Here’s a summary of an analysis I did to understand the impact on me (as a grid-connected solar member) of a recent change in rates at the electric coop (Riverland Energy Cooperative) that I belong to.

My conclusion in a nutshell: I accept the new rates as they stand.  They seem fairer to coop members as a whole and I’m happy to carry the impact that my solar panels have on our shared infrastructure. 

I looked at three rate-change puzzlers: Demand Charge, Annual to Monthly True-Up and Rate of Return.  The rest of this post goes through them at a high level, and there’s an 18-minute video at the end that goes into more detail.

UPDATE: There is a new version of the spreadsheet and an additional video on how to use it at the very end of this post.

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A quick post about getting X/Y Pal connected between an iPhone 15 and an M1 Mac Ultra.

Connecting over the wire (USB in the documentation) didn’t work, but using a Network MIDI connection did — with the advantage of not having to be tethered to the Mac.  Here’s a 45 second video that shows the following steps:

Open Audio Midi Setup and show the MIDI Studio window

Click open the Configure Network Driver window (the little globe in the top menu bar)

Enter and enable a Session (which defaults to Session 1 on both the Mac and the phone — confusing — this is the Mac Session 1)

“Network Session 1” should now be available in ShowMIDI

Head over to X/Y Pal on the phone and select a preset — “mike’s demo” in my case

Edit each device so that it points to the phone’s “Network Session 1”  (confusing, sorry)

Go back to the MIDI Network Setup window, select the phone and click Connect

That’s what I did to get X/Y Pal to talk to my Mac over WiFi.

Here’s a 45 second video of all that.  Click the pop-out icon to put it in its own window or just go full screen to really embiggen it.

Document wish list:

• NTIA funding – both power increase and Bedford St. move
• CPB-qualification
• Bedford St. deal
• Board minutes from that period

Significant Events

• Applying FCC approval to change frequency and transition to vastly upgraded transmitter power and antenna facility on the west side of town.  Joan Rubel and Vinnie Curren worked on that, Steve Lewis and Ben Dawson assisted.
• Applying for and getting the NTIA grant.  We had NTIA funding for the power increase / move to WMTV’s tower and for the build-out of the new facility on Bedford Street.  Memories are currently vague about whether it was one grant or two, but funding was critical.
• Getting CPB qualified, with the Community Service Grant then rolling in to help subsidize operations.  Joan Rubel did all of that.
• Managing to buy the Bedford St building from STASH at a time when interest rates were 18%.  Joan Rubel and Mark Fuerst pulled that miracle off.

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Distractions led me to falling way behind on these two chores and I had to relearn a lot of stuff.  So here’s a list of notes to aid my failing memory. Continue reading →

Scratchpad — reminding myself of the steps needed to remove the pulley and key in order to drop the blade hub out of the mower.  Really boring, don’t read any further..

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This is really fast/early draft stuff.

The puzzler:  Building a 20-person mix-delete audio routing template in my Pretty Good Jacktrip Toolkit crashes (moderately-sized) Linode servers.  They seem to crash when automating large numbers of Jack-connection adds or deletes — issuing a delete-all with JMESS for example.

The hypothesis: Jack works OK, it’s the number of connections per endpoint that’s causing the trouble.

The idea to get around this (so far): split the mix-minus routing in two by putting players in sections.

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Clogged sandpaper leading to burns in the wood has always been a big problem with my PerformaX (JET) 16-32 drum sander.  I’m hopeful that this is the fix — replacing the cover to provide a connection for a 4″ dust collection hose (from the current model) rather than the original one which connected a 2.5″ hose.  Here are the pictures — which started just before COVID and end…  today, almost a year and a half later.

Starting point — March 1st, 2020 — the old cover

The new cover arrives – March 7 2020

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UPDATE: September 2023

This post is for a person using command-line connection to Jacktrip and Qjackctl to manage Jack (which is the way we did it back in March of 2021).  It creates a single virtual device to route audio to and from Jacktrip.  This makes Qjackctl a lot easier to manage by providing a single interface that can be used for both input and output.

These days JackTrip has a terrific graphic user interface (GUI) that can manage audio input and output devices directly through RT Audio (eliminating the need to use Qjackctl).  In that case I would suggest creating a separate Loopback devices for audio being sent to Jacktrip and audio being received from Jacktrip.  It’s much easier to keep things straight and just as flexible.

Here’s a step-by-step post about routing Jacktrip audio using Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback software.  Loopback is a for-money successor to Soundflower and similar to BlackHole.  I like it because it is more visual and does more stuff.

The goal of this post is to get a person with a 2×2 interface going with a setup that will let them join a Jacktrip session reliably, without having to “rewire” things each time.  It also covers things like routing audio into and out of other audio software like Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Max and Zoom.

Alas, this is for Mac folks only.  Windows audio puzzles me.  I don’t have a clue how to do this on a Windows machine.

There are links to short videos that “animate” each of these steps and examples.   Click on the pictures to embiggify and read them.

Step 0: Assumptions – Click here for video
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Here’s the rig that that Marcie uses to take pictures of things at microscope scale.  We took a long journey through a lot of attempts that were unsatisfactory — perhaps this post will save you some steps.

Here’s a picture of the whole setup (click on the photos to embiggen).

Here’s the recipe: Continue reading →

dear WORT.

happy 45th!

many thanks for the invitation to throw a few words into the virtual gathering.  here’s a collection of WORT memory-jogger photos, starting off with a few pages from early program guides, that tell a lot of the story of the early days.  clicking on the newsletter-page photos brings up bigger versions.

. . . .

here’s Numero Uno – volume 1 number 1.  my writing style in those days was a completely-hopeless attempt, by an illiterate geek,  to emulate my hero Lorenzo Milam.  Milam was guiding light for a gaggle of us who started stations all over the country — we lost him this year (2020), along with so many others.

a pretty good exposition about why most of us did all that work – it was fun, we made lots of good friends and we kinda took care of each other.  Jeff Lange did a lot of the graphics for the first-generation newsletters including everything on this page (i think). Continue reading →

Here’s a scratchpad on how Jacktrip Hub Mode does audio routing as of early September 2020.

Starting the server in Hub Mode (capital-S instead of lower-case S) with the “-p” option offers four ways to configure the server.  Here’s an example launch string that would fire up a server in Mode 2:

jacktrip -S -p2

Mode – 0 (the default – my machine hears everybody and everybody hears the mix that I send them)

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Here’s a video and a recipe for musicians who want to display something other than a web-cam of themselves when performing in an ensemble.  Maybe graphics, or animation.  Especially interesting is to insert a Syphon stream into the mix.   Here’s one way to do that.  Sorry — I only cover Mac software here. Continue reading →

We here at Prairie Haven live on Little Waumandee Creek in Buffalo County, Wisconsin.  We’ve always wondered about where the word “Waumandee” comes from and what it means.

Listen to these blackbirds and see if you hear them saying “waumandee!” the way I do.  Maybe that’s where the word comes from?

This is a scratchpad post about the battery power-storage system. Another in the “Prairie Haven Operator’s Manual” series of posts.

Right now there are just a series of documentation diagrams that I made — I’ll add explanations as time permits.

Just for fun — here’s a picture of the Submarine Control Room Command Console that shows off the three inverters at the heart of the system. Continue reading →