Essentially I’m putting in a two-foot wide work bench with roughly a dozen outlets at the back of the Florida room. This should be enough for all mixers and recorders space to write or prop an elbow. Everything else gets winged since I’ve zero experience setting up anything but the most basic studio layout. My projection is room for two seated musicians, guessing they will be guitarist-sized and occasionally one singer who generally would be standing up.Even so, cramped quarters is the best I can do, though the chairs will be considerably more comfortable than before. It’s a good thing I can move sheets of plywood with the sidecar. So far most of the building materials are recycled including lag bolts from a display of one million toothpicks, gosh was that already half a generation ago, and brackets from my former kitchen table which shredded itself the moment it got wet on the stoop.
Thank the rain for so much getting done. It keeps me indoors and the temperature below the energy-sapping 80s. The new home studio area in addition to air conditioning must also have several powerful fans. I find the best working environment has both systems in tandem. (One large fan is less efficient as it causes a cross-current that puffs microphones, music sheets, and guitar picks off your counter.)
Trivia. On classic IQ tests, invented in 1905, women tended to score higher than men. So more sports questions were added to restore the balance. One shudders to think that elections are won by the person who appeals to the larger and therefore less intelligent mass. Also, intelligence is an individual trait where stupidity is collective. That’s why you can’t define stupid. Computers were originally operated by a small intelligent elite. Now, the average user doesn’t know or care how the thing works. I’d go a step further and bet he could not learn it if he wanted to. Electronics is not even on the grade school curriculum.
My research on electronics went overseas to see what they are doing. Most countries don’t even have a place to shop for parts. As a hobby, electronics is largely confined to Western-thinking nations although the opposite is so for the manufacture of components. But what I saw time and again was that the concept of the part-timer soldering up a project in his den is outdated. Instead, all design work I saw was on CAD software at the microchip level.
Most assembly was done by robots using SMT (surface mount technology). SMT is where the part, now often too tiny to be held by a human hand, is soldered on the board surface rather than to wires that go through holes in the board. And, there have been no fundamentally new inventions in twenty years. To me, this explains why electronics magazines seem so repetitious. The pods and pads you see out there all have ordinary backgrounds, their only innovation is shape and design. The real breakthroughs involve interfacing electronics with social software.
The payouts, mind you, can be enormous. One “invention” and you are a billionaire, meaning electronics fulfills the role of the research lab a century ago. Society largely believes that social mobility still exists if you patent the right product. I’m suggesting that today’s product won’t be electronic unless it is developed by a wealthy team of educated staff. The last do-it-yourselfers may have been Jobs and Wosniak. That was the last era when one could rely on “heaven-sent good fortune”. They did not and indeed could not have built the chips they used.
Nor could I. The half-adder circuit I built, if scaled up to be a useful computer these days, would require a 5/8 of a square mile and the remainder of my life to wire it up. Next time you see a picture of an early computer like Univac or Colossus, peer at that maze of wiring and realize these were less capable than your pocket calculator. There will be no giant steps for mankind from my kitchen desk. My goal remains same as the day I began (January 1, 2011), and that was to “to take a look”. To be able to say I at least looked at robots. Because not many can say that.
And I’m coming away with the feeling that wiring is no longer done much. It is finicky and time-consuming, since nobody has ever invented a convenient way to terminate circuit wiring. I’ve seen a few plug boards but the plugs only work once. To troubleshoot or experiment, you need a bucket of plugs, which makes them no longer cheap. (Hence, our decision early on to include test points and LED indicators when possible.)
Where do things stand? I’m still hand-wiring small circuits as a learning tool. In 22 months, no robot controllers have been built. My working circuits are empirical, none of the mathematics have been done. I connect currents known to be strong enough to activate and trigger without any consideration toward power conservation. (Right? If I get anything to work, let some engineer type streamline it.) I can’t say if I’ll ever get to the stage of the videos I see, where the operator builds nothing. He just designs and runs the simulator, rarely using tools.
And what tools they have! When I review these amateur videos, I see $20,000 of sparkling gear in the background. This is not a hobby for the penny-pincher.
Nextly, we had some activity next door. If you don’t know the area, the vacant lot beside me looks like a shortcut to Federal. I get so used to traffic, I rarely notice who drives by. Around 9-ish tonight, there’s a Monte Carlo with two confused occupants in the driveway. Two total jerks of the type that we are forbidden to racially profile at the risk of being politically incorrect. Don’t you dare profile, these people have rights, you know. We called the cops. They towed the car.
ADDENDUM
Computers. You may have guessed I’m running BBC documentaries
I remember my early computer days. I was a fully qualified programmer, but I had to drop out of school and go work in a lumber mill. There was no place in the middle of the bush to use my skills, and they lapsed for close to ten years. The terrible thing was that back then, there was no software and so programmers were paid a fortune. A fortune I could not touch from so far away. By the time I took my first “modern” programming course (RPG for Report Program Generator), coding was already degenerating to the mess it is today. My favorite language is still COBOL, my least favorite C+. And I don’t believe a computer has ever replaced a useful human being.
[Author’s note: if you mention that any programming language is better than C+, the nerd element gets on your case to the effect that the other languages aren’t “elegant” and there is so much they can’t do. Nonsense, with the addition of new commands, all languages can be made better. It is the structure of the code that I like, the logical flow of English-like commands. C+ dorks with their objects and pointers and shorthand don’t realize they are the major causes of bad code. There is a language worse than C+, the totally bastard LISP where even the relational operators are placed outside the variables.]
What I consider wonderful news was the revelation today that MicroSoft has fallen to number two in the computer field, behind Apple. (Update 2013: however, Apple has become a music and telephone company instead of strictly computeres.) MicroSoft repeatedly misses the big ones, like the Internet. Now they’ve come out with Windows 8 which can be used on handheld devices. I’ll wager it is another mess for home computers, rearranging all the popular commands and forcing users to learn it all over again. I hope this one plows MicroSoft under forever. I think Apple is overpriced, but I don’t dislike their product the way I do Windows. Despite 30 years of financial dominance, Windows still has the same brand of problems and quirks. I’m referring to everything from slow boot-up to crashes to forcing unwanted changes on the previous purchasers.
