Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 50

@bifpowell I haven't played for a while, but my main style is Nike Rodgers style funk rhythms. That's what I learned the guitar for. To add such rhythms to my tracks.

@bifpowell One interesting design I've seen is optical pickups. Their big drawback is that you need to enclose the strings and pretty much design a custom guitar body. They can't be fitted to standard guitars because the alignment is so critical.

@bifpowell I kind of want to swap it for something with a brighter sound. It's not ideal for my guitar style. I bought it because I wanted a humbucker, and the problem with humbuckers is that they're not very bright. Electric guitars are really conservative. I'm pretty sure we could pull off something better than magnets and piezo mics if we applied the full might of 21st century tech to pickup design.

Luggage is packed. I leave in one and a half hour's time. My itinerary:

- Short bus ride to the train station
- 30-minute train ride to the airport
- 2-hour flight to Tromsø
- 1-hour flight to Lakselv
- Taxi to my parents' house

I won't be in Lakselv until 23:30. Dad usually picks me up at the airport, but they'll both be in bed since this is a late flight, so I'm taking a taxi and letting myself in this time. It'll be a bit weird to be in the house but not see them until tomorrow.

I'll be travelling for 5 hours today, between 18:15 and 23:30. About a third of it will be checking in or waiting at airports. I'm washing clothes at the moment and will be packing my suitcase later on.

The MEMS microphone breakout modules they sell on eBay are shitty. Their frequency response is flat, but stops at 10 kHz, and the main digital module they sell has a INMP441 capsule with an I2S output on it, meaning that you're stuck with the sampling rate they set at the factory. PDM (pulse density modulation, also known as sigma-delta modulation) is much better. You can actually do your own filtering and downsampling then.

The MEMS microphone breakout modules they sell on eBay are shitty. Their frequency response is flat, but stops at 10 kHz, and the main digital module they sell has a INMP441 capsule with an I2S output on it, meaning that you're stuck with the sampling rate they set at the factory. PDM (pulse density modulation, also known as sigma-delta modulation) is much better. You can actually do your own filtering and downsampling then. They probably avoid that because most hobbyists can't write DSP code.

Whenever I see some kind of sex-themed account in the federated timeline, I wonder who is following them. "Fetish Ass" with a GIF of a naked woman's ass waving at the camera as an avatar.

Who is even turned on by something so vulgar?

This, together with 90% of the porn that exists out there, gives me the impression that all you need to do to turn on the average man is wave a vagina in their face. It's like shaking a rattle at a baby to make it laugh. So extremely direct and basic.

A Norwegian foreign correspondent reports on how shockingly old fashioned the United States can be compared to West Europe:

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.nrk.no/urix/er-usa-egentlig-veldig-gammeldags_-1.14506087&xid=17259,15700023,15700043,15700186,15700190,15700253,15700256,15700259&usg=ALkJrhjhg4-VYiRNsjF4R5MoBWWoLPcnYA

I've been vaguely aware of this for a while, but this article really sets the record straight. Hollywood and Silicon Valley make America seem far more modern and affluent than it really is. If you're an immigrant, you're far better off going to Germany or the Nordic countries. Britain? Well... It's mildly old fashioned too, so maybe not...

@sn0w You'd expect the local timeline to be influenced by said interests, is what I'm saying. It never seems to be. It's hard to tell you're on a themed instance most of the time. So then I begin to wonder why we have them. Presumably, you want to actually engage in conversations about the subject, but nowhere seems better than anywhere else for that as far as I can tell.

Things that don't need themed instances because every instance is already full of them:
- Linux talk
- Anime talk
- LGBT talk
- Furry talk

The average Mastodon user is a furry transgender software developer who watches anime, owns a ThinkPad and uses Linux, so if your instance is dedicated to any of that stuff, I'm not gonna count it as a real themed instance.

Things that don't need themed instances because every instance is already full of them:
- Linux talk
- Anime talk
- LGBT talk
- Furry talk

The average Mastodon user is a furry transgender software developer who owns a ThinkPad and uses Linux, so if your instance is dedicated to any of that stuff, I'm not gonna count it as a real themed instance.

I have yet to sign up on a themed Mastodon instance and go "Yes, this is exactly what I expected."

Every insrance looks the same to me. Just a bunch of people posting about random stuff that they have on their minds.

I just signed up on a Mastodon instance for STEM scholars. Not much STEM going on except a few people talking about Linux, and that's every other Mastodon instance too, in my experience..:

Why in God's name is someone having a barbecue at 10 PM in Norway in April? It's cold and dark outside. I'm aware of this barbecue because I can smell it here from my bedroom through the window, and it's making me crave smoked pork chops.

If there is one thing I wish the Internet was better at, it's teamwork. We're all just doing our own thing. Why isn't there more pooling of resources? Why don't you see more businesses being started in cyberspace? I mean, I'm totally down for starting some kind of international team of software and hardware developers who knock out cool products. Instead, we kind of live like cats. You even see it in the hackerspaces. No one working together and everyone doing solo stuff despite sharing a space.

During one of the more playful conversations around the lunch table at work, Francisca, one of our designers, proposed that airlines should just knock people out and stuff them in capsules instead of forcing people to sit through long flights. If you should accidentally wake up mid-flight, you hit a panic button and gas is released to knock you out again.

Just imagine how cheap the tickets would be! Also, boarding would be over in no time, since they could just load you in with a forklift.

Now that I've taken the pick-and-place machine course at the hacker space, I should think up a project that uses it. What it excels at is placing large arrays of SMDs on a PCB.

I wonder what I could do with a large array of MEMS microphones and a high performance ARM microcontroller.

One loose knot I really need to tie up is connecting things to a computer. I want to make USB devices, preferably high speed ones.

I'm thinking I won't be bringing any electronics projects with me up north for easter. If I decide to start a project while I'm up there, I'll have to start off by drawing a schematic and ordering parts anyway.

That peak at 25 kHz kind of explains why smartphone and tablet microphones sound so crisp compared to more traditional microphones. It doesn't look too hard to neutralise the response with some digital EQ filters. It wouldn't surprise me if some mobile devices already do that, since digital filters are basically free.

Knowles SPH0641 MEMS digital microphone. That's a very good frequency response for the human hearing range. You could use this as a calibration microphone. I reckon the bump at 25 kHz is the resonance frequency of the diaphragm. That's probably a compromise. Too high, and the diaphragm would be too stiff, too low and it would be audible. It's also a decent compromise for the ultrasound range, since it leaves the 36 - 70 kHz range flat to within +/- 1 dB.