Enigmastation.com

Went back out to the RAMS field today; week two, first as a provisional member. One of the leaders of the club helped me fly three times; I took a charged battery, but I only have one. They recharged it there. It took about fifteen to twenty minutes to recharge the battery each time, and [...]

I do a lot with messaging architectures, and because I work on embedded systems so much lately, my main broker protocol has been MQTT, used with Javascript. I learned something that surprised me this morning, even though it really shouldn’t have, given some thought. MQTT is a common protocol used in IoT. It stands for [...]

I was having a conversation a few days ago – just before the Fourth of July – and someone said they’d opened up Facebook and been frightened by all of the people posting American flags, thinking it was related to a conservative social media platform being launched. Given the timing, no. It’s the Fourth of [...]

American culture is broken, and badly. It’s broken to the point where there’s a civil war going on – thankfully, still at the “civil” part, mostly – and that civil war is going to break the national identity and bring chaos into America, first, and spread to the rest of the world, to humanity’s detriment. [...]

I liked watching the planes fly. They just seemed so magical, like they were suspended by wires nobody could see, even though I knew the magic was called “physics.” At first I imagined them held up by the wires, then held down by the wires, like their natural expression was to be set free, to [...]

One of the things I’ve had to learn over time – and that I’ve learned poorly, I should add – is that everything, everything, exists. It might not exist in the sense of being real, I suppose; it might exist only in the imagination. It might not even exist in the “real world” in the [...]

I recently set up a new VPS, because there was a sale on an instance large enough to serve my needs (and then some) at a price point that I couldn’t ignore. My old host was RamNode, and make no mistake, I’ve never ever had any qualms with RamNode – the customer service has always [...]

I’ve been running TomatoUSB on my router (an Asus RT86) for years, but I’ve been noticing some flakiness lately, primarily in network devices just acting oddly on connection, poor connection throughput for a few specific devices, and a few other oddities. It just so happened that a few of the devices that were struggling were, [...]

Yesterday, G-Force Software introduced the OB-E synthesizer emulation. It’s another OB-8 emulation – sort of – except it has some features that make it look really compelling. Oberheim has some absolutely iconic synths. They were originally built around the SEM, the Synthesizer Expander Module, which was a monophonic synth; it was pretty simple, although it [...]