Latest blog posts from Marv's Blog
I made a tool that lets you fly over a PDF and create a presentation from it. I'm not good at making slides and everything I tried so far just felt much too clunky. I just end up putting bullet points on slides and called it a day. This was one of the last presentations I had to do during my Digital Humanities studies so I really didn't want to do it the same way all over again. I had this ideas…
There are so many things to do and so many tools to keep track of what needs to be done. When I'm working with developers, kanban boards, markdown files or issues in a git repo can already do the heavy lifting. It's good to have one central place you can look at and immediately see: Here's what still needs some work. Other teams might not write code, understand how markdown works or want to set up…
It happens pretty often that I'm in a space where it's hard to get out of. There is work to be done but I just feel drained and foggy. This especially happens when there's a lot of stuff to do but there are no deadlines I can really adhere to. It's hard to get back on track in situations like these sometimes. One thing I frequently forget but almost always helps: Go for a walk. A short walk…
It's true that I'm drowning in unfinished projects but this one was a fun afternoon project. Sometimes I need a small project in between just to get some fresh air and I was missing a good small keyboard for playing small synths anyway. So I ordered a Roland K-25m. It's meant to be used with the Roland boutique series and connects via a 16 pin IDC connector (the same that Eurorack also uses). I…
The MFB Nanozwerg is a small Synthesizer from Berlin. Nobody talks about it and it's often overlooked but you can get a really wide range of sounds out of it. I've been using it for acid lines and even thicker sounds thanks to its pulse width modulation. Its MIDI implementation is flawed but it also accepts control voltage. I also own the MFB-522 which is built in exactly the same way. A standard…
I got my first cassette recorder when I was 3 or 4 years old. It was small enough to be carried around so I naturally recorded everything around me. Two of those recordings survived and I still have them here, waiting to be listened to one day. Cassettes taught me that information can be stored on media that you can't see with your naked eye. When I got my first computer at 5 years old, the…
I’ve been working on this project for a year and finally have a platform to host a website for it: https://800dv.paperboat.website/ Follow via RSS or paperboat for all my 800DV posts. Synths were much simpler in the 70s. No chips, only simple resistors, capacitors and transistors. To the point where it’s actually possible to draw and print the circuit boards, populate them with components and…
Sometimes life can be a lot and I often feel how important it is to have a way to escape. I'm about to finish my degree in Digital Humanities, have job, some other side gigs and a kid and a partner. More often than not things stack up and it can take weeks before I get to work on my projects, make music or build something. It's hard to really dive into something if there's not much time. As my…
When I was in Rome for vacation, I found this interesting model in a thrift store. It doesn’t seem to be particularly well made. The trees are made of moss and it’s coming apart in a few places. Still, someone had an idea or an assignment for school. It’s a handmade object with its own history which I’ll never find out. I couldn’t take it with me but I’m glad i could take a look at it and wonder…
Originally published in 2021 … I started finding a layout that I like using Blender. I then ended up with something that’s pretty close to the final layout. Before starting to build, I needed to make sure that everything I had planned actually works in practice. The keyboard uses capacitive sensing and I wanted to use thumbscrews. I tried booting the volca with a screwdriver on one pad. Touching…
It snowed a fair bit this night. Isn't it crazy how snow transforms the places you know and go to every day? It feels like I've been teleported to somewhere else entirely.
(public draft) Ever since 2006, creating websites has been a part of my life. My first website dates back to 2006. At elementary school, we had a really cool computer club where we learned HTML, Logo, image manipulation with GIMP and so much more. I still have some files from back then. Sadly, the data on the diskette containing the website is long gone. The website was about dogs and it even…
What I'm listening to right now (feel free to listen while reading): https://patchingflowers.bandcamp.com/track/pears A few months ago, I decided to build a Korg 800 DV from scratch. It's a synth from the 70s and its schematics are available on the web. With the help of some really nice people on modwiggler, I managed to gather even the missing parts of it. Some sections of the circuit have been…
