The Casio Power Supply Works; On Speeding Up the Process
Today I've got two quick things:
First:
I posted recently about my frustrations putting together my little Casio power supplies. I spoke too soon when I wrote that post because the entirety of the problem was my bad soldering. On all but one of the boards. I'd missed a pin on one of the SOT23 FETs I have on the front end of the board acting as over and reverse voltage, and on one of the boards I'd missed a pin on the SOIC-packaged linear regulator. These are all parts that I can technically solder without a microscope these days with my still-young-enough eyes, but clearly I'm inconsistent. I chalk this up again to my forever struggle to fight the urge to go as quickly as possible and cut corners using only the tools I have at hand, not the tools that are in the other room.
Tonight I will re-install a set of blinds in my bathroom for the third time because the first time I left the instructions downstairs and thought I had the orientation of a critical piece on lock (I did not). The second time I installed them too high because I thought I had eyeballed the height correctly and the tape measure had run off with my two-year-old (I had eyeballed wrong). Tonight I'm going to gather every tool I might need and slow down.
I worry I'll get less done and by worrying, I get less done.
Second:
The obverse of the lesson I'm writing down for myself above is that sometimes I need to relax and proceed instead of avoiding. In this head space I use the hammer that's in the garage to justify my procrastination instead of as a frustrating block around which I'll have to corner cut.
This morning I saw a post on a music gear focused discord asking for submissions by March 31st to a compilation. I knew I'd have a light couple hours at work and I knew I had a pile of improvs to pull from on Dropbox, so I said to myself I'd set aside an hour and see if I could wrangle something in Audacity.
I was successful and I feel proud. I've submitted my track. I'll surely post here when it's out.
Audacity has implemented a select few real-time plugins (thankfully compression is among them) but for the most part the effects are all still as they've always been: you hit apply and it applies; you can only preview a 30 second snippet of what you're about to do. This is usually frustrating and limiting, but sometimes it's empowering and limiting. Make a choice. Move forward. Make another choice. Delete wide swaths of audio no one needs to ever hear. Crank 100hz in the graphic EQ. Cut at 4k. And so on.