Banjos & Such @mayor@banjo.town

I don't actually *look* at this banjo often enough

Current obsession: An absolute banger in C minor by Herbert J. Ellis, circa 1900

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqjFUCAYocU

Shout out to the main branch of the Carnegie library for sending these a third of the way across the country. Glad they're rebound in hardback!

Alas, the CDs are not with them, but that will be a fun side quest #plectrumbanjo 🪕

🫠

I'm poking around for "local" (haha, nothing is ever local) trad jazz/jug band groups and goings on and there's still mostly-bupkes, although there is The Great Northeast Jug Band Festival on the 30th 👍

The 'New England Jazz Banjo Festival' is happening this weekend, which is bad timing. I'll keep it on my radar for next year, but from what I know of that one it's still kind of a "guys in red vests and boater hats, furiously strumming bye bye blues as fast as humanly possible" scene

Hell yeah

Ah well, the workshop curriculum was a *little* bit ambitious; had the drum machine breadboarded last night but there was just not enough time to drill holes, mount stuff, *and* solder umpty leads in the last session

I have an open invite to come back and finish it, which is nice because it's a lovely space and the people are cool, and i was bummed to leave.

dang, have I really never checked if there's a classic style arrangement for this before?

The theme of this year's fall #americanbanjofraternity rally in late October is 'minor keys' and I doubt I could learn this well enough to perform it between now and then, but I want to learn it either way

ok yeah, I'm glad I spent the time hacking around with a from-scratch activitypub service but knowing my attention span there's no way in hell I could single-handedly write anything as solid and full-featured as existing apps out there, and I particularly dig the direction #takahe is going.

...and with its major deemphasis on native front-end, I should (in theory) be able to fairly easily maintain a fork for the front-end I have in mind while still pulling in upstream changes

I may or may not have just placed an interlibrary loan request for a book about edison phonographs, because I've been saying to myself "gosh, I think I'd really like to own one of those some day but I don't know the first thing about them" for at least 25 years

you don't say

Lol, I'm pretty sure this is a shitpost in song form from 1882

I present to you Mr. Franco Piper, the greatest #banjo soloist on earth

I could probably have had the basic "play beeps and boops according to an interleaved pattern" logic done by now but I decided that the measure + beat counter needed to be a virtual seven segment display

theremin hard

Still mad I missed out on this t-shirt, which Moog sold at one point

👀👀👀

Not surprisingly, muted/grayish stuff comes out pretty well thanks to the c64' three shades of grey. #retrographics #imagemagick #commodore64

Because I'm an inveterate yak-shaver, idle dabbling with 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64 led to me writing a utility (for modern computers) that takes an image and spits out a VIC-II multi-color bitmap mode compliant image, which is to say: an effective resolution of 160x200*, with 3-4 colors per bitmap character depending on whether that part of the image contains the background color.

It is slow as hell because it's probably grossly inefficient (I don't really know C or the MagickWand API) and it's single-threaded to boot, but it's pretty cool.

Next step is writing a program to take the resulting graphic and generate 6502 assembly (or at least BASIC) to display it on a C64.

*displayed at 320x200 with double-width pixels #commodore64 #imagemagick #retrocomputing #c64