Anachostic

The Modern 3D Printer

Posted by anachostic on June 25, 2026 No comments

After a lot of pondering and a lot of research and a lot of self-justification, I finally have gotten on board with the AI train. I admit, I probably did it a little too late, but I also bought my house at the peak of the housing bubble, too, so it’s just what I do, I guess.

Let’s go back to before I had my mixed emotion experience with generative AI. I would only use Ai sporadically, like when I had a funny idea and wanted to make a surreal image of the thought in my mind. That’s pretty much how I viewed AI – just a fun novelty. I would also later come to use it more and more regularly as a search engine.

That needs a little explanation. Some people say that AI killed the search engine and some people really bitch about the AI summaries that come with all your search results now. But, you know what? Search engines and the broader bullshit gaming of search results by each and every website brought that on themselves. It is now as it was then for me. There are two types of query results that I want from a search engine. Maybe you’re the same way. I either want an answer or I want a set of data to research. Old search results suck for the former, and AI results suck for the latter. If I search for "magical toilet plunger", I don’t want AI telling me all about toilet plungers. I want to read about cases where a toilet plunger had a magical effect on the situation (or whatever. It’s just an example). Likewise, if I ask, "Is Metroline part number 123 compatible with my 2010 Mazda MX-5"? I don’t want a list of sites selling part number 123 where I may or may not be able to find a compatibility chart. AI can answer that with a yes or no.

And so that’s the extent of my past AI usage. In earlier posts, I had a revelation with AI music generation – with a lot of conflicting feelings that I had to work through. I’m not 100% on board that specific train, but I really want to see what it can do. And while processing those thoughts, I had a really interesting conclusion. Generative AI could be at the crux of everything about me. While that sounds like hyperbole, it’s really uncanny how it slots into SO many details of my life. So let’s run through them.

Technology – Obviously I’ve been lifelong tech nerd, I have really fallen behind the times and don’t do much cutting edge stuff like I used to because, well, I thought I’d seen and done it all. Or at least all that I wanted to do. AI opens the door to things I’d never considered and while the learning curve is a little steep, keeping your mind active and your curiosity alive has life-long benefits.
Programming – Beside the fact that AI can write code (which I wouldn’t trust, but I could be a capable proofreader for it doing all the gruntwork, unlike vibe-coders), when you look at the leading tool for AI work, it’s very programmatic. They say it’s supposed to be easily understandable by non-technical people, but let’s be real. If you are technical, you’re going to have a much easier time with it. And the way you learn it is generally a lot of trial and error, exactly like how I learned programming long ago – you change something, it breaks, then you figure out why that caused it to break and you gain knowledge. (side note: for AI processing, you create a "workflow", which is a bunch of steps where the data is routed between them with connections. It looks and behaves exactly like a modular synthesizer. Coincidence?)
Language – This reason came to me as I was learning AI image generation. The quality of the output is dependent on your mastery of vocabulary. If you don’t know a lot of words, you’re not going to get unique output. If you don’t know how to describe something, how can AI know what you have envisioned in your head. As a long-time writer, this is just another "this is made for me" checkmark.
Artistry – While I don’t have any graphic design skill, I do have ideas. And I’m not exactly unartistic, since I’ve written unique music for decades. Wouldn’t it be fun to have music videos for those songs? I have some ideas, but I can’t create them – until now. And the purists that say, "you’re stealing money out of the hands of animators!" Music is my hobby. I do it for free for myself and I’m not going to pay someone to create something for me for something I do for free. That’s like saying you should never work on your car because mechanics exist, or never fix a toilet because plumbers exist. Get the tools, learn the skills, do it yourself.

That covers the high points without having to be too detailed. And the result of all that consideration is this idea that building a home AI machine is like when 3D printers became available to consumers instead of being limited to commercial industry. It’s just instead of physical output, it’s digital output. Both still create anything you can imagine, a lot of times you’re using someone else’s template, and the quality of results can vary widely. 3D printers got a little hate early on with "Cheap!", "Tacky!", "Who wants that?", but they also were beneficial, like making replacement parts for things that no longer existed. Maybe someday (like right now, someday), AI will be generating music, video, and pictures of things that no longer exist, with the exact same quality variability as 3d printers.

I talked myself into it. Initially I decided to buy a used 2nd-tier system (which is still absurdly expensive thanks to AI data centers) with a budget of $3k. I contacted a couple of sellers on FB and neither responded timely (one still hasn’t). It got my spidey senses going because of all the reports of people buying high-end GPUs and finding the GPU chip has been harvested from it and sold to China. So buying used looked like more and more of a liability. Losing $3k on a "it was working when I sold it to you. You’re the one that harvested the chip!" argument is not interesting to me. And also, it’s a 2nd tier GPU, which can’t be upgraded without complete replacement. The upgrade GPU? $4500 just for the card.

I then convinced myself buying new is safer. So I started sourcing parts. $4500 for the GPU, hundreds more for RAM, CPU, cooling fans, case, hard drive – there’s no way. Then I thought, maybe buy pre-built? A pre-built computer is traditionally seen as the "easy way out", but I’ve cut my hands on so many computer cases in my days building PCs that I feel I’ve put in the time. And as it turned out, there’s no way I could have come in at that price point.

Total damage: $5200. Top-of-the-line GPU, 64GB RAM (with two extra slots to fill later!), 2TB SSD drive, liquid cooled CPU and nice case – I mean it’s a NICE case. Which brings me to today. I haven’t bought a new PC in decades. I’ve either just bought upgrade parts or built one myself, but always mid-tier components since I was never a gamer or real power user – just business grade stuff. So imagine how surprised I was to see an 80 lb box sitting over two feet high being delivered by UPS. It’s comically huge.

And this is what it looks like next to my old "server", which did mail,web, and database services for years.

So it’s up and running and I’m jumping in with both feet. But I’m trying to pace myself and learn incrementally without trying to jump straight to the finish. It’s my old programming habits coming through, like this task is the next obvious step in my life.

The Rise, Fall, And Rebirth Of My Hobby

Posted by anachostic on May 2, 2026 No comments

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working on new music for my next "album". I say "album" as if it’s something that gets released. They don’t. It’s just a collection of songs of an era. I don’t share my music, since it’s mostly for my own enjoyment. Today I had a bit of a meltdown, which led to a lot of reflection and acceptance. Big surprise, it’s all about AI.

Every artistic field is running scared in the threat of AI’s creative absorb-and-destroy domination. Today, it showed its face to me and I was initially captivated in its glamour and quickly fell to pieces.

I had a particular song written and I liked it. A lot. But I wondered if it could be even better, so I sent it off to my CB partner, who is gifted with drumming and has a great producer’s ear. Time went by and as a surprise, he returned an experiment with an AI tool that took my song and redid it as an 80’s anthem. I want to start with my impressions on the technical results before I get into my emotional crisis.

The song was immaculately produced, perfectly mixed, had drums, keyboards, guitar, and fucking VOCALS. That last part – I’m still not 100% over the fact that we can generate perfect human speech and now I’m being presented with speech, played back with in-key pitches, vibrato, and vocal expression. That in itself is unreal to me. Then there’s the song itself. My song was uploaded to the server, AI dissected it, extracted the key, the chords, the rhythm, the lead lines, the structure and used it all in its version. It was overwhelming to hear my song played back to me as if some superstar producer said, "Oh yeah, I had a crack at it and this is what I came up with."

And that’s where I’ll start the breakdown. This was my song, but it wasn’t my song anymore. I could never have created this final product. Never. And that realization made me extremely hesitant to even suggest it was my song. The melody and rhythm was mine, and that’s where it stops. I tried to reason with myself. This is what every artist has to accept when they work with a heavy-handed producer. The producer is there to make your song the best it can be. Accept that you are not a producer, you are a songwriter.

But the song was amazing. And I couldn’t stop listening to it over and over. And why wouldn’t I? This is the exact music I love. A song I loved and it’s being played by complete professionals. If I hadn’t written it, I would still love it. But I did write it. And after a few hundred listens, I listened to my original again. This was the crash.

My recording sounded terrible in comparison. It was thin, weak, basic. It had my personality, though. The synth patches, the somewhat silly choices I made in the lead lines that made me smile. Those weren’t in the AI version. And I tried to sell my song back to myself with these thoughts. This is the REAL version, the AUTHENTIC version. And then, the poison took hold. This is the ugly version. Don’t share this one. Why would you let anyone hear this one when you know what it COULD sound like?

And just like that, I was in the same place that any insecure teen is when they first see themselves presented in an AI beauty filter.

I went through many emotions and tried as best I could to sort them out. In a past post, I explained how I had just gotten over feeling inadequate about my style of writing. I was also trying much harder this time around to put more effort into the songs. For example, I wouldn’t just mix a song and consider it done. I would mix it down and listen to it over weeks, listening for anything that irks me or nags at me to fix, then I would fix it and start over. Being faced with a version of my song that I could never hope to rise to, put the thought that I shouldn’t even bother now.

And yet, I still couldn’t stop playing the AI version. It was slowly becoming the official version. I’ve listened to it now, without exaggeration, hundreds of times. I started drafting this post in the initial emotional whirlwind. A couple of days later now, and I’ve sort of come to peace with it, so here’s my current thoughts.

From a technical perspective, it’s unbelievable. The sound generation – including voice – is beyond comprehension to me. Stylistically, it nailed the 80’s rock anthem formula, which is an underlying feeling in most of my work. I like bombast, heraldry, regality, and the algo took that and ran with it. I spent a lot of listens trying to map the original version to the new version, trying to figure out what pieces it was keying off of and how it was translating them into a mainstream song. I was able to figure most of it out, but some is still a mystery.

I’ll have to be honest, a couple of times, I was brought to tears with the delivery – in particular, what seemed to be a calculated emotional buildup before the guitar solo. But in my continual analysis, I was shocked to find, that was me! The AI captured two things about my version at that point, an unusual key change and a diminished chord that added a bunch of tension before returning to the intro theme. But truthfully, the vocal melody line AI added was the killer part.

To expand further on that key change, I had inserted a change that caused a odd situation that might usually go unnoticed, where the outro was played a full step lower than the intro, but had the same chord progression. Typically, writers will move a step up to give additional emotional impact, but I’m weird. AI didn’t miss it. The key change was preserved through to the end and when it repeated the chorus it had conceived and played twice earlier, the vocal melody line was altered to fit the different scale, so it had both consistency and variation.

The biggest takeaway for me is that my original song had no commercial potential, but my choice of chords, rhythm, and melody did, if it was constructed in a way to be more mainstream. It has led me to a strange place that makes me feel bad that I can’t write a polished song, but good that I can write a compelling song with my oddly contrived musical choices.

While proofing this post, my eyes landed on a statement "If I hadn’t written it, I would still love it." And right there is the answer. This song literally could not exist without me. No one writes the way I do. The actual statement should be, if I hadn’t written the original, this song would never have been heard. I would never have the chance to love it because no one else could have done it.

Explosive Inflation

Posted by anachostic on April 11, 2026 No comments

Yeah, I’ve heard it and seen it. But this one really takes the cake. Not so long ago, I was buying more cables for my studio, because you never have enough, and I had put off my purchase by a couple of weeks, which resulted in the total price going up $4. not a lot, but still that was the loss of one cable that I could have gotten for the same price. One month down the road and I need more cables, because you never have enough. Those same $4 cables I was buying are now $10. Ten fucking dollars! For what used to be $4 only a month ago. So, this leads me to a place where people go in hard times – making it on your own.

Before I had gotten the sticker shock of buying the new cables, this was something I had briefly considered – that is, making my own cables. That particular moment was when I had run out of short cables and I was using big 10ft cables where I only needed a 3ft cable, and I was thinking maybe I should just cut the cable shorter and put a new end on it. I have the tools and skills for soldering now that I didn’t have previously, it’s not impossible. The only thing I was missing was the jacks.

And now with 3ft cables costing $10, the research began in earnest to see if I could make a cable cheaper. And it seems I could.

Since all my studio patchbays are TRS (stereo jack) and every device connects to a patchbay, all my cables have to be a single 1/4" TRS to two 1/4" TS (mono jack). These are typically sold as "insert cables", which are used for insert jacks on a mixer, where one TS jack is the output and the other is the return input, but yeah, they can also be stereo splitters, sure. And that’s how I use them. So I priced out the bulk parts that I would need: cable, jacks, and Y boots.

I can buy 100ft of stereo cable for about $.50/ft. TS jacks are about $1/ea in bulk, TRS jacks are about $1.20/ea, and surprisingly, the most expensive part is the Y boot, which are about $2/ea. If I want to be less pretty about it, I can just use heat shrink tubing which is probably under $1/ft.

So, roughly, a 3ft insert cable is 3ft of cable, two TS jacks, one TRS jack, and maybe a foot of shrink tubing. That’s about $5. So, a month ago, it wasn’t worth it for me to entertain the idea of cable-making. Now it is. And the benefit of having custom-length cables instead of 10ft of spaghetti wrapped up in my racks is a nice bonus. And, it’s another hobby. Why shouldn’t I try something new, especially when it involves saving money by spending money?

Talking Your Way Out Of It

Posted by anachostic on March 26, 2026 No comments

I’m stopped on the side of the highway, hazard lights on, windows down, hands on the wheel, sunglasses off – waiting. The highway trooper walks up from behind the car toward my window. Hopefully he sees the effort I have gone through to ensure he doesn’t feel threatened.

The trooper looks in at me. "I stopped you for speeding. Do you know how fast you were going?"

It’s pretty common practice to feign ignorance to this question, but I’m a terrible liar. "I know exactly how fast I was going." I point to my dashboard where the cruise control has my saved speed conveniently displayed.

The trooper acknowledges and since I’ve already incriminated myself, decides to see just how much I’m willing to give up. "And do you know the speed limit for this highway?"

I point to my car’s infotainment screen, where Android Auto is running. "Google maps shows the posted speed limit right in the corner."

I can tell my honestly is throwing the trooper off. "You understand there are laws against exceeding the posted speed limit, correct?"

"Of course, officer. But I do have opinions on that, if I may share them."

"Opinions on law are generally reserved for Supreme Court Justices. Are you a judge?"

"I am neither a judge, jury, nor executioner, but I would still like to have a say."

The trooper rolled his eyes. I couldn’t see it because of his mirrored sunglasses, but your head always makes a telltale motion when you roll your eyes – I’m very familiar with it. I’d already piqued his curiosity with honesty, he was now invested and I knew it. "Go ahead then," he impatiently replied.

"You see, officer, laws don’t just appear out of nowhere. They are always in response to a prior incident, as a deterrent for having that incident happen again. They are created for the benefit of society, so that individuals can’t behave in a way that negatively affects society as a whole." The trooper remained stoic. I continued: "At the same time, a law is inflexible. It’s a boolean. You are either within the law or not. I recognize that flexibility can be introduced through the choice to enforce the law or not, but that’s not what I’m arguing for here. This is a much bigger concept."

The trooper looked back down the road, maybe for his own safety, to see if there were any cars coming, or maybe simply wishing for an escape from this person climbing a soapbox.

"I’m honestly not against traffic enforcement. In fact, I would like to see an increased amount of enforcement. However, my targets are different. And this is because speed itself, within reason, is not unsafe. What is unsafe, is deviation. If everyone is going 85 miles an hour, the speed limit is effectively 85 miles an hour, regardless of signage. And conversely, if weather is bad, and everyone finds that 60 miles an hour is better for conditions, that is the speed limit. And in both cases, someone who is driving 10-15 miles faster, or slower, than the pack is a moving hazard. These are the deviants. These are the ones that need enforcement." I pause to let my point sink in. I can’t tell if it is or not, since I am getting a blank stare.

"It’s kind of funny, officer, highway driving is almost a microcosm of society as a whole. What’s good for the group is good for all. Individualism is a bad thing. But, we don’t feel that way here in America, do we? And of course, you have those people out there, doing whatever they want to do, disregarding the safety and well-being of anyone else but themselves. It’s their right, you know? And those rights will not be infringed, right? Well, we do have laws, but like I suggested earlier, they can be selectively enforced."

"And to a certain degree, I can see their point. There’s a lot more people nowadays than in decades past. The roads are much more crowded now, which means that now, more than ever, we need to work together so we all survive. Sometimes you need to sacrifice for the benefit of all. Ha, it’s that socialism stuff again! On or off the road, some people just don’t want to be around other people, don’t want to sacrifice anything. Hmm. I wonder if that’s why they have an obsession with boats, so they can go somewhere uncrowded and don’t have to follow any laws. But oh yeah, did you ever see pictures of the time there was a boat rally and everyone just behaved how they wanted and did whatever they wanted and boats got swamped? They can’t even get out of their own way, haha."

"So, to go ahead and get to the point – the part you can actually do something with – I want to see traffic enforcement using drones to identify the individuals that are speeding through or holding back the pack. Get those people and get them in line. By definition, there can’t be a lot of them, because if there are a lot of them, they’re the pack. Does that make reasonable sense?"

The officer sighed. I couldn’t hear it because of the wind, but your body makes a telltale motion when you sigh. I am familiar with it. "Sir, you’re the only one on this road and you were exceeding the speed limit."

"Exactly. I am the pack."

The officer did not reply. He thought for a moment and straightened himself up. "I’m not going to ticket you today. I have your entire statement recorded on my bodycam for the record." I nodded slightly. "What I am going to do is post this on our social media site. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to edit it to make you look like you’re a genius or you’re insane, but either way, it’s going to get a lot of views. You shouldn’t have taken your sunglasses off. Have a nice day and drive safely." And with that, he walked back to his car.

Eggs And Baskets

Posted by anachostic on March 15, 2026 No comments

A little bit ago I kinda went off on a tangent with my home networking. I have a server tower in my studio, which is noisy and now it’s just more than I need. Meanwhile, in my laundry room, I have a rack shelf screwed to the wall with my router, raspberry pi and network switch all on it. I thought I should just downsize the server, upsize the network rack and get it all together.

So I did. I bought a larger 6U wall mount rack cage, a couple of shelves, and a new tiny PC for my new web and mail server. The rack stuff came and I installed it with a lot of sweating and swearing. The tiny PC arriver this weekend, and while there wasn’t sweating and swearing, it was still a bunch of bullshit. Setting up the web and mail stuff wasn’t so bad. I only had one configuration option in the mail server that gave me some headache. But then I had asperations.

Since I was already downsizing my server, could I go a little further and eliminate the raspberry pi device by running it on my new server? Apparently that’s an option, but in the end, it turned out to be so much not worth it and highlighted the pitfalls of all your eggs in one basket. There’s something very valuable in having discrete devices, and until you experience the problems all-in-one packages come with, the lure of all-in-one is very strong.

So, it’s probably not a big deal to run a pi hole on a server with everything else, but ugh. Pi-hole runs on Linux, whereas I am a Windows tech. So I can run a virtual machine with Linux, right? Why not? I actually have my TFS server in a virtual machine on my development desktop. I’ve used VirtualBox plenty in the past for various things. I’m not completely ignorant of virtualization. But, I am leery of it in production environments. I honestly hate having one massive server broken up into lots of little virtual servers. And that’s kind of what I was hypocritically working towards.

The ideal way to do it would be to install hyper-V on the server and run the Linux VM in there. But damn, do I HATE the way Hyper-V approaches networking. It abstracts everything and you have no idea what is what when looking at your network settings. If something went awry, I don’t want to have to fight with that. So then came option 2 – VirtualBox. I got all the way to the end with this one, but it was a lot of stumbling around. The last thing I was testing was how the pi-hole would behave if the host server lost power or needed rebooting. It wasn’t ideal.

VirtualBox isn’t a VM server like Hyper-V is. If VirtualBox isn’t running, your VMs aren’t running. So for any outage or reboots or anything else, you’d have to make sure you were logged back in, VirtualBox was running again, and the VM was started. Compare that to the Raspberry pi, where any power outage don’t faze it at all. It just reboots and comes back online. I’ve never had to think about it.

And while I was doing the reboot, I did another check for updates. Of course, I had installed a .NET update and there was another update following it, so I got that as well. After the reboot, the pi-hole in the VM didn’t work at all. Nothing could see it and it couldn’t see anything. And this was after I had already changed DHCP settings, so now my desktop can’t do anything on the internet either. This is what things would look like in downtime, and I didn’t like it at all.

As it turns out, the Windows update just did whatever the fuck it wanted with my network drivers and disabled the thing that makes VirtualBox work. It could happen at any time and apparently it’s a well-known problem. So that was the end of my experiment with running pi-hole on a server in a VM. A dedicated web and mail server and a dedicated pi-hole is definitely more desirable since either could be down without bringing everything to a standstill.

Meta And Cleanup

Posted by anachostic on February 28, 2026 No comments

I found this note from October 15, 2017 about blog posts that I wanted to write. They were just subject lines that apparently meant something to me back then but I’ve forgotten in the nearly 10 years since. There’s only one that actually became a reality and one that still resonates with me. The list of topics are:

Swearing Poetry – I don’t know what I was thinking about this. Maybe the concept of being both vulgar and romantic?
Background music in homes – This is probably from the rise of smart devices like Alexa at the time and how it was odd to have music that wasn’t actively listened to. Yeah, I know, background music has always been a thing, but there was something different about this, like you’re trying to bring a retail store atmosphere into your home.
"Going through the motions" – God only knows what problems I was trying to work through, or maybe it was something about work.
Tortoise two – I guess I had a new gopher tortoise in my yard.
Spiriva TV Commercial (Bear Hug) – Ok, I watched it and I’ll bet my observation was that the bear in the commercial (representing asthma) does not go away, he’s just not hugging the asthma sufferer anymore. He’s just… hanging out… right there. So it’s not really a relief, is it? You still have a wild animal right near you that could kill you whenever it chooses.
Food restaurants – The title makes me think that this has to be some play on words. Like now we have restaurants for different purposes and we need or have lost restaurants that deal with food?
T-shirt sweatshop interview – I did this!
How teleportation will destroy economies – I want to do this!
What If? Lever big enough to move the world – I don’t know if this was in reaction to an actual What If? or if it was a fresh idea of my own.
Most wanted posters for men: boobs and butts, that’s more recognizable for men – Who. The. Fuck. Knows. Ohhhhh. now I get it. These are wanted posters for outlaws. And if the outlaw is female, use pictures of their boobs and butt, because guys would be like, "Where have I seen them before?"

So now I can scrap this note now that I’ve made one post out of what I planned to be ten posts. and maybe one for the future, too.

Searching For Gold

Posted by anachostic on February 23, 2026 No comments

I had an unusual experience this weekend. I was browsing the Internet and was seeing posts about this racoon girl getting gold in skating. She had a visual style and attitude that was impossible to ignore so I got sucked in reading the post comments. Gushing praise about how you could tell she just loves what she was doing. Stories about how she quit because it wasn’t fun and started again just for fun and not for competition. And more and more comments about how you could see it in her routine.

I’m not a sports person, and figure skating is even further down the list than other accessible sports. It always seems clinical and kind of robotic to me. Regardless, I watched the clip that won her the gold. I guess it really was evident. Maybe I was prepped by all the comments, but it did strike me differently than other skating displays. And then the two pieces came together for me – she’s doing it because she enjoys it.

Now to make it all about me. Wait a minute, is this guy going to compare himself to an Olympic gold medalist? Hold on now. It’s not like that.

I’ve been slowly working on a new album of music in-between my constant acquisition of new gear. It’s been harder this time around for a couple of reasons. I’ve had long-standing doubts about my writing. I could easily build up a list of criticisms: Too many major chords, always the same 1/4/5 chord progression, same old 8th note rhythm, it’s the same song over and over. So I’d been struggling trying to do something different. The recent piece I had worked on that tried to be different with darker voicing and stranger key changes made me sad. Was this going to be some slow, boring morose album? I didn’t want that.

But after watching that skate routine and reading comments and full opinion articles about how her outlook and attitude is a lesson on how to approach difficult situations, I sat down and knocked out two of the most joyous tunes I’ve done in a very long time. It was a similar feeling to when I completed the first track on my previous album and declared that it was going to be a great year.

The songs? 1000% in my tried and true style. And the important thing is, so what? It’s what I do. And I’m not doing it for someone else. I’m not saying I’m a gold medal player or writer. Lots of people can and do do it better than me. But what I’m saying is, I am the best at doing what is my signature style and it might be difficult for others to duplicate. Sure, they could with effort, but I just did it effortlessly. And the final product is that I am fulfilled listening to them.

There will be opportunities to experiment and try other styles and stretch my abilities, but what I had been doing was shutting off my natural style in order to do something different. it’s like, I need to run fast, but my legs go slow, so I should remove my legs because they only go slow – obviously that’s where the problem is.

This Isn’t Even My Final Form!!

Posted by anachostic on February 14, 2026 No comments

Picture a Saiyan warrior, standing alone, screaming his head off, trying to raise himself to the next level of power. Such is my experience with my home studio. It’s been about 3 years now since I first began acquiring gear, initially to remaster some old tracks, then to create new tracks in a more traditional, non-in-the-box fashion. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of gear that is available due to aging, the abundance of new gear, and more people’s choice to go in-the-box for music creation. So, my choices have been plentiful and I’ve taken advantage of that.

It’s a little reminiscent of when I started collecting CD players from thrift shops. It was something I never could have entertained in the past, having the ability to experience different players and notice their sonic differences – something reserved for audio reviewers and people with tons of cash. But now, I can experience all these different synths that I never would have been able to before. So it’s a golden era for experimentation.

But growth comes with challenges as I’m sure any Saiyan warrior would know. Like where do you put all this muscle? I am literally out of room in my bedroom studio. I just completed assembling my third rack unit and I don’t have anywhere to put it. It’s just kind of in the middle of the room. But it’s on wheels, so it can go wherever. And this brings me to the next evolution in the studio.

Discovering patchbays and their functionality was a total gamechanger for me. Once you come to terms with the cost and quantity of cabling you need to purchase up front, everything becomes easier from then on out. My current bottleneck is that I have a rack that is physically tied to my mixer and my keyboard stands via MIDI and audio connections. The goal is to make racks "Red" and "Deep Wood" uncoupled from everything. Rack "Grey" (formerly "Blue"), which contains effects and guitar processors, has always been uncoupled and it’s been an excellent model for where I want to go. So how to accomplish this? More patchbays!! And another "rack".

The end goal is to tether the keyboard stands to a new patchbay located at the main mixer. Each set of stands will have their own MIDI interfaces, coincidentally the same make and model – 2x Edirol UM-3x units giving 6 ports to each stand. Then the rack at the mixer will contain that patchbay and the audio interface. I also plan to relocate the recording PC onto a shelf in the rack. So that’s one "unit": the mixer, the patchbay connected to the keyboard stands, and the audio interface connected to the PC and the mixer. In a world with no racks, that would a complete setup.

Racks Red and Deep Wood will be identical in design. Each will have a patchbay, an 8 channel mixer, and a MIDI interface. The audio from the devices in the rack go to the patchbay, which map, normalized, to the 8 channel mixer. Devices in excess of the 8 channel capacity can be patched into any channel as needed, which is how a patchbay is to be used. The output of the mixer goes to the local patchbay, which then routes to the patchbay at the main mixer. The MIDI interface in the rack connects to the PC. This setup means I can easily play up to 8 devices from each rack at a time, and that’s not a hard limit. I can patch more devices from any rack over to the main patchbay as long as I’m willing to handle cables being strewn about. I can patch Rack Grey in anywhere, even directly to the main mixer. Complete flexibility.

But I did say "uncoupled", didn’t I? Having a USB cable and a TRS cable tying each rack to the main patchbay is hardly uncoupled, right? And that’s where the most clever part comes in. Each rack will have jacks mounted at the back to quickly connect or disconnect them so they can be rolled in or out or where they may need to be placed. This is done with these pieces:

I mount the TRS and USB Neutrik jacks into the brackets and mount the brackets on the side of the rack. The jacks connect to the internal patchbay and MIDI interface. Then I have quick-disconnect jacks. Elegant. This little detail excites me the most about the new setup.

The parts are slowly coming in. The last bits that I’ll need to do is fabricate the new rack to sit underneath my mixer that will hold the audio interface, patchbay, and shelf for the PC. The 8ch mixer for Rack Deep Wood is on backorder, which is probably just as well, since I’ve been spending money like an American. As far as the latest rack goes, I have about 7U of space left in it. God forbid I fill that up and have to bring Rack Blue out of retirement.

You Get One Chance And You Have No Idea If You’re Doing it Right

Posted by anachostic on February 9, 2026 No comments

Today on my drive to spend $75 on a device (which turned into spending $300 for a lot of stuff I didn’t want or need), I had the classic thought of, what if you could start life over retaining all your current knowledge. That’s typically an exercise in recognizing life’s regrets and identifying what you’ve gained and learned in your life. One of the things I wanted to gain in my youth was the ability to be self sufficient. Like now, I’m able to diagnose problems and fix things and don’t have fear or worry about breaking things. When I was younger, I always took things apart, but never had any guidance, so I just ended up breaking them and never putting them back together. I didn’t even have any instruction for how to analyze what I was looking at. Of course, the internet didn’t exist back then, and while I did go to the library, I always saw the library as a bunch of books, not really a place to gain knowledge. Again, I was not taught how to best utilize resources that were available to me.

Anyway, that mental exercise led me down a particular path with a specific question: "What did your dad teach you?" The question was in the context of the nostalgic image of a father and son fixing or building something together – passing skills to a younger generation. In my recollection, I couldn’t think of anything. I had no memory of my dad sitting me down and explaining how something worked or how to do a task, or any life skills, or any special knowledge. I’ve lamented in my past how my dad was multilingual and never raised me to be. I suspect it might have been my mom’s influence that she didn’t want her kids to be "different" in that way.

So as I mulled on this, I became a little jealous of kids who had a handyman dad that could show them these life skills. And as I mulled even longer, I came to the realization that I didn’t have any mentors in my youth. I was completely self taught on everything. So oddly, my request for self-sufficiency was actually granted, it just didn’t have the end result I wanted.

I don’t want to paint my parents as bad, because what they did provide me was any tool I needed to help me figure things out, and professional training too, but most of that was wasted because I can’t learn in a structured fashion. Additionally, what my dad was was a good role model, if not a good instructor. He was well-mannered, respected, a stable provider, and technologically curious. I guess my upbringing was not "do as I say, not as I do", but more "do as I do, because I have nothing to say."

There’s a lot of stories and videos that talk about Gen X and how they grew up without supervision which became formative to how they grew up as adults. And now I find I really had nothing guiding me at all. It’s sort of a miracle I ended up how I did. And not really a surprise I would look back and wonder if it could have been done differently.

I Finally Figured This Out

Posted by anachostic on February 8, 2026 No comments

So the failed purchase of the synths in GA kind of got me thinking. After breaking my heart telling me all his synths were sold just the other day, the guy said, in consolation, it shouldn’t be hard to find a K2000 or a Quasar. And you know what, he’s right. And he’s smart, too. For many, many of my purchases, I’m spending so much more to buy the devices because of my time, my gas, wear on the car, in extreme cases, lodging costs. Like driving 8 hrs one way and $200 on a hotel room to spend $500 on a keyboard? It’s now an $800 dollar keyboard and you can get them for cheaper than that shipped to your house! And I’ve been thinking about that and I have my answer. Why do I do this?

The reason is because buying a new device online is too easy. Seriously, it’s the easiest thing you can do – spend money and wait. And when it arrives, it’s like, eh, it’s here, what else can I buy now? My in-person purchases are limited availability items, in both time and distance (granted my distance threshold is much higher than normal people’s). But, the REAL reason is that it takes effort to make these purchases. I am committing to driving 18 hours for 3 devices. Just today, I drove 6 hours for a $450 device. Tomorrow I’m driving 4 hours for a $75 device. It sounds insane, doesn’t it?

But when you expend the effort, you have equity in the device. You have a stronger connection to it and it means more to you because of it. That sounds dumb – why would you ever want to "care" about a product? It’s just a product, you can get it anywhere. And that’s the trap in which modern convenience and consumerism has gotten people. They aren’t attached to their purchases, they don’t mean anything, so there’s no desire to keep them, cherish them, maintain them, or even use them with purpose. It’s just stuff – entirely disposable stuff.

You know, it wasn’t always like that and I’m refusing to let it be like that for me, at least when it comes to my collectable items.

Just as a side story on the effort that went into today’s purchase, this device was the same as one that I missed out on in GA, and it was $50 cheaper to boot. It was listed on a weekend and damn it if I didn’t see the listing under Monday. I messaged the guy and said I would like to buy this, but I wouldn’t be able to come up until the next weekend. He said he wouldn’t hold it for me and I agreed he shouldn’t. But he did say he would be coming by my area over the next weekend which would work out awesome in that he could practically deliver it to me (if it didn’t sell by then). I anxiously waited and the device hadn’t sold by Thursday. I messaged the seller and said I was still interested. No response. I messaged twice on Friday. No response. Oh well. That sucked.

Today I wake up and see the seller replied at 10:30 the previous night. He had a buyer who no-showed, but he was also not coming to my area now. I immediately replied and said I’d come get it. No response. GAHHH! I start doing other work in the house and he finally responds at like 1:30pm saying, sure, I can come up. Man, I did not want to deal with afternoon/evening traffic. I wanted to get started first thing in the morning, but fine. As I’m travelling, I’m giving him updates and I swear he didn’t believe I was coming. He would take so long to reply. Luckily I had 3 hours to get his actual home address.

Once there, the deal was completed and he was a cool guy, but the drive home was a lot more stressful than it should have been. At least I got a good dinner in Orlando out of it. And luckily, my house didn’t flood in my 7 hour absence (that’s a story for another blog).