Atari ST How it came about Back in the early 90′s I was happily making music with an Atari ST, Roland MT32, Casio CZ-101 and a Roland TR-707. It was quite a powerful system for the time given it’s relatively low cost. As I have always done, I had converted a spare bedroom into a makeshift home studio to be able to setup my ever expanding collection of musical equipment. I was writing some of my own original music, was...

I’m following the suggestion to make 1st Aug “How I got started in ColdFusion” day (How I got started in ColdFusion Day). To set some context, I was employed at The Daily Express (I was there for 14 years) and moved into some web based applications as we were looking at replacing our in-house Unisys A-Series mainframe based advert booking system with a bought-in system. As part of the bidding process we created a...

The deployment of this and a couple of other blogs I am currently working on was delayed as I struggled with the “broken image” issue most people have been encountering when deploying a multi-site WordPress 3.1 blog to a Windows IIS7 based web-server. There are some really good articles out there going into great detail about getting WP to work reliably with IIS7, especially using the URLRewrite add-on for IIS to emulate the...

So here it finally is. At last I’ve got up off my arse and have launched a personal blog. It’s as near as I am ever likely to get to fulfilling a New Year’s resolution. The general idea is to give myself an outlet for all the rants and ravings that have hitherto been solely delivered to my long-suffering cat, Bowie. I think publishing these ramblings might prove to be a bit more cathartic and, just possibly, a little bit...

Quick update: I’ve now finished assembling the unit. Several hours with a CorelDraw template, a centre punch and a variety of drill bits in my pillar drill resulted in a case with all the holes prepared. The wrinkly appearance of the front panel is purely down to the protective film that’s still stuck on until the unit is finished: Next was a test fit of all the components to ensure the drilling was accurate or if any...

I’ve finally made a start on building a passive monitor controller. I’ve had a good look at the various options available on the market and decided that I can build the kind of spec I’m looking for much cheaper than I can buy one. It will have 4 selectable inputs, where the selected one can be routed to 4 selectable outputs. In the middle of this routing is a volume control. I’ve opted for a stereo balanced motorised...

The more or less finished control surface I have had this one planned for a while… I was just waiting for something suitable to turn up on eBay and last week I managed to snag a used EPOS keyboard for £5… woohoo! It’s a USB keyboard and is the TM_KMR128A made by Tipro (product info). All the keys are programmable and each can be programmed to issue a single character or a string of keystrokes. To the right is a...