Kara Brightwell

  • weeknotes #6: peace lily

    a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that

    i have a studio space

    on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there’s an iceland. above the iceland is this 70’s pebbledash concrete box. i don’t know what it used to be, it’s a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.

    i’ve put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it’s really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.

    it’s a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.

    some of the things i’m making there

    i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they’ll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it’s so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.

    photograph of five unpopulated circuit board with quirky designs and tantalising prospects, created by yours truly

    from left to right, top to bottom that’s:

    • Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
    • Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you’re either going “why is that useful”, to which i’ll say if you’re live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you’re going “holy shit i want one” in which case hmu
    • Ants: (probably) the world’s smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it’s tiny, it’s like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
    • a bootleg black panel for Pamela’s New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. “rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face” also describes a PCB
    • a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them

    this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay

    i have a new line manager

    and it’s Alice! hello Alice. you’re fantastic already

  • weeknotes #5: varnish hotbox

    1. oops where did three months go

    holidays always throw my habits entirely out of the window. i also managed to gate posting my next weeknotes on having edited my photos from camping, which was a terrible thing to do to my brain.

    2. whistlestop tour

    1. went camping
    2. went and saw my parents in Yorkshire
    3. went and saw my in-laws in Cornwall
    4. went to the welsh borders and bathed in a hot tub watched by sheep
    5. went camping again but this time it was sort of a festival

    3. what if solvent fumes, but too much

    when we renovated our kitchen in 2017 we got solid oak worksurfaces, for some reason. never get solid oak worksurfaces, you’ll spend the rest of your life oiling them and they’ll get waterstained anyway. this weekend i finally cracked, bought a tub of the varnish they use in pubs and basketball courts, and spent saturday with a headache.

    beautifully varnished oak worksurface

    4. cute keyboard alert

    cute minimal split keyboard with white, pink and purple keycaps

    it’s a Corne Cherry v2, with hotswap sockets, gateron green switches, and a cheap etsy knockoff of DSA Hana (but in XDA profile).

    the keyboard shop sent me the wrong kit; i bought the cheaper, non-hotswap version. that version was also through-hole soldering; this one is surface-mount.

    i’ve never done surface-mount soldering before, and it was way easier than i expected, and now i want to buy every eurorack kit i’ve dismissed because it was surface-mount, and also start designing surface-mount PCBs.

    5. things i can’t talk about yet

    there’s this one thing, and this other thing, and they’re both really exciting, and maybe i’ll be able to talk about them in a future weeknotes. ggggggggggggg

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