My new glasses and prescription sunglasses were ready, as were L—’s glasses, so we cycled up to the Barbican to pick them up on Saturday morning. Being able to see is expensive, but useful. I’ve only had prescription sunglasses once before, and I made the mistake of choosing very dark lenses. That was absolutely terrifying when I drove into a multi-storey car park. This time, I went for a fairly light 75% tint, which is more reasonable and doesn’t render me totally blind if I wear them indoors.

I built a couple of Eurorack modules that I had bought a few weeks ago in Thonk’s sale: a Befaco Muxlicer and a Zlob diode Chaos. The Diode Chaos was easy enough, but the Muxlicer is a lot of soldering that kept me busy for hours.

While clipping the transistors off their cardboard strips, I accidentally launched a 2N3904 transistor somewhere into orbit, or at least into some inaccessible corner of the room. I had a few of those in my parts library, so it was only a minor inconvenience to scurry up to the loft to grab a replacement.

I learned of the existence of Lunetta CMOS-based synthesisers via this album on Bandcamp and I think I might have a new project.

I decided that I’d had enough of trying to coax labels through the laser printer (with a failure rate of about two in three) so I bought a cheap 4 by 6 inch thermal printer for postage labels. Not only does it work with Linux, it doesn’t need any special drivers to do so, which means that it also works with my Raspberry Pi print server running Linux on an Arm processor. I’ll write more about that separately.

A lamb looks up towards the camera

A lamb, or perhaps I should say hogget, at the local city farm

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