It’s #frogFriday, so here’s a favourite photo of an amorous fellow (Rana temporaria) watching the world go by from the wall of our pond.
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It’s #frogFriday, so here’s a favourite photo of an amorous fellow (Rana temporaria) watching the world go by from the wall of our pond.
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This morning, I thought I’d found a small, but perfectly formed, lump of black pearl slime mould just outside our back door. Each “sporangium” was about 2mm across and looked perfectly black. The whole mass was about 6 cm across. Subsequently, I found two other lumps in a direct line to the pond…
Somewhat suspicious, I scraped up a very sticky lump and dropped it into a bucket of water. Within half an hour, it was expanding and showing transparent albumen and central black nuclei. Frog’s eggs!
I suspect that a couple of our garden frogs joined in amplexus, and then couldn’t get back over the low wall of the pond. I moved the remaining eggs into our tadpole enclosure, though I’m not sure if they will be viable. We don’t know how long the spawn had been sitting on the damp earth. Possibly not long, as the local magpies hadn’t found them.
This is the earliest I’ve found frogspawn in the garden. Normally, we don’t expect to see it for another two weeks or so.
If you find frogspawn in a problematic place, like a dried-up puddle, it is not advisable to move it to a nearby pond, as this could spread disease. However, it is relatively easy to raise tadpoles in a bucket or an old washing-up bowl. See the Sussex Wildlife Trust for details.
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We went to the fascinating “Secrets of the Thames” exhibition at the London Museum Docklands yesterday. My favourite exhibit was some examples of Doves Type recovered from the river and subsequently used to recreate the font. The photo is poor, but the story is much better… Around 1900, two neighbours in Hammersmith founded Doves Press and created the rather attractive Doves Type typeface for use in all their books. There was a falling out, and one partner was given sole use of the typeface but had to bequeath it to the other on his death
He decided to bequeath the typeface to the Thames instead and made 170 trips to Hammersmith Bridge to throw the matrices and punches into the river - 1,000 kg in total. Just over a century later, Robert Green recovered enough of the type to create a digital replica.
Today, I made a big step in the process of disengaging from American megacorps by switching from a Chromebook Plus and an Acer Windows 10 laptop to a new Ubuntu laptop. I picked a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 15 running Tuxedo OS, which is the German company’s mildly tweaked flavour of Ubuntu. The most noticeable difference to 24.04 LTS is that it uses KDE Plasma…
Tuxedo build their laptops to order, and the configuration process was straightforward. I ordered a machine that should be able to keep up with my spirited use of Vim (Intel Core Ultra 7, 32 GB of RAM, and 2 TB of SSD) at the end of June, and it turned up yesterday. Tuxedo doesn’t handle VAT or import duties into post-brexit UK, but even paying the tax via UPS proved to be surprisingly easy.
The initial impression of the InfinityBook is excellent. I do have some familiarity with Debian (Raspberry Pi), and I live in Bash at work, but I’d not used Ubuntu before - other than discovering that I couldn’t dual-boot my Acer with it without upsetting Windows. The hardware is solid, with a white backlit keyboard that is a pleasure to type on. The 3K screen is a significant improvement on my previous machines, but I do need my reading glasses to make the most of it.
I had seen some reviews mentioning that the trackpad is not quite up to Apple standards, and that may be true - though I haven’t quite dialled it into my taste yet - and tend to use a mouse anyway.
The Tuxedo Control Center gives a lot of options to match battery charging and lifetime to your planned usage. There is also a nice dashboard that shows how fast the power-hungry CPU is getting through the juice - hardly ticking over at 7 watts as I type this.
Installing essentials like Obsidian.md, QOwnNote, and pCloud sync and backup proved to be pretty straightforward, though the built-in “Discover” software manager wasn’t a lot of help there.
Now I’ve got the basics installed and working, I need to start on the journey of finding a photo management application that will meet my needs.
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Miscellanea for the weekending 26-Nov-2023…
Miscellanea for the weekending 12-Nov-2023…
The unrelenting poison poured into UK society by the current Home Secretary can lead to a sense of numbness and apathy at how she wants to reshape Britain. If you are as appalled as I was by her depiction of homelessness as a “lifestyle choice”, then there is a positive way of pushing back.
Find a local homeless charity or foodbank and bung them some cash - even the smallest amount helps. If you are in a position to do so, add Gift Aid. That way, the Government has to top up your contribution by another 25%!
It is worth doing a little research to find out how a charity raises and spends its money. A quick check in the Charity Commission’s Register of Charities can tell you a lot - do they have a whole load of board members with salaries of more than £60K per year, or are they sitting on an excessive amount of funds? Note, though, that the Charity Commission does consider it good practice to have some reserve funds to provide financial resilience.
Smaller local charities often give more bang for your proffered buck. I recently found that the food bank I had been supporting was sitting on a large bequest, so I switched to supporting Friends of Essex & London Homeless when I can. Their Charity Commission entry says:
We set this charity up to help homeless, vulnerable and people living in poverty in Essex and London by distributing foods, drinks, clothes, toiletries and sleeping bags and we do this by operating 2 soup kitchens weekly and also if anyone needing our help is brought to our attention.
And that is what they do, with minimal overheads and providing regular evidence of their activities on their Facebook page.
If there are multiple ways of donating to a smaller charity, check them all out. I found that it wasn’t possible to add Gift Aid when contributing via their website, but it was an option when helping Friends of Essex & London Homeless via Facebook. Of course, that means keeping a Facebook account, but that is a minor inconvenience if it forces the Government to help people experiencing homelessness, even in a small way.
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Rory Cellan-Jones and five other people living with Parkinson’s disease accompanied me as I strode along on my lunchtime walk today. The “Movers and Shakers” podcast’s inaugural episode wasn’t how I had imagined it. I’d recently completed a course on the neurology of Parkinson’s, but I had no real idea of what day-to-day living with the condition meant. So I feared it would be a depressing listen, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The podcasters were three journalists, a writer, an academic, and a High Court judge, and they were hilarious. Laugh out loud, hilarious. While I didn’t learn much about the latest science and treatments for Parkinson’s, I’ve got Rory’s substack for that. But I learned a lot about the wide range of symptoms, the variety of ways the disease can progress, and its impact on the sufferer.
With a panel made up of:
the conversation is always going to be interesting. If you want to learn about the impact of Parkinson’s on the sufferer, their families, friends, and colleagues, then this has all the makings of a must-listen series. Search for “Movers and Shakers”, produced by Podot, on your favourite podcast app.
]]>The Korg MS-10 was an entry-level monophonic synthesizer from the 70’s. It had a 32-note keyboard and a control wheel driving a single VCO, VCF and VCA.
Perhaps a little background may help here. The keyboard and control wheel each generated a voltage that could be fed as input to the various modules. The Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) generated a number of different waveforms with a frequency dependent on the input voltage. So given the voltage from a particular key on the keyboard it would generate the relevant frequency.
The Voltage Controlled Filter (VCF) worked in a similar way. The voltage, from the Control Wheel for example, would effect the frequencies passed by the filter.
The Voltage Controlled Amplifier (VCA) could vary the amplitude of its input signal depending on a control voltage.
Finally the Envelope Generator shaped the amplitude of a note through time. Imagine hitting a piano key. The amplitude of the note increases from zero to its peak very quickly as the string is struck. It then drops down to a level at which the note is sustained before finally decaying back to silence. The Envelope Generator is responsible for generating a control signal that models such an envelope. This can be fed into the VCA to simulate the sound of a conventional instrument.
Now the thing that really fascinates me about analogue synthesizers is that all the parameters of these modules are fully adjustable (there are lots of knobs to twiddle). The various modules can also be connected together in different ways via a patch panel. For example feeding the output of one VCO into the input of another will generate vibrato effects.
That was 1978. Fast forward to thirty years later and the introduction of the Korg DS-10 on the Nintendo DS. This is not a 100% perfect emulation of the Korg MS-10. But in many ways it is so much more. It emulates two mono synthesizers loosely based on the MS-10. In addition each has a 16-step sequencer, roughly equivalent to a Korg SQ-10. Finally there is a four pad drum machine with its own sequencer, a six channel mixer and an FX unit (delay, flanger and chorus).
Each synthesizer has a 24-note keyboard and a Kaoss Pad. This is a X-Y touch pad where the coordinates of a finger touching the pad generate an X and a Y voltage that can be mapped to parameters such as note, volume, pan etc. Sweeping a finger tip in patterns around the pad can produce control signals simply not possible from the keyboard.
So how well does the Korg DS-10 work in practice? Is is a toy or a serious musical instrument? Initial impressions are very favourable. Emulating two MS-10’s gives the possibility of richer, deeper sounds and for stereo effects. Add in the drum machine and reasonably complex compositions can be attempted. Incidentally the original MS-10 manual recommends combining two synthesizers for a richer sound.
Sound quality seems pretty good, though limitations of the DS hardware means that bass notes are perhaps not as good as they could be. With very complicated patches and absolutely everything running there were occasional hints that the processor was struggling to keep up. But this would not be a problem in normal usage.
What is a slight problem in normal usage is the size of the font used for the menus. The graphics are gorgeous but with my 48 year old eyes the menu text is quite hard to read in places.
Creating a song from a series of sequencer patterns is not particular intuitive for someone not used to sequencer programming. Here, the manual could have done with more examples and tutorials, including a walkthrough of a typical workflow. However once you have a mental model of how a song is built up the system is powerful, flexible and easy to edit.
In summary this is a fantastic software package. However it has a steep ramp-up and is one Nintendo DS program where it really pays to read the manual in detail. You’ll need to do a lot of experimenting to get something really musical out of the DS-10, but the end result can be absolutely fantastic.
]]>Stumbling on the Korg DS-10 emulator for the Nintendo DS on Amazon sent me spiraling back to the early seventies. As a thirteen-year old brought up on late 60’s synth-pop I was fascinated by the thirteen part series in Practical Electronics magazine to build your own analogue Sound Synthesizer.
The series began in the February 1973 issue and each month a new module was added; voltage controlled oscillators, ring modulators, noise generators etc. I remember pouring over the circuit diagrams and dreaming of vast arrays of pots to twiddle and spaghetti like patch leads. Unfortunately my schoolboy pocket money didn’t stretch to that many 741 op amps and by the time a DIY keyboard and one VCO had been built I was out of funds. Another youthful dream horribly dashed on the rocks of reality.
Sound on Sound have an interesting article on DIY synthesizer projects that describes the PE Sound Synthesizer and its descendents. One phrase, describing the original article’s audience:
“aimed at the anal-retentive schoolboy with no interest in girls or sports. The schoolboy would have had to have some kind of qualification in either physics or maths to complete such a task, and few did!”
gave my wife much amusement for some reason.
And now there’s an emulator for the classic Korg MS-10 running on the Nintendo handheld. According to the spec sheet it is not an 100% emulation and adds enhancements such as a sequencer. It’s unlikely that the DS will get close to reproducing the famous MS-10 fat bass sounds but in a few days time I’ll be able to live my boyhood dreams and find out.
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