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The classic! Yes! Some people actually write and read BOOKS on DJing. As if YouTube wasn’t enough. Well it can be enough.. but YouTube is also a cess pit of rubbish information, and at least a book has a better chance of being properly edited and reviewed. Also reading a book makes you more intellectual. Which is utterly true. So. I have been reading through these DJing books to see if they could teach me something I didn’t know about DJing after over 10 years doing it. And there were quite a few interesting techniques and tricks that I learned from these. ...

I thought I’d write a bit here about my Twitch DJing setup and some of the hardware and software I’m using. Twitch streaming has become very popular over the lockdown period, and I think people might be interested in how I have configured my stream. Something that seperates my stream from anyone else I’ve seen on Twitch is that is that I do live vinyl DJing AND live VJing at the same time on my stream. This is how I achieve it. ...

Journalism has deteriorated to a huge degree in the online age. A lot of articles and video content are one-sided short ‘clickbait’ – short messages designed to trigger an extreme emotional reaction. ALMOST ALL journalism is like this these days, it doesn’t matter if you have a highly established news network you have been trusting for decades, they have all had to adopt this low-quality strategy due to the ultra-competitive and dire financial situation that all news reporting finds itself in. However a lot of people still take news content at complete face value, and this leads to a huge number of people being misled about the real facts. ...

The three sections Left 9U section Right 9U section Middle 9U section So.. finally my 27U Eurorack modular synthesiser is complete. I have filled up the third - and surely last, as there is no more room in the studio! - case. I started this Eurorack modular in 2015.. so I am glad it is all complete now. I put in a small amount nearly every month for new modules. I am not some ‘rich kid’ who could afford to buy everything at once - and indeed I think my gradual approach has benefitted the overall modular because it’s made me think about what I actually need, and given me time to learn as I go along. ...

In our house, seperate to my main PC (see the tab above) we still have two Ivy Bridge-based PCs: Conny’s PC i7-3770K 16GB DDR3 RAM Nvidea Radeon 970 Graphics Card 250 GB SSD Windows 10 My wife uses this as her main PC, and plays quite a few games with it. For a CPU and motherboard that I put together in 2011 or so, I am quite amazed it still runs adequetely! It runs the games she wants to play, the most graphically intensive being Deadpool, but it will also cope with Borderlands 2, Skyrim Special Edition, Shadow Warrior 2, and others. She is not interested in the top graphics games, but it runs just fine. ...

I have made some considerable modifications to my modular since my last post. I have a 4-voice polyphony setup now with multiple voice Osc, VCA, Envelope and MIDI-CV modules, allowing me to experiment with polyphony voicing. Elsewhere, I have added an Access Virus C synthesizer to my studio, and now have rack-mounted Behringer Model D and Emu Orbit 9090 synthesizers. I have also upgraded to Ableton 10 and use NI’s Komplete suite including Massive X, plus TAL-NO-UX Juno 106 softsynth, Sylenth1 and others.

I thought I’d update my blog to reflect recent changes in my life, and review what was good and bad about them, as I was doing before. The “Not Awesome” My overall health level has got a bit worse over the years. I have had limited success in losing weight. I was going for regular walks nearly every week with a friend of mine, but that has stopped lately. I find it difficult exercising while living in a city, as my favourite activity for excercising is walking, and there are not a huge amount of pleasent walking oppertunities around my area. I have been getting Ubers to parks and walking there. A posssible solution that I am actually considering is moving outside of the city, where there are a lot more pleasent walking oppertunities on my doorstep, and which would hopefully lead to a much more active lifestyle. The “Awesome” ...

I have been gradually adding parts to my PC so that it functions better for watching movies and gaming. Here are the components that I have used: Monitor – BenQ EX3501R 35″ Ultra WQHD Curved Monitor This monitor is great for watching movies and gaming as it is ultra-wide at an aspect radio of 21:9, 3440x1440, a VA panel with high contrast, and the monitor is slightly curved so that you get a cinematic experience. ...

Finally I have finished my Eurorack synthesiser! And I know many people say that ‘Euroracks are never finished’ but this one absolutely has to be, for financial reasons. I think that I have got to a place where I have every major feature common in most synthesisers, but in a modular instrument format. It is a great place to learn about different synthesis techniques. [gallery ids=“1945” type=“rectangular”] ...

I couldn’t find a concise guide to setting this up quickly so thought it was worth a post. To quickly get something working and create a https server using the above versions of openssl and node.js, do the following: Generate self-signed server certificate with no password sudo openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout ./csr.pem -out server.crt -days 3001 -nodes Use this node.js code to setup a server quickly const https = require('https'); const fs = require('fs'); const options = { key: fs.readFileSync('csr.pem'), cert: fs.readFileSync('server.crt') }; https.createServer(options, (req, res) => { res.writeHead(200); res.end('hello world\n'); }).listen(8000); Go to https://localhost:8000 and accept the certificate, you should see ‘hello world’