Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

Greetings from the Nut Hutch. Thailand is in the middle of their Songkran celebrations and it is very hot outside. So I thought today would be a good day to take a break from the heat and celebrations to finish discussing my Stereo Pi project. In my previous post, link , I listed the parts I used in this project. Now it is time to put them all together to make a working system. Speakers Because they were the first component that I had all the parts for, the first thing I assembled were the speakers. As stated before, the speakers I used were originally designed for use with a car stereo. In order to use them properly with a home stereo, some special care had to be taken in their construction. The first has to do with the size of the speaker box. If the box is too large, the low frequencies produced by the speakers will not be heard. On the flip side, if the box is too small, the lows produced will be muddled. I decided to use a very unscientific method to figure out the size of bo...

Greetings from the "Nut Hutch". Today we had an unusual event for this time of the year, it has been raining all day. I am so disappointed that I had to put my yard work on hold... not. Since I was stuck indoors, I decided it was time to talk about my "Stereo Pi" project. This project was born out of my disappointment with the sound quality of music out of my current multimedia setup, a Soundbar/ Sub-woofer combo. While it does a good job for movies and television programs, its music playback tends to be very muddy and distorted. This quest for better sound quality took me down a surprising path. Which turned out to be quite fun and a learning experience for me. Since this project is a long one, I am breaking it down into two posts. Today I will discuss the parts I purchased and next time I will discuss how I built it and the results. Ultimately I wanted something that I could play all of my digital music through. With this goal in mind, I came up with some requi...

Hello again from the Nut Hutch. I must apologize for my lengthy absence. The reasons for this absence are why I call my domicile the "Nut Hutch". For example, in the last couple of months, I have started to learn to speak, read, and write Thai. Meanwhile, the wife started a new job that keeps her busy for a longer period of time. Then the pièce de résistance, the LCD Screen, keyboard, and the SSD in my laptop all decided to die in a cascade of failures that would have been funny if the repair parts were not so expensive. Because my laptop was never sold in Thailand, I had to import the LCD Screen and Keyboard from overseas. Finally, after a month and a half of waiting, the parts arrived and I was able to effect the needed repairs. Needless to say, the laptop is now back in fighting shape. Replacing the SSD in the laptop meant that I needed to reinstall Manjaro Deepin Community Edition (Manjaro Deepin CE). Since I regularly backup my home folder, I did not loose any data. Even...