The Noisy Cricket

Whilst trawling on the internet I came across the enticingly named "Beavis Audio Research". It's a website run by a couple of guys who like to mess around with electronics and design effects pedals and so on. One of their projects was a 1/2 watt transistor based guitar amplifier called "The Noisy Cricket" that runs off a 9v battery. It only had about 30 components in it and I could get all the parts from Radio Shack for about twenty pounds. So I thought I'd have a go. Electronics is not my strong suit but looking at the schematic for the design I could begin to get a feeling for what was going on. I like the idea of building something and learning at the same time. Because I'm so sure that I'll cock it up I have actually ordered twice as many of the super cheap components so I'll have spares to hand when I short things out or solder them to death.

If it does ever actually work I felt that I'd like to design some kind of enclosure for it. As it's a transistor amp that set me thinking about 1960s transistor radios and so I've been playing around with designs influence by that aesthetic. The amp has three knobs but other than that I felt I could do as I pleased. The casing will be small, i.e. about ten inches wide. These are my three designs. I think I like the last one best. I'm still waiting for the actual parts to arrive before I can begin the build but I'll try and post some pictures as I go. Wish me luck, I shall need it.

Bletchley Park

Last Monday I did a day trip I've been meaning to do for ages. After breakfast I took a train from Euston up to the nondescript small town of Bletchley, just south of Milton Keynes. Bletchley itself has little to recommend it but about five minutes walk from the station is a site of massive historical importance in modern history and in cryptanalysis as a whole.

Bletchley Park is an estate with a manor house built in around 1880 by the Leon family who lived in it. When the family sold up the site was bought by the UK government. It was convenient to them as it was close to the main rail and road routes to London. The reason for the purchase was that the government wanted to move their cryptanalysts out of London and expand the cipher-breaking operations at the outbreak of World War 2. The operation took over not only the manor house but a myriad huts, and brick office blocks built on the site to provide work space for the up to 10 000 people who worked there at the height of the efforts to break the Enigma cipher that the Germans were using to encrypt their communications.

The site is now a museum, many of the huts have displays about the Enigma machine, the bombes used to break its cipher and the minds who enabled this to happen, especially Alan Turing. The site also has a rebuilt Colossus, arguably the world's first electronic computer, which was constructed to break the even tougher Lorenz cipher that Hitler used to communicate with his chiefs of staff.

It's a fascinating place and I will probably go back at some point. Here are a few photos I took of the place:

Scribbles

I've been playing with the Colors! painting package thing on the Nintendo DS. Here's a doodle.

Angry Otto

Angry Otto
Originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity

I made this little fellow in Processing, a graphics programming language this afternoon. I was inspired by all the little monsters made using Processing on this page. In the video, the moving dot represents the location of the mouse pointer and Otto really hates mouse pointers. It's fun to make him chase the pointer in the actual application and to see his cross little face snap at it when he gets close enough makes me giggle every time. It's surprising how much life and fun you can impart in just 200 lines of code.

More Processing Doodles

Here are three new algorithmically generated pictures using code I wrote in Processing. I'm quite fond of them, they seem to have a slightly ethereal Rothko quality.

Guitar Design

Apropos of nothing I was talking with a couple of guitar minded chums about the state of guitar design. We had come to this topic because one of our number was looking for something "a bit different", which is shorthand for "not a strat, tele or Les Paul". This led me to thinking about those guitars and why they dominate as they do.

Of the three I think the strat is the greatest, it has the most, for its time, revolutionary design, it's functional, never out of fashion and eminently practical as a workhorse instrument. In fact it's basically perfect. It's a situation very much like when John Kemp Starley designed the Safety Bicycle in 1885 and with it invented the bicycle as we know it today (diamond frame, chain driven rear wheel, etc.). He basically got it right in one go, an amazing achievement of bold design and engineering, especially considering that the Penny Farthing was the state of the art in bicycle design at the time. Just as Starley hit the nail firmly on the head in 1885 so did George Fullerton, Leo Fender and Freddie Tavares in 1954. The bolt on neck, the solid contoured body, the exciting bright paint finishes, the whammy bar on and on. It's just perfect. I look at Tinseltroos' Strat and it still amazes me 54 years after its invention.

But does that mean that guitar design is done? Is it not worth trying anything else? Sure, there are guitars like the Parker Fly that tried to reinvent the instrument with limited success. For me, the Strat cannot be bettered in its practicality, non-fussiness of its engineering and the manner of its construction. I like basic electric guitars with all the bits bolted together; it's unfussy and if anything breaks it's quite straight-forward to get a replacement part. The only thing that might be worth playing with is body and headstock design because this is a question of taste and style rather than pure engineering common sense. Even so, there are many limitations when designing a guitar body: the neck and bridge have to fit in a certain configuration for intonation to work properly, you need to be able to rout out the right areas to install the electrics, you need to consider having enough mass for the guitar to resonate but not too much so it becomes unwieldy, although that never stopped Rick Nielsen. Finally you have to think about how it would feel like to have the guitar on: could you play it sitting down? A Flying V, for example, is a strictly standing up only instrument and that bothers some people.

The more I thought about it, the trickier the problem became but it intrigued me all the more too. So I decided to have a go. I love the proportions of my Charvel Strat, and I knew what bridge and pickups I'd want if it were my guitar so I laid out those components from scanned photos in Photoshop and started sketching body shapes around them. It took ages to come up with something that I liked aesthetically that would also work as a guitar. I finally appreciated why designing something new is so hard. Not only do you have to compete with something that is basically perfect already, but there are so many constraints that trying anything else is very difficult. In the end, this is what I came up with:

Truly I am a God

The Spore Creature Creator was finally made available and after a couple of false starts (you can buy it for the Mac now but you can't actually have it yet) we got a version working on Tinseltroos' PC. We were pretty cross after all the installing, uninstalling, upgrading and other Microsoft based yadda yadda needed to make it work but when it did, boy it didn't disappoint. For those not in the know, Spore is a game where you can design your own organisms and watch them live out lives, evolve and develop until they become sentient and then go off to explore their galaxy. Pretty much the ultimate in God Games. At present only the creature designer is available but that on its own is so much fun. Sticking limbs and sensory organs all over your creature, scaling them, tweaking their shapes until you have your finished beastie is incredibly entertaining. Here a re a couple of creatures I made yesterday. First is a Snufflodon with its young:

And here's my take on an Elder Thing from H P Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness:

What a little cutie. You can probably expect more creatures to appear over the coming weeks, I don't see myself getting bored with this one anytime soon.

Finger Painting

Fingers Painted, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Tinseltroos and I are in the midst of putting some fancy dress costumes together and for one of them some dismembered fingers are required. Last night we stuck our hands into alginate and filled the resulting moulds with plaster of paris. This evening, upon getting home from work, I painted them up. Tinseltroos had already given them a good fleshy base coat, I added some texture and detail to the skin and painted in the nails. I knew all those years at art school would pay off eventually. I'm rather pleased with our ghoulish creations. I love making costumes, it encourages all sorts of cutting, painting, sticking, sewing, and is thus, I feel, a good thing.

Retro Gaming Joy

Fate of Atlantis, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

It's great big nerd time again. For those of a certain age the classic Lucas Arts games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max and of course the Indiana Jones games will always hold a special place in our hearts. It was the mixture of puzzles, beautiful design and attention to detail that sucked us in and kept us interested. The good news is that for those who still have their game disks you can relive the glory days again.

The Lucas Arts games were written in a development environment called SCUMM. Some kind souls have written a SCUMM virtual machine and another saint has ported that to the Nintendo DS. Using my lovely homebrew card I spent a little while last night getting it all up and running on my DS. Of course given my current state of new Indy fuelled excitement I had to choose Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis as the first game to get dusted off and played on its new tiny, portable home. It's as good as I remembered it and far from just being an exercise in nostalgia it's actually still an engaging game to play.

Today I am a happy nerd with many hours of reliving the glory days of Lucas Arts ahead of me. Altogether now, "Memorieeeees..."

Another Nintendo DS Sketch

Living in the Future

In 1991 my dad bought himself an Apple Macintosh Classic, a lovely little computer which is still in a box at my mum's until I can think of something fun to do with it. It was a spritely little beast back then with an 8 Mhz processor, a scarcely believeable 20 Mb hard drive and an entire megabyte of RAM. I thought this little bugger was the bee's knees.

I have just had my studio workstation upgraded today. The new slab of technology now keeping my feet toasty and warm is 3400 times faster than my dad's old Mac, has 16000 times as much memory and 15000 times as much hard disk space. I think if you'd told me that in 1991, my head would have gone pop. Many people seem to get blasé about the rate of development in technology but every new leap forward makes me catch my breath. These are exciting and weird times, Bubba.

Sketch Poly 2

Sketch Poly 2, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Another procedural scribble. It'll all make sense in the end, I promise.

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I've been working on an arty programming project for a little while and this piece is one of the waypoints on the way to a greater goal of which I'll probably write more later. What's going on here is a demo of some code I've written to "sketch" any four sided shape in as natural a way as I can create an algorithm for. In this piece what happens is that I randomly generate a four sided polygon, randomly determine how fat the line should be, how scruffy and messy the penmanship and finally how finely spaced the lines should be. The code then selects a colour from an image that serves as a palette (in this case the Mona Lisa - hence the title) and then begins to sketch polygon after polygon until you tell it to stop. I let this run for about 15 minutes. I'm rather fond of it and I plan to make some "paintings" with this technique over the coming days.

Tiny Art

This is a quick little post to mention the joy of a lovely piece of free software for any who have a Nintendo DS and homebrew card. It's called Colors and it's from www.collectingsmiles.com a lovely website name if ever there was one. The software leverages the DS's portability and it's pressure sensitive touch screen to make the perfect tiny pocket sketch book. It takes a little getting used to because the screen is so small but it's really quite delightful to have these tiny little jewel like painting sketches appear in front of you as you scribble away.

One of the other nice features is that the program stores each brushstroke as you make it resulting in an animation playback facility where you can watch the whole painting being drawn from scratch. It's quite instructive to see how I work. I had always thought that I obsessed over a single detail until I liked it before moving onto the next but from watching the few sketches that I've done I seem to flit about the image from place to place tweaking things as they catch my eye. I really didn't think I worked like that.

Here's a couple of sketches I did yesterday and if I can work out how to make a movie of the process of painting one I'll try and upload that too at some point:

To Boldy Go Where No Matrix Has Gone Before

I know this may not seem like much but I'm quite proud of it. There's still something funky going on with the perspective transform and the field of view calculation otherwise I'd be very proud of it. This wireframe cube you see above was rendered using some software I wrote in the Processing language. I have a long-term project I want to do once I've ironed out the wrinkles in my code but for now I'm quite pleased that it's drawing a cube, roughly where it's supposed to be. Although there is still much to do, even now you can define a camera position, a point for it to look at and some geometry and my little renderer will produce a perspective(ish) picture like you see above. I don't think it's too shabby for an afternoon and an evening's work. I've already learned a lot, my rudimentary trigonometry and matrix skills are hanging on by their finger nails but I know more than I did a week ago.

All Good Things...

Last night Tinseltroos and I finished watching the last of the original four series of Futurama. This has made us both rather sad, as though a good friend has left our lives. I shall be trying to find a copy of Bender's Big Score soonest. I am generally not good with television series. Even the good ones bore me quite quickly. The only series I've got through prior to this was The Prisoner and that is probably my favourite telly of all time. And this should tell you how much I loved Futurama. There has never been a show with so perfect a geeky sense of humour. It pokes fun at the things that annoy geeks, it panders to our whims and fantasies (where, exactly, is my flying car?) as well as having characters with whom we can empathise and can share a laugh.

Today has only been made bearable by the iTunes discovery I made during the week. I finally figured out how to make a Smart Playlist that sorts a band's output chronologically. Because of this, today is a very special Rock Friday. Today we have every Led Zeppelin album, in order. It's two o'clock in the afternoon and we've hit Physical Graffiti. All Hail "Hammer of the Gods Friday".

Games night

Soho, London, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Here is a photograph I took yesterday that is completely unrelated to this post.

As I mentioned at the weekend Tinseltroos has discovered "Singstar", a karaoke game for the Playstation 2. The only problem was that we did not have a Playstation 2 so one had to be obtained. It turns out that second hand PS2s are incredibly cheap, you can get them for a little over thirty quid on eBay. T managed to get one of the smaller, more recent ones and it is a very dinky device.

Excitingly, not only is the hardware cheap but so is the software. This week eBay has furnished us with "Gran Turismo 4" (for me, mostly) and "We Love Katamari" for both of us. Last night was an extravaganza of videogaming at Schossadlerflug. I played "GT4" and "Star Wars - Battlefront" on my laptop whilst T played "Katamari" and "Singstar". I think the Katamari game is the highlight of the bunch. Games as idiosyncratic, beautiful and entertaining as it are few and far between. Everything about "We Love Katamari" is delightful. The music and graphic design are especially note-worthy. Tinseltroos is now threatening to knit herself a Katamari Prince. I can practice sucking less at "GT4" whilst she does this.

Noises

So I didn't spend the evening playing Super Mario Galaxy after all. When I got home the guitars were staring at me with their shiny, new, silvery strings. I was also keen to try out a few different sound settings on my guitar amp simulator box thing. I found a nice bluesy backing track from a CD and layered three different guitar parts over it: one clean blues, one more hard rock and a bit of slide to finish it off. I also wanted to see also how GarageBand coped with all the different sounds and how well it mixed them down. It's completely improvised as you'll be able to tell but it's as much of a testing equipment piece as it is just me mucking about for the fun of it. I continue to be amazed at how good GarageBand is for a super cheapy piece of software. It automatically picks up when I connect the guitar amp simulator box thing and allows me not only to record from it without any latency but also sends all the audio back in to the wee box and out to the speakers so I can hear everything as I'm playing without having to use headphones. I remember trying to record anything was a huge exercise in heartache before it all went digital. Have to love technology and what it can do for you sometimes.

You can see, well hear, how I did in the "movie" above. For some reason Blogger won't let you upload just sound so I had to create a video using a still photo to go with it. Go figure.

Just call me Short-sighted Kumquat Atrocity. It's my new blues name.

Hunting and Gathering

Gibson "Faded" SG, originally uploaded by TurdOnTheRun.

I had an unexpectedly pleasant evening last. I had planned on heading home after work and spending the evening honing my practically non-existant Mario Galaxy skills. This plan was altered after I told JJG, with whom I work, about the result of my lunchtime trip down Denmark Street. For those who don't know, Denmark Street is the centre of the music retail scene in London. There are many guitar shops and I had popped into one to buy myself some acoustic guitar strings (the last of my guitars to get restrung after Saturday's efforts) and also to get Tinseltroos some strings for her Strat. I'd foolishly forgotten to ask what gauge of string she liked before heading out on Saturday.

As is customary when visiting a guitar shop I had a little look round,just out of curiosity - you know? I knew that JJG had been looking for an SG with a Bigsby trem and there in front of me was a lovely Epiphone one, in the sale to boot. Having excitedly told him about this once back in the office we conspired to leave work at 6, grab Abe (another work chum) and head back to check it out.

This we did and JJG declared himself impressed. Then, he dipped his head and said he had to show us something. He took us over the road to another shop wherein a beautiful faded Gibson SG rested - just like in the photo above. The look on JJG's face was something akin to Tiny Tim's upon being presented with the enormous goose at the end of A Christmas Carol. He's going to have to save up some more pennies to have that one but he is clearly smitten. And he's going to have pay someone to put the tremolo arm on it too but he seems to consider such things trifling concerns.

After ogling we decamped to a pub with another of JJG's friends for a few beers and to chew the fat. I treated myself to fish and chips on my way home (I've finally tracked down a good chippie in my neighbourhood which is a major bonus in my book) and having munched my way through that and a cup of tea set about restringing the last of my guitars. I offered to do Tinseltroos' guitar too but she, weirdly, claims to like changing guitar strings so I left hers well alone.

And so to bed.

Guitar Heroes

Guitar Heroes, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

It was supposed to be Tinseltroos and my Christmas present to ourselves but we'd both had very crappy weeks at work and decided Christmas had to come early. So we rocked out for a few good hours last night when I got home from work and I suspect a little more rawk may happen tonight.

I'm in work again today, but as I have a lot of simulations to run, and most of that involves a great deal of waiting I'm playing a lot of Zelda on my DS. Today has gone thusly. Kick off a simulation, wander round a dungeon in Zelda looking up every now and again to check on progress. Rinse and repeat. Boring but could be worse.