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All the wiring for under the board is done, allowing it to be mounted and the wires as seen in the photo to be soldered to the board.

As I’m fresh-out of Android development boards, I decided to try and repurpose a Raspberry Pi 4 for Android experimentation in preparation for when the next version of this book comes out: http://newandroidbook.com/. I had originally tried this with my Raspberry Pi 3A+, but only found real support for the 3B. First, you need a version of Android that is customized for the Pi 4 . I used this repo and followed the guide: https://github.com/android-rpi/device_arpi_rpi4 ...

I was looking into what was taking up space in my Dropbox account and found some older videos, each a few gigabytes in size, where I didn’t really care if there was a small loss of quality to make them much smaller. I found some options with ffmpeg that worked pretty well ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx265 -crf 34 output_file This will re-encode the file using x265. The “-crf” option specifies the amount of compression, with a range from 0-51: “0” being lossless and “23” the default. With the default I was able to halve the storage space required with negligible video loss. I upped it to “34”, as above, and while there was a bit of loss in video clarity, it didn’t matter for the video content. The result? A file originally ~ 2.4 GB in size was reduced to ~ 300 MB. ...

The main board is coming along, this is before I placed the remaining capacitors and IC sockets. Here I’m matching transistors with an ATmega328-based component tester. And then the placing the potentiometers, sockets, and switches on the front panel

I got the following error when running “cargo run” on my “Roguelike” follo-along project (https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook) Err` value: CreationErrors([NoAvailablePixelFormat, NoAvailablePixelFormat])' I found the error was due to 3D acceleration being enabled on my Linux Mint 19-based development environment, running on Virtualbox 6.1.10. That is, make sure you have this in your vboxmanage line in your Vagrantfile: vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--accelerate3d", "off"] # Disable 3d acceleration until Virtualbox team fixes it Remembering back as to why I had that line set to “on”, I think I was playing around with getting the Android emulator to work in Virtualbox, which as of 6.1 supports nested virtualization. I came close to getting that working, ultimately I don’t think it’s possible right now. ...

The supply that powers the +/- 12v rails is done! I think I’m about 1% of the way there.

This arrived in the mail today from Synthcube It is the Music From Outer Space (MFOS) Sound Lab Mini Synth Mark II, an analog synth from the great late Ray Wilson. There is quite a lot of involved soldering - though I did do more soldering back in the days when I was constructing the Electronics Australia Playmaster series of pre-/subwoofer/stereo amps, but it actually looks like the wiring to all the pots/plugs may be the killer. ...

As seen from the Everglades to the west of Miami

I had a sizable pile of infra-red RGB controllers that came with every RGB LED strip I’ve ever purchased. Still, one was never around when I needed it, and the transmission range was so small that I’d have to move closer to the LED strip to change the color anyway. Finally, there were really only a few unique colors - most looked the same as the next. I decided to instead replace the RGB LED PWM generator with an ESP8266 (as a NodeMCU) that I could control via a web interface from my phone. ...