Tech – Government-Imposed Slavery in the United States High-Tech Sector

It doesn’t matter even a tiny bit that you don’t want to be their employee, you never wanted to be their employee, that you wanted to be responsible for your own damned taxes. It doesn’t matter even a tiny bit that FooBarTec didn’t and doesn’t want you as an employee, that you may not even be qualified for employment by their standards. The IRS decides to “reclassify” you as an employee, no discussion… and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, because all of the work that they are “reclassifying” is in the past now.

Surprise, surprise… survival on Mars will require generalists and appropriate tech, not specialists and high tech.

None of these general thoughts should come as a surprise. Survival on Earth has almost always implied stepping down from whatever level of technology has failed to a level that still works. It’s one of the most fundamental principles, and a reason that the line between “survivalism” and interest in various forms of primitive technology is so blurred.

One more microphone…

I yielded to the temptation… the Marantz SG-58 “Professional Audio Scope” (302 mm shotgun mic) was apparently introduced at $79, then slowly ratcheted down in price over time. Last week it briefly hit $13.44 (Amazon Prime shipping) and I “bit”. Hard to pass up at that price, even just out of curiosity. Shortly after I ordered the price bounced back up to $49.98.

Hackaday on Stirling Engines

It’s really not that difficult to understand the working principle of a Stirling engine, it’s mostly just counter-intuitive that there’s enough energy there for it to really work… similar in that respect to the fire piston, or the Rüdiger roll. As described, they all seem barely plausible, you have to see it to really believe it.

Fake TV

What this is, is a small inexpensive box that plugs into the wall with a panel of multi-colored LEDs. It can be set on, off, or to come on for various periods after dark. When it’s on it uses the panel of LEDs to effectively simulate the light coming from a television set… and does a good, convincing job of it. From outside of the room the indirect light coming from the room looks very much as if there were a TV on, with the typical changing and flickering patterns that one would see from pans, jump cuts, commercial breaks, etc., with no repeating pattern that I’ve been able to detect, giving every appearance that the room must be occupied.

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools

I subscribed to the mailing list as soon as it started, and while the quality has varied somewhat and there have been times when I felt that it wandered too far into non-utilitarian (non-useful) selections, I’ve never been tempted to un-subscribe, and I’ve learned of a great many useful things from it that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

DIY SM7b microphone?

Maybe this dynamic microphone classic is worth the $400 price tag, “Made in Mexico” and all. Maybe not. It has certainly proven itself many times over. Thing is, I’ve got no business owning one even at a quarter of that price. I’ve got negligible microphone experience in recent decades (when I last sang on stage the Electro-Voice EV664 was the mic of choice- ancient history). There’s no way I can remotely justify spending $400 (not to mention $150 for a Cloudlifter CL1, which seems to be the “trick” setup) on this thing.

Of course, I still want one.

Sense and nonsense: Studio Monitors

I may be about to make an exception for “studio (reference) monitors”. I have, admittedly, pretty much zero experience with them, and I went into learning more about them with an open mind. Having done so, I can’t say that they are or are not worth the money that professionals pay for them (which is often extreme), but I can say for sure that many of the reasons that I’m being fed for that make no sense.

PVC in “Furniture Grade”? Am I the only one who didn’t know?

Anyway, what I have in mind now requires building a small space frame or two, so naturally I started thinking about PVC pipe. The stuff has many virtues, it’s strong, impervious to the elements, pretty easy to work with even without specialized tools, and the specialized tools that you might want for small projects are inexpensive and don’t take up a lot of room, so you don’t need a dedicated workshop.

A Pocket Recording Studio

A few days ago there was a deal on Slickdeals (now expired) for the Samson Go Mic USB Microphone. I think MSRP on this is $50, it seems to go for just under $40 normally, the deal was for $30 from Adorama with a $5 mail-in rebate* for a net cost of $25 shipped. I had seen it and read some things about it before, so I was intrigued- but the place is filling up with microphones, I clearly didn’t need another, so I resisted for a few days. Finally curiosity won out, as it usually does with me, and I ordered it. It got here yesterday and I played around with it for a few hours last night. Turns out I don’t regret the purchase in the least. I’m impressed with the little beastie, I hope I can express why.

Gear Lust – The Zoom H6

There are things that are very cool functionally but aren’t impressive to look at, and there are things that are cool to look at but not impressive functionally.

In the first category I think first of the Raspberry Pi single-board computer. There is a ton of potential in these little things, but you really have to know what it is and then think about what you can do with it to really appreciate that. To the eye, it’s just a very small circuit board, it doesn’t look particularly interesting, much less cool.

In the second category I think first of the prop-replica field, and especially the sort of stuff that Adam Savage turns out in Youtube videos. These look very, very cool, but it’s all skin-deep, the bottom line is that they may look and sound and even to some degree act as though it does something really interesting, but it’s all “a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”. It’s basically a toy, a fake… and somehow that really isn’t cool at all.

Mars is in the Air

Honestly, how could you NOT love an honest-to-god spaceship with a hatch latching mechanism from a junked minivan? This not only captures the best spirit of the Maker movement, but also Victor Korman’s excellent and prescient book Kings of the High Frontier, and, for that matter, Tom Swift, Tom Swift Jr., and a whole slew of we-can-do-it “juvenile” science fiction from ages past, from what seems in retrospect like an alien, long-vanished culture. I loved it all.

Home Recording Centered on a Raspberry Pi, How feasible?

As I recently posted I came across a “deal” on the Behringer “U-PHORIA” (ugh, stupid name) UMC22 and UMC202HD USB audio interfaces, for $40 or $45. Even though I don’t anticipate getting a lot of use of out of these for… well, who knows. If there’s a move in the offing, which seems inevitable now, it might be a year or more… still, it got me thinking.

I was reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the functional differences between condenser microphones and dynamic microphones, and the problems of filtering out background noise, and one of the consistent gripes was about the microphones picking up computer fan noise.

Since I’ve done a lot with Raspberry Pi computers and have several of them around, I jokingly thought “why not just record with a Raspberry Pi? No fan!”.

Then the more I thought about it, the less it seemed like a joke.

Seriously, why not?