No Win Is A Win

Not so long ago I bought a Lenovo Ideapad 120s because I needed some kind of machine with Windows installed.
Windows served its purpose and so the Ideapad was just kind of knocking around not doing much, which is a waste. I played with it a bit, tried a few things but I've been using Linux for so long now that I really had no use for it. The 120s is a bit like a modern netbook. It has a 32GB hard drive and Windows 10 Pro takes up pretty much all of that space. By the time I'd done a decent system clean there was only about 6GB left. I added my own 32GB micro SD card but that's still not a lot of space.
Having searched the net I found someone who had managed to install Ubuntu 18.04 and that inspired me to do something similar. My Lenovo is now running Lubuntu 18.04.
Lubuntu is a really lightweight distro and I've reversed the hard drive allocation so that I now have just over 20GB of free space on my home drive plus the 32GB micro SD. The startup time is about 30 seconds but after that it runs smoother and faster than Windows 10. Everything is familiar about the distro so I feel right at home and I now have a very productive laptop.
Linux is the ideal choice once again.

Liverpool

A few years ago I sold my Yamaha QY100 sequencer.
I think from the moment it was gone I regretted the sale.
The only thing that would replace it for me was a Korg MicroArranger or a Yamaha Tyros. Both are expensive arranger keyboards and I never had a spare £500+ to invest in either.
The other week I was looking into either a MicroArranger or another QY100. There was one of each on eBay, both around the £250 mark, second hand. I was late at making a decision and both were gone by the time I'd decided to bid on one of them. While looking for another MicroArranger I stumbled across the Korg Liverpool. After some investigation I discovered that it's a reworked MicroArranger stuffed with Beatles songs and a Union Flag case. It's a bit ugly but it's growing on me.
As you can see I bought one, brand new and sub £200. It's a great keyboard to play and a good accompaniment for my bass playing. I think I've only scratched the surface of its abilities and I'm really enjoying messing about with music again. It's been more than 3 years since I wrote a track.
I think that's all about to change.

Memories

I did try and avoid posting about the TRNG but I thought I had just one more post left in the story.
The Element 14 kit for the desktop Pi has a board included so that a mSATA drive can be added. I wanted the extra drive to store the files of random numbers that I'm producing. It took a while to work things out. Adding the drive really wasn't that straight forward and I spent three hours getting everything talking to each other. I even went as far as breaking out the soldering iron and hard wiring the cooling fan into the GPIO power pins. The desktop is a bit noisy now but it'll never overheat.

While waiting for my transfer hardware to arrive I'm re-purposing the Pi Top as a processing machine. As I type this it's downloading the full Kali ARM OS.
So that's about it really. I'm just about set up for some serious encryption experimentation, that and restarting my Python encryption course along with a decent pen testing introduction.

I imagine the next few posts will be music related. Hopefully next week's blog will contain some exciting keyboard news.
Until then it's back to the bass.

Back To Bassics

When I was about 8 or 9 years old I learned to play a cello.
I did that for 3 years, got a Grade II certificate and played an end of year concert with the school of music.
The cello went and so I taught myself keyboards on a cheap Casio VL-1. I was still playing basslines.
Fast forward a few years and I spent a back dated dole cheque on a candy pink bass. I think I sold that for a night out.
When I started writing tunes I always wrote the bass first. I played keyboards with my left hand playing bass and my right hand filling in the blanks with chords. For as long as I can remember the bass was the most important part of anything musical.

For the last three years I've been without FL Studio. It doesn't run well on Wine for Linux. I've tried LMMS and a few other things but my heart was never in it. I haven't recorded a track in the last three years and I miss it.

To rectify this situation I decided to go back to what I know. Four strings.
Not another cello but instead another bass. A half decent one. Five minutes ago I was playing my Squire Precision Bass. It's easy to play and the experience of 45 minutes solid playing was cathartic. I'm happier for having spent the time with the instrument and although it's back to basics my enthusiasm will drive me on to be better. I can see myself writing tracks again soon.
Just for myself, but I will share the resulting happiness with everyone else.

Gimme Numbers

Tested and working, my new hardware RNG is in operation.
It's not quite offline yet because there are still a few drivers and bits of software to add. Once everything is one hundred percent it'll go dark and you'll never hear about it again. In fact this is probably the last time I'll mention it.
So that's it. Goal reached.
I'll be making numbers.