(draft – without her)
I didn’t expect That at all, that I would slip then
They were terrible people who made beautiful things
And I would be happy to go by that name
aspire to, even
That was the surprise. I didn’t realize
That they represented hope to me
that there was hope
That I could be beautiful too
They‘re all dead now.
Him too
Waking up to speed
Lethal for the world or me
One touch, all I need
Obligatory finished product first:
Sometimes things come together, and sometimes they come together perfectly. This was not either of those scenarios; it’s actually just a name pun. I think the journey began confidently over beers, but the tolerances involved in interpreting what someone means by “portable and loud but doesn’t have to be too loud but also make it look really cool” can allow for a lot of design doubt (by no fault of their own–it’s just hard to gauge what reference points people have for “small” and “loud”), and so by the time I packed the Tesselator out, I had built 6 separate designs, each one but the last dusted in a fine sheen of “not-quite-good-enough.” This is their story (dim the lights).
Try 1 was actually pretty awesome. Basically, I wanted to see what the hype was about with the HiVi B4N’s. Ports in small boxes often of chuff me the wrong way and the client wanted “big circles on the front,” which I interpreted to mean speakers. Plus, I go for passive radiators when I can…and so I went for a passive radiator design. I had been having luck with asymmetry, and I wanted to carry a “T” motif through the design.
The problem with the B4N’s that all the fanboys won’t admit is there’s an insanely high Q 15 dB break up mode right at 3kHz, and it likes to jump around depending on boundary conditions, air temperature, zodiac sign, etc. So I wanted to be at least 15 dB down by 3kHz which meant a tweeter that could hit 1.5 kHz, and for directivity reasons, I decided on a 500 Hz crossover, which obviously meant I was going to use the Aurasound NS1s.
Then I found a sweet spot of plywood that I could waterfall from top to front face to edge, cut with confidence, laid out some paper circles for test fit, and very poorly lock-mitered the shit out of the wood.
Lock miters as promised:
The separated volume is for the electronics–lesson learned from previous projects is when trying to attain a good seal, either get better at electrical engineering, or compartmentalize your bad work.
Of course, I still overestimated my abilities and placed the batteries in the acoustic chamber for space reasons. The white boxes are the enclosures for the NS1s.
I also had the idiotic notion that using banana plugs as pass-throughs would be simplest, but not only did I get the polarities wrong, it turns out banana plugs are super expensive and take up tons of space:
I didn’t manage to fuck up the miters too much and the face is perhaps lovable by more than it’s mother:
I cut out some purple heart and embedded some glow in the dark for the volume knob:
With all that shit sorted, it was time to make an absolute mess of the ASP. The signal chain starts with a power-source isolated bluetooth chip, which is split by an op-amp active crossover, the low frequencies going to a china-market bought TDA7492 class D amp and then to the B4N’s while the high frequencies are padded down by potentiometer and sent to a similarly procured TPA3118D2 amp. The TDA7492 is rated for 40W into 8 ohms @ 25V @10% THD, which works reasonably with the B4N’s 25W RMS rating. Typically it’s better to spec an amp with more headroom (@ less THD) over the continuous power rating of a woofer in order to match the crest factor of music, but I didn’t think of that at the time.
This is the last build I used analog signal processing on, partially because of the above mess of wires. Here’s the terrible wire management in context:
I opted for a glow in the dark, 3D printed, inset handle to preserve the form factor, and then slapped some spar varnish all over that bad boy and called it a day.
There are far more than five senses available in the bleak sensorium of human existence, and one of them is the sense that you could’ve done better. Honestly, I was pretty happy with Round 1, but it was just not quite there. It was a little too big, and the lock miter bit I used for the edging was one of those cheap amazon finds that reflect their pricing in their quality. So, I started completely anew…by taking an old project that had been called into half-hearted existence with 3 other siblings in a similarly iterative process that finally yielded the Krump Kanon and cutting it in half. In general, this approach is poor.
It sucked for multiple reasons, some of which were that it was ugly and sounded bad and was still too big. Essentially, it failed to meet any of the criteria laid forth.
I then tried a new design that was basically Round 1 but with half the stuff in half the space. It also sucked. I was convinced that it wouldn’t because of my experiential lesson on KK Round 2–“efficiency is king”–but it turns out that only works if you have a pleasing natural response or some good DSP.
It was doubly a shame because the wood that went into the box was beautiful, but for some misguided reason, I used the cheap lock miter bit from Round 1 and, completely to my surprise, it didn’t work well the second time either.
I then decided that everything I had decided was wrong, that efficiency wasn’t king, and it was all about extension. I went back to some of my “super-compact design” notes and decided to drag some micro-subwoofer Tang Bands into wretched existence. The only problem is that tuning a small box to subwoofer frequencies requires a long-ass tube (because the air spring in a small box is relatively stiff, you need a lot of acoustic mass in the resonating port to get a low resonance frequency), and long-ass ports are very inconvenient to fit into small boxes (not a problem encountered in my daily life). I had a minor stroke of brilliance stroke and decided to make a port that was both a long-ass tube AND a handle, therefore circumnavigating this issue. Here is the relatively tiny box, which looks shitty because I had come up with the terrible play that I’d wrap the whole thing in carbon fiber once assembled:
And the incredibly sleek and not at all awkwardly protruding port/handle design. 
I set the thing up, hit play and was, for the first time in a long time, pleasantly surprised. Here’s a casual video of it in a living room (turn ya sound up and throw on some head phones to appreciate the FIDELITY that’s SPEWING out of this BOOMBOX).
For such a tiny little thing, it was really moving air. It had real potential until I yield-stress tested the carbon fiber with a hammer.
Not really much to go on about here. It was ugly. I underestimated how weird it would look to have the speakers sticking out of the face instead of flush mounted, and the thing looks like a damn bug-eyed pug.
In a surprisingly reflective and narratively satisfying moment, I decided to combine the lessons of the last 5 iterations. I drew up a plan for a small, relatively efficient boombox with precise waterfall miters, inset speakers, DSP, and a port handle. And no fucking carbon fiber.
On to the even more boring stuff. Yes, yes, I know the stereo image is going to be ruined by placing the “tweeters” on top of each other. But it looks cool, and there’s no point in attempting to get stereo width out of a box narrower than one’s head.
Anyway, it’s got 2x TB W3-1876 in a mono “sub” configuration, sitting in a 3.7L box stuffed with light polyfill, tuned to 48 Hz with a 12″ long by 1.2″ diameter port. This theoretically gives an f3 of 42 Hz. The port is a 3D printed 3-section design that was epoxied together for surface finish and adhesion. It’s flared on both sides equally for symmetry. The “tweeters” are 1″ W1-1070SH, which are sitting in a 0.1L box and crossed over in a 48 dB/oct LW DSP crossover at 500 Hz. The outer dimensions are approx 4.5″Hx4.5″Dx14″ and the 80Wh battery supplies 24V (nominal) to a China Black Market TDA7492 (to run the woofers) and a CBM TPA3118D2 (for the tweeters) for about 8h of quite listening and 4 hours of TURNT listening MiniDSP 2×4 runs the tuning, and the bluetooth is run by an APT-X Bluetooth 4.0 chip. The advantages of this chip are high quality transmission with surprisingly low radio noise, but by some trick of China-blackmarket circuitry, it manages to clip it’s output stage at maximum source volumes. I suspect they added a NE5532 output buffer but didn’t manage the gain properly. The numbers on the edge display battery voltage, which is my lazy solution for a battery gauge.
The wood itself is is 1/4″ maple ply, reinforced on the interior with another 1/8″ of ultra-stiff epoxy and some bracing. I finished the wood Water-Lox high gloss finish, which I enjoyed for the simplicity of use and quality of finish. It brings out the grain and luster of the wood beautifully, and it dries quickly into a reasonably durable exterior finish.
Subjectively, the thing is awesome. It sounds far bigger than it looks, and with DSP trickery, there are little concerns of over-excursion despite a relatively low tuning for such small woofers and such a small box. The stereo image is shit for previously mentioned issues, but it manages to have pretty laid-back directivity, which is all you could hope for from a small source.
Final assessment: can fill a living room with danceably loud music, yet it is small enough to hand carry to a barbecue. Ship it.
1
A multi-dimensional object that is, in shape and movement, part digital glitch and part sea urchin. It’s a shade of deep, massive gloss black. Darker than black, darker than death. It’s the color black that makes a noise like a planet collapsing. Its shape is eating itself and exploding outwards, broiling tumultuously. You’re a mile above a massive city, sky scrapers reaching to the sky like hope, you’re looking down with no body, watching it roll, seethe, swarm, sky-scraper tall, into the center of the neon night, shanghai future. It’s here-but-not-here, it’s in a layer superimposed over reality, a layer extra to everyone else’s run-of-the-mill 3-dimensions, visible to you, real to you, real to it, but not yet manifested as real to everyone else. This is good because otherwise everyone would be dead.
2
An underground environment lit by fluorescent lighting, Parisian subway tiles on the wall. It’s here, with you, bus sized. This time, manifested, real to everyone. Everyone is not dead yet. That’s because you and your team, team spelled family—you’ve been through it all together, like that one time you barely pulled it off at the last minute, with a plan just crazy enough to work, to stop that one end-of-the-world scenario, that was, what? last month or something?—are here to stop it. All of you, and it, are sharing in the same realities now, so you all have bodies and their associated delicacies. It’s a liquid-obsidian black, the same color that greed is, a deep, lustrous, beautiful black, like ballpoint pen ink, but for the pen that wrote the end of universe.
The reason for the sudden partialness to the more standard reality currently expressed by all parties is that it came here to fight you: loser dies, winner continues on their merry way—it’s merry way being to consume the city and world and everything you love in a maelstrom of hatred and violations of fundamental laws of physics. Luckily, you’re a goddamn weapon, and you’re carrying one too. Something very futuristic and Japanese, with a sleek dark look, the kind of look that a fancy knife has that indicates that it is definitely for killing. You softly un-sheath the weapon, which, to clarify, is technologically as much like a knife-definitely-for-killing as silicon is like silicone, with enough style that it’s clear you’re here to fuck shit up, but not so much style so as to be unprofessional. It’s unclear how exactly you got here and why the confrontation is in the format of a duel, but what is important is that you’re gonna fucking win, because this is what you’re made for. You’re something like the son of a fallen god, and you’re here to get after it.
You’re sorta going through all this in your head as the moment of confrontation draws out, with your teammates ready to lay down their lives and this creature ready to do whatever the fuck it is that it does, and you realize you’re not really sure how to get started. For lack of a better catch phrase as you raise your weapon, you say Okey-dokey.
It pops into a million spikes and then inhales itself into a smooth wave and then breaks into a cubic digital mass and then it freezes as a voluminous scream, a dark-matter Rorschach. Before you have time to move, it booms, deeper than the oceans, deeper than the crushing loneliness of the abyss space, deeper than the tomb of God closing shut
YOU CONTINUE TO JUSTIFY YOUR OWN FLAWS AND POOR CHOICES THROUGH A DESIRE TO BE YOUR OWN ANTIHERO DESPITE KNOWING THAT IT HURTS THOSE WHO CARE FOR YOU
you yell a battle cry and attack with the smooth ease of an athlete
WHAT MEANINGFUL AND POSITIVE IMPACT THAT’S UNIQUE TO YOUR EXISTENCE DO YOU HAVE ON THE WORLD AT LARGE? HOW ARE YOU NOT REPLACEABLE OR EXPENDABLE?
in shock, the world blurring, screams echoing, blood
YOU SAY NEXT TIME EVERY TIME AND WHEN YOU GO NOWHERE YOU LASH OUT AGAINST OTHER FOR YOUR OWN MEDIOCRITY
your teammates die and/or kill themselves
HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE DISPARITY BETWEEN YOUR AMBITION AND YOUR INADEQUACY
you alone stand determined
YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SOMEBODY
you sit down
It is a color of black that is the opposite of glowing in absolute darkness. It is the color of black of a bad goodbye. It is the color of black of hope when there is no hope.
3
A moment later, it’s silent. There floats jet-black sphere oscillating slightly, radiating smugness in a way that only a floating jet-black sphere that is oscillating slightly can. You look at your lethally-Japanese-but-also-futuristic-looking-ass weapon, it’s important end, on your temple, and realize that it was useless. This is gonna be different than before. You pull the trigger and you fucking kill yourself; it is you and you are it.
So I’m flying back from Shanghai right now, (youalreadyknow it’s business class) and I decided to business-expense-splurge for the in-flight wifi, which is about as fast as a snail in the process of peacefully passing away. This means the only scrap of entertainment I can garner from my laptop is writing code in MATLAB. Writing fuckaround code in a pretend programming language in a rickety IDE has a provided surprising source of succor; if you were here you’d know it too because you’d notice I have been sitting FOR HOURS WITHOUT MY SEATBELT ON because I was simply too enraptured by the alternating tides of hate and happiness that MATLAB so easily exerts on the user.
Basically, I’m working on a GUI that allows a user to programmatically create test limits for test data, while also allowing the user to efficiently adjust the limits where our absurd test data manages to invalidate centuries of statistical knowledge. This requires allowing the user to load a specific test from within an absurdly packaged data file which comes from a test system written by someone who clearly much prefers obfuscating and hiding things over effective data collection WHICH in turn means deeply and variably nested structures. Like 400-megabyte-CSV, stuck-in-limbo-with-Leonardio-DiCaprio, booger-that-you-can-feel-but-after-several-embarrassing-red-lights-you-cannot-remove levels deep.
Therefore, after careful perusal of mathworks, I wrote the following code. It uses recursion to return an array of strings describing each and every branch of a struct, down to the twig. It is surely my greatest accomplishment thus far.
function allfields=fieldnamesr(struct);
% FIELDNAMESR recursively explores the depths of nested structs To find all
% possible branches
% fuck yeah recursion
fields=fieldnames(struct); %are there any field names?
idx=1; %increment variable
for i=1:1:size(fields,1) %for all field names
if isstruct(struct.(fields{i})) %see if that field name itself is a structure
temp=structRecurrr(struct.(fields{i})); %if also structure, then we must go deeper!
for j=1:1:length(temp) %for all returned values
allfields{idx,1}=sprintf('%s.%s',fields{i},temp{j}); %return a string containing returned values
idx=idx+1; %increment
end
else
allfields{idx}=fields{i}; %if field name not struct, then we are at bottom level
idx=idx+1; %increment
end
end
Hey baby,
what’s the world coming to these days? It’s all going to hell isn’t it?
what if we just got away from it all? like light years away, like really out there
fuck all this noise, all the people hurting each other
with the sky figuratively falling and with the economy and the people and the election and the general state of things
you’re the one thing that’s good in the world
so
I was thinking
let’s just get away from it all, like you’ve always wanted
you and me in a cottage on the sea side
you know? Let’s do something crazy and just run away
we don’t need anyone if we have each other.
Just you and me
I can see you’re with me to the end no matter what
so let’s elope,
let’s go some where crazy
I’ve got the perfect spot in mind:
let’s go to PSR J1748-2446ad
what if we did that? let’s just get away
I know this is a little out of the blue, a little crazy, I can see you’re a little worried, but it’ll be perfect
let me tell you about J1748-2446ad
it’s a little spot up north, in Sagittarius, by Terzan 5, it’s exactly the kind of place we’ve always imagined we’d grow old together in
there’ll be plenty of room for kids if we want to have some
it’s a fix me up for sure, the heating’s a little wacky, it’s probably like 6×10^5 Kelvin there year-round
but I love the way a little sweat looks on your skin
the foundation needs some work, the whole place might collapse into a black hole;
you’re all the foundation I’ve ever needed
it’s also a bit bright there; the 1.29×10^26 watts of emitted X-Rays would either instantly vaporize us or instantly give us cancer and then instantly vaporize us
I’m not worried about that though, your smile is pretty damn radiant and I haven’t vaporized yet, have I?
that aside, it’s got a great view, the perfect place to watch the sun set, though we might get a little motion sick because J1748-2446ad rotates at about 44,000 miles per hour. But you already spin me right round baby (like a record)
anyways, that’s 61,862,299 more sunsets a day we can watch together with our toes in the neutron sand
also probably the wifi won’t be that good, what with us moving at 0.25 the speed of light and the 2.3×10^13 Gauss magnetic field that will erase all of our devices
and also instantly destroy them
and also instantly crush our bodies
but I think it’s nice to unplug from everything every once in a while
Oh, and we’ve got to watch for the tide, or at least the tidal forces, because J1748-2446ad’s gravitational field,
well it’s about 106,387,117,347 G
it’ll keep us down to earth
but together I know we’d figure out how to make it work
and once we get there it’ll be our own little paradise
Imagine! what if we did it? what if we just got up and dropped everything and left right now?
with only high-energy astrophysics to bother you and I
we can finally have a cottage on the sea side like you always wanted
it’ll be just you and me
and a sea
of ultra-densely packed neutrons radiating gravitational waves into the starry sky
a place where we can just be us
just you and me
and PSR J1748-2446ad
I know its late at night, babe, but it’s 18,000 light years a way so we better get going
it’ll take 134,123,326 more anniversaries to get there if we sling shot by Jupiter
we can celebrate on the road
Classic bro-split. With some things mixed up/distributed.
The idea is to cut effectively. The metabolic shift when cutting can reduce caloric deprivation efficacy for people with naturally slow metabolisms, while the energy deficiency can hurt those looking to preserve lean mass, especially for people with fast metabolisms, and people coming off of bulks. The plan is made for my friend (Aquadman) who is looking mainly to have visible abs, so the preservation of lean mass is somewhat secondary, but the theory is compound lifts for energy output and physiological stimulus, with a rotating high-intensity finish in order to add some spice.
Personally, while cutting, compounds and higher weekly lift frequency helps preserve lean mass. It’s completely anecdotal, but I’d guess the consistent stimulus keeps a muscle group from being in ignored by the body, while the compound lifts helps maintain a more anabolic hormonal balance.
This plan was developed for Ironvlad the Giggly and the Philibuster, two fairly light individuals who are training up for Muay Thai. The idea behind this is a simplistic 3-day/week periodized program to gain lean mass to develop functional strength for Muay Thai using barbells and dumbbells only–it is assumed that other more specific training will be done in the scope of the Muay Thai classes. The two individuals it’s intended for need to move up a weight class, so the idea is to split between large compound lifts in a strength rep/set scheme to build power and explosiveness and large compounds with accessories in a hypertrophic rep/set schemes to help build lean mass. The mesocycle structure throws in some extra MUSCLE CONFUSION by changing movements and modulating intensity and volume through out the cycle. The gradual ratcheting of volume/intensity through the cycle, besides being a mainstay of periodization, is intended to take advantage of the bulk.
Essentially, the 1RM are establish on Week 0, which sets the weights for the next few weeks. Then a 6 week periodized mesocycle follows, with each cycle ending by re-establishing a (hopefully) higher 1RM. Obviously, the %1RM numbers and rep/set structures are guidelines, as the math they are based on is fairly generalized, and one sees a lot of variation day-to-day and person-to-person in response to volume/weight/bulking etc. And besides, sometimes your friends are watching and the cute chick you were staring at is vaguely looking in your direction wondering which of the sweaty, grunting, gym nerds is making so many noises and the random song that came on right before your set drops super hard and you deadlift your current 5RM for an easy 12 and you walk away like a light-headed, red-faced, veiny and skinless gorilla, so never let a prescribed rep number tell you what to do.
The structure of the lifts is 2 main movements, meant to be done at the rep and set and %1RM determined by the week number. This is then followed by 2 accessory super sets, which don’t really need to follow the mesocycle, though the recommendation is 4 x 6-10. The 2 accessory lifts vary through the week, and there’s a decoder ring which includes 2 versions for each accessory superset; the idea is to alternate between the x.1 and x.2 versions one week to the next.
There’s also a little calculation section on the right which recommends the weekly intake, and daily recommended intake as per Ironvlad The Giggly’s BMR, activity, desired gains, desired time etc. Everything that’s green text in a green box is for user input, in order to calculate necessary intake.
Click here to download:
Much like worried parents will fuss over a child before sending them off into the world, I fidgeted over the details of this lil guy, attempting to delay the inevitable departure, filled with pride and worry at the rigors he’ll face out in the real world. Unlike most worried parents, I eventually said “fuck it,” and dropped this fucker off at the local Fedex, to be shipped cross country in a large cardboard box.
The details were particularly sweat-able on this build, as this was essentially the third iteration on the concept, starting with a beast of the beats that went to Keith, and then a semi-pro configuration that went nowhere. Here are the vague details of the build:
Obviously, the first detail to isolate is the Lego theme. Legos, by the way, are a fairly mediocre permanent construction material. Turns out the 10-micron precision makes them fairly expensive from a cost/volume stand point (a small enclosure requires a lot of legos). Had my little siblings help me build lego boxes to compare the looks. Turns out rainbow is a crowd favorite
Fast forward a few days, after much designing, some deliberation, and then cutting, I’ve got a wood box to match the lego box. I believe I designed for 4L internal volume for each NS3 driver, which, in retrospect, I feel was too much. However, once the wood is cut…alea acta est. I went for a seamless miter approach on this build, to avoid the ugly “end-grain” of the birch plywood. I wrapped the grain around the “depth” of the box, but the grain of the “face” does not flow into the edges. So far I haven’t figured out a solution to this that works out in our boring 3 dimensional Euclidean / Newtonian universe.
Here we can see the translucence of the 3d prints, pre assembly. Originally, I had not planned for there to be a VU lightstrip in this build, but then I realized that since I built all the electronics off of the wood box, fitting them into the lego box, which had 5/6 faces constrained already, would be extremely difficult. At this point, I also realized I miscalculated the amount of space wires take up. Medusa rears her ugly cable management head yet again.
Now you see what I mean.
Analog signal processor demonstrating that I am the particular type of person that loves neat things but does not love making things neat, and so I live in a constant torment of my own devising. I chose a scheme that allows for a bass shelf at lower volumes, but flattens the EQ towards higher volumes—it’s essentially a loudness compensation circuit, except that since I have no reference for the actual loudness of the output (due to lack of information about source gain, listener position). I call it the “party” compensation circuit, because while one might enjoy deep sonorous extension at lower listening levels, once your friends roll through, 14 beers deep each, you’re cranking that fucking volume knob. And while the NS3’s have a lot of allowable excursion before crashing, the garbage bass lines that litter the hip hop soundscape are essentially glorified sine waves that will fuck your shit up. The obvious and simple solution to this is a simple dynamic gain-tied or signal-adaptive high-pass for excursion limiting, or a multi-band compressor. I leave these endeavors as an exercise to the reader until I have the time to implement them on the next build.
Pre-wood finishing. After disliking the gumminess and amber tint of marine spar varnish, I chose to use tung oil to bring out the figure. Then I sealed the box+3d printed parts with epoxy (bar top) for strength/durability, and finally, for UV protection and hardness, I finished with a clear gloss polycrylic. Here’s what it looks like finished:
