Media - new toys - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the top of my monitor with a slim webcam on it, and a large white LED panel light behind it.

Coming up for four years into the pandemic and I finally have a grown-up video call setup (and the best part is that work paid for it).

Posted on 17 January 2024, 13:14

A photo of a Roland A-49 MIDI keyboard in white sitting on my (also white) desk. As the name suggests it has 49 keys, and has a number of buttons and knobs on the left hand side.

It look longer than expected, but it's finally here! 🎉 The keys are _very_ nice-feeling, there's a really good weight to them. And I haven't read the manual yet so I have no idea what this is about, but the very lowest key is marked "Panic".

our house music darkroom new toys midi keyboard

Posted on 27 October 2023, 14:59

A photo of a Suhr "Reactive Load / I.R." load box. It's a chonky metal box with curved edges along the top, and several silver dials and switches on the front, plus two seven-segment red LED displays at the left marked "Bank" and "Cab".

First new bit of guitar kit in a while! I already have a load box, but the problem with it is that there's no headphone output which means I need to plug it into my USB audio interface which _does_ have a headphone output but is all wired up to my computer setup, which in turn means I can't play my tube amp anywhere except our home office. This new Suhr one has a headphone output and can be powered from my pedal board power supply so I'll be able to take the amp and pedal board to the front of the house and play with my full setup there, AND it has an auxiliary input as well so I can plug my iPad into it and play along to music or just use GarageBand's backing dummer functionality to have a drum kit to keep in time with. I have to say, though, this thing is significantly larger than I was expecting!

our house music darkroom new toys guitar

Posted on 5 October 2023, 14:53

A photo of the box of Apple's AirPods Pro second-generation earbuds.

Woot, these will be a nice upgrade over my increasingly janky Powerbeats Pro that I bought like six or seven years ago. The braided charging cable is SO much nicer than the old plastic ones. The other thing that'll be nice with these is being able to fit them into my pocket when we go on the Metro where I don't have my bag and can't bring my AirPods Max. The case for the Powerbeats Pro is just ABSURDLY large, and bounces around uncomfortably even in the leg pockets of my cargo pants. And it also means my migration to USB-C everywhere continues apace!

our house darkroom new toys airpods pro

Posted on 3 October 2023, 11:11

A product shot of the Roland A-49 MIDI keyboard in white. As the name suggests it has 49 keys and has a number of buttons and knobs on the left hand side.

I've decided to continue my musical journey and get a MIDI keyboard and actually learn how to play it! 😁 I actually had an M-Audio something-or-other keyboard ages ago (nearly twenty years in fact: https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/1423) but in a similar story to my guitar from 2007, due to the lack of decent learning resources I never actually stuck with it. It turns out that the "Melodics" app I use for learning drums _also_ includes a whole course for keyboard as well so I'm going to take full advantage of it! I did a bunch of looking around and settled on this, the Roland A-49. The reviews are all glowing and apparently the key feel is very good as well. I could have gotten the black version and probably had it in my hands this week because the white one doesn't seem to be in stock anywhere, but I think the white looks far cleaner and sleeker.

music new toys midi keyboard

Posted on 2 October 2023, 19:42

A photo of a split mechanical keyboard. The primary keys are a nice grey/blue colour, the surrounding keys (Control, Shift, spacebar, etc.) are black, and the Escape and Return keys are red. There's an LED under each key and they're busily changing colours like a rainbow.

New keyboard day, Keychron Q11! I mostly blame @damonism for this. Also I didn't realise it had the hilariously tacky crazy RGB backlighting.

our house darkroom new toys mechanical keyboard

Posted on 28 June 2023, 16:29

A photo of the box of the Dream Router. The router itself looks like a little squat white cylinder with a ring around the top and a gently curved top and bottom.

New router day! A Ubiquiti "Dream Router". Our current router is a six year-old Netgear D7800 running OpenWRT and appears to be slowly dying because increasingly often the entire wireless radio just... drops. Like, no devices can see any of the networks, then it'll come back a minute later. Last time this happened we actually had to power-cycle the router entirely because it didn't come back at all. And while I like the flexibility of OpenWRT, I've managed to fuck things up on a couple of occasions and it feels more like I'm needing to be a sysadmin versus it just being an appliance.

our house darkroom new toys router nerd shit

Posted on 6 June 2023, 12:53

A photo of a long and narrow white cardboard box with an image of a stainless steel Apple Watch on the front of it.

New Apple Watch! I'd been using @yayKM's one since mine died as she can't wear hers regularly so it didn't really matter, but she's going to be going into the office more often now and it's super-handy for notifications and such. I was going to wait for the Series 9 later this year, but on reflection I was fine with the Series 5 as it was and @yayKM was going to need her old Watch significantly before the expected September release date of the new one. The backup and restore process from the old Watch to the new is slick, I was up and running with the Series 8 within a matter of minutes with all of my configuration and data exactly as it was on the old one. The physical size of the new Watch is only 1mm larger (41mm versus the 40mm of the old one), but there's much less bezel so the physical screen area is significantly larger, 904 sq mm for the new versus 759 sq mm for the old and it's very noticeable. I can only imagine how comically oversized the 45mm Watch would look on my dainty little wrists (or better yet, the Apple Watch Ultra).

our house darkroom new toys apple watch

Posted on 28 April 2023, 14:52

A photo of the box of a Fender "Mustang Micro" headphone guitar amp. It's a little box with a volume dial on the front and some buttons on the side that plugs directly into the output of the guitar. You plug headphones into the amp, and off you go!

Yesss, very excited about this! All the reviews have been glowing and it'll be wonderful to just plug into the guitar, pop headphones on, and not be tethered to one place when I just feel like doing a bit of guitar noodling rather than anything serious that'd warrant the full tube amp setup.

our house music darkroom new toys guitar

Posted on 7 February 2023, 11:05

A photo of a compact electronic drum kit, with a very shiny metal acoustic hi-hat stand with a black plastic cymbal mounted on it sitting behind the kit.

I've started doing some more advanced stuff on the drums and some of it involves using the hi-hat pedal to open and close the hi-hat, but the stock hi-hat pedal that comes with the drums is fairly mushy and I was having a lot of trouble getting it to register when doing fast switches between open and closed (it's perfectly fine just when it's fully closed or open, just not so much when switching between the two in rapid succession). I did some research and Roland actually have a hi-hat that you mount on a regular acoustic hi-hat stand and it physically moves up and down as a regular hi-hat would. I ordered both the cymbal and the stand earlier in in the week and it arrived today, and man it feels nice to play!

our house music darkroom new toys drums

Posted on 5 January 2023, 14:14