Cold. I despise being cold. This big old house is never warm, except in the summer when it’s to hot to breathe. The downstairs bath is still gutted - I discovered last weekend that a joist needs replacing (or at least sistered), and the fact that its dark by the time I get home from work is doing nothing to encourage me to work on the weeknights. I did get all the wiring re-routed Monday evening, so perhaps this weekend I can get the joist in and start on the floor - that might help the heating situation a bit.

In other news, I’m looking for a mixer. Specifically:  12+ channel, at least 4-bus, decent, older, affordable (so not Mackie/Yamaha/Behringer, but not a Trident either…).  I’ve got it in my head to minimize the options I have when recording, so I’ve decided to start treating my PC as an 8-track recorder.  Granted, I can bounce to my heart’s content w/o worrying so much about noise as one would in a truly analog setup, but it will still force me to work within a set of confines. I’m hoping establishing a set of ‘rules’ will help me get unstuck.

Got the banjo cleaned up and rebuilt - took quite a bit of polishing to get all the years of crud off all the metal bits - it still shows its age, though, so that’s cool.  I put a set of regular strings on it, they just don’t work quite right with this short scale length.  I have a tenor set, just need to take 15 minutes and put them on.  I’ll post pics eventually…

OK, so I’m late to the party, but this is friggin’ cool!  Jack is a killer audio routing widget for linux that allows multiple applications to participate in audio I/O streams.  There’s been no direct equivalent on windows, AFAIK, except for ReWire, and that’s not universally supported.  This port of Jack seems to have an ASIO backend, so all your audio apps can see it.

I’m in the midst of rebuilding my windows box, as much as I love linux, the audio support isn’t quite there yet (least not with my hardware), so I’m gonna remain a fence-sitter for a while longer.  More news after I give it a play and see what happens…

Thanks to Dan turning me on to the wyrdfolk goodness from Some Dark Holler, I’ve been craving a banjo for about 6 months. Scored an old 4-string at an auction last night, photos and new sounds a forthcoming…

Update: It is apparently a tenor banjo (17 fret, “irish” tenor) of unknown origin. There are no marking to indicate its origin or maker, just a “Narawco” stamp on the head. Google doesn’t know what Narawco means, and neither do I.

CDM has an article about a new build of Pure Data called Pd-extended. I’ve always been fascinated by Pd (and it’s expensive cousin, Max/MSP), but the learning curve is insane. This new build claims to be better documented and have more of the inner goodness of Pd exposed to the user. The install certainly is painless (least on my Ubuntu box), we’ll see if I can get any noise out of it. I’m hoping it will be useful, and that I can get by brain around it. I’ve been very happy the last few months being MSFT-free, a killer noise-making app would be the cherry on top.

Found the other day in the park near my office: