Late night fun with glitches

Last night I was driving home down I-5 and the notoriously, uh, imperfect, Bluetooth connection to the stereo in my old Subaru Forester glitched out in a fabulous way leading to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album getting played at 50% speed.

 

Ok, that was so cool I’ve gotta share. I slowed these tracks in Audacity for the same effect. Then I tried to upload them via WordPress but found it’s stuck with an 8 meg upload size limit and I don’t feel like troubleshooting that right now so I threw ’em on der aktiv-schaum. Then I googled the wordpress upload limit and…. BROKE GOOGLE.

COMPUTER MALTHUNCTION MALFUNNYTHINKIN….

Mitternacht wound up sounding like something that belongs as haunted house ambience:
http://aktiv-schaum.kg4cyx.net/Mitternacht-slowed.mp3

The title track, Autobahn, just… took on whole new dimensions of weird.

http://aktiv-schaum.kg4cyx.net/Autobahn-slowed.mp3

I was also treated to a weird stuttering flanging thing happening when I tried to play an Aphex Twin track through it, which eventually stopped as my phone simply gave up on sending Bluetooth audio. Oh well.

Shitpost Multiball

The Simpsons Pinball Party has not exactly proven itself to be a very reliable game; I’ve never played one where everything is fully functional. Malfunctions sadly seem to crop up with the garage door and mini playfield, and failure of these make most of the game inaccessible! No multiball…. On this one the upper left flipper didn’t work, so there was no way to shoot anything up there.

Just for the record, the way you have to get to multiball is to get the ball up there (open the garage door then shoot the ball in there) and the VUK (vertical up kicker) inside will send the ball to the left flipper on the mini playfield. From there, pass it directly to the right flipper or use the orbit at the back to send it to the right flipper, then shoot the lock ramp which will put it in the couch.

Yes, this is as challenging as it sounds!

So is maintaining an old RVR / Armstrong tube transmitter. Cut to avoid page spam…

Read more “Shitpost Multiball”

Aktiv-schaum

Someday this stuff will be the new Solo Cup Jazz Pattern.

Also I have in my hands an Open Repeater Project controller to be set up to run a machine in Redding, and it seems I’m fully allowed to put a dumb macro on it that makes it say “TRI-COLOR FOAMING WAX”. What have you fools done 😀

Yeah about that

Pay no attention the fact that this STL transmitter antenna installation looks like something generated by Shiv Integer ….

Not seen here– there’s a second pole with one more on it…. And no means of preventing the pole from turning….

Then at the other end, months ago, the vertical and horizontal got mixed up… Surprise, after fixing that, some meters now move farther to the right…

You poor STL, show us on this Smith chart where the confused engineers hurt you….

YEET!!!

Well, so much for that PEI print bed!

I was getting progressively weirder leveling on the last couple of prints I ran on my Monoprice Select Mini V2…

The original BuildTak clone sticker on the build plate failed, and actually managed to kill a nozzle when it did by snagging on it, so it was subsequently YEETed into the nearest trash receptacle and replaced with a PEI sheet. Now, that PEI sheet I got came with a big sheet of 3M 468MP adhesive transfer film which I used to apply it to the bed after cleaning it up and scraping off some stubborn bits of the stock sticker… You can see the PEI sheet here after it’d been sanded a few times to improve adhesion with some regrettable no name eBay PLA filament.

The blower and fan duct are the result of the stock fan proving inadequate.

It worked great until I found a print I ran today twisted up like a funhouse mirror, the adhesive under the build plate all bubbled and torn, and the PEI raised up and warped on one side as if it tried to rise like dough.

And suddenly it dawned on me, like every time I see someone’s photos of their printer on the Facebook group, they have binder clips on the edge of the glass or PEI bed. Oh gee, I wonder why, could it be that this method of fastening it Just Works without any complications whatsoever (as long as you don’t place them where they obstruct moving parts and, thus, find themselves YOTE into space?)

Yeah. Worked perfectly, though I think I might do it with four clips next time to avoid the PEI sheet lifting and warping the print (not sure if it’s actually doing this — the first layer showed no signs of leveling issues, so it may just be perfectly fine).

Speaking of Monoprice printers…. My Mini Delta decided to inexplicably spring back to life when given a very old SD card with the Marlin firmware build! I was about to rewire the whole thing to a RAMPS board, but now the stock controller came back. Flippin’ weird.

I now have an Anycubic Kossel Linear Plus that’s waiting for me to figure out how the heck to set the delta parameters on as well.

What craziness is all this??!!

Addendum: it takes a lot of clips. A LOT.

Oh that’ll wake you up

The RMT for this month came through just GRRRRRRRRRRR-EAT!!!

Warning: Replaying these files on any broadcast station or cable TV system is a violation of FCC rules. Yes, there are people who would be ignorant enough to try it otherwise (oh hi Bobby Bones show).

This is the end result with Billy and Patrick being very very confused…

The actual audio received by the SAGE Endec:

Had this been an actual emergency, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

FNORD!

The slow reveal

I’ve had this same building appear in my dreams three times now and I’ve wondered what’s up with it. It’s a pale yellow building, and I’m thinking it’s somewhere in an older section of Miami based on a couple of details, but it might not be. It has two floors above ground and one below. The middle floor has come up as having a center entrance/lobby that’s no longer in use and a space that’s open on one end to the outside, and it’s shown up once as housing a little cafe/bodega, and once as housing an ice cream shop. In both cases, a hallway towards the center of the building accesses a restroom and kitchen area to the other side of that center entrance.

The center entrance is the intriguing part though. As you go through it, there’s a space where a narrow wooden staircase would have once stood, since removed. It would have gone up one floor to a hallway to where there are some living areas, and down one floor into a basement level which continues WAY out of sight. There is no other obvious way to get into the basement level, but the living areas above seem to be in active use.

It’s partially built into or against a hill.

The first time I saw it in a dream I just noticed the basement level and missing staircase. A roughly built wood railing would keep one from walking into the hole. I began to contemplate sneaking in a ladder somehow so I could climb down there and see where it went.

The second time I was in this building in a dream, someone had sort of covered the hole with plywood but it was really obvious it was still there.

The third time, it was back open again, and I found the entrance to the upper level. A staircase outside the other end of the building took me up there and it was a hallway to some apartments. The hallway had amazing royal blue carpeting.

However, this third time, I was reading SOMETHING that gave the history of the building, and had diagrams, showing this building and others nearby. It had been constructed in the late 1800s out of wood and stone or coral rock. The basement level wasn’t a floor of the building, but rather an opening into a tunnel system that connected at least a dozen different structures in the same early settlement! The tunnels were originally kind of a happy accident, the result of an excavation during the construction process that the builders found would be trivial to just cut-and-cover to leave as a set of passages for everyone to use, shielded from the weather. It kind of barely went below actual ground level at that point because this building was built on a hill, and continued into the hill or ridge to go through two other residential buildings, a church, and a theater. Only the church remained in its original form. Someone’s account of having gone down the tunnel in recent years was in this article, where they found someone had partially filled that branch with concrete, but not enough to limit passage to where it went under a nearby street.

In this third dream appearance, the side of the first floor opposite the ice cream shop also housed a small datacenter room.

I wonder what the significance of this may be?

Occupational Hazards

…. When you walk into the studio at like 11 PM, NOBODY else is there, and you’re carrying a huge armload of tools… you walk past a studio door where a long quiet outro of a song has been playing out and suddenly THIS COMES BLASTING OUT

….. in other news I now know exactly which sockets are missing from the socket set and just how far down the hallway they can roll when I FREAK OUT AND THROW EVERYTHING TO THE FLOOR IN SURPRISE WTF

I’ve never been to The Beadman. It sounds like a pretty neat store honestly, but damn if THAT part of their radio ad sounds like nothing else reasonable in this known freaking universe

To be the Chief Evangelist?

Found on the box of a Creality Ender 3 printer….

Uh yeah, sufficient levels of fnord are present. I wonder what the instruction manual looks like?

Speaking of things that have leggy frames, Linguini Mountain is evolving into its final form.

And here’s a thing that’s also afraid of wet…. an aluminum field flange…. also scheduled for replacement. I’m really hoping the innards of that combiner contain none of that folderol. My boss told me that the aluminum fittings are common in the cellular industry, where it works fine because they don’t mix aluminum and brass. If only we were so lucky. Fnord.