David Eisinger

April bled straight into May, so it felt like a three-week month and flew right by. We celebrated Claire’s birthday and spent Memorial Day weekend at Lake Norman. Then summer kicked in – ran the Running of the Bulls 8K with the kids and a friend of mine, and went to our local pool for the first time this year.

Claire’s bike got stolen – someone just walked off with it while we were over at a friends house. What the hell. Real bummer, and because it has a throttle, our home insurance was no help (I guess they consider it a moped or something). Aventon was nice enough to give us a discount, so we’ve got a replacement on the way, and I’ll for sure invest in some additional security.

Here’s some new music:

I used Ableton’s new MIDI generation feature to come up with that bass line, which I find to be the hardest part of putting these tracks together. Set the key and some basic parameters, and then have it start generating different ideas to use as a starting point.

This Month

• Adventure: my little man turns two!; family camping trip
• Project: publish an article about my 3D printing project from last month
• Skill: I’d like to read the manual for my Bass Station 2 – I use it for everything, and while it’s relatively intuitive, I don’t really understand how a few of the knobs (“mod env depth”) affect the sound

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: The Poppy War, R. F. Kuang
• Non-fiction: Every Tool’s a Hammer, Adam Savage
• Music: Modal Soul, Nujabes

Links

• It’s time to talk about my writerdeck (via)

  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.

• Resident: vibe coding firmware (our new sandbox library for ESP32 devices) (Interconnected)

  We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.

• Key, in sight – Aresluna (via)

  It’s fun to slam big keys without thinking, and it’s fun to experience the mastery of precise combinations of meticulous keyboard shortcuts. It’s great to see things on the screen that react to what you’ve done, especially if those are things that really understand how you work. And it’s magical to watch your fingers do things seemingly on their own while you’re preoccupied with deeper things, just because you set up something that allowed motor memory to blossom.

  Inspired me to order one of these; TBD what I’ll do with it.

• The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book | Brain Baking

  This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy.