Tom 7 Radar

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Entries from January 2016

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Consolation prize (31 Jan 2016 at 14:25)

Well, welcome again to Tom 7 Radar, where on the last day of each month I post a hastily-written last minute apology for not accomplishing anything interesting to work on during the month.

This month I have been working on my weird computational Nintendo stuff a lot. I finished the systems stuff (especially an extremely painful project to clean up the code of the NES emulator I've been using and make it thread-safe) and now I'm on the "fun" part where I can try experiments and make it do crazy stuff. But the fun part is also rough going so there are ups and downs to that. Hopefully putting together a video before SIGBOVIK, including some explanations of the systems stuff. I had the realization recently that I think it's possible that I've executed more NES cycles than any person ever; these recent experiments are about 2 billion frames a day (which is about a year of running at native NES speed). Don't think there is a Guinness Book entry for this yet.

My other projects have been fun but uninteresting (to you) home projects, like redoing all the lighting and scraping paint for hours in my basement. One thing I did finish this month that's moderately interesting to look at is another carpentry project. Behind my couch was this mess of wires and an iPad and mixer for playing music. You couldn't really see it but it was impossible to clean and you'd have to pull the couch out or suck in your stomach and sidle to even change the volume or put on music, which was stupid. I built this skinny thing which you can see in its final home:

Console <i>mis en place</i>

Console mis en place

This one—known as "Console", since every project gets a name—is made with somewhat more complex joinery than before. The corner joints are the most interesting, where slots in the vertical beams support cross beams, themselves routed out to fit the top member. The "inlays" around them (made of oak; the rest is pine) are actually me covering up a mistake I made wherein I subtracted rather than added kerf, which was pretty dumb, but I've come to like this feature. Corner joints:

Don't know what this joint is called, if it even has a name

You can see my sloppy gluing highlighted by lacquer shine. This is one thing I still have not figured out how to do well. The rest of the connects are with dowel joints. This time I put the whole thing together with dry press-fit joints like the dowels before doing any glue, which I think helps a lot with a problem I've had in the past where although all my measurements are right, it's an uncomfortable fit due to the fact that the wood is not really straight or flat over these kinds of distances. The finished thing, obviously overkill for where it's used, but I'm happy with it:

It matches!

Right this moment I am in the airport IAD stopping briefly on my way to the airport called ZRH for a short work trip in Zurich. I had hoped to get some newish T7ES covers online this morning, but I realized that my software for rendering them does not support drums so that was a bust. Still you can listen to Theme from Zurich.

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Entries from December 2015

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I'm not an IDIOT who needs COLOR CHEAT CODES (31 Dec 2015 at 21:28)

Well, here we are at the end of 2015. December was a bunch of travel (14 segments!) and relaxing for me, neither of which make good stories.

The show in New York that I wrote about in post 1126 was awesome. I had some last minute trouble with the electronics after a wire broke (it was hook-up wire, not good for repeated stress). Though I have no recollection of it, I'm certain that at some point when I was assembling that USB laser hat 7 years ago, I momentarily considered, should I really use black wire to denote POSITIVE, just because it's handy? And then thought, sure, it's not like I'm going to FORGET that I made that switch. I'm not an IDIOT who needs COLOR CHEAT CODES. So imagine my chagrin when in 2015 I foolishly soldered the positive and negative leads together and then spent minutes trying to connect to the thing over USB while it was just cooking. But I didn't fry it, and got the software up to modern OS X standards, fit it all in my luggage MacGyver style and got through airport security just fine, and even managed to get the drums there too. The show was super fun! A bunch of people I hadn't seen in ages but who happened to be in NY (or make the trek) surprised me by showing up, and I think I played my weird video game music to about 70 people. Definitely one neat thing about New York is how many people you can find that actually care about some obscure thing like that. I also really enjoyed seeing the other bands rock it live. There are a few videos of my section, and to show my gratitude I also made T7ES-heroifications of songs by Kleenex Girl Wonder and Saskrotch both, all of which I'll try to convert into a reasonable format and post here. But as you know it's New Year's Eve and that means the tradition of Drinking begins imminently!

Also: People have been rediscovering my Alphabetical Star Wars recently due to the new movie. Just tonight I was alerted to this tribute called ACEPS ABLLS which is the same idea applied to the even more hallowed Space Balls. This one is different because it was done automatically, using some new transcription alignment software which seems pretty cool. (It definitely has mistakes in it, but the accuracy is pretty impressive! It even hilariously catches some words in the singing in the closing credits.) So all of you who were asking for alternative supercuts with the ARST ARSW data can now create this on your own without too much tedium.

(9 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from November 2015

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Kleenex Girl Wonder, Saskrotch, Tom 7, Thunder & Lightning (30 Nov 2015 at 22:06)

Hi team,

I'm excited that on this Friday, December 4, I'll be playing a show in New York City. I'm delighted that this show is with two artists I really like. Headliner in charge is Kleenex Girl Wonder, whose precocious album Ponyoak is surely in my personal Top 10, and in some ways inspired my own poopy 7-track project(s). I also really love the strange redundant epic Yes Boss, which has some of the best lyrics this side of Franklin Bruno. But wait! This is not just a Rock 'n Roll show. Also performing is Saskrotch, who among other things made the chipmusic for the muy dificil exploration platformer game Rex Rocket. I heartily recommend the game and Saskrotch's sdtk.. (No offense to the other band playing! I just haven't heard your music yet. Also, no official word on whether I like my own music but you can probably guess.)

ROCK and ROL

Here is the Facebook event which you can "friend" or "poke." The show is 4 Dec 2015 at Fat Baby in LES, 7:30 doors, and costs $8/$10.

Though the show is billed as "Tom 7" I'll be performing my Tom 7 Entertainment System project. It's a kind of weird performance-art piece / chiptune thing; you can get a pretty good idea of what from this video of me performing it 8 years ago. I have some new music and some new technology this time, but if you get very bored of things that happen at 8 year intervals and have something in common, I invite you to not attend. But if you live in the York or environs, come say hi!

In other slow progression of time news, I just finished up the busy time at work so I expect to get to finishing some in-progress projects right after I get back from NYC. Watch this spot ----> [ ]

(4 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from October 2015

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Halloween 2015 (31 Oct 2015 at 21:58)

Yikes, this day got away from me and I need to post my monthly post! I spent a long time today designing a ray gun for this costume, but then when I went to 3D print it, it was like an 8 hour print time, so I was scrambling to finish in time.

Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty (FAKE)

I'm literally posting this from the party while wearing the costume! What a nerd! Bye!

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Entries from September 2015

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36th birthday: Great Race Cake Wreck! (29 Sep 2015 at 08:17)

Sunday was my 36th birthday, and this year it coincided with the Great Race 10k. Last time that happened I ran it carrying a tiny cake, a feat that I guess no longer seems that difficult to me, and so this year I needed to increase the size of the cake.

It took about a day and a half to make. The cake's skelebones are made of cardboard and its bone adhesive is hot glue. You can see the tab-style construction approach in this in-progress pic:

Cake skeleton in 'wheels-up' configuration

The cake of course also needed to have actual cake! Rose baked almost all of the 17 cakes that adorned it, a scene kind of like this:

Cake-o-rama

Some were mild caketastrophes and we did some America's Test Kitchen stuff to figure out whether it was a good idea to reduce the amount this ingredient or that one in order to get the most pliable and sturdy cake skin, but we didn't keep any notes or nothin' like that. We also made 6 pounds of frosting, which was not nearly enough.

Due to lack of forethought, the cake cardboard was so big that I couldn't fit it out of any of the doors of my house except turned on its side (and then just barely). But thanks to midthought, I did that ahead of adding any cake, which would not have tolerated rotation, and assembled it in the garage. It looked like this:

I did have to use the ladder to put the candles in

How could 6 pounds of frosting not have been enough? The "imagine cake here" stuff I wrote on the cardboard as an insurance policy against the eventuality that the cake would fall off while running. I really didn't have a lot of confidence in the vertical cakes, which were just attached with string and frosting. And if I was just going to be running around in a dirty cardboard box, I wanted people to at least have some hope of puzzling it out after I passed, like "Wait—I think it said something about cake on it? What does 'erstwhile' mean?" But it turned out my cakestimate was off, and we wouldn't have had enough ingredients anyway, so the bottom layer went without cakes (I put some insulation foam down there which you can see in a later picture).

Which was probably for the better. The skeleton was already sagging under the weight and the butter soaking into its paper joints.

That night I barely slept due to cakemares. These were not performative fears, but two main worries: That I would wake to find the cake had collapsed under its own weight, yielding deflcakegate, or that an enterprising ant would have found its way up the sawhorse legs to discover the motherlode, and I'd wake to find the costume teeming with millions of ants. Third worry: both scenarios. But in the morning it was fine, a simple team-lift effort, using the knees and not the lower back, to get it on me. I immediately realized that I was going to need a mouth hole, which I cut from the inside out, since it would not be easy to get that thing off again.

I stepped on a bathroom scale before and after to weigh in. The edifice was 30 lbs.

No longer a need to smile for photos

Since it also wouldn't fit in a normal car, we walked to the start, about 2 miles up the hill known as Squirrel. We got there pretty early, and managed to get it off for 20 minutes while we waited for the race to start.

This was probably the worst first mile of any costume I've done. Most of the other costumes are things you might reasonably wear walking for a short distance, and just get hard because of how they destroy your body. This one was really hard to start, and I was trying to keep it from ripping apart, and of course had not spent any time thinking about race ergonomics, so it was just bouncing its weight on my shoulders with each step. The shoulders got sweaty, the cardboard got softy, and tore, and some people were like "Looks like it's time to give up the cake! Do you need some help getting it off?" and I'm like "I'm not giving up!!". I had a bunch of weird arm techniques like where I'd lean backwards into the cake with my head and neck and push my elbows into my belly so that my hands would be rigid tripod legs, or where I'd lift the whole cake onto straight-up arms to breathe for a sec (but then I couldn't see), etc. Eventually the head came off except for a small cardboard tendon, and I looked like this:

Oops, forgot that I needed to smile again

But the flip side is that as cake fell off, it became lighter and somewhat easier. I decided to make a point to not actively shed cake, but when it did fall of of its own accord I was fine with that. In the last half, more and more hit the street, and it became plausible again to put the head back on and hold the bottom of the costume up with my elbows or whatever.

By the end of the race, it was light enough that I could run almost at a pace that one would call "running". I'm in this video crossing the finish line at about 8:30. My official time was 1h21m55s, slow of course but not all that bad. There's also some humorous coverage in local news. I'm sore in pretty weird ways today!

Category: races

(10 comments — 9 years ago) [ comment ]

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