Episode: 2539
Title: HPR2539: Interview - Austin Lee
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2539/hpr2539.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:07:58

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That's your noise floor?
I'm here with Austin Lee, Austin Lee, where did we originally meet?
I was going to say, was it not a prize of my Chinese?
Yeah, I had to live, so that was forever ago, so it was had to live and then I remember you
brought a big, like at one point in time you've got like a big ammo box, like a light, like a switch on, like a hard core.
A big lighted switch that you find on a lighter jet with a caveron, you flip the caveron.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you flip the switch and this was like, what was in it?
It was just a battery.
There's a bunch of batteries and a small DCAC inverter.
So we plug our laptops in at the cafe at fries because it wasn't a power.
There was no power there?
There was no power there and they did not provide Wi-Fi.
And so that was another one of our crew projects.
It was two bounce Wi-Fi from the hotel.
There was like a hotel, like it was a hot water once a week.
Yeah, a holiday in.
Oh, probably got a half mile away.
I used my pickup truck in the parking lot and we tried to set up a repair with some cantanas and beam it straight
through the glass doors of the device into the cafe.
And I don't think we got any significant traffic.
We were able to see SSIDs and some of the signal-to-noise feeds.
I don't think we ever got any blood on traffic there.
We had the two cantanas hooked up to our blue.
It was a thin pan, open pan with a PCMCA, a car that we bought at fries.
It was a D-link that was hackable to add an external antenna connector.
That was a big deal if you couldn't get it.
It was like 15 bucks and you couldn't buy a PCFCA Wi-Fi card that had an external antenna connector
unless you're going to drop it like an 8 bucks or something.
I never saw on the internet that set up for whatever happened.
Well, because it didn't work for a long time.
Because you had these snoops or whatever.
Stink dolls.
I'm going to be in trouble.
You're going to be in trouble enough.
Troops.
Troops.
Troops.
Troops.
Potato potato.
He's not like a Navy ship or something right now.
Or was that you?
I can't remember.
I heard something about it the whole last time.
I don't know.
I really miss seeing all these guys pull up with a car full ring in here.
Who was the guy?
Who was the guy?
It was very like...
He was taking some more of that.
He's got droops, me, and...
I don't remember anyone.
Yeah, I don't remember anyone.
He was a daily.
Dark hair.
I don't know.
He was a senior guy.
Yeah, he was like a senior dude.
And he got all...
He got several of us from the hack deluth.
He got us all hired on to America.
Oh, that's one of the whole primary cut things started.
Yep, that's fine.
So we all meet up in France for a while and then...
Oh, they're at least a couple of us.
They worked at Price.
I didn't work there.
But several people.
Cycle didn't out of a worshiped at Price.
A lot of you grouping there.
And then a bunch of us headed up over to America
doing a big roll-ass for their...
They would replace all of machines.
Can't swipe.
It's huge.
Yeah, we were putting...
Pouts of old PCs on the dock every day.
Because there wasn't really anything else.
There was like hack deluth.
And like one other thing.
2600.
2600 was around.
And I had gone to a few of them.
But it was just...
It was made stolen.
It was about it.
Yeah, it was a handful guys.
But it seemed to be like four or five,
like really old winning six asses.
And they seemed to be kind of the core at the time.
So...
What do we get here?
I never really got an information like how you got your start like in IT
and like with computers in general.
Like, where did that whole thing start?
Mainly take...
So my dad was always working in...
And he was always doing computer stuff.
It worked a little bit ahead of...
Now the main work force curve.
So we had...
We had an old office that's not machines in our house.
Or, you know, some of our earliest memories in my...
Like that's what it is.
Or it's certainly finding out that we had figured out how to...
You know, go into the DOS prompt and undo, you know,
while we were supposed to be being babysat.
And here we are playing ultraviolet video games at like 5 and 8.
Because we had now...
We had managed to remember the necessary DOS commands to get it into this.
So was your dad working at Cisco at that time, right?
No, he worked at Rome.
And then Rome got bought by Siemens.
Yeah, it was IBM, Rome, Siemens.
So you'd be working a bunch of telecom equipment and stuff.
So long time.
I mean, we had like video phones in our house,
like while you're on a studio,
while you're still...
Why are you talking about...
Yeah, dial up modems.
And, you know, here's a video, you know, teleconference.
All of it was, you know, awful required, you know,
like three pieces of rack of equipment.
Yeah, I think we ended up having like a T1 or something.
Yeah, we ended up with some connectivity.
It was very nice.
I still spent a lot of time working with some like that.
So my early stuff was really early when there's PCs,
you know, working with junk hard drives and stuff.
I uploaded OS's off of floppy disks.
And not just what floppy disks.
Yeah, so it was also like your dad.
Yeah, I left for all computers.
Left over office computers.
And then by the time I was getting into middle school,
I was starting to build computers from my neighbors.
So, you're going to land at that time?
No, I was still living in my parents' house in Duluth,
and you know, Suburban, Winnock County.
So it was just literally the people that lived on the same street
that I had to walk down my front door,
and then down the street, right by five,
to somebody else's house.
And they would either pay me to do something
as a computer or whatever.
And so it was...
Do you think of all of my apartment workers?
Yeah, but without it.
It would be a podcast with that.
It would be a podcast with that.
It would cut stuff on the spacebar or stuff the street.
Do you want to do the key sounds?
Let's see.
Tell us a little bit about your parents.
I know they're real big into the...
Because I was talking about foreign films and gaining them.
Oh, okay.
You used to go...
My parents were going to, not only like a film,
like an art film, like weekly or fine-luckly critique thing,
but it was, like, typically heavy like art film.
You know, film festival stuff.
But my mom's been going to Sundance for years and years
because one of our neighbors has a place out there.
And so my mom's been going to Sundance for years
to see all these cool, you know,
cool art films and stuff.
And they're like next year,
then they're Academy Awards and stuff.
But yeah, their parents are real cool.
It's taking a while to come around on this fact,
but I definitely appreciate it now.
And then certainly the opportunity to play with a lot of this
PC hardware and they let me spend a lot of time
with my head like six inches from a CRG monitor.
Yeah.
And it's amazing.
I kind of like the deal with the tailoring
and all that stuff, like, like a prodigy net,
or whatever.
What is that?
Can you talk about what's in the blue thing?
Do I put some books for you?
Oh, no, this is...
Or is it...
It's just rain water.
Just rain water out for what?
Your plants?
Water and plants.
I got a bunch of...
I got a bunch of carnivorous plants.
I actually had one right here.
And we ended up with several hundred dollars
worth of plants, lights, aquariums, all kinds of stuff.
This...
Was that from the good place, or some more?
This is from a friend of my girlfriends
that happened to be moving out of the country.
He couldn't tape all these carnivorous plants
playing with them for some reason.
I'm sure they said, you know, important and dangerous for them.
I have four.
You're messing with them by...
Oh, yeah, you're destabilizing me.
You go systems and such.
But...
That's why you have pets.
Yeah.
And so, actually, through my research, I found out that
almost all of the carnivorous plants in the world
originate, like, part of South Carolina and North Carolina.
That's who the swampy has.
Yeah.
There's practically no other bubbles of carnivorous plants
in your personal world.
It's a handful, but...
They're very localized.
Just a few of sorts of sort of stuff.
Oh, and also one that the Atlanta Botanical Garden
has their own cultivar of...
a Venus flytrap that is beautiful.
And next time that they have them out in the collection,
I'm going to have to visit him.
Yeah, let me know.
So, when did you do this?
You were doing the computer thing for early, early hour?
Mm-hmm.
When did you get into music stuff?
Oh, it's just a kind of support.
This would be totally a parallel also.
My dad was also a part-time DJ during most of my childhood.
He did radio remotes for, like, 96 rock.
I don't know.
Yeah.
What is radio remotes?
Well, it's so you would do a...
What could be a thing?
It would not be a party.
He'd bring some speakers.
And, you know, a DJ set about to a pool party
and a partner complex, typically.
And hooters would provide wings.
And, you know, some places would provide pizza.
There's something like that.
There'd be some promotional tie-ins with some other businesses
to provide as a food and drink.
And they would bring the music and the, you know,
the name, the gravity of the name, the 96 rock.
You know, the local radio stations.
And then they would literally call on a phone, you know,
or have the radio station call that on a phone.
And be like, you know, you know,
holy, I'll turn the music up in the background.
And be like, yeah, we're having a crazy party over here.
It's such and such a partner complex.
And so it's a...
There's promotions on all sides, but...
Did they ever do any...
I wonder if that was when they were doing an extreme...
Like streaming through, like, bands and stuff.
They did a live...
Live streaming stuff.
They never did any of that.
Oh, and...
This would have been...
This would have been into the 90s.
So you had, like, you had, like,
just stuff to play around with growing up, too?
I remember dancing to, you know, NC Hander and all that kind of stuff.
In front of speakers that were exactly as tall as I was.
So, very...
From a very young age, you know,
to hold a woofer up those, you know,
bigger than my entire, you know, arm spread, etc.
So did you have more, like...
I never got any hardware till much later.
Like, did you have any hardware first,
and then do software, computer stuff, or...
It was all second-hand, because I had a strong tendency
to take apart and break things that were already in the house
or that were working.
I was encouraged to take things apart,
but I was strongly discouraged to take apart anything that was currently working.
So almost all of my explorations started with physically disassembling
computer hardware.
Like, you know, if I can't get it to turn on,
I'm literally going to pull the cool package from the board,
where I pull apart, crunch the resistors,
and see what's inside of it.
Like, I wouldn't have to know.
Like, what is this hunk of plastic and metal?
That does magic, basically.
And it should be something that I can understand,
because other people can understand it.
It shouldn't be...
Nothing that can be done with this machine
is something that I can't do.
And so, that was always my home look.
I never had any interesting, super interesting stories about it.
Great, great stuff.
It's like a topic, certainly.
My parents separated.
So I was like, well, I was like, nine.
And after that, it was just my mom.
So she didn't really have anything that I had with my home.
Well, anyways, but I would get rid of, like, malware viruses before.
And that's an advantage to check.
But I didn't have a whole lot of electronics.
And I would have to go get it.
Second hand, or go get whatever it was, myself.
Don't dumpster data kind of stuff.
A lot of the earlier computer stuff
would be a 40 megabyte hard drive or 400 megabyte hard drive
or something like that.
It was really outdated hardware,
even when I was planning with it.
And huge ice of us is...
I mean, I still have my collection of, you know, processors.
I still got NEM2 slot processors.
I think those were some of the earliest ports
that I really got working and got to practice installing operating systems.
Oh, over and over and over again.
This is actually the tip.
I thought about doing a bathroom in this, like,
getting a, getting a, like, a go-of-fun meter
or people to send me all their, like, old processors
to make that actual tile on the bathroom.
Like, it was something overlay.
It had a cool, small bathroom,
but it was like random.
Yeah, it cast a whole form of boxy.
I got, I don't know, about at least three or four square feet
in some processes.
I tried to, like, shape the bins off some of them
and make them jewelry.
But there are, the old processors
are definitely cool to find.
Because it's big, you can see all the parts on them,
the pins and stuff.
And I really would be interested to, like,
deal with some of those, you know,
asset, adjoice, and other, you know,
DCB and stuff like that.
Because it doesn't be older processors,
they're actually able to see the big transistor batches
and be able to see the functions of the processor.
Yeah, it's normal.
But it's one big, yeah, we can bet it thing.
Yeah, the new stuff is, it's, like,
looking to do a fractal.
Okay, I have no idea.
This is any of this.
Well, there's zero over there.
I'm not pretty straightforward.
It's got the big old capacitors
and it makes noise when you plug it in,
and it's not like you'd like,
so you plug it in,
and you hear the clicking of like the relays,
and then you hear the buzz of the,
the transformer,
the transformer charging up,
and then it goes on, on, on, on.
And then, like, turns,
like, turns, so it'll be something that,
like, we didn't take part.
But I want to talk about the,
the groove machine thing.
So, like, I want to get some idea
of what you think,
how we can make it lighter,
or more portable, like,
put it on the hand truck,
or, like,
get nice batteries for it,
or,
some way to make it,
like, the other weird thought ahead is, like,
have, buy a bunch of cheap generators somehow,
and have them on the edge of strings,
and you're just like,
throw them at people,
and have them.
And then, have them,
if you want to walk,
and create the wheel,
and then they just pass it around.
Cool.
So, this actually,
this is a perfect,
and it's actually recently read an article about the,
somebody is throwing underground parties in Atlanta,
in a manly spaces,
and presumably,
they're using some sort of portable battery power sound system,
and the commercial offerings for that
have expanded dramatically.
You can now buy a,
somewhat crappy,
plastic powered speaker,
that's similar to,
you get a guitar center for a 100 bucks.
You get from China,
and you get a battery,
or a unit,
and it's pretty damn good.
And so,
it becomes a, you know,
a tear, like,
what, you know,
what can I fabricate
that's going to be competitive against,
some of the stuff that are going to, like,
blow mold out of plastic.
And it's,
it's getting a little tricky,
but I still have,
I still have designs in my mind.
I still think the backpack is,
the ideal form factor,
because this is a,
this is a mobile noise complaint.
You want to be able to take it with you,
when you need to go.
Yeah, if it's got wheels,
like you're going to have the shoes,
like, going downstairs,
and something like that.
It's, it's slightly the mobile,
obviously,
that's the carrier.
That's the greater amount of weight.
And I've probably
destroyed the,
the hardware,
it's between my brain and brain.
Yeah, yeah,
you said the,
yeah, the,
the groove machine is,
is, is,
is the allows for it to be damaged to me.
Yeah.
So,
the groove machine is the next,
the iteration,
I would think,
should be something.
Um,
still, I like,
I like the,
so there's, I think there's a visual aesthetic to it.
Um, that is helpful.
Surely,
being able to blast sound,
it's, it's the number one priority.
Um,
really easy or cheap?
Like, yeah,
we get small.
Yeah.
Something that incorporates a light show,
I've considered,
I have an idea for a,
either some sort of,
a,
a long air,
assisted banner,
or something that,
floats above you,
floats above your backpack,
either on, you know,
you say,
some efficient rod type,
like, weight poles.
Yeah, like,
they'll say where I,
like, say where I were,
when they were around.
Yeah, like, a little,
like, a little sail flag thing above you,
but then you get the,
the little,
LED pickup projector,
and you can throw a light show,
or a logo,
or something like that.
Um,
and certainly,
any,
any fun that I could have with it,
it would be nice to,
also have it,
you know,
a commercial,
you know,
so,
for money as well as,
out of the,
enjoyment of the device.
Um,
but, uh,
I think the potential to use them,
I see the segue tours
going around town,
I see people,
you know,
and,
doing stuff where,
having a,
a slight amplification
of the voice would make a big difference,
um,
and certainly,
the, uh,
megaphone is the,
um,
is the old fashioned way of doing that,
but I think, you know,
I had set,
with the,
with the group,
you want to give a walking tour to city,
and you,
you've got to cover it through a coin slot on there for tips,
and you can just run around and talk to yourself,
and people don't have the money in your back.
So what about, like,
to give it more power,
and,
and longer,
or longer time,
what about it,
if you had just, like,
two,
like, kind of done,
you had it,
um,
have two people carry, like, battery parts,
or,
have it split up?
You still want to split the load between, like, two or three people?
Now, I think,
I think,
from here on,
and I've,
the way,
how you distribute the audio,
and,
I want individual notes,
ideally, each backpack would be,
um,
an almost identical clone,
but a,
you know,
it would have a core,
and then,
it's case to be variations,
essentially,
like, you could have, you know,
it could be a stereo,
or a mono backpack,
but,
but it's only requirements
that would need to,
essentially, be a backpack,
would be highly mobile,
relatively lightweight,
I'm thinking,
with the online,
um, like,
the hobby,
motors,
pass,
or drill batteries,
I've considered,
um,
and the potential to, like,
three print-a,
receptacle,
so that you could really,
hotspot,
chuck,
external,
drill batteries,
on to a real minor pack.
Yeah.
But that wastes some of the,
the internal cavity space
of the green machine,
could be an asset,
but, um,
I thought about,
you know,
we could put great dispensers in there,
like,
the potential to have a small cargo area
in the vehicle,
cargo,
a, a small battery pack,
or,
uh,
probably a water pack,
because I'm pretty sure,
you're getting dehydrated,
and letting my spine pancake,
yeah,
is, uh,
it's not,
it's not as quickly to wear it right now.
But you definitely would have had
more than one person carry the rig, right?
Um,
I think,
I think the new,
I think the new rift
will have a
source
and multiple receivers,
you know,
and,
the previous backpack,
was essentially a,
you know,
a source and amplifier,
usually neat,
and then two satellite speakers
that were both the sound and the power.
Yeah.
And I think,
I think we could get all,
all in one.
So if you wanted to be a one-man show,
if you put on the backpack,
hook up into your mic,
or your guitar,
hit the street,
you know,
or your MP3 player,
or your phone,
or whatever,
hit the street,
and make too much noise,
um,
or,
preferably asking some sort of receiver
and size that,
you get two friends
with,
with the matching backpack,
so you get as many people
as you can to show,
and one place,
um,
and the only way
to be,
uh, one to many,
uh, low latency broadcasts
that has,
everything I'm looking for,
is FM.
So,
I've pretty much come to the conclusion
that micro broadcasting,
FM,
is the way to go,
for,
you know,
distributing audio,
mobile,
in a mobile platform.
Bluetooth has too much overhead.
So you can make a super modular
if you just had,
you just had the,
the, the master,
and then the slaves were just,
you could just build a million of them.
Exactly.
And so,
and so,
I've got,
I've got the FM transmitter,
I've got a,
a fairly good way of,
uh, prepping an audio
that goes into the transmitters,
uh,
I get maximum,
uh,
transmission out of it,
uh,
excitation.
Uh,
it's, uh,
it's tripier than you would think.
You just plug,
you plug your, uh,
your phone into a FM transmitter,
and it sounds like crack,
when you listen to it on your stereo,
it sounds like,
this required,
yes, to, uh,
get a little bit magic
to the audio stream before it,
uh,
really fills out,
uh, it's potential in the FM.
So, you think,
you see, you think,
from the modular perspective,
you can hold your own,
hour and speakers.
Absolutely.
You had the right batteries.
Yeah, and, uh,
and the right speakers,
like, if you want to be crazy,
you get some, like,
white white bows,
and like,
a ridiculous,
ridiculous battery,
and then,
it would only weigh, like,
you know,
250 pounds or something.
I, I, I,
everyone's from a lot of your couple months,
I fill up my Amazon
and my parts express catalog,
you know,
you fill up parts,
you know,
actually, some of the parts,
like a wish list.
Yeah.
I have some of them already.
There's, uh,
there's a,
there's a class D amplifier,
um, ensure,
uh, God, that's,
it's four channels,
so give me, um,
some really heavy-duty stereo.
Yeah.
Um, each speaker would have its own
independent power source,
like 25 watts.
Like, it would be,
it's certainly loud.
Um, you know,
it gets to be an issue
of tuning the cabinet,
um, for the drivers,
especially later,
to put amateur power through,
um,
but thankfully, the,
uh,
uh, amplifier,
so we've got,
now, the class B amplifier
is a track pad,
um,
um, basic,
so little power.
Like, it's,
it's nothing.
The, the car out of your stuff
that I was using before,
is,
it was a ton,
it was,
it was a ton,
and it doesn't efficiently
use the power.
Um,
I had a huge cap,
um,
you know, on the,
on the old system,
uh, was,
looked amazing,
and, uh,
provided a very necessary resource,
because when the,
when the bass would kick,
there'd be a huge,
brown out on,
uh, on the amp,
and it would actually
click out sometimes,
flums, yeah.
Uh, and you could see,
you could see the, you know,
with the sustain,
the bass hit,
you could watch the,
the voltage drop,
rhythmically.
Um, so,
it,
the new,
the new track pad amplifier
is a new class B amplifier,
and the,
you know,
lithium ion battery packs,
are hands down.
I mean,
pretty much those two speakers
they're pushing now,
then, are,
really close,
and they've,
they've done exactly what they've
done, and they've,
you know,
they've run on there,
uh,
an audio sweep through the,
to the,
to the cabinet,
to see that,
oh, you know,
it resonates too much here,
and,
I think it boosted here,
so.
So, do you think,
do you think,
the other part could be, um,
like how you control it?
Do you have any ideas
around how to control the audio,
like, uh,
do they have, like,
an Apple app,
or an Android app,
that we could put on a tablet,
that would let you do,
like,
you know,
track,
uh,
changing levels of the,
yeah,
or even do, like,
why mixing from the tablet,
or is that not,
um,
ready yet?
To see that,
so they do have,
there are many, um,
mixing software,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
track,
uh,
changing levels of the,
yeah,
or even do,
like,
yeah,
or on my shoulders,
or a screen not on it,
it looks pretty good.
Um,
it's in guitar with a mixer,
instead of string.
Uh, so,
it's a nice visual effect,
um,
but the screen's
a little too small,
and I personally have,
have come to DJ,
you know,
with a lot more buttons
and controls
of my,
in your tips,
so having to use this,
you know,
clumsy,
you know,
like half mixer,
that audio is,
is tortured,
it's like,
oh, I can't get the thing
I want to do,
that take me either too long to do it with my hands,
or I just don't have enough hands to do it.
So you would rather have a hardware controller.
I need that.
I need the custom hardware controller personally.
And I think a lot of DJs would have to go in that direction,
especially if it's something you're
going to carry around mobile.
If you're going to be able to set up on a table,
then it can be a more traditional CDJ mixer,
even really simple controls.
But I think you can just take one of those city tractor
controllers and just throw it in your life.
And you can get a couple of them and carry one on the part.
And then if you fuck it up, you'd at least have one more
to like whatever.
I'll take it.
The idea would be to buy one of those little cheap tractor
things.
It'll see.
Share the part and then make it however you want to make it
to be portable.
I don't know if that would be an idea.
That's kind of what I did with the mixer.
It doesn't have any job controls, which I think would be nice now.
The cost of a lot of stuff is come down.
There's cheaper.
There's more deploy-like versions of some of the DJ control
stuff that I could prototype with.
And that would be a perfectly acceptable end product
also.
Like a really cool cobbler gatherer.
Let's speak and spell some staples.
Get a bit of a long line.
But the bottom line would still be that you kind of have
to have a full fully fledged computer that's on the wrong
here, running the source, which I don't think
is necessarily too big of a problem.
Yeah, we could get it for like three in our box.
We could do it a few times.
We could do it a few times.
Drop it around the back.
And so the transmitter, so let's say you have your transmit
unit, which may or may not be a machine but.
So here's one of the interesting things.
So Sam, pushing all this audio out to FM,
FM has somewhat a limited spectrum.
If I want base, if I want low frequency,
if I want to hook subwoofers out, which is a pretty high
goal for a mobile sound system.
And with those subwoofers, we pretty much
need to be hooked into the source.
That's the only place where the low frequency
unit exists accurately.
Once they go over the FM, they're not going to be accurate.
We kind of recreate them on the other end,
but it's going to be muddy.
So I actually do have these bazooka tubes that look like
nitrous oxide tanks for car, there was not any stuff.
Yeah, so it's supposed to go on your bicep or whatever,
and it looks like an oscanic.
But.
So if you wanted to do a cell, your worst case scenario
would be physically plugged into someone or something.
Yeah, and that would be the thing.
It would either, I mean, you could do a port sub
on the backpacks.
I can't see why not.
Yeah, I guess do a stereo amplifier that runs either two
or four speakers, and then have an additional amplifier
that does justice sub.
All right, an app that goes into open Wi-Fi
and discovers Bluetooth and wireless receivers.
Automatically hacks them and bridges them.
So when we were talking about something as an apartment,
I'm just like, boom, boom, boom.
That's a.
It's like, what the hell?
There's definitely so that there's a lot of Wi-Fi opens
and you've got a receiver with Bluetooth.
Just take over all the Chromecasts.
Chromecasts, anything.
All the Apple musics.
Yeah, it was just an audio-auto phone.
It was decided manually trying to compromise
and take over reading audio assistance.
Because there's so much of that up there.
There is the iPhone, the Apple's side play, AirPlay.
Then you got a Chromecast, and then the receiver.
Another receiver I got has a Bluetooth on it.
And tons of desktop software is the DLA.
And they hold already?
Yeah, so you can stream to or from it.
I think mindset, by default, you can just connect to
through DLA and I and play stuff through it.
That'll be pointless.
Yeah, I would definitely be interested in that.
You're almost at that point, you wouldn't necessarily
want to be the music, because the liveliness of the effect.
I think of when we've taken it out on the streets and into
crowded, crowded rooms, densely populated places.
It has a very magical, live effect on people.
Most people.
Some people are upset.
Recently, it's an obnoxious thing to do.
But it's so much fun.
And I think the audience is there for it.
And it's certainly if you're going to do a bar call or
something, like having somebody with a big, light up music
thing that they can talk out of, be super attractive.
And I've worked at different materials.
Certainly something cool, like acrylic, where you can see the
gut and the machine and all the working electronics will be
cool.
It kind of goes with the original aesthetic of the building
itself, like visual.
A little bit, but if you don't necessarily want it to be a
black magic box, like everything else in our lives is, my
phone and it's black magic box, my car underneath the hood.
I don't know if anything does.
It's covered by a big plastic wall.
And I have to assume it does magic under there.
I like disfilling the magic or ever possible.
So if nothing else, at least some sort of window or a face
plate with a wire room diagram on it.
So just take the cover off of whatever it is you buy and just
let it.
Oh, that's, I mean, that's it out there.
That's exactly what we took this time.
Spray some, spray some of that, what do you call it?
It's pouring, yeah, spray stuff over it.
So it'll protect the leaves and stuff.
It's a key ingredient, everything.
Yeah, so we took the lid off the amplifier.
There used to be on that.
There is no rear vision instead of down the basement half.
But when it would rain, there would be a non-animalist.
Yeah, non-animalist.
So there's, like, yeah, there's some, there's some
fuck-ups in the rain, for sure.
Oh, we got fire.
We got fire one time.
Not fire one time.
That's going to be spectacular.
It was hot again.
Because of the rain?
And it was now rain related.
So we had this big system, I got, you know,
sealed lots of batteries in each of the machine backpacks.
And then the center pack with the amplifier.
So all the power had to come out of the backpacks
with the speakers, the batteries had to come out
two wires back to the amplifier.
And then the lines to the speakers had to come back out
to the backpacks also.
So there was a little kind of, yeah.
So it's a four conductors total, you know,
two power, two, and one speaker's left,
one backpacks left, one backpacks right.
I like the future ones to be stereo,
but we can figure that out.
Maybe a little toggle switch.
Again, I've diagrammed a lot of this.
Some of those books, there's a lot of possibilities.
But the cables were kind of conversant.
Then there's a rule, specifically a dragon counter,
you're now about to have your costume attached to anybody else.
So you can't have a person on a leash, or, you know,
You can't have two people who's costume.
You can't have a front of a horse and a back of a horse
where they're attached together.
Like, we have to be independent so that they can screen you
and count you as two different people.
And we really have people like coming with, like,
close love.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, clearly.
Yeah.
You'll get trampled if you're attached to somebody else
just in general, because the crowd's a pretty intense.
So we were trying to conform it, because they had stopped us
at the door at multiple times, be like, hey, you guys
are literally tied together.
You can't do that.
We'd be like, well, we can't really
when we can technically unhook, but it's paying me ass.
So we got some trailer disconnects, quick disconnects,
like we're working up the power and lights
from a vehicle trailer.
And so that actually was their very robust connectors.
I spent some dollars on them.
And then we couldn't get the trouble getting the wires
to slide down the tubing.
So we had to go to the store and I didn't know
that you could just finally pour this at the store.
So we went to the sex store for a little sampling
of sex loom.
Not as water-based, or maybe a set of kind of basic loom.
And so there we are, like, tearing off
these little one-time use of things
and squirting them into the tubing.
And shoving the speaker and the power wires through.
Yeah, so we spent a much of an afternoon,
I guess, in that project.
And we plugged it in, and we had these big, so now somewhat
heavy because of the weight of the physical connectors
and the weight of the tubing on the cables.
They're now kind of heavy.
And so we started walking around with them
in the DragonCon a couple of days later.
And one of the connections gets hot inside
along the trailer connectors.
And it surets inside of the connector.
And then the whole thing wiring all over the place
starts getting hot and starts shortening out everywhere.
I swear this speaker went like full jack liner.
Like the two guys living inside of your bathroom
turns like, hey, the skills you get hot.
Like, I'm like, well, that's not good.
I turn it out, look it over.
And there is like glowing orange behind the speaker cone.
Like you can see the light from inside of the speaker box
pushing out the speaker cone.
And then after a few seconds of that, smoke under pressure
starts going, like spreading out
from around the speaker flange on all sides.
Like it was, like someone lived in smoke bomb inside there.
Like it was pushing heat and smoke out on all sides.
And I still have the wires from it.
It was kind of a, you know, a safety reminder to myself.
It was awesome.
Yeah, it was case scenario.
It absolutely caught fire in there.
And it would have, we had sprayed all the cabinets
with this truck bed liner.
So it was still a little tacky, to be honest.
So the nice rubbery coating on the outside,
very grippy, good aesthetic.
But if it had caught fire, it would have burned like a tire.
And there would have been no way to put it out.
And so there would have been standing on the sidewalk, like,
well, watching the whole thing burn into a melting puddle.
And I'm sure the police would have, yeah.
So maybe like, you know, you see the little Mr. Foggers
with the little, the little, the kids real hot.
We could just have one of those on one of the backpacks.
It's like, like, put it all back in.
Yeah, because the one I have, I can even give it to you.
It's got a little circle of elegance.
And then the part that gets part is in there.
And then you can just have like a cup.
And then you go to your cargo area to put more water in it
or just find some water somewhere.
And then when you walked around, it would just be like,
it's chasing us, the trail of steam, the fog.
So that way, if something actually did catch fire,
you'd be like, no, no, no, it's just the Mr. Fogger.
It's fine, there's no actual fire.
So also, you know, I want to make an impact
on people when they have this sudden and bizarre experience
of being assaulted by a lot of music unexpectedly.
And I've always thought an old factory signature
would be a nice thing to add to any billion
in the sort of art experience.
So it's thinking of running a particular brand of incense
at every performance or every outing of the museum
to create a mostly a sudden conscious association
with that smell and strange things.
So like encounter all the senses and be like, smell here.
Blast and flight.
Yeah, white and then touch.
No, they didn't touch each other, I guess.
There tends to be a lot of touch.
You gotta really go down.
I think it gets to be a pretty touchy crowd
if they break a sweat, the inhibitions come down.
I'm not sure if you're walking around dreaming.
The whole thing, the whole idea of walking around dreaming
with something heading around your bed
doesn't sound like the best of idea.
But to your point, if you did it at the end,
and it was modular, you know, if you keep some auxiliary battery
somewhere, and people could walk around
and then when they got tired,
you could just get it back back to somebody else.
And we didn't have a lot of backpack handing off.
And I think the, since you'd be transmitting a referendum,
you could say, hey, if you've got a boobah,
if you want to hit the thrift shop on your way
to the gather tonight, you know, get a boobah
and then you can go back to the box and do batteries.
Then there's an entry level of proof of machine
that you can bring, you know, or, you know,
and you can show up that they took in presents
that you can still crank, and then the only problem with that
is with FM, you have all the, you know,
the entire other half of the FM spectrum
is your competition.
So people don't like it to point.
And they all wrap room boxes,
and V103 is doing like a killer club matter
something like, I'm gonna lose out.
I think it's interesting to see if you can keep a crowd
that all had their own noise makers,
you know, to do one frequency.
I see a lot of them.
Or just having it say that they could join your phone, too,
but the phone wouldn't be much of a speaker, though.
Yeah, and so, and so a lot,
the big problem becomes latency.
If you do any sort of digital transformation,
if you're Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, streamcast.
Doesn't matter.
Yeah, if you're doing a Twitter stream,
or a YouTube stream.
Yeah, it's all, it all gets started and stuff
if you get two devices near each other.
So, but it's okay as long as they are far enough
with any kind of your experience.
So you could independently, you know,
teach a, you know, or broadcast to multiple locations
as long as they didn't overlap.
Yeah.
So the potential there,
and you have a lot more control over a digital system,
like that, you could say,
I want this to be the volume of, you know,
whatever, whereas if you've got everybody hooked
at front FM, and a, you know,
plane flies by or somebody else
with a transmitter drives by,
we had a lot of interference initially,
and I think it was because of the antenna I was using.
But I did, we did have a set up where I had my laptop
around my neck with a brake in the shoulder pad,
and the FM transmitter and some batteries,
and then in birthday,
and so I was running around the whole laptop with tractor,
and it can, and it can pull around my neck,
and everybody else was running around the root machine,
and then at the receiver,
we tried a couple different things,
and the FM was one of the better sounding ones,
because I didn't have a UHF stereo receiver,
that works pretty well too,
but it just narrowed his hell on the proptimating.
So, you know, you went around the corner
and you walked into the killer,
you know, we were done,
but the source doesn't think, yeah.
It was super loud, that was a big problem.
Yeah, that's probably some of it,
it's just like audio quality,
it doesn't really matter all that much,
and you're walking around circles.
But audio control,
because it's okay to have some of a crappier sound,
or a mono sound, but it's not okay
to have crazy transients, you know, in the sound.
Or just to straight up.
So, if you did like a Wi-Fi with DLNA,
it does not automatically like do the syncing,
and you're like, it wouldn't see it to the max,
or every client gets to decide how they're gonna buffer it.
Yeah, it does the buffer, it buffers.
So, you have to like, you have to have
some kind of mandatory.
And I see.
But I know there's whizz-bang chin out there.
I've probably called it out there like Zigbee,
or whatever that does the whole Wi-Fi,
and it's all Wi-Fi, so I don't know how they do it.
But we might get hacked together,
by synchronizing the delay.
And they have to be able to hear each other
to some degree to all be able to decide
that they're gonna use a common,
not a common delay value,
but we have a delay value that gives them a common final.
Well, they just do it based on like time.
So they say, everybody start your buffer here,
and then start playing.
But you can make it all,
you just make a ridiculously high buffer,
and then make the time be like,
that would be the same place of the 32nd delay.
Yeah, no matter what,
it would just be as long as the time is exact on everything.
Maybe that's how they,
it's probably how they do the other stuff.
I've tried similar stuff,
because I've tried multi-casting all you,
and I wanted to do multi-casting video around the house.
I could have the illusion of having different
television channels that only play what I want,
and play fake hilarious commercials,
and single commercials.
But I've looked into Raspberry Pi,
set up sort of like mumble,
a little bit of humor,
doing audio streams with a wide pie,
with super low latency,
and being able to set the common buffer,
which it should do me a real time thing.
I actually haven't run it all over the house at one point,
at Intercom, or Raspberry Pi,
based Intercom's running this very microphone, in fact.
Which, the hubble, or hubble,
would mumble?
Well, well, yeah.
The mumble and murmur,
which are like gaming,
you know, the more low-end stuff.
Yeah, the mumble is the one they use for HDR,
or the weird thing that they,
it works great.
I highly recommend it to me.
It's extremely lightweight.
It runs really well on the Raspberry Pi.
The only problem was that it wasn't the version of the client
that I had didn't have to have this version for command line,
so I had to boot all the way into the Raspberry Pi desktop,
and then have a script locally,
visual version of the interface,
and then configure it,
where, rather than being able to run,
I guess, single command with the script.
Yeah.
Group.
What is the 8260 HD thing?
What is that?
Oh, okay.
So I've got some 8266 ESP,
8266 little Wi-Fi modules,
and I've played around with a bunch of people's,
like, bad Wi-Fi kind of code on GitHub,
and then come up with a custom Arduino sketch
that lets me blast my hashtag, basically.
So you put in a hashtag that you want to show up,
and everybody's list of Wi-Fi things,
and it just, it does your hashtag now.
And you're, you know, a hash symbol,
and hold whatever characters you choose,
and then a random number or a symbol,
and then it does your hashtag again,
and then it does it again,
and that's the SSID.
It does a new MAC address,
every, it generates hundreds of new Macs,
and SSID is a second,
and it is new things.
So you pull out your phone,
and you pull out your laptop,
and you look at the available Wi-Fi,
and it just, it falls off the screen.
It's like, for every second you have it open,
there's another 10.
You can even do that with the,
with the green machine,
and just have a script running in the background
on the laptop,
and it's like spamming the shit out of everything
when you're walking out of the street.
So, so it's, it's a cool project,
and I've had, I've, you know,
I've flashed a bunch of my ESPs
that you do this one thing,
because it works better if you have multiple ESPs
doing this,
running the same sketch near each other.
That way you get,
you get a handful of different,
like, uh, strength values.
Uh, so yeah.
Anyway, so they show really weird in iPhones,
Apple devices sometimes,
each, uh, Android,
each OS kind of has its own way of showing
these, uh, slightly out of, uh,
you know, out of, uh, spec SSID names.
Weird.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
So, it's, it's, it's highly effective
the only one you know reason it's worth bringing up
is because it's totally working.
It is my viral marketing, uh, thing I left it at the bar
that I need to get in,
and I'm getting an additional like 30 or 40 views
across my Facebook page every day.
Like, people are showing up,
they're trying to connect the Wi-Fi to the bar,
and they're seeing my hashtag 100 times down their screen.
Um, at least some of them are then going to Google,
like, is doing a question on my way back.
What does that mean in my act?
Because this hashtag is showing up.
I did that with the, the, that,
it was like the Wi-Fi or whatever,
and you could spam.
And I did that,
I did that to the neighbor,
the neighbor had an only dog,
so I just let you go.
We got, but I just let it,
left it near the corner of the house,
like a couple of days.
And, uh, anybody,
anybody over there trying to get their Wi-Fi on,
look what, hopefully get the message,
because we have nothing but dogs around us.
So, yeah, yeah, I invested that a little bit.
Well, cool.
Is there anything else you want to chat about?
I think that's enough rambling for today, at least.
Um, we got some, we got some,
some homework to do for the, for the green machine.
Yeah, definitely.
It's definitely, I have to, like,
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