THE MAPLOTUBAZON TRIANGLE

Dick Pountain/Idealog 280/29 October 2017 10:57

Living in 21st-century London poses many threats to the health of elderly gentlemen, from acid-flinging scooter thugs to spice-addled footpads, but these dwindle into statistical insignificance for me personally compared to the threat of getting lost in the Maplotubazon Triangle - the seductive maze of online tech retailers that encourages one to squander money without even leaving the house. 

The mid-life collecting impulse that afflicts many males with disposable incomes is a pretty well-understood pathology, which often manifests itself through fast cars, motorcycles or vintage electric guitars. I try to resist it myself, partly out of principle but also from a certain parsimony towards the confiscatory prices that prevail in these adult-toy markets. However I'm still vulnerable because I do enjoy playing guitar. I don't collect guitars as such, being satisfied with two I purchased years ago - a 1984 Gibson Blue Ridge acoustic and a 1987 Fender MIJ (Made in Japan) ‘Hendrix re-issue’ Stratocaster, plus a more recent Hofner Beatle Bass replica. I do however have an unhealthy relationship with effects pedals, provoked by my doomed desire to emulate Bill Frisell, who deploys delay, looping and reverb as instruments in their own right. 

It's not that I actually collect pedals either, already having (most) of the ones I want, but rather that I need to connect them all into a *system*, the ergonomics of which have become a bit of an obsession. I have five pedals that need connecting: an Akai Head Rush delay/echo/looper (bought after I first saw KT Tunstall); a Zoom MRT-3 drum machine, which in addition to hundreds of preset patterns lets me use its pads interactively; a Zoom G1on multi-effect processor; a Belcat tremolo pedal and a Rowin twin looper. I can play guitar(s) and drum patterns into the looper, then play over it like a one-man trio.  

The problem is the vast number of ways you can connect these up: which should go before which, parallel or series, which can be bypassed? It's even forced me to draw flow charts. Do I need tremolo on the drums? No. All these pedals ultimately feed into a small Marshall practice amp and the "glue" that holds them together is a dense thicket of short jack leads, 9v power leads and mixer boxes. And sniffing all this glue is what caused me to be cast away in the Maplotubazon Triangle - I have a branch of Maplins just down the road, I have a highly-active Amazon account, and I watch guitar-pedal porn on YouTube.  

This whole enterprise means waging war against two powerful enemies, mains-hum and impedance mismatch, my Scylla and Charybdis. Try new configuration, works until I add in one last pedal and then it hums. Bung in another £17 Maplins passive 3-channel mixer and the hum goes away, but I lose 40dB and the volume knob on my Strat behaves like an on/off switch. Put active mixer back in and it hums when you turn the third knob... Spend hours reading specs and user reviews of multi-pedal power supplies on Amazon, but never actually settle on the one to order. Will its power leads be long enough? Will it really be hum-free? Agony...

There's a deeper level of OCD still to which I've not succumbed, yet, namely to open up the boxes and alter their gubbins with a soldering iron. I've tasted this forbidden fruit via a YouTube video about hacking the MRT-3 to add an 8-socket patch panel and noise generator. I'm pretty damned good with a soldering iron (mine's a Draper butane-powered cordless one, if you're interested (which I'm sure you are)) but no... just no.

You may wonder whether there's any purpose beyond all this fiddling, and the short answer is yes. One day, once it all works well enough to navigate in real-time with confidence, and assuming that occurs within my lifetime, I'd like to perform in public. All pedals attached with velcro, just a single mains plug, hoick the rig down to The Green Note open-mike night and treat them to 15 minutes of space-age howls and twangs. You may wonder why I don't just find two human musicians who are into electronic, effect-heavy, free-jazz guitar music. I would, but it seems most of them are working part-time on remote unicorn ranches. 

And anyway, I'm almost there now. I've just discovered a configuration that works hum-free and loud so long as I use three separate wall wart power supplies. That being the case I've ordered, from Amazon, a Caline 10-way isolated power supply, which should fix me up for sure. I just found 1,140 YouTube videos, half of which say it's the bee's knees and half of which say it's crap, so a 50:50 chance...


[Dick Pountain has been a good boy in 2017 and would like Santa to bring him a DigiTech PDS-8000 Echo-Plus]

AWFUL LOT OF COFFEE

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 279 /05 October 2017 13:33

I love coffee. Or rather, I love making and drinking coffee - not talking about it, bragging about it or agonising over equipment choices. I neither roast nor grind my own beans, and am a stranger to the burr-grinder. Instead I work my way along Sainsbury's shelf of Fairtrade ground coffees (tip: Sumatra Mandheling is very nice). Occasionally, when I can be arsed, I go to the little guy in Delancey Street NW1 who employs gorgeous old-school gas roasters that give off sparks and fill the street with perfume. I do not buy any coffee that has passed through the alimentary canal of a tree-bound feliform, and avoid those hipster blends that have the pH of battery acid.

I've owned almost every type of maker, from horrid percolator to mini moka, over the last 50 years, but ended up preferring the espresso machine: living in Italy for 14 years will do that. I do *not* need to hear your stories about the Aeropress, and I've never owned a bean-to-cup machine because they combine the most irritating features of the laser printer and the photocopier: whenever you want a shot, some damned internal organ is either full or empty, and it tells you so on its horrid LCD display. I've had to buy several "desktop" espresso machines over the years - their pumps tend to expire two weeks after the warranty does - but still doubt I've spent the price of a bean-to-cup. 

I hear you all mutter "What's all this got to do with computers. He's finally lost the plot...", but I do have a connection, and it's not just that programmers run on coffee. The first book I ever had published was "A Tutorial Introduction To Occam Programming" in 1987, commissioned by Inmos and co-written with David May. When I began writing, the only parallel  demo program they could give me to work from was, you guessed it, to run a coffee machine. A classic real-time, concurrent problem, how to run heater and pump while also handling user input. I never actually got to build a coffee machine controlled by a transputer, and it would have been way too expensive. 

As a result of this early experience I developed a fascination with the user-interface of the espresso machine. Apart from switching it on and off there are really only three things you need to ask of it, namely to deliver coffee, deliver hot water or deliver steam to froth milk. You should be able to accomplish this with at most three buttons and lights, but it's astonishing what a pig's ear many manufacturers have made of it. Many try to skimp by only having two buttons or lights, which introduces needless combinations and confusions. Some of them believe a pressure gauge  adds to the machismo, but the fact is that if a machine doesn't already know what 15 Bar feels like then it's a bomb rather than a coffee maker.

Anyhow, my last machine's pump conked out a while ago and I replaced it with De Longhi's cute little Dedica EC680M. Narrow as a pod machine and beautiful in brushed-chrome and black, its user interface was designed by someone who gives damn - and who ought to be teaching UX design in Redmond. It has just three buttons with back-lit icons on them that depict one cup, two cups and a puff of steam. There's no LCD display and no menu, everything being controlled by a simple protocol based on the state of these icons: unlit, steady-lit or flashing. They can flash sequentially to indicate programming mode, in which you can set coffee temperature, water hardness and auto-off period by a short press. But the truly marvellous feature - which set me skipping round the kitchen when I discovered it - is the way you set how much coffee is delivered for one-cup or two-cups. Press the requisite button, hold it until it's delivered as much as you want, let go and it remembers that until further notice...

Staggeringly simple, highly effective, almost biological, being the way that many neuronal operations behave inside our brains. It's also so simple as to be beyond the designers of much computer software. In 2017 I still, every day, encounter programs in both Windows and ChromeOS that won't remember the last menu option you chose, hence forcing you back to the top and rendering some repetitive operations unspeakably tedious. Of course no protocol is entirely impervious to error, and rarely I'll press something at the wrong time, upset the sequencing and all the lights just flash. In that case an error handling routine is needed, and De Longhi's designer chose the most sophisticated and most popular one there is: turn it off and turn it back on again.