I killed an old Yamaha toy keyboard. I was trying to retrofit a MIDI input to a PSS-100 by emulating the keyboard matrix. I had mapped everything out, it was all going well, then I decided to look for a place to pull 5V off the board. My probe slipped, I accidentally bridged two contacts on the power transistor, heard a click, and now nothing works. It’ll either be easily fixable by replacing some passive components, or I’ll have managed to kill the ICs. As the power supply is now putting out 0.5 V instead of 5 V, I have some hope that it’s a power supply issue.

On the plus side, the reason I was doing that is that it’s a rather knackered example with a dodgy keyboard, so I haven’t destroyed anything of value. By dodgy, I mean that the keybed is made of parts from two separate broken instruments, held together with tape, and not all the keys are reliable. I suspect it escaped from a school after a period of abuse at the hands of energetic children and valiant repair by a teacher.

We had a fancy reheat-at-home dinner from Gauthier Soho on Friday night. Eight courses of vegan fine dining, and the closest we’re allowed to get to a restaurant experience right now. I’d definitely recommend them.

I watched the live première of the new Mogwai album on Saturday. It wasn’t too much faff. It didn’t require any special software, and the viewing window was wide enough that you had time to get set up and sort out any technical issues without missing anything.

The implementation was simple: you bought a ticket, then a few hours before the performance, they emailed a personalised link. That page contained a countdown timer, and once the start time rolled around, a private YouTube video appeared. At this point, I realised I didn’t need a laptop plugged into the TV. Instead, I saved the private video to watch later on my YouTube account, and opened the YouTube app on my Amazon stick.

It was good, by the way. The boomy low end went some way to replicating the authentic live experience. I almost felt bad for my next door neighbours, but for the number of times I’ve had to endure their tone deaf karaoke of Hey Jude.

I reached a one thousand day streak on Duolingo today. That’s a thousand days under the rule of that tyrannical computerised owl. I like it really. Duolingo isn’t enough to learn to speak a language, but it does give you a decent grounding in grammatical structures and a lot of reinforcement of vocabulary. The whole concept of a streak is a bit daft, and yet it keeps me putting time in every day, so I suppose it works.