A blog on programing, electronics, plotters and cats.
Last year I got back into analog photography. As more and more of my devices seem to randomly turn on me, dumber devices have become surprisingly comforting. I've acquired a lot of analog cameras in the past year, as I try to find one that gets me. I wanna talk about these devices, and this Leica Cl is one of them. The Leica CL is a 35mm compact rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses in…
I've been meaning to get a small Adana Letterpress forever. I saw one a couple of years ago, and I could never get over it. Because of that, I've had an eBay search setup for years, waiting for the day the perfect specimen showed up. It finally did. The Adana Agency was founded in 1922 by Donald Aspinwall in Twickenham. I find it extremely fascinating how it always seemed to be directed towards…
I've been doing a lot more bookbinding lately. I've done a lot of it throughout the years and recently decided to dive a bit deeper. As part of this dive I've tried looking a bit deeper into the adhesives I use. I use Bookplast 22 most of the time. It's sold on my local bookbinding supply store, dries quickly and flexible. It is based of Methylisothiazolinone , which I've never heard of before. I…
2024 has been wild. Towards the end of 2023 we decided to move to Spain. I've always loved Spain and it's the country I've travelled the most to. We made the decision randomly one night and so the scramble started. The first step was finding a lawyer and gathering documents. We knew we didn't need the added stress of DIYing it. We scheduled a couple of calls for the following week and were sold on…
A while back I built a BLE MIDI controller. I was never too happy with it and had been meaning to take another stab at it. My plan is pretty simple, I want a 4 or 5 faders in a small battery-powered box. I recently came across a TTGO display board. It brings most of what I need onboard, bluetooth, a screen, a couple of buttons, battery management and, best of all, a usb-c port. I knew exactly what…
Wraps are my favorite way of storing small electronics. Whenever I get a new one I'll probably make one really quickly to store it and it's accessories. It's a fairly straightforward process. Start with a piece of cloth. I really like this one, where it's like felt on one side and like linen on the other. It makes it so the interior is really nice and soft. I'll start by measuring the device I'll…
I've been using an old Rockband Keytar as a midi controller for the longest time. I usually take advantage of the OP-Z's ability to be a MIDI host to use the keytar via a midi to usb adapter. This is fairly cumbersome as I have to use big cables and a USB-A to USB-C adapter. Last year I got myself a ZM-1 module for the OP-Z which allows me to connect MIDI devices via a 3.5mm jack. These are fairly…
I was lucky enough to be gifted an old, broken guitar. It was in pretty rough shape. The bridge had been bolted to the body so when it started lifting it broke through the top. I felt that it wasn't really worth restoring it and that I'd rather try building something new on top of it. I was thinking that just adding a pickup would make it a bit more interesting. I started by removing half of the…
I've been meaning to backup my GitHub repos somewhere for a while. I recently discovered that Gitea can mirror them and will keep them updated. I am running Dokku on my dedicated server and pretty much run everything I can think of there. Gitea was a bit tricky to install so here are some notes. You start by creating the app: ; dokku app:create gitea Once that's done, we can initialize it from the…
As the end 1 of the Pandemic approaches, I wanted to write a blog post to remind myself of these past 18 months and how we spent our time in exile. There isn't really a point to this blog post in general it's mostly a slice of my life and a lot of disconnected thoughts. I originally started writing this post in August 8th, 2021. It took me a year to get around to finishing it but here it is.…