Blog

Writer's drip April 26, 2022
It only took me 15 years, but I’ve finally started to properly manage, organize, and zero out my Gmail inbox. This wasn’t for lack of trying. Every 2 or 3 years I try to set up a few filters and categorize the mountain of emails that come my way, but after sitting down with the problem and stumbling upon a system that works for me, I’ve been meaning to write about it here and share...
Why build a music studio PC in 2021? April 12, 2021
The last time I got my hands dirty with building a custom PC was about 10 years ago, cobbling together a small home theater computer that also doubled as a large RAID array for storing a burgeoning media collection. I had built a few desktop machines before then in the late 90s/early 2000s, a time when PC gaming and PC building was a much less of a cool pursuit, but since then I’ve reliably stuck...
Getting Started with Samples Packs January 29, 2021
Ever wondered what the secret is to creating an inspiring piece of electronic music? Different musicians who admire different artistic inspirations will inevitably give you different answers here, but if you ask me, it all starts with a good set of samples.
Peanut Butter Wolf 24-hour Valentine's Day mix February 14, 2020
A diggers paradise, I remember watching this event live streamed via Stones Throw as PB Wolf spun record after record from his cozy basement vinyl cave. I didn’t quite make it the entire 24 hours, more important things were in the works that Valentine’s Day, but every so often I remember this massive masterwork exists and I highly encourage you to listen in and share it with someone special (no matter what day it might...
Bye Bye Picasa API April 05, 2019
It’s always a nice feeling to realize, after a long bout of confusion and pounding my head against the desk, that I was never actually going crazy in the first place. Putting together this Jekyll site has been a fun and challenging exploration of the unfamiliar and I enjoy the process of cobbling together new features while figuring out what’s possible as I go. Most of the time this means breaking things completely before getting...
5 Jekyll lessons I've learned so far July 25, 2018
About three weeks ago, I had a breakthrough. Ever since my old Wordpress website kicked the bitbucket I’ve been exploring more minimal, lightweight options to transition my personal website to. Jekyll was of course the winner of that competition, but even as I’ve started to enjoy the robustness of engine and simplicity of working with a static site generator there have been multiple hurdles to clear in order to get things working the way I’ve...
Happy GDPR Day! May 25, 2018
Pop those bottles and drop those balloons from the ceiling, it’s May 25th, aka, GDPR Day! Today the General Data Protection Regulation goes into full effect in Europe. For us Americans it doesn’t mean too much, unless you happen to work somewhere that does business with European clients or otherwise manages data records of EU citizens (in which case GDPR has been a pain to implement on your systems), but as controversial as the GDPR...
Things I wish I had known before I got into synthesizers January 26, 2018
They say that the longest journey begins with the first step. I took my first step into the world of electronic music production way back in college, getting to understand this obscure new software a friend turned me on to called Ableton Live, but it wasn’t until 2010 that I made my way into the wider world of audio hardware, MIDI controllers, and analog synthesizers, permanently cementing my interest in making music as well as...
Installing Arch Linux on a Thinkpad X1 Yoga for fun and profit December 14, 2017
I’ve been a big fan and supporter of Ubuntu Linux for well over a decade, since at least 6.06 (Dapper Drake). They’ve done more than any other distro to help propel Linux forward as a tangible option for a desktop operating system among average computer users, and that’s a great thing. A rising tide lifts all ships.
Bookmark No More November 29, 2017
Ever since the introduction of social media, bookmarking stuff on the internet has seemingly become irrelevant. Of course the physical act of bookmarking websites hasn’t gone away, you probably have the equivalent of an Amazon warehouse of orphan webpages sitting in a dusty folder in your web browser somewhere. We find cool things on the web and we want to come back to them someday, so we add a bookmark to that page and then...
Backpack Quest II - Pack Harder October 10, 2017
What’s in a bag? Stuff, generally, but on a deeper more philosophical level, what makes a particular bag good at what it does versus every other bags out there in the world today? They’re all just a pouch with zippers and straps on the back, right? Well, if you travel enough, you’re probably on the same page as me when it comes to hauling your things from point A to point B (and all points...
Archive.org to the rescue August 25, 2017
One day, a few months shy of two years ago, I did something very stupid to my web server. All of the downtime since then, the moving away from Wordpress, the roll over to a new website and hosting solution, was precipitated by one unthinking moment of weakness: upgrading my server’s operating system without first taking a full system backup. Up until that point I had been running the same Wordpress install on the same...
Minor tasks, major procrastinations August 22, 2017
What brings me to write? I guess it would have to be stillness, peace, a blank sheet of paper and not a single other worry or thought in the back of my head besides the ideas I hope to put down permanently. Only problem is, I have a lot of nagging thoughts and ideas that so easily distract me from the creative process.
Make the switch to Jekyll in only 37 easy steps! April 12, 2017
Today marks this site’s official switch over from Wordpress, a CMS I’ve utilized for almost 12 years, to a more light-weight and agile platform, Jekyll. I’m looking forward to a long a fruitful relationship with something a little leaner and meaner than Wordpress, and hosting things on a personal Github repository via Github Pages is a welcomed solution, but I’ll be damned if getting things off the ground wasn’t the slightest bit confusing and frustruating....
IPv4 finally exhausted, long live IPv6 September 24, 2015
From the folks over at ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers):
Surfing the wavetable January 16, 2015
The Elektron Monomachine. Six mono tracks, five different synthesis engines, a lot of possibilities. I had one of these machines a few years ago, actually the second synthesizer I ever purchased, but if you’ve ever used an Elektron box you know that there is a bit of a learning curve with getting adjusted to how the Swedish do hardware, not to mention having to understand how each synth engine works and is modeled. With so...
Fortune-TV - fortune files full of TV quotes November 01, 2014
There are many things I like about using Linux/UNIX, but one of my favorite things to play around with is a little program known as fortune. It’s very simple (I get along well with very simple programs), the purpose of fortune is to spit out a randomly selected strings from a list of strings (a fortune file in our case), like a Magic 8-Ball or a fortune cookie (except funnier and less edible).
A man, a plan, a Eurorack modular October 14, 2014
As someone who has made their way through a variety of synthesizers, samplers, effects, mixers, and other machines that go bleep in the night, I’ve never gone into too much detail about modular synthesizers. It was watching Radiohead perform Idiotque on Saturday Night Live in 2000 when I first got my first glimpse of a modular system, though at the time I had no idea what I was looking at, only that it was gigantic,...
Constructing a complete drum kit October 04, 2014
Drums are the basis of any great track. Many times when crafting a song you’ll find yourself dealing with the rhythm of the track first. To some extent the rhythm ends up dictating the majority of your tune, it sets the tempo, the timbre of the individual drum hits creates a specific mood, even the act of adding or taking out specific drum tracks creates the skeleton of your song, laying out where other sounds...
Solving cloud sync issues with Synology Cloudstation June 04, 2014
I like the cloud, I really do. Being able to seamlessly transfer and make your files accessible across any of your machines from anywhere in the world is a pretty great use of networks and servers. The cloud has also replaced the need (in a lot of instances) for a local development machine as a place where code can live and be accessed by others and executed remotely.

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