Media - new toys - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of the box of my iPad Pro. The box itself is white with an image of a black iPad Pro on it, and on the screen is some abstract art, mostly black, with a set of lines that kind of give the impression of something having been vacuum moulded underneath it.

Upgraded to the new 11" iPad Pro tonight, 6 years from my 2018 one is a good run! I had unfortunately dropped the old one a couple of months ago and cracked the glass, and it's since spread and is now registering phantom touches. I also likely would have been upgrading later this year anyway since the old one was getting rather long in the tooth (and I've had to have the "automatically remove unused apps" on for a good two-plus years now because I had very much run out of storage space), this just pushed the timeframe up a bit.

The new Magic Keyboard is MUCH more solid feeling than the old one (and there's an Escape key! 🎉), but the first order of business is disabling all the bloody Apple Intelligence rubbish now that I have an iPad that can actually run it.

our house darkroom new toys ipad pro

Posted on 23 January 2025, 21:58

A photo of seven ESP32 microcontroller circuit boards sitting on a table. The one on top is the old one and is about 5cm wide and 2cm tall. Underneath it are six of the new boards, each of which are about 2.5cm by 2cm or so. The new ones are ASTOUNDINGLY more compact than the old one.

I'm modernising my ESP32 setup! 🎉 The one on top is one of the old Adafruit HUZZAH32s I'm using at the moment that originally came out in ~2017 and has 520KB RAM, 4MB flash, and a Micro USB connector. The new ones are Adafruit QT Py ESP32s with 2MB of RAM, 8MB of flash, and USB-C.

I have a bit of functionality in my MicroPython code where I can trigger the board to update itself remotely by pulling the files down from GitHub, but unfortunately with the overhead of running MicroPython plus my code itself, I only end up with about 80KB or so free after a fresh reboot and so the update-from-GitHub code frequently runs out of memory and I end up needing to update the code by plugging it directly into the computer. (Which in turns means needing to find out a damn Micro USB to USB-C adapter or cable because all my computers are USB-C now.)

The actual physical cable setup with the old boards is pretty messy too, because even though my sensors are all using the nice compact and clean Stemma QT connector, I have to break those out into individual power, ground, SCL, and SDA cables and plug them individually into the GPIO pins on the board whereas the new QT Py boards have a built-in Stemma QT port on them!

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 21 January 2025, 15:42

A photo of the box of the Espresso display. The display itself is only 5mm thick and has a silver housing with a bit of a chin at the bottom similar to how the old Intel iMacs used to, though much less chunky.

When I'm recording my drums in Logic Pro, my laptop sits on its stand over behind and to the left of the drum kit, and I have my iPad sitting in the middle acting as a second monitor so I can put Logic Pro on that and see which bar I'm up to without needing to awkwardly turn my head over to where the laptop is. The annoying part about that though is that you can't actually tap on the iPad screen to do anything, it's purely displaying output, so to pause Logic Pro or go back to a specific section I still need to lean over to the laptop.

It turns out that there's a company that makes little touch-capable portable displays, so I bought the 13-inch one (mostly because anything larger doesn't fit in between the two crash cymbals on the drum kit 😅)! I've also got a VESA mount stand to attach to the drum stand and a little VESA mount tablet/display holder so I can use both the iPad (during regular drum practice when I'm just using it to stream music) as well as the new Espresso display when I'm recording stuff, but unfortunately the display holder isn't arriving until next week so I can't take it for a proper spin yet.

our house new toys photos.app

Posted on 8 November 2024, 14:42

A photo of the subwoofer, it's a glossy black box about 29cm square, with no ornamentation on it at all except for a silver plate in the middle of the top face that says "REL" on it. There are four short silver legs, and it's sitting in a corner next to our TV stand in front of the window.

We have FINALLY upgraded our lounge room stereo system and added a subwoofer! It's a teensy little REL Acoustics Tzero MkIII (sealed box, 6.5" driver) but damn does it add some excellent punch.

The bookshelf speakers we have are twenty year-old Wharfedale ones and still sound fantastic, but the HomePod definitely shows them up in terms of bass so I decided to finally do something about it.

our house new toys photos.app subwoofer

Posted on 2 November 2024, 13:50

A photo of the box of a "Black Titanium" iPhone 16 Pro. The box art has phone itself showing that standard swirly abstract art that Apple uses.

Secondly, picking up a new iPhone 16 Pro to replace my trusty iPhone 11 Pro!

(Thirdly, I have a dentist appointment at 3pm but I'm not taking a photo of that. 😛)

(TEETH.)

darkroom new toys new iphone day in the office

Posted on 24 October 2024, 13:57

A photo of the box of a Boss ME-90B bass guitar multi-effects pedal. The "pedal" is more of a board, it's very large and a dark blue colour and is absolutely festooned with dials.

Huzzah, the last bit of my order arrived! Very excited to be able to get significantly more interesting bass tones now.

our house darkroom new toys bass guitar

Posted on 23 October 2024, 12:21

A photo of an electronic drum kit sitting in a corner, with a mesh snare and three mesh tom pads on it, and four black cymbals. Three of the cymbals are noticeably larger (and also cleaner) than the fourth one, and they're the new ones.

It's aliiiiiive!

Three crash cymbals are go, and the drum module is smart enough to assign a different crash sound to each of the inputs (the default single crash that it came with, the extra "Crash 2" input, AND the third one that's just marked "AUX") if you have it set to the correct cymbal type, so no mucking around needed.

our house darkroom new toys drums

Posted on 16 October 2024, 18:17

A photo of an electric guitar with a white body, black pick guard, and a maple fretboard and headstock. It's VERY handsome.

A photo of an electronic drum kit sitting in a corner, with a mesh snare and three mesh tom pads on it, and three black cymbals. Two of the cymbals are noticeably larger (and also cleaner) than the third one, and they're the new ones.

New gear day! 🎉 A Fender Player II Stratocaster, and upgraded cymbals for my drum kit (CY-16RT ride cymbal and CY-14CT crash cymbal, both Roland).

Mannys only had one of the crash cymbals in stock so I'm still waiting on the second to arrive, as well as a Boss ME-90B bass guitar multi-effects pedal. I haven't had a chance to play with the Strat yet, but MAN the new cymbals are nice, they have a far better feel to them than the stock ones, and the new ride cymbal has three trigger zones on it, so you get the bell sound in the very middle too.

I'm currently trying to see if I can fit another cymbal mount on there to use with the last input on my drum module so I can make use of one of the now-spare CY-8 cymbals as a third crash... 🤔

our house darkroom new toys guitar drums

Posted on 14 October 2024, 13:58

A photo of a Blackstar ID:CORE V4 20 guitar amp, it's a compact black box with silver trim on the front mesh and knobs on the top panel. There's nothing for scale but it's pretty compact, 37cm wide × 29cm high × 18cm deep.

Putting my union referral bonuses to good use. 😎

our house darkroom new toys guitar amp

Posted on 28 May 2024, 10:36