I Circuit Bent the Hangout Feature In Google+

I'm definitely a big fan of Google+ so far, and yesterday a group of friends and I decided to use it's "Hangout" video chat feature. We thought it would be fun to keep adding more users to find the breaking point.

I think it was after getting 9 people simultaneously video-chatting that the app froze on my Macbook. I refreshed it, and this is what I saw and heard - a tableau of blank faces with soundtrack that sounded like R2D2 with a head cold. I did not know software could be circuit bent, or unintentionally datamoshed. I recorded the sound with my cell phone and did a screen shot of the page, so this fairly accurately recreates what was going on. Enjoy!

My Studio in the Throes of Music Production

As some of you may know, I am a musician when I'm not being a geek. I played for many years in New York City with lots of different groups, mainly the band Kinetic.

I was recently hired to write and compose music for a video game that's in development, so it was time to convert what is normally my hacker studio into my music studio.

I work fast and messy, so here are some pics of my 20 hour audio tirade. Funny how after all that, you can still see tools and materials poking out of the shadows...

How To Rewire Roland DS90 Speakers (For Humanities Students)

After so many years of literary analysis and myriad other right-brained ventures, I've become quite sluggish in mathematical type analyses. So, when I accidentally blew the internal amplifiers on my Roland DS90 desktop monitors, it took six years of procrastination before I finally opened them up and converted them to passive speakers.

Wiring in series and parallel I could understand, but when it got into the heady world of impedance and frequency crossovers, my brain started to swirl. I'll try to give the condensed version of how I figured it all out.

First, these monitors have two speakers, one standard for all frequencies, and one tweeter for only high frequencies.

A "crossover" is a speaker wired in parallel that has it's frequency limited by wiring in one or more capacitors.

I found out the "crossover frequency" of my speakers, then checked out this site to calculate the proper capacitance

Then it was a matter of rummaging through my junked circuit boards to find the right capacitors. That same site I linked to has a nifty little calculator that tells you how many farad you get when wiring the capacitors in different series or parallel combinations.

Now for the build pics:

The monitors with their butts ripped off.

The capacitors wired in: 2 10 microfarad caps in series, and 1 2.2 microfarad cap in parallel = 7.2 microfarad

Hacking the input: After I went all Om Nom Nom on the preamp circuit board...

I used the existing RCA input jack, and kept the rest of the amplifier guts intact, guessing that their physical presence has an effect on the overall sound of the monitors.