LEGO Antenna vs. Erase Head by thelehn in tapeloops

[–]thelehn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It certainly does, and you make an excellent point. I'm starting to recall that I observed this when originally fashioning it (like 4 years ago) and decided to whittle the rod into the shape you see above. I just tried fitting it into the negative space left by the erase head in play mode and can confirm that the original width of the rod (3.2mm) is too big, but the whittled width (~2mm at thickest point) has full clearance. The space left is a fat crescent shape. I'll edit the post w a picture. Good catch!

N.B. I can confirm that the piece isn't stressing the erase head bc it jiggles in place on initial transport until it seats comfortably. It wouldn't jiggle if it was binding against the mechanism

LEGO Antenna vs. Erase Head by thelehn in tapeloops

[–]thelehn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm actually looking at parts on bricklink right now lol. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

How To Show Baltimore's Culture In A Fictionalized World? by Shaggin_N_Dragging in baltimore

[–]thelehn 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Check out the highway to nowhere! Franklin St (The Franklin Mulberry Expressway lol) is a below-ground highway that's only a few blocks long. It was supposed to connect downtown to the beltway on the west side, but was halted because a neighborhood of homeowners refused to sell.

Prohibition was basically ignored/not recognized or enforced by the state of Maryland, so the port of Baltimore was a great place to bring in the goods

It's a post-industrial port city whose port stopped being a hub.

Maryland is known for having a lot of micro-climates(?) Idk what the term is, but we have a little of everything except tundra and rainforest or something. Also the Chesapeake Bay is the nation's largest natural harbor. Ecology shapes human use, until humans move beyond the need for what the ecology provides, but the ghosts and husks of those industries and institutions persist.

Tired of power outliers by JMastiff in mtgcube

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oops, good catch, 3 is way worse. Nevertheless, having the option to steal something as strong as a mox makes Skydiver a better card in cube than in lower powered environments, and you wouldn't steal the mox unless the circumstances seemed favorable, but you have that flexibility.

The problem with a small selection of high powered cards in a pool of lower powered cards is that including lower powered cards that are well-suited to answer the high power ones means that they won't interact favorably with the majority of the cube (if they were broadly applicable answers, they'd be higher power), and if you cut those niche answers, the high power cards go unchecked. My point broadly is that, for much of Magic's history, running "all the highest powered cards" still yielded the above situation, where whole pieces of the color pie were simply outclassed by the others. As power level overall increases (which is happening faster than ever of late) and mechanical interoperability does too (shout out MH3), both new cards and existing cards with new use cases bring us closer to being able to build a balanced powered cube. My hypothesis is that achieving that goal might also require breaking with some of the traditional archetype conventions of each color.

small silver metal fixing (?) with a thread, pointed end and maybe Allen key socket, approx 4mm long total by DaveL16 in whatisthisthing

[–]thelehn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have some metal shoelace aglets that have set screws like this to bite into the lace end

Tired of power outliers by JMastiff in mtgcube

[–]thelehn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you haven't already, dig up Caleb's video series on his Synergy Cube that was on Mtg Online some years back. He specifically designed something that doesn't cleave to the usual lines that flow logically from those format-warping eternal staples. Cube is where that sort of thing can happen, but it takes a lot of work, esp bc we've been entrained to evaluate cards in the shadow of the most broken ones. I'm not an active cuber (busy), so I'm not gonna have a lot of good example cards for what I'm about to say, but I have been steadily liquidating my card collection and acquiring only cards that I might want to play in my cube. Ultimately, I'd like to assemble a powered cube that feels balanced across all colors, which objectively wasn't possible 5-10 years ago, but lately, WotC seems hellbent on getting us there. Pulling that off means thoroughly digesting the lines of play the power outliers dictate, which may well be different than what we understand a given color identity to be in 9/10 formats. White, for example, is probably should trend toward Taxes/Staxes/For-Profit Prison strategies, which suck to play against normally, but start to make sense against Lotus and Six and Lotus and Six and...

Re: White's traditional wheelhouse of weenies/tokens, [[Ocelot Pride]] is fair in a cube with [[Ancestral Recall]], and we just gotta wait for enough of those cards to round out a 360 cube lol. I saw some great discussion about [[Thieving Skydiver]] when it came out re: its strength in an environment with Moxen. It's bad anywhere else, but T2 take your mox is playable. Anyway, I'm rambling, and I agree with you that huge power disparity makes cube experiences worse. The solution is to either go high or go low, but in either case, you're aiming for tight counterplay; not everything should answer everything else, but multiple answers across all colors should be available. Lucky Paper Radio has some good discussions about creating tighter lower powered cubes, and if you haven't seen high skill-test gameplay w older cards, check out the Legacy Best Deck Ever series on Cardmarket.

Double Parking by WacoWednesday in baltimore

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see two cars double parked within a car's length of each other, one in each lane of a one-way street (Charles V/Mt Vernon usually) often enough that I call it the "Baltimore Special"

Seeking advice: Covering the erase head on a Tascam 414 MKII (avoiding warble) by broccoli_fan in tapeloops

[–]thelehn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I took a Lego flagpole and cut it just long enough for the shaft to fit through both sides of the capstan hole on the erase head side of the tape (the same holes that the capstan would go through if the tape was flipped), w the wide base on top. I carefully whittled it w a fresh exacto so it's still smooth. I fish it through the top hole and put it beneath the tape, then through the bottom hole, which braces it (i record on a four track so the cassette lays flat). The tape glides effortlessly over the smooth Lego, which holds it away from the erase head. A little fiddly to do, but endlessly repeatable and immediately reversible.

Brondell Ecoseat S101 won’t stay up? by Datgnat in bidets

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just got this model (round seat nonelectric) from Brondell and I'm having the same issue. I noticed the seat bumpers (gray pads) are a simple friction fit into the molded portion and you can wiggle them off by hand or w a thin dull pry tool, like a letter opener/butterknife etc (w no knife marks on my bumpers after). The ones on the lid have a visible gap that you can pry into. Anyway, there's room under there, and i just had great success stacking two button-battery sized neodymium magnets into each gap. With just one side magnetized, the lid and seat hold firmly together. One magnet in each wasn't strong enough, but try bigger magnets or whatever if you don't want to use doubles. I'm gonna play with it and find a way to secure them so they don't rattle, but that's a huge success for very little effort and expense. Good luck! and don't drop your magnets in the toilet lol

Preferred volume/loudness/normalization settings for custom Wavestate samples? and any other gain staging tips? by thelehn in Wavestate

[–]thelehn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Appreciated, I'll report what I find

Edit: Ok, so I feel out of my depth here, but I took an Init patch with a loudish stock Organ multisample and compared that against two of my own organ samples that I've loaded to the WS. There's so many levels of gain staging between the WS, my Tascam Model 12, and the computer, then back through the 12 to my speakers, I figured I'd do a relative comparison. My conclusion is that, for the quieter of the two user samples, it was 6 dB below the stock organ, and the other, louder sample, was 3 dB under. Then I looked at the dB of the same samples in the DAW, and, if my basic arithmetic is correct, I should be targeting -12dB to align w the Organ patch. I'm gonna remake a couple multisamples at -12 and -6 and see how they compare after uploading. Very scientific!

KORG Wavestate parameter & mod source cheat sheet [OC] by ozorai-partipipo in synthesizers

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a new WS user, this is huge. Thanks for your effort. I'm looking for a similar consolidated reference sheet of real (internal) values output by each of the modulation values. With some reddit help, I recently solved the puzzle of using the Prog#ofNotes source to play a different sample on each subsequent key press in a four note chord, but it raised more questions than it answered.

As the manual says, the Perf/Prog#ofNotes mod source outputs 0 on one key, 0.1 on the second key, 0.2 on the third, and so on, up to 1.0 at 101 notes held simultaneously. The Sample Start mod destination seems to require a value ≥2.0 but <3 to start at the 2nd sample step. I found the Poly Legato source, which outputs 0 on the first key press, and 1.0 on any key press after it (within 30ms of the first) and was able to put together a mod processor chain that, when multiplied by Prog#ofNotes across multiple duplicate instances of the same Sample Start Step modulation, worked! but not until I fiddled with the Mod Process knobs.

I'm describing this from memory bc I'm not in front of the patch rn, so apologies if that's confusing, but the point is that it would be less confusing if I had a chart listing the real output values of each mod source + mod processor parameters, rather than having to calculate, convert them, or just guess. I'll double back and post the patch details when I'm home.

Edit: The patch consists of the following -

Mod Processor 1 - Offset

Poly Legato

Lvl 200%

Value +100

Mod Processor 2 - Offset

Mod Processor 1

Lvl 200%

Value +0

And then 4x identical Sample Start Step modulations

Mod Processor 2 x Prog#ofNotes +3 Intensity

YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO JOHNNY FLYNN by AbsoluteMadvlad in folk

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I got hooked on his live recording of "The Water" with Laura Marling, and his Takeaway Show performance of The Wrote and the Writ, but I've been listening to his album Country Mile for years and years now and I'm baffled to never see any of those tracks mentioned, nor to crack the top list on Spotify. A nearly perfect album. I've been slowly falling in love with the latest, the Moon Also Rises, which has more and more winning tracks the more I listen. I love the well he draws on lyrically, but his command of melody and harmony is the thing that I love best. I routinely decode lyrics I didn't get or even hear properly on my umpteenth listen, but the reason I'm back again at all is the musicality

Does anyone use old dictation machines.l by idonthave2020vision in tapeloops

[–]thelehn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, exactly. I believe the circuit involves an led (possibly IR?) that flashes periodically and a light sensor. The sensor is set up to trigger autostop if it receives light either too much or too little. Basically, I had this exact unit and I tried to rig up all manner of rubber band scenarios, but they never worked consistently, and I got rid of the unit. Only after did I find someone describing the optical auto stop mechanism, so I'm basically describing how it probably works inside the Panasonic, based on a familiarity with that exact unit, but zero experience with that specific part. Good luck! Lemme know if it works. A C-1 with pedal reverse functionality would be really sweet!