I’m trying to work out what happened to someone’s disk. This is one of a rotating pair of external drives used to backup an Ubuntu laptop. One of the pair, Backup 2, failed to mount the other day. I confirmed the problem and ran a backup to Backup 1. I now think that may have been a mistake, but we’ll see.

I tried fsck from the administrator account with no result, but noticed along the way that Backup 2 is seen as a single exFAT partition, which seems a little odd as I’d have expected ext3 or ext4.

Switching over to an OSX laptop where I have a better range of tools to hand, I can confirm that it reads as GUID/exFAT. But a look at it with a sector editor is puzzling. I see nothing in sector 0. Moving on to the sector 1 I have what looks like an EFI header so that should be fine. Sector 2 seems to be part of the same system. And I went back to 0 but this time scrolled down. That helps.

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A summary of investigations into Hohner analogue electronic pianos and string machines. (To date. Not planning any updates at this point, but you never know.)

HIPs and Strings

Ephemeral photos of most of these instruments turn up occasionally in online sales; longer-term linkable references are given below. Different branding seems to have been used by Hohner in different national markets, however, so even if this list is comprehensive technically (which I can’t guarantee), there may be alternative names in some parts.

Drawings below are sketches intended to highlight the distinguishing characteristics of the instruments, rather than be exhaustively accurate. Or get the perspective right or anything. Slider caps in particular may vary even in the same model; so I’m not trying too hard to represent the exact types found — where they haven’t all vanished or been replaced.

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The Russ’s children are a wild bunch. We knew that all along. They’ve never been easy neighbours, though sometimes their parents were our friends. But yesterday we heard a scream from the little sister and wondered what it was now. Turned out that the biggest brother was dragging her into a cage he’d built. She’d been trying to get out and meet people, and the brothers didn’t like that. The littlest of them was always too small to dare to do anything himself, and too scared to talk to anyone or to disobey. So he’d helped build the cage and kept quiet.

We wondered what to do. Could we, should we, do anything? Sometimes everyone knows what’s going on, but no-one says anything. This wasn’t the first time she’d been dragged into the house and tied down, while Big Brother did whatever he wanted with her, and the Little Brother sat and watched, giggling to himself about the things he’d do when he grew up. How she got over that and still had enough nerve to talk to anyone, I don’t know. Perhaps she wants to believe that it’s good to be friendly, so long as people are friendly to you.

But this time I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’ve heard of it happening before in other villages. Maybe they’ll just tie her to the bed again and Big Brother can use her like before. Or maybe he’s so crazy about her, so mad that he’s not the only thing in her world. Maybe it’ll happen this time. Maybe he’ll say, it was an honour killing. And all the people looking for excuses will just say, well, honour. Yes, that’s important, isn’t it. It’s traditional. It’s their family business, after all.

Stop looking at me like that. You’re not helping.

Side by side shots of the Korg SD delays, the -200 opened for comparison while I convert the -400 for 240V.

The SD-400 (brown) has the bypass, short/long delay option, swell, and ADT settings, but no tone control. I haven’t quite worked out which I prefer; the -400 seems to have a fixed filter; it’s smoother than the SD-200 (silver) on simple delays, unless you turn the -200 tone down. Maybe the -200 is better for harsher delays. The only online technical information I’ve found for them suggests they have roughly the same range of 30–400ms for the -200 and 25–400ms for the -400. Presumably the -400 should go lower on its Short setting, but it’s the same as the -200 on its Long setting. In practice, comparing these two, the -400 gets up to around 10% longer delay, but that could just be a calibration thing on one of them.

Having finally worked out how to write blogging software capable of containing the Vosathenik pages, I feel able to publish my page of thoughts about why I didn’t adapt to the Maltron keyboard. (Apart from a few grammatical edits this was mostly written in late 2014.)

In their defence, I have to say it was probably more to do with the structure of my fingers than anything else. The Maltron keyboard is based on some design principles which reflect usage assumptions which may be valid for some people, but not for me.

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So, a new site? Yes, after a year of covid and code. The older site was no longer serving its original purpose, and I’m writing now mostly about . . . well, Zen & the Art of Synthesiser Maintenance seems to sum it up. (Contrary to my expectation, it seems no-one had used it before . . . ) Also I’m consolidating a few other things here which never worked very well in the old CMS, and mostly got lost in different subdirectories in earlier/other sites. (They still have their original publication dates though, near as I can work them out — anything prior to this post.)

This site will be divided into topical sections for ease of access, and will be less constrained by templates — I’m doing my own CMS. This may involve a bit more vector graphics than works well with off-the-shelf software, and anything I fancy trying out. Some pages will even have scripts for special operations, but this will always be a) handcrafted, b) lightweight, c) served from this domain, d) stated and explained, and e) honest (but don’t just trust me on that). Enter at your own pleasure over pain ratio, but feel free to contact me about visibility issues.