Octoberfest Beer bottled!

Posted on September 25, 2011 by mkb

For my birthday, my parents got me two beer kits as usual. One was an Octoberfest, albeit with an ale yeast, which is not according to style. I just bottled it today, and I have taken absolutely no hydrometer readings! (which father-in-law preaches)

Tastes good. There is more roasted malt than in, say, Sam Adams, but using an ale yeast didn’t seem to matter much. The yeast was Safale S04, which is a pretty clean fermentation. And, of course, it was flat since it just the dregs from the fermenter.

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Google+

Posted on July 6, 2011 by mkb

I’m now a member of Google+. My profile is here.

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The Get Together

Posted on April 14, 2011 by mkb

I will be playing some records at the Get Together on Saturday, April 23. Get there early! I start at noon! The format is “some weird and beatless stuff, transitioning into chill daytime beats”. It will all be stuff that would be appropriate for a record fair/fashion show/experimental concert.

This event is part of the Boston-wide Together festival which starts this coming Monday and goes for over a week!

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The Plan

Posted on February 18, 2011 by mkb

In reference to this post, my decision is to acquire either a Kurzweil K2000RS or a K2500RS, a Korg Z1, and a cheap 1U rackmount line mixer. I came to this decision after checking the prices on eBay for all these things. I’ve also decided to spend some time playing with my music toys at least once a week, even if it’s only for a half hour on the train.

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New music toy?

Posted on February 14, 2011 by mkb

Every year I buy myself one (1) music toy. Here are the options this year:

  1. Replace my crappy Behringer mixer with something nicer and with more channels (Mackie, Soundcraft, Yamaha, A&H) – The Behringer is starting to sound really weird and awful, and I constantly have to re-organize what’s plugged in since I don’t have enough channels to fit everything. Perhaps I could relieve this problem with a patchbay instead?
  2. Kurzweil K2000R or K2500R, (no Mac editor for the K2600 as far as I can tell) – I really love the way VAST synths sound, and they are CHEAP. I could also get the keyboard version and dump my CS1x.
  3. Korg Z1 or Yamaha AN1x – I like VA synths, but they don’t sample.
  4. Elektron Machinedrum or Octatrack, or Yamaha RS7000 – This would replace a Yamaha RM1x.
  5. Korg microSampler – Hee! It’s cute!

I had briefly considered buying a new computer, but I bought a new-ish MacBook late last year which got hijacked by my wife while I was setting it up as a replacement workstation. We will switch. She will get my old PowerBook for email and Pandora; I will use the new MacBook for music-y things. I also have this old Shuttle PC at work that I can take and repurpose for a PureDyne machine, as well as the netbook we loaned out should come back some day.

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New Project – OSC for Go

Posted on January 4, 2011 by mkb

I’ve been playing around with some new things, namely Google’s Go language and the SuperCollider music programming environment. Go, intended to be a systems language for writing long-running server processes, feels also apt to write sound applications (to me anyway). I started a SuperCollider project under the Republic of Nynex umbrella that I abandoned after my Go language prototype sounded terrible. Since I like the Go language so much more than the SuperCollider language, I think I’m going to start a new project to control the SuperCollider synth server from a Go program.

The SuperCollider programming environment is actually a totally separate process from the synthesizer. It compiles all your code into OSC messages that are then sent over TCP to the server process. There are many other systems that can interface with SuperCollider over OSC, and Go has no OSC implementation, nor any bindings to other OSC libraries. The first question to answer is whether to create an OSC implementation in Go or bind to an existing implementation with cgo.

I think I’ve nerded enough for everyone reading this though.

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He thrusts his fist into the post, and still insists he sees the ghost.

Posted on November 18, 2010 by mkb

title from Reber Clark’s In the Brain of the Moon

All of my old posts on my blog are gone, safely backed up in one or two places. My previous host allowed PostgreSQL databases. My new one does not support them, and my old s9y blog was set up for Postgres. Now I am back on WordPress because s9y wouldn’t let me turn off the freaking emails from spam comments.

Anyway, Hi.

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High Voltage Circumcision Playlist 2010-10-03

Posted on October 4, 2010 by mkb

Last night, Deftly-D asked me to sub for his High Voltage Circumcision Show on WZBC. As usual, I did not have enough time to play all the music I wanted to, but here is what I managed to fit. The show will be archived at ZBC Online for two weeks.

10:03PM / Phylyps / Trak / Trak / Basic Channel
10:14PM / Rhythim Is Rhythim / The Beginning (Ken Ishii Remix) / The Works + The Unreleased and Unexpected / 70Drums
10:19PM / Moritz Von Oswald Trio / Pattern 4 / Vertical Ascent / Honest Johns Records
10:27PM / Prince Far I / Deck of Cards / Under Heavy Manners / VP MUSIC GROUP, INC
10:30PM / C.M. Marquinho Coreba / Seu pastinha / Cantigas de Capoeira /
10:32PM / Ulrich Schnauss / Here Today Gone Tomorrow / Goodbye / Domino
10:38PM / Nekochan / Minimal Bump / Minimal Bump /
10:44PM / Anthony Shakir / Simpatico / Frictionalism 1994-2009 / Rush Hour Recordings
10:52PM / Robert Hood / Unix / Minimal Nation / Axis
10:54PM / Hrdvsion / The Mohana / The Mohana / Wagon Repair
11:03PM / Coil / Amethyst Deceivers / Moon’s Milk in Four Phases / Eskaton via World Serpent
11:09PM / Claude Young / Dear 1 / That Dear Green Place / Djax Up Beats
11:13PM / Visitor / The Last Time / Basement Life / D1
11:18PM / B12 / 32 Lineup / Last Days of Silence / B12
11:26PM / Convextion / Desolate Hub / Convextion / Downlow
11:34PM / Jeff Mills / Track 5 / Time Machine / Tomorrow
11:40PM / My Brother Daniel / Scene 7 / The Runner Theme /
11:42PM / Delta Funktionen / Nebula / Delsin II /
11:50PM / Aaron-Carl / If There Is a Heaven (ICAN Remix) / Electrevival / Wallshaker
12:00AM / The Black Dog / Lounge / Music for Real Adverts /
12:00AM / John Cale / Movement 11 – From Kiss / Eat / Kiss: Music for the Films of Andy Warhol / Ryko/Rhino

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Less QQ more BBQ

Posted on June 28, 2010 by mkb

Last night I made the best Q in like a year. Raw data follows.

THE MEAT: A three-pound slab of beef chuck sold as pot roast.
THE HEAT: Oak logs and lump charcoal. I started off at 400 degrees until the meat reached an internal temperature of 140° then wrapped the meat in foil and moved the logs to the firebox. Then it started raining and I moved inside to the oven. I turned off the heat at 190° and let the meat rest for a half hour.
THE RUB: Salt, pepper, cayenne, paprika, chili powder, cumin.
THE MOP: 1 12 oz. can of beer with 4 oz. each of Worcestershire sauce and apple cider vinegar and a touch of salt and pepper. I stopped mopping after the foiling point.
THE SAUCE: Once I finished mopping, I added about a cup of ketchup, some blackstrap molasses, onion powder, garlic powder, mustard powder, and peach juice to the saucepan of mop sauce I had brought to the boil. To thicken it up, I added the usual cornstarch slurry. The peach juice made all the difference.
THE SIDES: Potato salad and garden salad because of CSA vegetable overload.

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Using keychain on Mac OS X

Posted on June 15, 2010 by mkb

I use keychain to manage my SSH keys on every system. This means I don’t use SSHKeychain, and I don’t use launchd as an ssh-agent front. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible for graphical Mac OS X apps to use the keychain; the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable is set when your shell starts up and any custom environment variables for your graphical apps are set in ${HOME}/.MacOSX/environment.plist. To get around this, add the following or something similar just after your shell reads the keychain script.

source ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh

# to allow p4v to use keychain instead of launchd
cat <<EOT > ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>SSH_AUTH_SOCK</key>
	<string>$SSH_AUTH_SOCK</string>
</dict>
</plist>
EOT

The one limitation is that you must start your Terminal before launching anything that uses keychain, but since I start Terminal as soon as I log in, that’s not a problem.
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