This is an extension of my last post: A brief musical journey, as well as a number of stories which I’ve been posting on Instagram in recent days.

As part of my of my adventures in the world of producing elecronic music I came across the fascinating world of modular synthesis. Modular synthesizers are composable musical instruments which are built up of many discrete modules, almost like the Lego bricks of synthesizers. Unlike traditional keyboard synthesizers which have defined signal paths modular synthesizers allow you to patch together whatever sequence of modules you want to create the sounds you desire. For a computer nerd like me it’s the perfect mix of music creation and programming. If you’re not familiar with it then I highly recommend taking a quick look at this introduction YouTube video to familiarize yourself with the idea as it’s much easier to understand through observation.

I’m back! It’s been a while but I’ve decided to dust off my old blog and to start trying to write some more regular updates as to what I’ve been doing these last 18 months. For those of you who I’ve not seen in a while it’s been a busy time.

One of the primary things I’ve been spending time at recently has been all things music, in particular both learning to create and attending more live electronic music. Electronic music has been an interest of mine for many years ever since being introduced to the likes of Mugasha and Soundcloud by friends back when I first arrived in California. Since then it’s become by far the largest genre that I consume, serving as a backdrop to most of my daily activities. Whether I’m working on software issues during the day or doing the dishes at home in the evening you’re likely to find me enjoying some music at the same time.

This weekend I took the opportunity of some downtime and the fact that I’ve deployed a new primary VPS (with the wonderful iocoop) to migrate my blog source to use hugo, leaving behind the Octopress setup I’ve had for a while.

Why? Well I’ve been on a small Go kick recently at $DAYJOB and elsewhere and having played with some of the other utilities developed by spf13 such as cobra and admiring their ergonomics and simplicity I was keen to give hugo a try.

Administrating a single server that’s your sole responsibility isn’t that much of a hassle but anyone who’s shared this responsibility with others or inherited machines manually configured by others knows without documentation will quickly tell you it’s a pain to work backwards from the finished server and maintain it going forward.

Getting bitten by this once or twice is OK, but as I get more involved in certain projects it’s becoming a stronger anti-pattern, and so I’m making a pledge to stop it.

I’ve lapsed yet again in the weekly writing requirement of the Iron Blogger project at Noisebridge and so feel compelled to give a core-dump type post to recount the happenings of the last two weeks.

I made a real breakthrough in my running in the last two weeks, after picking out some advice from /r/running on Reddit. I was absentmindedly browsing looking for training plans when I came upon a “beginners guide” of sorts which I scrolled though. All of it I was familiar with, except a very good point about pace: that you should run at such a pace as allows you to have a conversation throughout. Previously I’d run run intervals and push myself to the point of being out of breath, which sucked as I knew that I knew my legs could carry me further but my cardiovascular system could not. Slowing to a more comfortable pace has made the experience much more enjoyable: I find it easier to get into a groove where I can run for a while and let my mind wander. I’ve set a personal goal of running a 10k this summer with a friend, but have yet to nail down a particular race event. In the meantime I’m following a 10k training program and running 2-3 times a week.

This week I finished the first version of the barcode scanning flow I’ve been working on for Noisebridge. It’s a very simple Rust CLI that listens for input from a specified input device, and outputs only valid ISBN13 codes that it receives. Today I’ll work on a small Go program to take the ISBN numbers, looks them up and records the books in a PostgreSQL database. The next step after that is a small web service which allows people to search the books and see what we have at Noisebridge.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and write a nicely thought out blog post, but in the complete absence of any rhythm in recent postings I figured I’d write down some thoughts about the last 2 weeks.

I’ve been making slow (mostly due to time commitments), but good progress on the USB barcode scanner project I’ve been hacking on for Noisebridge. One of the frustrations in choosing Rust for this project was the lack of API stability in pre-1.0.0 Rust. This manifested itself in many ways, but mostly it was documentation being out of date and confusing given breaking API changes, or refactors where functionality that was previously in “core” being moved out into their own external crates.

I’ve been neglecting my weekly blog post the last few weeks, but I’m back! The last few weeks and weekends have been busy with fun stuff.

The workshop I gave on Data Security for Journalists at the CPJ conference was really wonderful fun. It was great to meet Cyrus and Micah and hang out with them teaching journalists how to use security tools to protect both themselves and their sources. The workshop itself was a great success, with all attendees walking away with both a working knowledge and a suite of tools to help them in their daily work. Feedback after the workshop was really positive as well. All in all a success I’d very much like to recreate again.

Last Saturday I gave a workshop on Data Security to a small group of Bay Area journalists at Noisebridge. The workshop was a small-group test of the same material that’ll be used at a larger workshop I’m helping to lead at the Committe to Project Journalism’s SF conference later this month.

Overall it was a great success and a really awesome experience, with 4 journalists walking away with a fully functional email encryption setup, as well as a good working knowledge on the concepts underpinning it.

I started riding my bike to work the other day, and it’s very enjoyable. I’ve been feeling a bit sedentary in recent times, so a more active morning and evening commute is a really welcome change. I’d kinda forgotten that nice feeling you get post-exercise, and it’s made me realise that I should do this more often.

I find it easy to fill time with non-exercise related things, so coupling exercise with my daily commute will hopefully facilitate this becoming a habit. Usually with new changes like this I’m not very successful in consistently carving out the time to dedicate to it. Swapping out a MUNI ride for cycling is a perfect alternative.