That’s correct! The blog known as Mr Speaker has moved: same internet, new location! http://www.mrspeaker.net/!

It’s got over 8 new colours, (as well as the 5 colours you’ve come to love) – a ludicrous new design (thanks to some spiffy design skills of a close, personal colleague), questionable typography, floating bubbles, and most importantly – exactly the same content! Wow!

Yes, it’s been the regulation 4 years since the last design update, and I thought I’d take the chance to set sail from the Webeisteddfod domain (as brilliant as that is… get it? Web Eisteddfod? Sheesh, it’s lost on you lot…) and move in to the easier-to-remember-yet-far-more-uninspiring, Mr Speaker Dot Net.

I know moving can be hard on the littl’ns. But I’m sure you’ll all manage: I’ll keep updating both till I get all the redirections set up. Sorry that the new place is a bit messy at the moment… We’re just unpacking… We plan to knock out a couple of walls still, stick up some new widgets to increase the resale value… clean out that horrible purple font the old owners had. What were they thinking?!

You should probably go straight to Part Three – as this has the juicy details, and a fairly brilliant song I composed. Part one and two are mostly content-free, self-oriented pieces that are sure to be of interest to few (though, with the high demand for fairly much anything to read on the internet these days, who knows…).

I’m committing them to Google for prosperity, in the knowledge that I may read it in a year or two and smile – thinking to myself “I must have known I’d read this again in a year or two and smile”. Howdy Mr Speaker 2010… hows tricks? Did you end up taking care of that “issue”? I hope so!

Anywayz, this story (all of it true, much of it parenthesised) is based around WävRüta – a 2 channel, super lo-fi, 8 bit, microprocessor-powered, digital effects monster that sounds a little somethin’ like this…

Well, that’s one of a zillion things it could sound like. That particular sound was generated by one of its channels, and effected by its other.

WävRüta is the creation of engineer-genius Aras Vaichas, it was designed to give electronics newbies an insight into the power and goodness of microprocessors (as if we weren’t already convinced!).

Part three is about that. Part one and two are more narrative-based. I gave you the chance to skip them earlier, but you failed to grasp it. So, we go…

Part 1: The first part.

Some time back I attended a Dorkbot presentation by Vaichas entitled “WävRüta: It really fucks with your audio” – essentially (well, entirely) a small stomp-box-esque device that lived up to its name and tag line. Everyone who attended wanted one. I attended.

The caveat: to get one, you had to attend the Dorkshop workshop at Electrofringe and build it yourself.

The cost: nothing.

The challenge: spaces were extremely limited – you just had to get there first… and the workshop commenced at 9.30am on a Sunday – A Sunday that followed a Saturday night main-gig-event of This Is Not Art – A Sunday that followed the losing-of-an-hour to daylight saving time.

A last-minute camping trip is organised, bike tyres are pumped up, and things are looking good…

To Be Continued…

I quite like my pushbike, but let’s recap: 8.30 am. Thunderstorm. Hangover. 6 kilometres. By bike.

These obstacles fail to dissuade me – a journey of 6 thousand metres begins with a single pedal. About 100 pedals in, however, events take a economic-crisis-bar-chart-like turn.

The tire, it has gone flat. Pretty much mostly completely. Mostly. I cling to the hope that it’s not as flat as I imagine, as I do my best to ride on the soft grass – cringing every time I do that “hit a hard spot, and it makes that horrible riding-on-the-rim noise” thing. I weigh up options as I try my best to distribute my weight to the front wheel. Out of grass now, I dismount and walk. A walk would take hours to cover the distance.

9am

It’s 9am. Things look grim. I fear the trip has been for naught – and I sense that “hey, that’s unfair” feeling. But just then, on the horizon appears a shining light… a service station! Of course! My spirits lift as I run/ride the bike up the road…

…alas, the reprieve is short-lived. The tire deflates quickly – giving me only about 200 metres worth of riding… Let’s see, about 4ks to go – that’s 4000m/200m = 20 service stations. I need there to be 20 service stations between me and my goal, but no – there is but a handful. With time ever-ticking, and desperation encroaching, I chain up the pushy and break into a hangover-impaired run….

Holy b’jesus. It’s hard work. 2ks in – I feel like I’m aging like that guy in 2001: A Space Odyssey and my brain is making the same sounds as the Japanese noise artist was making the night before. The thunderstorms have cleared, and it’s bloody hot. I’ve made it to the main road and now, as luck shines on me like the bloody hot sun does – I am able to catch a bus. A beautiful, air-conditioned bus.

9.15am

The air-conditioning blows a wave of sense over me, and and whispers in my ear “You don’t really know where this thing is, do you…” – I don’t… but my friend does, and he has a phone – As I hits send on my text inquiry I notice that I’ve certainly gone well past where the event might be. Now I start to feel a little disgruntled.

Off again! Another brisk jog back to the centre of town. After checking a couple of the possible venues, a reply to my inquiry comes through: the workshop is at number 175, back up the road I just caught the bus down. Disgruntled-ness has given way to a giggling-annoyed-dispaired-ness. Back towards where I came from… Quite a pace I’m running at now as I follow the street numbers up the road. I get up to 176. Wrong side of the road. I turn around and look across the street: 280. I’ve gone way too far. And there’s my bike.

9.25am – the final countdown

A final sprint – cooled only by the waves of alcohol-filled sweat that began running down my face – must…. make…. WävRüta! I start to view everyone I see in the street as potential competitors for the remaining workshop spots. I contemplate knocking down an old lady in front of me, but that’s just because I was still feeling disgruntled. I let her be. I spy the workshop location as my third wind sails me through the doors and onto seat in the hall. Gasping and wheezing, people are chatting and holding circuit boards. I look around – there are a couple of printed circuit boards sitting on the bench. I grab a lovely white one. I’m in! Holding a blank circuit board! Now there is no escape (Besides the door, and a fire exit)! Two people who I passed on the way arrive – and they are the lucky last. Others arrive shortly there after – but they didn’t want it bad enough. They didn’t have the fire. I feel bad for them for a second or two, but now it is time to build…

To Be Concluded…

It couldn’t not be, that’s the answer to that rhetorical question – and as promised way back in part I (or part one, for non-romans) – Here be a track demonstrating some of the effects capable from WävRüta:

Yes, Aras Vaichas has certainly created a monster; a dirty, freaked-out, no-good, beautiful monster. And thanks to the excellence that is Electrofringe, it was now it was time for them to multiply…

Surface mounted ‘lectronics

With custom-made (and very pretty) circuit boards in hand, we were instructed in the dark art of “surface mount soldering”. At first you might believe such a task impossible: I mean, have a look at those components – they are really really little! A resistor could be carried by a single (reasonably strong) ant! In my state I had trouble enough seeing large items, like the soldering iron – let alone things that were getting carried away by ants. And I was never that good at getting big things to stick to circuit boards. So this was going to be a challenge.

But under the excellent tutelage of Aras, Nick Wishart and Pia van Gelder – it was all plain sailing. The trick is, you see, to apply a small amount of solder to one side of where each component will sit. Once this is done, the component is placed with one leg in the solder-pit you created – a small amount heat is applied to the leg, and hey presto! The component is half held in place. All that’s left to do is solder on the other leg (an easy task, as the components will happily sit still, now that you have grounded them). All-in-all, surface-mount stuff seems waaaaay easier than the old-school way. I hate those shiny volcanos now.

Inside the WävRüta

The guts of the WävRüta is the ATtiny85 microcontroller – it’s part of the AVR series of 8 bit microcontrollers made by Atmel. Aras has painstaikingly filled it with audio-munging DSP algorithms that will make you smile, and make you cry.

He has managed to squish 16 demented effects on to the chip: Feedback, DTMF, VCO, Speed, Crush, Wibble, Warp, Chorus, Phayz, Phlanj, Randgate, FM, AM, Square, Shape, Noise. They are all better than they sound (except perhaps DTMF which is exactly as good as it sounds). There is also a “signal mode” which is capable of generating a digital oscillator: Sine Wave, Square Wave, Sawtooth Wave, Triangle Wave, Sine Wave LFO, Square Wave LFO, Sawtooth Wave LFO, Triangle Wave LFO.

It has 2 channels, and either channel can be in “effects mode” or in “signal mode” – which is pretty damn cool. The input can be modulated with the oscillators, and the output can also be fed back into the input via a jumper, for extra spazmotic entertainment.

I don’t know if it was intentional, or just a recommendation by Nick Wishart, but WävRüta is also very susceptible to a good dose of circuit-bending, which helps take the madness to an insane zen state.

And we’re done

Well, it certainly was a wild ride – from the dizzying mids, to the character-building lower-mids, it had it all; bicycles – camping – electronics – jogging – you name it! After the heartache and terror involved in acquiring and building the WävRüta, one thing is for certain: Next year I’ll be back for Aras’ latest installment – and this time I’m getting up an hour earlier.

The End

Nothing like a major milestone to throw you into a whirl of nostalgic self-reflection. Today I’m 30. 30 years old. There’s no doubt about it – I’ve done the maths and it adds up. I’ve tried recounting everyday since my first memory (a huge green praying-mantis in the back yard) but there are certainly a lot of holes in there.

One thing I’ve noticed to be a recurring theme in the mesmerizing drama that is/was my life is the presence of computers. If my existence were portrayed as an art flick, you’d turn to your friend 3/4 of the way through and say “What’s with all the computers?”

In case one or more of you out there wish to produce such a film, I’ll supply some background information – so you get the details right.

My Life Through Computers

First off, some clarifications – I’m talking about Computers here – I did have ample exposure to the Atari 2600 and various game&watches, but I just wasn’t into them so much. No, the first time I realised the awesomeness of computers was one christmas – when the next-door neighbours introduced me to their brand-new Commodore Vic 20.

It was 1984, and I was 8.

1 PRINT"VIC20"
2 GOTO 1
RUN

It was amazing.

My very own computer

It would be another year until I would receive a computer of my very own. It was Christmas 1985. The Commodore 64 was rapidly becoming best thing created by mankind ever. However I was told by my parents that Santa wouldn’t be bringing me a computer that year. I believe it was because the C64 cost a pretty-penny, and Santa didn’t think I REALLY wanted a computer.

Luckily for me, that year saw the introduction of a “competitor” to the C64 by a company called SpectraVideo. The SV-318. Sold in the middle of the local shopping centre, it was much cheaper than the C64 and featured a 3.6Mhz Zilog Z80 CPU (still used today in washing machines!), a not-so-massive-even-for-the-time 32kb of memory, and a games catalog numbering in the 10’s. Santa grabbed one for me – allaying my growing concerns that perhaps, just perhaps, there was something fishy about his existence…

Although I thought the SVI-318 was absolutely unbelievable (IT’S GOT A LIL’ JOYSTICK BUILT RIGHT INTO THE KEYBOARD!) it did suffer the noticeable problem of not being owned by anyone except me. That made it pretty hard to swap games, but was also responsible for changing my life forever… Once I got bored of my 5 games, I commenced a hobby that has stuck with me to this very day – I read the programmer’s manual.

Learning BASIC presented a pretty exciting and magical time that lasted until I realised the SVI-318 could not run the Alfred E Neuman code in Mad magazine. It was time to take it to the next level.

Hitting the big time

Bingo! It was my 12th birthday and I got the C64 I had wanted for some time. It was everything I ever imagined; tape drive, disc drive, International Soccer cartridge – I would be LOAD"*",8,1ing my way to good times for years to come!

When I was 15 – half a lifetime ago now – I witnessed my first real-life nerds. In the shopping centre near my house a bunch of odd-looking characters had set up a display of computers in order to attract the crowds into joining their computer club. They had C64s, Commodore 128s, Amigas, and other things I’d never seen before, like a telephone sitting on top of a weird looking box. This menagerie of computing beasts (the computers, not the nerds) was a sight to behold. I convinced a friend to come with me and hang out with weirdo-nerds every Thursday. I’d found my place.

Over the following couple of years I learned all about computer nerd culture: assembler, the demo scene, super-star coders, and most importantly – trackers. Trackers are programs for making “pattern-based” music on your computer. It was awesome fun, but bloody hard on the C64. After using NoiseTracker on the Amiga I knew it was time to move on…

Make some noise!

The Amiga 500 – With the 1/2 Meg upgrade it was a multimedia powerhouse. Programming was a lot more difficult now – there was no built in BASIC, and learning assembler for the Motorola 68000 microprocessor was a task I’d never undertake.

But making mods in NoiseTracker was awesome – And when the dodgy tweeters in my aging television didn’t cut it? Plug the Amiga straight into the guitar amp of course! Mono-rrific!

The rest is history

I got a PC in 1995 – a 486 with 16 Megs of memory, running Windows 3.1, with a SoundBlaster16 (just couldn’t afford the Gravis Ultrasound) and a 9600 baud modem. I signed up to a couple of BBSs and shortly after, I got the internets.

The next 11 years was, um, I forget – Good times though. Good times!

In other Mr Speaker news, while I was gone my hosting provider (smartyhost) decided to pull some wizardry of incompetence on my site. It’s kind of back and runnin’ now, but I think I’ve lost a whole swag of comments from you lot. So, you’ll just have to say something else to make up for it.

Update… no, not up and running. Even more dodgy-ness from my provider.

Update on the updates: HALLELUJAH!!!! Well, it only took two weeks of constant nagging and insisting that things were broken… but it’s back! Sorry bout the down time…

It started out in August of 2004 as an idea – To jump on the band wagon and start a blog. So many one years later, Mr Speaker clocks up the historic 51st post. Oh what a time it’s been – the tears, the sadness, the happiness. Let us now take a retrospective tour of the magic that has made up the 51 posts of ‘Mr Speaker’…

In the beginning…
On a grey morning in August of 2004 it appeared… Sydney Ferries Change Their Tune – undoubtably the most indepth journalistic account of the infamous “change of ferry messages” incident of 2004 and certainly a sign of the quality, and indeed quantity, that would ensue. A meteoric rise to the top seemed inevitable…

Jumping the shark
Alas, the rise to the top would be more bumpy than imagined – one moment capturing the essence of perfection, the next – dejected, reviled and despised. This turn of events can pretty much be seen from post #2 through to post #49. An obvious lack of structure and direction, coupled with horrendous spelling and grammar were to cast a dark shadow over the pitiful blog.

But, like all gripping tales, there is the fight back! Through a rigorous exercise routine and under the guidance of some kind of older mentor – the blog fought its way up through the ranks – beating opponent after opponent – and eventually making its way to the semi-finals where the montage ends and regular time recommences…

Where it’s at
While many suggested that the ferocious pace coupled with the outstandingly high quality of output would surely lead to burn-out and fatigue. But so far there has been no sign of slowing – The “A Still Tongue Makes a Good Citizen” post amused us all and forced us to consider the modern condition. And who can forget the historic “51st post retrospective” article – a gripping and emotional recount of the life and times of the Mr Speaker blog.

Encore! Encore!
But where to from here? It’s hard to tell. Certainly there are exciting changes afoot – Celebrity authors? Revolutionary doctrines? A different font? Who knows… but if the past is anything to go by you can be assured future posts are going to be as good as they are misspelled.

And for the employee, that flower takes the form of the Friday Afternoon Beer. The closest most of us will ever come to pure enlightenment.

So to ease the quotidian burdens that lay ahead, here’s a handy tool for tracking your time ’till enlightenment: Beer o’clock – The Firefox extension. A little app that sits patiently, alerting you periodically, reminding you of your purpose in life. Keeping you focused. A great productivity tool.

Here’s how it works – set your office beer oclock time and choose the frequency of notification – for example, every 2 hours. A small beer icon appears in the status bar of your browser. Every 2 hours a message is displayed next to the icon with the message “34 hours, 30 minutes ’till beer o’clock”. Splendid.

To spice it up a bit, the message is not just displayed in hours and minutes, but other time-frames that may be more relevant to you and your office fellows: “15 cups of coffee ’till beer o’clock”, “3500 lines of code ’till beer o’clock”, “10 ridiculous questions from clients till beer o’clock”. You can also add your own messages for non-stop beer/office fun.

So install the Beer oclock extension (Pre-FF2.0 version here…) now and watch those “Work-in-progress meetings” fly by.

Phew, just 1 more blog entry ’till beer o’clock…

I was given a Nutrigrain E.T. from a work colleague. Although I have had a life long fear of that horrifying (and most probably evil) movie character, I was impressed with the likeness and hopeful that once my colleague forgot about the gift I could flog it on ebay.
The next present I received was a tin of wasabi peas which I ate while admiring my new nutri-friend. Due to my equal mix of happiness and horror caused by simultaneosly thinking about my birthday and the ugly freak that Spielberg decided to unleash upon my untainted mind all those years ago, I became distracted and dropped a few of the wasabi peas on the floor.

As I picked up the last of the so-undeservedly-wasted peas, I noticed that it held a passable likeness to Waldorf (or is it Statler?), of “The Muppet’s Statler and Waldorf” fame. Wow! What a birthday this was shaping up to be.

Unfortunately my plans for seeking my fortune with these babies on ebay went bad that very eve, after I accidently ate the wasabi pea, and a rat or a bunch of cockroaches or something of similar capabilities ate half of E.T. Oh well.

I also got a bunch of other cool stuff for my birthday, but none of them looked like celebrities. I wonder if I could get Steven Spielberg to reimburse me for the dropped wasabi peas.