I’m way behind on my ornament game this year because work has been insane lately. Here’s one I made two weeks ago for a neighbors small holiday open house. They provided a heavy blank paperboard ornament and Dana came up with the concept for this.
Here’s the illustration I created. (The final piece consists of layered felt that is laser cut and then spray glued together on the blank ornament.)
Here are the individual pieces of felt. I did illustrate the stars in gold/yellow but I found a silver backed felt and used that. I ended up stacking a few layers of the white snow to give it some depth, though I should have done a boolean difference of the top of the trees for the stars, or better yet, layered the stars a bit better. (I have another project in the works that is an improvement in this.)
Oh, it’s “Ornament 69” because we live on 69th Street. Happy Holidays!
The Korg NTS-1 is a $99 digital synthesizer and effects box that is just straight-up awesome. It’s cheap, but packed with features, including the ability to load custom oscillators and effects, and there are a bunch of them out there for free and for a price. I’ve had a blast making noise with this thing, and there are a few groups online for discussion of the NTS-1.
The NTS-1 is a kit you build yourself. Don’t worry, it just requires a screwdriver (which is included) and it’s really just assembling the enclosure around two circuit boards. Takes about 15 minutes if you go slow. Where the NTS-1 does not shine is in its durability. This is not a device you just toss into your bag, or that can easily travel to a gig. It is… fragile. The main fragility (as many will attest to) is in the connectors. So I’ve tried to strengthen them a bit.
I started by taking the unit apart. Well, just removing the top panel and top PCB. The rest of the pieces of the enclosure can stay put together.
The 1/8″ jacks are soldered on as surface mount components. This is pretty terrible, as they really should be through hole components to help provide a solid mechanical connection to the PCB. I’m sure it was done this way to keep things cheap. The problem is that if the jack pulls off the board it will probably pull off the solder pad as well, so you can’t really replace it. Sigh. I added a bunch of hot glue around the headphone jack. Some have questioned if this will do anything. I figure it’s better than nothing.
Here’s the same treatment to the other jacks. (MIDI in, sync in & out, and audio in.) Just lots of hot glue. Basically the more you plug and unplug things with these jacks the more stress they’ll be under. I’ve seen at least one person build a larger case around their NTS-1 and then use panel mount plugs so they aren’t repeatedly plugging and unplugging from the jacks on the unit. It’s a good solution but does increase the size of the unit.
I also added a laser cut overlay panel to mine. (Mostly cosmetic, though it does keep the top surface a bit cleaner.) I did have to grab some longer screws to hold it in place. If I remember correctly they were 2.5mm machine screws about 8mm long. (The stock ones were a bit too short to catch enough of the threads due to the increased height caused by the overlay.)
The file I used was just a slightly modified version of one that Korg provided. Since black and green are two of my favorite colors this looks great in my opinion.
Oh, one thing I forgot to do was put hot glue all over the Micro USB jack! I will need to open it up and add more glue to that.
Here’s a little sound demo of the Korg NTS-1 which has a built-in arpeggiator.
All these stats and graphs are provided by a Fitbit Charge 3 that I wear every day. I just grabbed screen shots from the Fitbit web site.
As mentioned last month I’ve started walking more every day in order to get fit, stay healthy, and lose a bit of weight. For November 2021 I got up to 441,795 steps! That is 32,736 more steps than the previous month. I don’t expect that it will increase each month, but October was my first month, and I think I got much better at walking in month two. (I definitely started slow in October.)
The stat known as “Floors” are measured using an altimeter and for November it was 1098. Just 10 more than October. I really don’t take that many flights of “stairs” but I do walk up and down hills, so I think that’s part of it. (On a busy day of working at home I will easily go up and down two sets of stairs multiple times per day. At the office there are… zero stairs.)
Mileage! Yeah, 208.51 miles in November. Which is crazy. That’s up 15.81 miles from October. Again, the slow start in October probably accounts for the lower number. I definitely try to get more distance in on the weekends. Typically Saturday and Sunday morning I try to do an hour long walk in the morning. If I can do an evening walk that really helps, and if not, I at least still get in my minimum goal each day.
How about them calories? 108,967 for November. Only about a thousand more than the previous month which is seems like it should be more, but I guess I had more to burn off the first month. I lost about 10 pounds in October but only about 6 pounds in November. I suppose this makes sense, and I’m fine with it. I still have more pounds I’d like to lose, so I’ll keep trying to get my numbers up there as far as steps per day.
I did some traveling during November and it was difficult to get in the steps I wanted during travel days. I’ve got a few similar things happening in December, so we’ll see how that goes.
While I’ve been doing this DAWless thing and avoiding using computers for music making I haven’t completely moved away from what might be called “computer music”. I was exploring iOS music applications and found the EGDR606 Drum Machine which was $3.99 USD.
It’s a recreation of the Roland TR-606 which means it’s similar to the Behringer RD-6 Analog Drum Machine I use. For that reason I gave it a try. While I would rather use the RD-6 every time, while on the move the EGDR606 can be a fun little thing to play with. Occasionally I’ll make some drum pattern than I can then try out on my RD-6, which is nice.
I did find the application a little rough as far as saving out patterns, but it it can export WAV files and you can grab them to move elsewhere. Honestly that’s probably due in part to the clunkiness of the iOS file system, so it’s not a huge deal. It could just be a bit cleaner.
(If you’re more of an 808 fan you can check out the EGDR808 from Elliot Garage instead.)
All these stats and graphs are provided by a Fitbit Charge 3 that I wear every day. I just grabbed screen shots from the Fitbit web site.
Wow, check it out! Starting slowly and increasing over the month for a total of 409,059 steps in October 2021. That’s quite a “step up” from the numbers of previous months.
Totally floored by this number! We only have stairs at home, there are none at work, but I think a lot of these are from the inclines in the streets I walk. 1,088 floors? I’ll take it! (I’m still not sure exactly happened around October 16th & 17th but since that was a weekend I’m guessing I was pretty damn active those days.)
I’m going the distance. (Though I’m not going for speed.) I walked 192.7 miles in October. That is…insane! But hey, I’ve got more miles to go before I sleep.
Burned at the wire? No, but burned 107,844 calories. I’ve also been burning more calories than I take in each day, so that means weight loss, which is a good thing, because I (like many people) added some “Pandemic Pounds” I wouldn’t mind losing. For the month of October I shed about 10 pounds. I’ve got a bit more to go but it’s a good start. (I’ve also started eating a bit better, including smaller breakfasts and, alas… less burritos.)
