Sunday, June 16, 2013

Tunes are go!

Holy Roland, I can't believe it's taken me until 2013 to move my music hosting off MySpace! The only thing more embarrassing is that people have invested money in MySpace in the interim... good luck Justin.

Anyway, I've got three albums up: Singlestar (the latest) along with collections of tracks for both film music and older stuff. The site is here, but I've also embedded players below. Enjoy!

Krylenko (Bandcamp)

Singlestar


Composed - Music for Film


Collected 1999-2009

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Remixing a mixer

Is there a recording musician who hasn't owned a Behringer mixer? They're cheap as chips and do what they say on the tin.

I'm surprised my current model is only the second I've owned in 15 years of mucking about with music gear. It's a tiny thing, but just about perfect for the space I have and inputs I need. That said, it didn't come with an aux send. Those are super-useful, especially with my new spring reverb, so I decided to add one.

A bit of parts diving, soldering, and gluing later and I've got a mono out, stereo return aux bus. Had to scrap the tape I/O but don't think I'll be missing it. Here's a pic of this truly classic Junkbox Raider mod:

I could have made it uglier, but I ran out of time.

 

Monday, January 28, 2013

I broke a what?!?!

I've busted a lot of stuff over the years - mostly the poorly constructed and therefore delicate projects I'd built, but also plenty of electronic components, hardware, circuit boards, etc. I've even broken and bent a few small tools.

But until yesterday I'd never snapped off half a pair of needlenose pliers so cleanly it looked like they'd been sawed apart. How's that even possible? (Sure, my finger strength is unparalleled, but I wield it gently. :)

I'd post a picture, but I can't be bothered to dig 'em out from under the pile of Robosapien discards clogging up the trash. Trust this random guy on the Internet, though - it really happened.

Maximum information, minimum post

I've been planning for a while to write up some research I worked on in 2011 involving intrinsic "motivation" for robots. We got a workshop paper out of it, and I presented the results to the ECE department last year. I also planned to extend it into my thesis project.

But... the lab went through some advisor round-robin and the project fell apart, and I just don't feel like writing it up into a full post anymore.

In a nutshell, our robot learned a policy for a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) to learn about objects in a space by manipulating them with its arm, then assigning object classification probabilities, with Shannon information gain across all objects as the learning reward.

Here's the AAAI workshop abstract, with a link to the full PDF:
http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW11/paper/view/3960

Here's a fun picture of the robot!