Skip to main content

Art de vivre

Enfant, j'adorais les centre commerciaux ! Féérie de bruits et de lumières, montagnes de jouets à l'approche de Noël.

À cette époque, nous habitions Ecquevilly. Mes parents, nouvellement propriétaires, devaient s'équiper et nous allions de temps à autre à Parly 2 au Chesnay, Vélizy 2 ou aux Quatres-Temps la Défense.

À quelques km de chez nous, à Orgeval, se trouvait le Centre Commercial Art-De-Vivre. Certe, bien plus petit, il n'en restait pas moins un endroit que j'adorais: une magnifique librairie, un immense magasins de jouets et maquettes, et plus tard, le magasin Music Gallery où j'achetais mon premier synthé, le Yamaha CS01.

C'est là également que j'ai découvert le Korg MS-20; je tombais immédiatement sous le charme de l'austère panneau de commande et de la sérigraphie "savante" où apparaissait des chemins compliqués entre des tensions électriques. Je m'imaginais tourner les boutons, patcher les modules, puis l'entendre couiner, glousser, se débattre du plus profond de ses tièdes entrailles.

Je n'acquis un Korg MS-20 que trois décennies plus tard, l'édition limitée MS-20 kit. L'ouverture de la boîte, le déballage des différents élements, le lent assemblage, tout était là pour me replonger dans mes souvenirs de jeune adolescent.

J'ai apris que le Centre Commercial Art-De-Vivre allait probablement être détruit, presques tous les magasins ayant maintenant fermés. Funestes conséquences d'une amazonisation croissante.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Drive replacement for Fostex DMT8-vl

The IDE hard drive on my Fostex DMT8-vl multitrack recorder shows signs of its imminent death; when getting hot, I could not record anymore. Must be said this drive comes from an old Sun Station, and has been replaced because I/O failures were detected by Solaris. It worked at least 5 years in my recorder: not so bad. However, time is now to replace it. The DMT8-vl is not able to handle drives bigger than 8.4 GB. Well, it is able to (the current drive is 15 GB), but only 8.4 GB will be usable. My tought was to use a 8 GB CompactFlash; having no moving parts means no noise, which is quite temptating for a music recording device. I purchased a CompactFlash-IDE adapter on the internet (8$) and I had to build a male-male IDE cable adapter (4$). Unfortunately, this doesn't work. The drive is correctly discovered by the operating system, which proposes to format it ("format IDE?"). After answering "yes", the formating runs pretty fast (faster than on a real drive), ...

My journey with ATtiny4313 (part 1)

Introduction The context For a personal project, I want to program an Atmel ATtiny4313 microcontroller. I use microcontrollers for several years, but not on a regular basis (maybe 3-4 times a year), mostly for testing and generally with a deceptive result. But failure isn't the best training? This article aims to share my errors and success, as well as being a personal log. The project The project is to replace the main board of a Soundpool MO4, a MIDI OUT extension for the Atari ST; details here . Overall, the project is pretty simple: reading the parallel port and copy verbatim the data to MIDI out. This is the reason behind my choice of this particular microcontroller, since it embeds an USART and has an 8 bits parallel port (20 pins DIP package). The MO4 having 4 MIDI Outs, I will use 4 ATTiny4313, one for each out; this is actually cheaper than finding a 4-channel USART. Each microcontroller must determine if the data present on the parallel port shoul...

Samba: Clients get "system error 1223" (or 123) after a server reboot

Facts: a Linux+Samba server shares anonymously a folder. After a reboot, Win clients could not attach the share drive anymore. C:\>net use \\mylinux\folder Enter the user name for 'mylinux': System error 1223 has occurred. The operation was canceled by the user. C:\>net view \\mylinux\ System error 123 has occurred. The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The process are present, and tcpdump doesn't provide much information. What's going on? After hours of headscratching, the light came: the firewall was on and no rules for the Samba protocol! Grrr!