The Big Think

Widow sells husbands Transformers collection. For a million dollars.

Fresh off the tubes comes this video of Alan Szabo, Jr- R/C chopper pilot extraordinaire. I used to build and fly R/C airplanes in college, until I got jealous of them and got my pilot’s license. Flying R/C airplanes takes some practice and I got tired of damaging my planes while learning. \

During that time I came to realize just how incredibly hard flying an R/C helicopter is. I tried it on simulators (with the transmitter box and everything) several times and was always thrilled when I could take off, hover, and move forward very slowly without crashing. 15 seconds without a $900 virtual breakup was a real feat. It’s that hard.

Alan Szabo shows that I am a punk. You just have to see it to believe it, but the level of control this guy has is amazing. It looks like he’s on the edge of disaster every second, but he’s always totally in command. Incredible.

Just finished Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and The Crucible of Time by John Brunner. I went to Half-Price Books tonight (always a dangerous thing) and walked out with six, count ‘em, six books. The good news was that four of them were on the clearance shelf and I got them for $1.00 each, so very little damage done to the wallet (the others were only $4 and $7). I can’t remember the last time I bought a book from Barnes and Noble, even though I’ve been there dozens of times in the last year. But set me loose in a Half-Price Books and I’m guaranteed to come out of there with something.

I picked up Summerland on the advice of Barry who read it a few years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like. I’m way behind in my reading this year, having only finished 10 of the 30 books I want to read. The studio build really set me back, but fortunately I’m back at it, so I should get in the mid-twenties by Christmas (don’t laugh, Scott and Katherine, some of us are slow readers!)

Lego Meister-Master builds 350 pound aircraft carrier from over 200,000 lego bricks.

First light for the Great Canary Telescope in Spain.

The Maker Faire auditions come to Austin. The big weekend is in October, but this was the preliminary gig for staffing up the show. Wish I could have seen it!

Now that the studio is complete (I really, really swear I’ll post pictures someday soon), I’ve been recovering for the last few weeks and enjoying working in this space. It’s so wonderful to be able to show off my work to friends and have them Ooo and Ahh at everything.

I’ve been getting the itch to build something again, but this time I wanted to do something way outside my experience (as if the studio wasn’t enough). But instead of disrupting our lives for three months, messing up the whole house with sawdust and tools, and spending I-don’t-want-to-say-how-many-thousands of dollars on a project, I would like to try something different. I’ve been thinking about just what that could be and have narrowed down my set of requirements to these:

1. New skills I want to build something that requires several skills I don’t have yet, and the more uncommon the better.

2. Must incorporate skills I already have. I want to bring to bear as many of my current skills as possible. This means woodworking and shop skills, which means tools, naturally. But I would like to use my tools in new ways, or to do things I’ve never done before. What I really mean is that it has to have a whole new level of:

3. Precision and beauty. I want to work on a higher level of precision than I’ve worked before. Much of my furniture looks good from a distance, and as I’ve progressed as a Maker I have been able to increase my quality and detail, but I’ve still never attained the level of craftsmanship that I would like. This new project will have surprising and beautiful detail at a higher level of quality than I have attained to date. I would like to build something with museum-quality beauty that will outlast me.

3. Complexity. More than just an inert wooden box or piece of furniture. I want it to be useful for something other than just sitting there and looking pretty. Concurrent with goals 1 and 3, this means possibly building parts of it out of non-wooden materials, which could open up all sorts of project possibilities in the future. Some kind of brass or interesting soft metal work would qualify nicely.

4. Must take a long time but be able to be put aside when I hit a roadblock. Oddly, I would like a project that I can’t finish quickly. Something I can really dig my teeth into. Not something I can finish in a long weekend, a couple of weeks, or even a month or two. I want to attempt something that will take me really deep into a new area and force me to do some real research to come up with the design. However, I don’t want to get so far off the beaten path that I’m making something that has never been attempted before. So, complex but familiar, with a bit of the unusual will become my mantra.

5. Small. Because I want to be able to put it aside when I stall, the thing needs to be small enough to get out of the way. This means no new additions to the house, I’m not going to restore a car, and it won’t be anything that requires more than about 5 square feet for storage while in construction. After it’s done I want to display it (preferably in my studio), so it will have to be in the breadbox-sized range.

6. Finally, and here’s the most important thing to me, the new project has to bring together as many of my other interests as possible. Which ones? I have many interests. Some of them I feed for a while, learn what I want, and then move on, but science, woodworking, and astronomy are near the top of my list of interests, and they’ve been with me consistently for several decades, only growing stronger as I’ve fed them. I love learning new things about the natural world and reading books about astronomers of the past and what they discovered using simple tools. Those tools have become massively complicated, but there is still room for the amateur to appreciate science and astronomy with low-capability devices.

So I have decided to build, from scratch, a telescope. It will be beautiful, functional, and portable. Powerful enough to view the planets and stars, and beautiful enough to sit in a museum. I don’t know what the design will be (Refractor? Reflector?Dobsonian? Schmitt-Cassegrain? Newtonian?) or how it will be mounted (Alt-Azimuth? Equatorial? Motorized? Free-swinging?) I want to build the mount as well as the scope. I’ll explore the benefits of each design as well as the possibilities of making my own lenses or mirrors (probably mirrors, which means an S-C or Dobsonian reflector, but I’m not ruling anything out yet. I’ll probably purchase my own eyepieces, since they are really important to a good telescope and next to impossible for the amateur to build, but I want to make as much of the rest of the telescope as possible myself- including the main optics. I’ve read that it’s possible to grind your own mirrors- a messy, time-consuming, labor intensive art. I anticipate that this project will be of the on-and-off variety as I stop for a few weeks or months to research and discover what the next step will be, or as work draws me away from the shop. I have a lot of reading to do before I can even decide what the final design will be! I’ve ordered three books from Amazon on optics and telescope building and look forward to digging into them. I’ve also raided our library for astronomy books. I have a lot of astronomy books.

So I’ll create a new category on the blog here: telescope. I’ll use it to keep track of my thoughts on the design and philosophy of the project, as well as detail the construction as it goes along (with pictures as I go this time!). I anticipate that it will take me several years with lots of pauses and downtime between posts. You can easily buy a mirror and eyepiece and slap together a Dobsonian-mount reflector in a few days using nothing more than a cardboard tube and a few pieces of plywood. That may be a good starting point for me, but ultimately I am aiming for something much more difficult and detailed. Something beautiful and functional and wonderful.

Please join me for the adventure!

More news on the recent discovery of water on planet HD 189733b.

Good thing we have the Drake Equation around. Now that’s good science!

Smartflix. Rent instructional DVD’s. Everything from instrument flying to firearm repari to music theory (to sewing and cooking, locksmithing, electronics, etc, etc…)

Nova has a great set of short videos online about the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

…there can be no loud.”

Why music is sounding worse today than 20 years ago. A short lesson in overcompression. Compression is a great thing. It helps to smooth out a jagged performance or poor microphone levels, but taken to an extreme, overcompression causes a loss of clarity. Check out the video for a good explanation.

The use of compression is a subjective thing. I try and keep my compression usage to a minimum (technically, around 2.5:1 or so). I’ve seen the “big boys” compress at 4:1, 5:1, or even 10:1. Doing so can squash the juice out of any track. You’ll have a loud sound, but there’ll be no detail or contrast in it. Ick.

They do this to get the most out of the radio bandwidth, and to compete with every other track that’s overcompressed. It’s an arms race where the loser is your ears.

Scientists find the first instance of water vapor on an extrasolar planet. Great news! it’s not exactly one of the elements of the Drake Equation, but it’s good nonetheless.

Here’s the Drake Equation:

and you can find the full explanation for it here.

Incidentally, the N sub E is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets. As we understand carbon-based life, water is a pretty important step to fulfill this requirement, so the presence is a good indicator. You could just possibly have silicon based life, but using other elements (iron, oxygen, etc) to base your critters on gets very difficult very quickly. Carbon and water are your best bets by a huge margin, so finding water (carbon is common) is great news.

New Halo 3 Trailer. Love that main theme.

Anti Helium!

This would be fun. I’d like to try this and regular helium at the same time and see what happens.

I can’t imagine how long this took. Wow.

David Pogue in the new musical iPhone.

Geeky post. Just ignore.

Been messing around in Soundtrack Pro looking at the sfx and foley stuff, as well as Apple’s idea of audio workflow. I still don’t think Apple has quite the power in Soundtrack that they want the public to believe (jumping from version 1.1 straight to version 2 is a bit of a cheat), but Soundtrack Pro has some amazing features that leave other audio apps (Pro Tools and Digital Performer) in the dust. Stuff like auto click removal and DC offset fixes, as well as timeline conformity across several apps (mainly FCP). I only hope they continue to improve the product.

For now, even though it means a bit more hand tweaking, I’ll stick with DP. As a result of the session today with Adam I’m going to go ahead and upgrade to the X version of DP. I discovered that the computer likes to rev the internal fans up to full power when in OS 9. During the tracking session today it got hard to hear detail with the machine screaming along next to me. It’s virtually silent (okay, not silent, but much quieter) in X, and the power management software in OS X enables better cooling at slower fan speeds. I can even close the cabinet door and the computer doesn’t go into high-power conniption mode after three minutes. And I can monitor the internal heat in X. I can’t do this in OS 9 for some reason. The HD temp rarely gets above 110 degrees F so I don’t have much to worry about, but I’m loathe to seal the computer in the cabinet without sufficient circulation. I’d hate to see silicon melt.

I’m looking at other equipment upgrades as well, but those won’t be for awhile, or unless I get a big gig that enables them. I really need to get the AT4035a mic and boom kit from B&H, as well as a wireless mic (the Sennheiser G2). I’m considering a solid state recorder like the Marantz PMD670 or even the Tascam HD-P2 down the road. With this rig I could record on location at 48khz/24 bit resolutions straight to a CF card that would transfer data directly to the Mac. Dual record systems for film work (instead of the adequate but non-redundant system of recording straight into camera), as well as the ability to record foley and fx work in the field. I’d love to take the system to the shooting range up the road and spend the afternoon, then dump all those samples into Apple’s Loop Utility and categorize them. It’d be fun banging around to get sfx in the shop, too. I had to do a bunch of shop-sound foley a few years ago and lugging the tools upstairs into the studio was a huge pain. I don’t have any way to record off-site except for the wonky DAT deck (or a client’s DV camera), so having a system like this would greatly add to my flexibility.

Lots of gear that I could get, but it won’t be happening for little while. Still, today was a good work day. It’s good to feel the business momentum!

Today I had the most excellent day of voiceover work in the new studio. My friend and actor/voiceover artist (and there’s a big difference! Just because you can act doesn’t mean that you can do convincing voice work) Adam Creighton came over and we spent about 6 hours wringing out the new booth, new mic, workflow, and everything else that pertains to having sessions here. It was a great experience. Adam got some new additions to his demo and I got to tweak and track down gremlins. It was particularly helpful to have someone in the booth so that I could see what my workflow is going to be. How am I going to interact with the computer and the mixer (which are about 7 feet apart)? How is the workspace in the booth (need a clip-on music stand). Where should the talent stand in order to use the window most effectively? Do I need any more equipment (as always, yes: more auralex, bass traps, monitor mounts, a better talkback mic setup, and a small headphone mixer).

Adam spent about 90 minutes in the booth positively wringing himself out doing all kinds of different stuff. He went from soft Japanese Kanji-Master (okay, you know what I mean, grasshopper) all the way to enraged comic book superhero (wow!) while I tried to follow his levels and get a good setting on the gear. His performance gave the new AT4040 mic a serious workout and convinced me that it really is at the top of the pack for the price.

After the recording we did some editing and comping of the raw tracks, in addition to laying out a good flow for the two 60 second demos. We’ll add music and sfx early next week. I’ll be sure to post the demos here and link to Adam’s demo site.

By the way, if you’re in the market for a really stellar v/o talent, give Adam a call. He’s quite a good actor, as well. He’s had gigs on Friday Night Lights, industrial and training films, and all sorts of other projects. Plus, he’s a real pro and a pleasure to work with. And he likes buffalo wings. How can a guy who likes wings be bad?

I got some good pics of Adam in the booth for the eventual website upgrade/redo. I keep promising to post studio construction pics. Sorry that I haven’t done it yet. I want to do a really good job on the post and that will take awhile.

Street magic with the new iPhone.

It’s raining again! Yay!