions within the next couple of days for about 15 minutes each, as I forgot to copy a handful of programs from the old HDD that are unrelated to this web  site but which are needed for other jobs that the server constantly does. So, if you can’t connect to this site within the next couple of days, wait a little while for me to finish fiddling around inside and booting it back up, and then please try again. =)

Today, my Bleeper Music Maker program was added to Softpedia’s database!

This came as a surprise to me. However, unfortunately, this isn’t an update to Bleeper Music Maker, as I abandoned it over 2 years ago in favour of Bawami, which can read MIDI files properly, play them on the PC speaker in much more advanced ways (including pitch-bends), and control the PC speaker on Windows Vista/7/8.  I hope Bawami will get onto Softpedia before I abandon it.

Speaking of Bawami, revision 108 is in the pipeline and might be a big update…

The ultrasonic pulses that let Dojikko “see” her surroundings are normally inaudible to humans, but now, you can hear in detail exactly what’s going on. The ultrasound is 40 KHz, about double the highest frequency that most people can hear. When slowed down, not only can you hear the transmitted pulses, but the echoes and the delay between them are clearly audible, too!

[Watch in HD]

I recorded the sound at a very high sample rate (192 kHz – at this rate, the microphones can hear frequencies up to 96 KHz). Afterwards, I slowed down the sound to a quarter of the original speed, 1/8th, 1/16th, etc, even down to 1/128th (at that speed, just 2 seconds would be over 4 minutes long). I also recorded video in slow-motion, but my camcorder can only go up to 200 FPS (1/8th speed when played back at the usual 25 FPS), meaning that lower speeds such as 1/64th aren’t smooth, as I had to futher slow down the video in editing. But the main point of this video is the sound.

When the mouse is moved, the the Caps/Num/Scroll Lock LEDs on the keyboard come on. Then, while trying to prove that there is no program running in the background to control the LEDs, the PS/2 devices (keyboard, mouse) stop working entirely. Such are the strange things that my old server does. (Yes, that computer is what’s hosting my web site.)

[Watch at YouTube]

Please excuse the song sample that’s looping repetitively on StepMania in the background the whole time.

I decided to modify my phone’s USB headphone cable to turn it into a normal headphone socket. Now I can connect anything I want, instead of being stuck with horrible things that just fall straight out of my ears!

[Watch in HD]

Yes, this is an old phone, and yes, this isn’t complicated at all (although I suck at soldering), but oh well.