The Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl is coming up — one of the best and most legitimately Vancouver events of the year, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. Seriously. Walk around Strathcona, check out the insane ant-nest that is 1000 Parker, or if you’re on the agoraphobic side, stick to the periphery. […]
Another project, hot on the heels of the PCsr — and this one might actually be practical. Stereos were a huge part of my youth. I bought them in garage sales and at thrift stores, the cheaper the better — department-store brands with commodity modules glued into toxic particle board. 8-track, cassette, AM/FM radio, and […]
With apologies in advance: this was way too much effort for a bad pun. A footrest is also called an ottoman. An Empire is a fancy brand of record player. Thus a footrest with a record player built into it would be an Ottoman Empire. Hur hur hur.
A quick one following on the heels of the 8-Track tape backup — While it’s fun to kick a technology when it’s down, it’s not as satisfying as making something that actually, y’know, works well. And I had some 8-track parts left over, particularly the guts of another tape unit whose amplifier circuitry and read/write […]
I’ve cornered myself in my office amidst heaps of large, unfinished projects and it seems that whenever I try to get somewhere with one of them another 5 will throw themselves at me. I’ve got a broken B&W TV to fix, a monstrosity of a T6600 laptop to modernize, a few broken 8-tracks to tinker […]
I have long been meaning to work on some 8-track related projects. At long last intention grew to overpower inertia and I went looking for some raw materials. I was met with some surprises. First, in the hiatus since I last went looking for old gear, many of my usual haunts have ceased to exist: […]
An acquaintance who shall remain nameless has actually admitted to liking Nickelback. Now, I’ll concede that mocking this band has become a populist move and I’d rather ride a bike than take a bandwagon — but as this famous video shows there is something worth targeting here: manufactured, bland, cookie-cutter production masquerading as anything expressive. […]