weird skills – Jeremy Bent

Jeremy January 13, 2009

Reflection media, weird skills

My Great-Grandfather Is Smiling In Heaven

I come from a family of notorious tinkerers. My great-grandfather, Mort Mason, was a lover of all things mechanical; my dad spent part of his inheritance in 1983 on a computer that’s outstripped by most modern calculators; and my brother has probably broken more computers than many people will ever own. Messing with things is in my blood, and although I sometimes resist its siren call, necessity will drive me to my birthright.

Case in point: I obtained a very large Samsung DLP HD television from work a while back. It was given to me on the grounds that it made a loud and distacting humming noise that was no longer acceptable during meetings with clients. I suspected this was a bum fan, but ultimately the noise didn’t bother me, so I took the TV and used it happily for many months. Then the noise became, shall we say, banshee-like in quality. It could no longer be masked by increasing the volume, and I despaired. But deep in my veins, the tinkerer’s blood flowed more quickly.

I found out on the internet (friend to the tinkerer as well as common folk) that this particular run of Samsung televisions had been cursed with faulty bearings in the color wheel, the part responsible for the dazzling array of brilliance on a DLP tv that one comes to expect in high definition. These faulty bearings wear down and then grind against one another at a rate of 9000 rpm, which, as you may imagine, is a horrific whine. The part could be replaced by a qualified technician for four to five hundred dollars. Or… you can replace it yourself.

After ordering a new color wheel to the much sweeter tune of $80, I dove upon the inner workings of my television with savage delight, wrenching components from their cozy housings so that I might slay the wailing color wheel that Samsung had left tainted in so many televisions worldwide. It took me just under two hours, using knowledgeable instruction from the web as my spirit guide. But as I resealed my television and took a short breath as I pressed power, I knew I had saved myself upwards of $300. A new sound accompanied the picture: a soft, dainty whirr, so far removed from the angered howling of the former color wheel.

I played some crisp, colorful PS3 in celebration, knowing that despite advances in technology, the tinkerer’s blood will not be cowed by circuit boards or internal stickered warnings. We ask that the professionals might step aside, so that we might do it our damn selves.

So… anyone wanna play Rock Band 2?

Jeremy September 8, 2008

General geek cred, music, weird skills

8 bits are all you need

I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the surprisingly robust Little Sound DJ, a composition tool and music tracker for the Nintendo Game Boy. Coming off the musical high of working with the Apple Sisters, I wanted to keep pushing my brain towards musical endeavors. I got seriously inspired watching the chiptune documentary, Reformat the Planet, and I’d thought I’d try my hand at some 8 bit music.

It’s been interesting. The learning curve on LSDJ is not bad for a program on a system with only 8 buttons. It would’ve been wildly unsuccessful as an actual Game Boy game, because you really do need to read the manual and know how to navigate it, etc. What really shocks me though is how broad the functionality of the program is. Considering the Game Boy is a 20 year old piece of techonology, it’s impressive that you can have it run all of this wave synthesis and so forth with surprisingly complex sound.

I nabbed an old school GB off of ebay the other day, so as soon as I feel comfortable enough with it, I’m going to get the necessary equipment to make my own carts and start playing music off of it. My goal is to come up with a few songs and maybe play an open mike night. There’s a popular one down the street from my apt. that I’d like to perform at if I get some material I like. At the moment I’m torn between whether to keep it all on the Game Boy or to play bass under whatever melody/beat combo I come up with. I assume this will resolve itself when I’ve got things a little more fleshed out. Right now my compositions are more “ringtone” than “actual song.”