Modular Synth Selbstbau Workshop

In the beginning there was one

Last year, when I started building Eurorack, what eventually took it's peak of craziness in building my own suitcase, I got to know the great folks at Befaco, a Spanish group of friends that started designing and eventually selling their own modules.
Back then, the NK still existed as a venue and it was host to many concerts alongside the DIY workshops of Befaco (taken care of by Florian Hanisch).
When it closed down, I had already spent some time at c-base and found it to be a great place for synthesizer workshops (I mean, what better place for synths is there, but a space station? Well, maybe cats and synthesizers at a space station!).

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Extended longevity of a HTC One S using Cyanogenmod

The mobile

I own a quite old - at least by today's standards of planned obsolescence for every consumer device - HTC One S (2012), that won't be receiving any more Android upgrades (last update: version 4.0.4) or support by its manufacturer directly or any distributor for that matter.
It's quite a nice, small and lightweight phone, that by now has seen the world and besides a self-administered chassis change hasn't yielded any serious problems.
The phone doesn't have much RAM or much space. Neither does it have a microSD card slot, NFC or other fancy new stuff that people seem to need.

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Donaueschingen 2015

The festival

Due to a fortunate contact through the Electronic Studio of TU Berlin I went to Donaueschinger Musiktage 2015 being the robot kindergarten worker for Orm Finnendahl's piece AST at most likely the "New Music" festival worldwide.
The festival is curated and organized by the SWR (a regional public broadcasting station serving the southwest of Germany). Traditionally it is held in Donaueschingen, a small town in Baden-Württemberg.
As it is a highly publicly subsidized event and genre of music that is presented there, the whole festival is quite an interesting and diverse place to be in.
An additionally very interesting aspect is, that all pieces presented are premieres!
That being said, I didn't have that much time to watch other pieces, but I made it to those two: The dress rehearsal of Michael Beil's "Bluff" (incredible timing!) and Olga Neuwirth's "Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie" (literally big production).
The latter made me miss my train on the way back (which was okay, because I ended up with parts of Ensemble Mosaik).

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Chaos Communication Camp 2015

Only a few more days and the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 opens its gates.
The c-base crew is diligently working on bringing equipment as an extension to the space station below Berlin to Zehdenick.
C-base turns 20 during Camp! Expect awesome celebrations!

I'm looking forward to a week with ~4500 hackers/ nerds/ musicians/ friends and old acquaintances.
There will be plenty of talks, workshops, hacking and hopefully time for some music making, swimming and all those other free time luxuries.
I'll bring my modular suitcase for some jams in the audio village and possibly even finish up on my Paper VCO (by Wolfgang Spahn and Antti Pussinen) or turn my Arduino Esplora into a low-fi waveshaper.
Who knows... I'm going camping.

Hardware section

Again, it took me some time to write something of value here. But hey, it's quality over quantity, right?
I've just expanded the spectrum of this website (after doing some major visual overhauls and simultaneously dropping Markdown in favor of reStructuredText) by a hardware section.
The first page I've added is something I have been working on over the past two months: My modular suitcase (a suitcase for Eurorack modules). Go check it out, copy/ modify the source files and build one yourself (if you dare!).
More devices will follow as soon as I have the time to write about them (or the desire to document them).

Linux Audio Conference 2015

It's been quite some time since my last post.
But I have not been lazy!

I will be attending this year's Linux Audio Conference) in Mainz. Not only as a guest (I seriously hope I will have the time to just snoop around), but mainly for setting up the 8 channel version of "The Sound Of People" and to give a workshop on "Arch Linux as a lightweight audio platform".
You can find my information for the event here.

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SSH tunnel with single hop, using systemd-networkd and autossh

Recently I had the pleasure of setting up a SSH tunnel between two virtual machines that share no route and are located in two different subnets.
They can however reach each other via SSH, hopping their host.
Let's assume the following setup:

  • client1 (Arch Linux) has 10.0.5.2/24

  • client2 (Arch Linux) has 10.0.6.2/24

  • host (Debian) is 10.0.5.1/24 to client1 and 10.0.6.1/24 to client2

As I needed the two clients to be able to send mail to each other and reach each others' services, I did some digging and opted for a SSH connection using TUN devices (aka. "poor man's VPN").
The following is needed to set this up:

  • root access on both virtual machines (client1 & client2)

  • a user account on the host system

  • SSH (OpenSSH assumed) installed on all three machines

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