it's been an active day off work for me today.
i took out my compost this morning and when i opened the container, i saw that a bunch of seeds from some food i put in there had sprouted. they could be lemon seeds, or squash, or something else, but they seemed to be loving the moist, hot environment in there. i pulled a couple of them out and put them in some soil to see what they turn into.
yesterday i got some new speakers and spent way longer than expected getting them integrated into my setup. i am using them in a slightly weird way, because i have two different desks with 2 speakers on them each, and i also have a middle station with the modular synth, which i wanted to be able to monitor from as well by using the two inner speakers to create a third stereo pair. i was trying to use a passive matrix mixer for the routing, but it was unbalanced, which is a problem in my veritable hive of buzzing electronics.
but i have a motu audio interface with an internal matrix routing system! only, it's a little bit annoying to change the routing in the web browser UI that you have to use to control it. well, i ended up going down a slight rabbit hole because i sniffed the traffic from that web app and figured out what network requests to send directly to my interface, so now i can switch between several monitoring modes with a simple script that can be triggered from my home assistant instance. i made a quick shortcut to select between them, but since it's on home assistant i could set up a zigbee (low power radio controller) button or some other physical control, which would be nicer to use while working on music.
that wasn't the most difficult or important thing i did today, but it was the one that brought me the most joy. going from "i have no idea if this is going to work" to "hot damn, i have reverse engineered my audio interface's system controls" is the kind of thing that scratches an itch in my brain in the best way.
i also did other things! here are some of them:
- you wouldn't believe what a mess i made yesterday, but i cleaned it up
- i put sound damping blankets on the walls, it honestly looks weird but it sounds better
- tested out another video converter i got on ebay, yay it worked
- reorganized the bins on my storage shelves and labeled them all with the label maker
- set up another raspberry pi media player (the other one is for movies, this one is for music!) and integrated it with home assistant for controls
- came up with an idea for the next mystery object because i ran out of time for my original idea (will still do that one next time)
i still have the house to myself, so i've been a little chaotic, with no one around to reel in my shiny-object approach to projects. but my partner is on the last leg of their travels, so i'm looking forward to their return soon.