Tag Archives: technology

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.

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.

What Do The Robots Think?

Posted by anachostic on August 23, 2025 No comments

If you weren’t aware, I have a blog and post on it every once in a while. Every one in a while over a very long while. And I don’t have any metrics or analysis trackers or cookies or other bullshit (outside of what’s the standard WordPress default) – you don’t deserve that. I have comments disabled and I don’t solicit feedback from anything I’ve written – I don’t deserve that. So that leaves me with really no idea how my writing "lands" with people.

But, a recent technological development has created fake people that can actually provide you with somewhat constructive feedback. They call it Artificial Intelligence. It’s creepy shit. And also, sometimes hilarious. Also, occasionally insightful. One day I had the idea that I should ask the fake people what they think of my blog. Of course, I don’t want them to think I’m fishing for compliments or anything, so I just ask them anonymously. Starting with an innocent question like "If you look at the blog, anachostic.700cb.net, what assumptions could you make about the author?" And, like all AI chatbots, they don’t want to stop talking, so they provide you lots of canned prompts to continue digging deeper. And "deep" is about six inches for these silicon analysts. (insert Oh My! Takai meme here)

I tried both Copilot and uh… what’s Google’s? Oh yeah, Gemini. Both had the same limitations and both generally said the same things in different ways. The limitations for both were how much they could actually access on my blog. Both seemed to be limited to pages they had already indexed, which in both cases, was probably no more than five posts, out of the (maybe) hundreds I have. What this resulted in was trying to glean as much information out of a very small source of data, and that means that they repeated themselves over and over again.

AI is well known for being overwhelmingly positive, so it’s no surprise they had no criticisms about anything I said or about my perceived personality. Despite that, they both seemed to pick up on the tone of the blog correctly, as well as the recurring themes and some of my motivations. Flattering, but I don’t take anything a machine says as an absolute truth, only as a guide or a pointer to find the truth myself.

Copilot was definitely more umm, emotional about how it presented its findings, where Gemini was more basic explanations. They both liked to use the word "authenticity" in their reports. Gemini made some very strange comparisons that didn’t make a lot of sense when trying to figure out the meaning of what I was writing about and that seemed based on the limited amount of data it had to work from. When all you know is I have a hammer, everything is related to hammers, somehow. Copilot got heavy into my style of writing, pointing out cynicism and sarcasm, talking big about my attempts to make an "authentic" impression. Copilot actually went so far as to break my blog down into "eras", which conveniently coincided with the few posts it knew from different time periods.

I specifically asked Gemini for criticisms about the blog and one comment was "As a personal blog, there is no marketing or business agenda behind the posts." Oh, well fuck me, then. It went on to soften that by saying that it might not be expected from a personal blog, but still, that hustle culture. Gemini, if you had more post data available, you’d know that I despise monetizing your life.

Overall, I’m fairly satisfied that if the reports they are giving are consistent with how a general viewership would read my trash, I’m doing things just how I want to. Now, once they index this page, I wonder if they will change their minds.

Just A Reminder

Posted by anachostic on July 20, 2025 No comments

The site is back up after nearly 5800 hours of downtime. Good job!

Etched In Stone

Posted by anachostic on February 26, 2023 Comments Off

It’s rebuilding day. I can’t recall the last time I had to reinstall my desktop system. I’d have to do a little research, but it was probably when I bought all new hardware and went with two large mirrored drives with virtual disks on it. Feels like that was some time ago. I looked it up. August 2019. So 2.5 years of running non-stop without significant downtime. I guess that’s not too bad.

It’s worked pretty well, until suddenly it didn’t. The machine would reboot overnight for no good reason. When i would look in the event logs, it happened around the time of a Windows update. There were a ton of errors about the Windows Search service not being able to start.

Then I was having trouble installing updates. My Visual Studio was on something like 15.3.3 and I wanted to update to 15.5. It would install the update, then wouldn’t launch. So I’d reboot and I was back on 15.3.3 again and it’s bugging me to upgrade. I planned on just uninstalling and downloading the latest, but then I noticed that my Vivaldi web browser was also bugging me for updates. I had just done that the other day. I installed the update, it wouldn’t launch. This seems familiar. Reboot, back on the old version.

This sounds to me like the shadow copy service is broken. It can’t create any new system checkpoints and keeps reverting to the last version. So I follow the steps to delete all system restore points and move onward with trying to fix the search service. Everything I try fails. System file checker, chkdsk, dism, all have some problem or another. So I guess it’s time to start over.

Ok, then the first thing to do is get a current backup. BUT, Windows File History relies on the Windows Search Service, which is dead. It says my last good backup was October, 2022. Whatever, it’s fine. All my real files are on the mirrored drives anyway. I leave the machine on overnight with plans to rebuild first thing in the morning.

Amazingly, it didn’t reboot overnight, so then I got busy building a USB drive to install from. Shut down the tower and took it outside to blow the dust out of it and set it back up for install. First attempt was booting off the UEFI partition on the USB drive. But then it wouldn’t let me install anything on my internal drive because it was MBR. Ok, reboot again into the MBR USB partition and try again.

I try to delete the partitions and they wouldn’t delete, for whatever reason. Fine. i formatted both partitions and did the install. On first reboot, Windows loaded up and prompted me to log in. Excuse me? This is a brand new install. I type in my pin and I’m back at my desktop.

I have no idea what’s up with this cursed drive, but it’s going in the fire as soon as I can get a replacement. Amazingly, Amazon can have me a new drive, twice as big delivered within a few hours for like only $65. I feel like I paid 3x that when I built this computer.

Until then, I guess I’ll just poke around on the drive that refuses to change, or die.

I’m Getting Too Old For This

Posted by anachostic on February 26, 2023 No comments

It’s been a day. Like I had just posted, my computer’s main drive went south and I had to do a rebuild. There was a time that I used to do this almost for fun. like if your computer was running slow, you’d just wipe it and start over. But that was before having terabytes of data and dozens of applications and hundreds of online accounts that all need to be handled.

I had gone to lunch and just when I was pulling back into the house, the Amazon driver was stopping in my front yard with my new drive. Great timing. While I wanted to do something else with my early afternoon – a casa de chostic worthy post of adding gutter guards – they didn’t work out so well, so I had the day to devote to system restore.

After blowing the dust out of the desktop and installing the new SSD drive, it was off to the races, on crutches. I wanted to have as clean of an install as possible to avoid any bloated pieces, but unfortunately, that also leads to broken dependencies. And I’ve been out of the system building game for too long to understand what’s what in Windows anymore.

So I removed everything I thought I could. Applied all the patches that were available to me, then began the the dual process of installing applications and rebuilding my RAID mirror. After getting KeePass and Outlook installed, I was able to breathe a little easier. The bigger headache was setting up Plex again. I had backed up my old database before wiping, but I don’t think it’s going to be any easier to restore it than it would be to just rescan everything. Once I saw my new install created a duplicate server instance in my dashboard, I didn’t want to head down that path any further.

So after about 6 hrs., by RAID is about 50% built and I have most of my daily-functional apps installed: Outlook, Vivaldi, Money, KeePass. And a couple other ones, Open Live Writer (present), 7Zip, Faststone, Image Resizer, CDWinEmu. The others can wait until their needed, like Visual Studio. Because that’s going to bring with it setting up Hyper-V for my TFS server instance. Oh hmmm. I might have blown away my local SQL server and who knows what in-progress database I might have had on it. Oh well. Maybe someday, I’ll need them and I’ll find some way to read a NVME SSD externally.

But back to the point of this post, I am exhausted, and I didn’t even do anything strenuous today other than climb on the roof for about 10 minutes. Just the mental tediousness of restoring and configuring a system for the hundredth time in your life is draining. But what’s the alternative? I’ve never been trusting of system restores, only data restores. It’s the path I’ve chosen to take. And I guess it’s probably going to continue every 3 yrs or so.

The Last Time Is The Charm

Posted by anachostic on January 18, 2023 No comments

In an earlier post, I talked at length about this keyboard that came from a thrift shop and had a problem and how I tried to fix it over and over and eventually gave up and left it sitting in the garage, queued for the dump. Well, sometimes, I just can’t give up.

It’s been so cold the last few days that I didn’t want to touch the keyboard, seeing as it’s all metal (official weight: 51.4 lbs. – stupid heavy). Today was warmer and I left the garage open so it could warm up a little. After work, I went out and hauled the beast back in for yet another attempt at repair.

Did I have a plan? Not really. I was going to take the keyboard assembly out and just deal with the main board through MIDI. Doing that, I could at least move something in and out of the closet that was probably 30 lbs. less every time I wanted to make another repair attempt. And with that, I set the massive key bed out and hooked up the synth to another of my keyboards.

MIDI worked, And enabling a sound on the master keyboard verified there was still the pitch problem. I dug out the service manual and went through the reset and test modules. Everything seemed ok from what I could tell. A couple of the faders didn’t seem to register any movement and I had the pitch and mod wheels disconnected, so some blanks were expected.

Noodling around on the master keyboard, I happened to think to try the pitch wheel and when I moved it, I was very surprised to hear it didn’t work as it should. The pitch would shift a little bit and snap back to the original incorrect pitch. That would suggest that the contacts might be dirty, but this is a remote keyboard. These are MIDI messages being sent and the synth is not honoring them. Or something else locally is spamming the pitch controller signal.

I finally had a lead I could work with. I started thinking schematically about what components could cause the pitch wheel to be triggered consistently even when disconnected. I had the idea I should reconnect the pitch wheel and see if I could stabilize the pitch by holding it a certain amount. To reconnect it, I had to remove a circuit board that had all the fader controls on it, like volume and four programmable sliders.

When I got the board off, I immediately noticed the connector for the pitch wheel had some trauma. It was bent at an odd angle. That seemed suspicious. I inspected it closely and didn’t see anything broken. But the faders were disgusting. And as long as I had this board apart, I thought I’d try out my new chemicals, Deoxit and Deoxit Fader, the latter of which is specifically made for cleaning and lubing faders.

As I cleaned the faders, it was pretty clear they were just shot. The cleaner was running down the board in a black oil. But I cleaned them up as best I could. With the pitch wheel reconnected, I powered the synth back up and tried out a few keys. It was suddenly in tune. No drift. The pitch bend worked locally and remotely. And that’s the end of this saga.

Reflecting on the "fix", when I very first got the keyboard, it had a pitch problem. I was the one that disconnected the pitch wheel, so that was not the source of the problem. One of the faders had to be the culprit – it must’ve had a short somewhere. But I’m not going to be overly concerned about it from here out. If the problem comes back, I will just buy a new fader board or maybe the faders themselves, since that is where the problem is centered.

The important thing is I have the keyboard I originally purchased in non-working order, now in working order. And on a similar topic, I purchased another keyboard on a whim this week. So I now have five keyboards and a stand that can hold two, so three have to be in storage. I’m not sure where this is going at the moment, but we’ll see. One thing for sure, I’m not getting rid of any more keyboards.

DIYDNF

Posted by anachostic on January 4, 2023 No comments

In the world of Geocaching, DNF means Did Not Find. In the world of home improvement, DIY means Do It Yourself. Somewhere in my world, DIYDNF means Did It Myself; Did Not Fix.

For a few years I’ve had this keyboard that I picked up in a thrift shop for something like $100. My evaluation of it once I got it home was that this keyboard had problems. Its pitch would wander, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. It got stuck in a closet while I determined what to do about it.

There is a repair shop about 90 minutes away that handles keyboards and after a long, long time, I finally dragged it out there on New Years day. Sadly, they wouldn’t work on it because there were no parts from the manufacturer and no service manual. I actually had a copy of the service manual, but whatever. So I lost 3 hours and had a approximately 80 pound anchor on my hands.

I started doing some research online and after watching a repair video of the same model keyboard figured I could attempt the repair myself. And to some degree, it wouldn’t be so expensive to try as a last resort. Of course, expensive is something that comes with time and is usually not in the initial budget.

After watching many repair videos, the plan was to replace the main capacitors. Kind of like when a CD player doesn’t work, you first replace the belts. That’s the way it is with a lot of older electronic gear. The videos I watched, over and over, replacing the capacitors solved the majority of problems. So that was my plan. Now to buy everything I’d need to accomplish something like that.

What do I own now that I didn’t before?

Soldering station
Silicone soldering mat
300+ capacitors
Two different solder wicks

Overall, maybe I spent $150 for this endeavor. And because of the time it took to get all of these things, I had a lot of anticipation and excitement to get started. The last piece arrived today and I immediately got to work.

Before I start that, I need to explain that in the time waiting for some of the pieces, I practiced on a dead circuit board – removing and replacing capacitors. I thought I was doing really good. It wasn’t difficult at all. I was instructed the ideal way was to use the solder wick to remove the old solder, but I had zero success with that and chose a two-step process of removing the component, then using a solder sucker to clear the mounting holes. My technique worked very well.

Doing it for real then. I had to remove the existing three capacitors. That went pretty smoothly. Step two was to clear the mounting holes. This did not go well, at all. I ended up with some solder in the holes and it would not come out. I tried my usual technique. I tried using wick. I tried other people’s tips like adding more solder to pull the solder in the hole out. Nothing was working. It was probably about 45 mins of fighting with greater and greater desperation, eventually resulting in me damaging the board. But there was a hole.

Tired and disappointed, I mounted and soldered the new capacitors in place. The first one went well. The other two did not, but I did get them in place. Now it’s time to reassemble and see the results, if any. I mounted the main board back in the case, laid the keyboard back, and brought the control panel back for connection. Wiring up power and audio cables and flipped the switch.

It powered up. I pressed some keys. No sound. Oh yeah, volume. I had sound. It sounded pretty good and I was feeling pretty good. I powered up another keyboard to get a pitch comparison. Hmm. Slightly detuned. I did a factory reset on the panel and tried again. Now the pitch was off by an entire semitone. Worse. I held some notes and I could actually hear the pitch slowly changing - up and down. So, experiment unsuccessful. Any further troubleshooting is out of my league. I’ve literally watched the pros do it and I don’t understand what they’re doing and how they arrive at their ideas. I don’t have an electrical engineer background.

So, to the garage for the keyboard for now. I’m pretty sure it’s going to the dump. I considered maybe parting it out on eBay, but what a hassle. I already have a bunch of stuff I need to list and I can’t find the motivation to do it. Maybe it will come in the next few days. But for right now, I need to pack up my new tools of my failed hobby.

Farewell To Tweets

Posted by anachostic on November 20, 2022 No comments

Since this is an unprecedented event in my time, I figured I’d at least record my thoughts on it to remember exactly what it was like. I am referring to the sudden, rapid implosion of Twitter. Since I’ve been a wordy motherfucker for decades, I obviously have no interest in Twitter. It never suited my purposes and I never "got" what it was trying to sell. So, this is clearly an outsider’s opinion.

Let’s start with my issues with the man behind the destruction. Elon "This isn’t even my final form" Musk has been insufferable for years now and this is just the latest deed. Fortunately, this is the one that pulls the curtain back on his actual lack of ability. A spoiled brat falling upwards until he now seems to have reached the ceiling. The only thing you can give him credit for is bankrolling other people’s ideas, like EV and space transportation. I don’t buy for a minute all the people who say, "he’s a genius. I’ve heard him talk and he knows his stuff." He only has a skill of regurgitating other people’s knowledge, which is also a skill of a huckster. He also has the self-important aura that makes him appear superior to others. It’s no wonder he is an authoritarian, it’s his trajectory.

One of the biggest, biggest things that pisses me off about the Twitter problem is that it didn’t have to be a problem. Everything Musk complains about is from his own doing. Losing $4m/day? It wasn’t before you got there. Overstaffed, unproductive workers, company costs too high? Wasn’t before you got there. If Musk had just been a slightly better person and not tried to do some obvious market manipulation, resulting in him being forced to make good on an offer that was only supposed to make him richer, Twitter might still be around.

Next in line for gripes is the complete foolishness of Musk’s "management" style. It’s not really management, it’s just barking orders. The whole idea of, "I am the single source of guidance and direction" is impossibly stupid in an organization. And as much as I hate to bring this other asshole into the conversation, it’s just like Trump being president. Businesses and governments are built on a hierarchy for a very good reason. It frees the people at the top from having to worry about the details, but authoritarians have to control every little detail. And it sucks for everyone involved because there is no consistency and the second in command remains as clueless as the commoner. Why even have a hierarchy then?

All of this superiority complex leads to the next point of stupidity. Walking in on day one and firing the people in charge, then firing half the staff before you even understand how the company operates, then threatening the remaining people with double the workload and no additional incentive – still before you understand how the company runs – then, once a large number of those remaining people have bowed out, finally asking to be clued in as to how things work. Any intelligent businessperson would spend months analyzing the system from the inside before making any changes. Musk is lucky any of the other companies he bought survived his leadership and managed to stay on their original track.

I feel like I could go on, but I want to address the now and future of Twitter the service.

So, pre-Musk (PM), Twitter had a real problem with the quality of its userbase. It had lots of harassment, incitement, and general bad behavior. But so does every other social media site out there. In that way, I am anti-social media in total. I don’t think it has proven to be a good mechanism for communication. The strengths it touts, allowing you to send off a quick message, as well as quickly reply in kind, are actually the wrong things to be promoting. Spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff, spontaneous messages, spoken without consideration, as well as knee-jerk, impulsive responses, are not a conversation. They are not anything but thoughts, and they lead to people doubling down and digging in on things they never should have said and can’t bring themselves to apologize for. So again, quick messages are not good.

However, when it comes to news and alerts, quick messages are great. And now a lot of governments and officials are wondering how they’re going to get the same effects after Twitter dies. And again, I’m going to say, Twitter is not good for this use case either. The problem I am focused on is that a lot of "alerts" are not internationally important or relevant. The ones that people are worried about: active shooter, natural disaster, policy changes – these are all regional. It does me no good to hear about an active shooter in CA when I’m across the country. As best it’s a distraction. And that’s the term I want to apply to Twitter broadly, it’s a distraction. It causes you to concern yourself with things that are not something you can do anything about and are not time sensitive. This is the problem the 24hr news cycle started and Twitter just turbocharged it. So, I feel that governments are going to go back to the way they used to issue alerts, which were more regional. Journalists that cover those regions will subscribe to those alerts and will amplify the message appropriately.

And I think what’s going to close up this post is the observation from someone who was there before the internet and seen how things got better and worse. While the internet has been invaluable for accessing information that is more of a static nature, it has been more of a detriment for more transient information. There’s lots of news that doesn’t need to be consumed right at the moment. Even big news, like the Queen is dead, could wait for the evening. That news doesn’t change what I am going to be doing for the day. Again, it’s a distraction. And I think the number of distractions we’re facing in a day is causing some serious societal harm. I feel like I’ve written about this before, where if you read about 10 rapes in the news in a day, they feel like they’re all in your neighborhood. The whole idea of being an interconnected world is not so appealing when you have to also bear the weight of the entire world’s problems.

It’s almost like we need some sort of hierarchical structure for news.

Anachostic