Tuesday, December 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 December 2021

Control Surface Edition

Top Story

  • With the new software lab buildout I'm going to end up with eight computers on my desk - half laptops and half NUCs, so they don't take up much room.  And it's a big desk.  Huge actually, it's made from the oak floorboards of an old wool warehouse and weighs about three thousand pounds.

    Anyway, with three or possibly four monitors each with four inputs, there'll be no problem plugging everything in to a display.  But then there's sound.  What I want is all of those systems wired up to a single good speaker system, so it doesn't matter what the sound source is, it comes through loud and clear.

    I could use a Behringer mixer; they're easy to find and reasonably priced.  But they are mono, and designed for XLR or at best 1/4" phone jacks, so for each 1/8" stereo input I'd need a cable to convert to it two 1/4" mono plugs, which again, easy to get, but having eight of those plugged into a 16 channel mixer seems like overkill.

    If only there were something small, cheap, and purposed-designed to take five 1/8" stereo inputs, provide suitable fader, gain, and balance controls, and deliver three 1/8" outputs at line, speaker, and headphone levels respectively and maybe - stop me if I'm dreaming - have a special cable to loop multiple units together like the Maker Hart Loop Mixer (Amazon) oh wait that's just what I need hang on (clicking noises) right that should arrive next week.


  • Included in my lab shopping list is regrettably a MacBook Air because I will need to test some things on a Mac.  Plan is - with all four notebooks - that they will sit on a shelf while plugged in to two 27" monitors each, and rarely actually move.  They're laptops in potentia.

    That's fine with Windows.  Do it all the time.  Scaling support isn't perfect but it works.

    On an M1 Mac though if you venture outside standard 4k resolution the results are likely to be poop which is odd because Apple doesn't make a computer with a 4k screen.  (The Register)

    MacBook Air is 2560x1600; MacBook Pro 14" and 16" are 3024x1964 and 3456x2234 respectively; the 24" iMac is 4480x2420 and the 27" 5120x2880; and the Pro Display You Can't Afford It Edition is 6016x3384.

    So it's kind of curious why M1 Macs only give reliable results on third-party monitors if they run natively at 4k.

    But credit to Apple for creating new opportunities for independent software developers fixing their shitty operating system.


  • The jelly beans arrived too.  Amazon still won't let me order more, even though they're in stock.

    Were they really worth the wait?

    ...

    Yeah, actually.  These are pretty good.


Tech News



Hold Me Closer Tiny Mixer Video of the Day



That's the mixer I just ordered.  Apparently it's halfway decent, which is all I ask.  If I end up doing audio engineering that isn't 100% digital I'll buy something else.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Oi, the name's Sharon ya berk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 If the sum total of information stored keeps growing at the current (exponential) rate, we're going to need more punch-card operators than there are people on Earth by 1998.  It's a good thing our governments are keeping a close eye on these sorts of trends.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 08 2021 02:24 AM (LADmw)

2 Well, moderns are increasingly* dissatisfied with binary things, so the future of computing will be in vacuum tubes.

*According to these academics we dug up somewhere.  Either that, or we got into a university collection of coprolites. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 08 2021 09:34 AM (r9O5h)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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