Wayne and Layne

NBC Chimes

The NBC chimes of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) radio network in the United States were the first ever audio trademark to be accepted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It consists of a succession of three distinct pitches: G3, E4, and C4 (middle C), sounded in that order, creating an arpeggiated C-major chord in the second inversion, within about two seconds time, and reverberating for another two or three seconds. The intervals of this progression are up a major 6th from G3 to E4 and down a major third from E4 to C4.

via NBC chimes – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Record a ShoutCast Stream

In my hometown of Eau Claire, WI, there is a very cool community radio station called WHYS 96.3 FM. Since I don’t live there anymore, I was pleased to see that they are streaming their programming using ShoutCast. There is a radio show on Monday evenings that I want to listen to, but I have other obligations scheduled during that time, so I had to come up with a way to record the stream to disk, and listen to it later. I created a short script that can be run from cron to record an audio stream for a set duration to an mp3 file on disk. Click through for more details:

Save an Audio Stream to Disk (mbeckler.org)

SVG Circuit Symbols

When I need to draw up a circuit schematic, but don’t need or want to use a full-blown schematic capture program (Eagle, OrCad, KiCad, etc), I like to use Inkscape to draw simple circuits. I’ve collected a bunch of frequenly-used circuit symbols and standardized them in SVG format.

Available for download in high-quality vector SVG format at:

http://www.mbeckler.org/inkscape/circuit_symbols/

Google’s suggested completions to “why”

I use Firefox, and started typing a question into the search bar. I got distracted after I had only typed in “why”, and here are the results that google suggested:

Tactile Metronome release!

Layne and I have been working on some microcontroller kits for folks to solder up and have some fun with. We’re ready to release the first one, and we’re sure proud of it! It’s a Tactile Metronome. What that means is it’s a little gadget you can tap and it will beep back at you the same rhythm. It shows you the BPM and has tempo adjustment buttons. A really cool part is that you can tap patterns into it and it will tap those back to you as well. We’ve worked really hard on the documentation, and Layne made some really amazing pictures showing how some of the trickier things work in the firmware.

The entire kit is open sourced. More details (and a place to order one!) are over at http://wayneandlayne.com/metronome.