A Vegetative State

It's giardiniera time again.

Not much to report for this batch, except that I ran out of bay leaves and so one jar is without, and curiously two jars failed to seal properly. One was still holding a vacuum but with the lid not sucked down nearly as tight as it should be, and the other leaked down to atmospheric pressure completely.

I think the one that leaked down completely is probably the one that fell over sideways in the pot when I was pulling them out after canning, but I'm not 100% sure about the other. Either way those two go in the fridge while the rest go in the cupboard for me to nibble on over the next 6-ish months.

Getting Toned

The Yamaha TG33 is a desktop synth module, which the big Y prefers to call a "tone generator" for reasons beyond human comprehension. It's basically the sound engine from the SY22 with a little added spice and no keyboard. I picked one up from the land of the rising sun with the promise that it was fully functional. This was almost, but not quite, an accurate description of its condition.

How so? Click the video to find out!

With that bit of fish-exorcism dealt with, it still needed a bit of cleaning, thanks to the decades of dust that had made it between the LCD and the protective window it sits behind. It was apparently in a bit of a dusty environment, as evidenced by the volume knob.

So yes, this dust needs to be evicted.

Thankfully it wasn't stuck on or anything, so it was pretty simple to brush away once I managed to disassemble the entire module just to get at this part.

It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to just replace this LCD module at some point. The viewing angle is awful and the backlight is best described as just "a suggestion of illumination", but that's a problem for future-me. Present-me is just happy that I'm not looking through a bunch of dust to see what's on the screen.

And last but not least, this can't be a desktop module if it doesn't sit properly on a desktop, so let's give it some grippy feet.

And that'll wrap things up for this one. Another job well done.

Raising the Stakes

And turning up the heat! Today's special guest is the Boss DR-550, harkening back to the heady days of the early 1990s.

It naturally arrived in an unserviceable condition, which naturally I rectified.

One thing I didn't cover in the video was repairing the heat-staked posts that hold the copper foil shielding to the inside of the case.

Or at least should be holding the copper foil to the inside of the case. They're these little plastic nubbins, 6 in total, that go through a matching set of holes in the shielding and then get melted down to form a plastic rivet of sorts.

But as you might well imagine, that little melted head of plastic doesn't last forever, especially when the unit is subject to disassembly.

But luckily I have a 3d pen, and so I can rebuild what was once there.

I can glob on a bit of melted ABS-compatible plastic, ASA in this case, and then squish it flat to reproduce the original rivet.

It's a little bit tricky, though. The plastic needs to be pretty hot to melt into the remains of the post, and it needs to be squished down fairly flat with a suitable tool; I used the blunt bottom end of a metal x-acto knife holder for this task.

And one thing I didn't count on was the 3d pen having a hard time reaching into corners, particularly the back corner (not shown) where there's a screw post that hides the heat stake rivet and makes for a very tight fit with the 3d pen. I was only partially successful at repairing those ones, but luckily it only really needs to be mostly held in place, so it's fine.

So how does this drum machine sound, you might ask, now that it's all fixed up? Well, let's just say that this particular device has never been burdened by having to carry the weight of ambition or pretension. It makes drum noises, and it does so on the cheap. But still, it has some charm to it.

Them's The Brakes

Purple Haze is on the work stand today, as the brakes were getting a little worn.

Well ok, maybe a little more than a little worn. The aluminum backing plate isn't supposed to be getting scrubbed away like this.

Though at least being aluminum meant that it didn't cause any damage to the rotors.

From the side view it's pretty plain to see that there's basically no friction material left.

Compared to the new ones which have, let's say, a wee bit more.

Now while I'm in here I'm gonna take the opportunity to swap out one of the caliper bolts. For whatever reason the front brakes on my bikes tend to go out of alignment way more than the rears, and this can take its toll on the bolt heads.

The one on the right has definitely been through enough. It doesn't help that these bolt heads are really shallow, so there's only a tiny amount of metal for the torx bit to grab onto.

Anyway, I- oops, omelette break.

Anyway, I also took the opportunity to swap out the rear pads since they were just right at the edge of the 3mm minimum thickness.

And since I've got the tools out, I might as well use them.

I thought this was going to be it for the bike maintenance this week, but fate had more in store for me. On Friday I was out riding The Stig on my usual morning jaunt and I happened to get a puncture in the rear tire. This is quite a common occurrence but because I run tubeless on this gravel bike, the consequences are that some time later I notice a slightly damp spot on the tire where the sealant had plugged the hole.

Not this time, though. Instead I got a veritable fountain of milky orange-white sealant spraying out and coating the backside of both the bike and me. To its credit, the sealant did eventually seal the puncture, and just in time to keep the wheel barely off the rim, so I could continue my ride and make it home after topping things off with my frame pump.

Since the rear tire was also almost worn through the tread, though, I decided to swap it out for some fresh rubber. Not only that, since the front had finally almost worn down too, I purchased a new front tire and swapped the front to the rear to burn off the rest of its rubber. Given that I built this bike in 2022, I'd say that's a pretty good lifetime for the front tire.

While I was at it, I decided to record a few YouTube Sharts showing the proper technique for getting a tire on and off the rim, and for seating a tubeless tire. There's a lot of people who have done videos on this subject, but usually they're influencers who have more charisma than braincells and so they usually demonstrate inefficient or just plain wrong techniques. Well, now you can learn the right way.

I uploaded all three of these videos back-to-back, and amusingly about 5 minutes after posting, someone replied to the second one to say, and I quote, "I hope people keep their kids far away from you!" which is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. Presumably they didn't like my nail polish, but what's funny is that YouTube just recognized this as solid engagement and now that video has literally 10x the views compared to the other two.

So I guess there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

Personal Baggage

Quite a while ago my lovely sister gifted me a set of three handmade shopping bags.

They have been serving me quite well in my weekly grocery shopping trips, but this morning I noticed that one of them had gained an unfortunate hole near the bottom.

What good fortune it was, then, that I had a suitably matching thread already loaded in my sewing machine.

Close enough, at least. The camera obviously never quite picks up the right colour so you'll have to trust me.

So back and forth I sew to fix the hole back together.

And the result is suitably inconspicuous, especially considering it's right at the bottom, and thus almost always out of sight.

Good enough for another decade or two, I hope.

Crunchy Brown Bits

Recently I was lamenting that the tastiest part of my home cooked pot pies was the bit of sauce that bubbled over the top and crisped up on the baking sheet while it was cooking. The pot pies themselves were great too, but goodness those crunchy brown bits were divine.

This lead to wanting to figure out how to get more of that flavour inside of the pot pies. I already brown the meat to within an inch of its life before demummifying it with a long simmer, so that was already at 105% flavour capacity. Lacking inspiration for what to try next, I decided to ask the AI what flavour of glue I should add to the recipe.

It came back with a slightly peculiar recommendation, but it at least seemed like it would be more successful than trying to use pureed ham to frost a cake, so I decided to give it a try.

First up, I prepared the meat as per usual, as there was nothing left to optimize there. I also sweat up the veggie trio (celery, carrot and onion) as I normally do.

This makes a reasonably aromatic addition with some nice texture, but unlike the meat it has not been fully exploited for its maximum flavour potential, so let's get on with that.

Out comes 500g of the mix, and into my stick blender cup it goes.

As you might imagine, some stick blending comes next.

So I've now succeeded in making a pound of baby food. Ok. Next we need to concentrate and develop the flavours, so it gets spread out in an even layer in, very importantly, a non-stick oven-safe frying pan.

Spreading it out like this will help it dehydrate faster, which is a prerequisite for getting to browning temperature. The other prerequisite is being somewhere where it can get to browning temperature, so into the oven it goes, set to 450 freedom degrees, alongside the meat which is still browning.

An hour later, it comes out looking like this.

Now these big veggie-leather flakes aren't really all that useful as is, so they'll go in with the meat for the next step.

And that next step involves drowning in stock.

And spices.

Then the lid goes on and back into the oven it goes.

Some time later, quite a bit longer than usual because I accidentally bought pork loin instead of pork shoulder and simply refused to rehydrate properly, it comes out of the oven and gets hit with a potato masher to break it up. It also gets a quarter cup of flour mixed with some reserved pork fat to thicken it, and that's brought back to a boil and stirred well.

It is, at this point, unquestionably very brown. It's also done, so into the remaining veggies it goes.

And then into the pie shells.

Usually I end up with 425g or so of filling per pie, but because nearly 500g of water was boiled off during the veggie roasting stage, the filling is much more concentrated now, so splitting it amongst the 6 pies results in only about 315g per. (This also tends to vary a bit depending on what size package of meat I happen upon, how many veggies I load up with, etc)

On go the tops, and then a nice shiny coat of egg wash.

Then into the freezer as per usual. I cooked one up for lunch today and I have to say the result was fantastic.

The filling was very dark, rich and flavourful, and it no longer left me pining for the crunchy brown bits that escaped containment. So I guess chalk one up for the clanker, I seem to have survived its cooking advice.

Set It To Stun

Once again a few choice pieces of gear have fallen in my lap. This time I found a very nice deal on a nearly spotless Boss Micro Rack RPH-10.

This box applies a "phaser" effect to the sound, which basically mixes a bunch of slightly delayed copies of the signal with the original to cause phase cancellation across certain frequencies. It's hard to describe the sound of it in words, but when you hear it you'll know it.

It also came packed with some vintage packing material.

And just in case you forgot when that F5 tornado ripped through Oklahoma City, it was a few days before this.

And I guess the fellow who sold this got tired of keeping around this newspaper to remind them of that event. Idk.

In other news, I also got myself a Korg 01R/W, which was the successor to the legendary M1 (or technically the successor to the M1R, which was the rack version of the M1 keyboard, just as the 01R/W is the rack version of the 01/W keyboard).

I think this one was sold as "untested" but it works just fine, and even has an upgraded display (the originals tend to fail over time).

I hope it doesn't get in a fight with my Roland modules. In case you're wondering what it sounds like, you've heard it before.

So no dramatic hardware repairs in this instalment, but there's always next time.