Vitalik Buterin says crypto regulations have created ‘anarcho-tyranny’ The Ethereum co-founder says we’d all be better off with either anarchy or tyranny but not both.

Building a Hydraulic System With 3D Printed SLA Resin PartsShowing off the 3D-printed hydraulics system. (Credit: Indeterminate Design, YouTube)
Hydraulics are incredibly versatile, but due to the pressures at which they operate, they are also rather expensive and not very DIY-friendly. This isn’t to say that you cannot take a fair shot at a halfway usable 3D-printed set of hydraulics, as [Indeterminate Design] demonstrates in a recent video. Although not 100% 3D-printed, it does give a good idea of how far you can push plastic-based additive manufacturing in this field.
Most interesting is the integration of the gear pump, 4-way selector valve, and relief valve into a single structure, which was printed with a resin printer (via the JLC3DP 3D print service). After bolting on the (also 3D printed) clear reservoir and assembling the rest of the structure including the MR63 ball bearings, relief spring valve, and pneumatic fittings it was ready to be tested. The (unloaded) gear pump could pump about 0.32 L/minute, demonstrating its basic functionality.
For the hydraulic cylinder, mostly non-3D printed parts were used, with a brass cylinder forming the main body. During these initial tests, plain water was used, followed by CHF11 hydraulic oil, with a pressure of about 1.3 bar (19 PSI) calculated afterward. This fairly low pressure is suspected to be caused by leaky seals (including the busted shaft seal), but as a basic proof of concept, it provides an interesting foundation for improvements.
Want a primer on hydraulics? We got you. MIT likes 3D printing with hydraulics, too (dead link, but the underlying paper link is still good).

Solar Energy Plant Creates FuelNormally, when you think of solar power, you think about photovoltaic cells or using the sun to generate steam. But engineers at Synhelion — a spin off from ETH Zurich — had a crazy idea. Could you reverse combustion and change waste products back into fuel? The answer is yes if you can use the sun to turn things up to 1,500°C.
The input is water, carbon dioxide, and methane into syngas. The pilot plant in Germany is set to begin operations using a thermal storage device to allow the plant to operate around the clock. The new plant is slated to produce several thousand liters of fuel a year. Future plants will produce more, and they are targeting a cost of $1 per liter of fuel. The pilot plant has a 20-meter-tall tower and around 1,500 square meters of mirrors, producing 600 kW of output. The hexagonal mirrors are very thin, and the plant uses drones to aim the mirrors quickly compared to other methods.
Syngas shows up a lot lately. Getting to 1,500 degrees is a big ask, although we’ve seen ETH Zurich get to 1,000 using solar.

Getting It Done: Last week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers covered how to self-publish music, Billie Eillish’s email marketing tips, and more…
The post Getting It Done: Last week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: The new music industry’s last week in reviewIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception, with the MTV shutdown, Underoath taking on scalpers, Bandcamp expanding with private streaming and more.
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s last week in review appeared first on Hypebot.

Fred Again.. played surprise ambient set at Glastonbury’s Strummerville stageYou’re probably used to seeing Fred Again.. smashing the pads of an MPC when he’s up on stage, or spinning high-octane dance music on CDJs with Skillex and Four Tet. But, as a pupil of Brian Eno, the British producer seems to have some ambient in his locker, too.
At Glastonbury on Friday, 28 June, Fred Again.. (real name Fred Gibson) took to the Strummerville stage to play a surprise 30-min ambient set. The Strummerville area is mostly home to niche and upcoming acts, and is named after the late Clash frontman Joe Strummer, who performed Glastonbury’s main stage in 1999. It’s a cosy environment, with a 24-hour campfire, cafe and bar, with “the festival’s finest viewpoint.” It kind of makes sense that Gibson posted up there for his ambient set, then — but festival-goers were still taken aback.
READ MORE: Tame Impala has founded a musical instrument company — but it’s super mysterious
The unannounced set comprised mostly of unreleased music, plus tracks from his collaborative album with Brian Eno, Secret Life, which was released on Four Tet’s Text Records label in May 2023. Strummerville’s crowd was “hushed and reflective amid the late afternoon sunshine,” says Gibson’s press team.
Fred Again.. at Glastonbury Strummerville. Image: Theo Batterham
Gibson’s ambient set this year is a huge contrast to his performances at Glastonbury 2023. We praised his main set at the Other Stage for his ability to get tens of thousands of people dancing and, later that night, he had thousands more people heading toward The Temple for a surprise set with The Blessed Madonna.
Glasto-goers have shared the experience online, with one saying that the unannounced appearance was “completely bonkers”, while another said they headed to Strummerville to escape the madness, only to find that “some madness turned up

Most Glastonbury thing ever. We’re up at Strummerville, the chillest stage in the joint, up in the woods above the site. Here for The Royston Club but they’re running an hour behind.
Why?
Fred Again… just played a secret set up here. Absolutely bonkers ahaha pic.twitter.com/UdWcIl0KP6
— George Poole (@GeorgePuddle) June 28, 2024

Went to Strummerville for a break from the madness and some madness turned up.#FredAgain#Glastonbury2024 pic.twitter.com/Wg4J4SIJqv
— Polly (@PollyJacksonx) June 29, 2024

 
There’s currently no word that Fred Again.. is performing elsewhere at Glastonbury. But, with Gibson, you really never know. It was only a few weeks ago that he announced a live show at Los Angeles’ 77,500-capacity Memorial Col​iseum. He announced the show on the 11 June, with the performance taking place only three days later on the 14 June. Did it sell out? Of course it did.
Other acts performing at Strummerville this year include Dennis Just Dennis, Rompa’s Reggae Shack, Ged Lever and Cumbia Kid.
Read more music news.
The post Fred Again.. played surprise ambient set at Glastonbury’s Strummerville stage appeared first on MusicTech.

Krunch is a new FREE filter and saturation plugin by Hollance
Hollance releases Krunch, a FREE filter and saturation effect for macOS and Windows. Krunch is a combination of a low-pass filter and saturation effect. Hollance based the plugin on the One Euro Filter, an algorithm used to filter noisy signals. The One Euro Filter utilizes a first-order low-pass filter that stabilizes signals by reducing jitter [...]
View post: Krunch is a new FREE filter and saturation plugin by Hollance

Modbap Modular shipping CLRS effects module CLRS reimagines Modbap's HUE module, combining DJ-style high- and low-pass filters with some versatile saturation and stereo width tools and built-in ducking. 

6 LGBTQIA+ producers to watch in 2024
These six creators are pushing sonic boundaries and taking music production to inspiring and unexpected places.

Album Review of "War Story" By Yelawolf (7/10)Slumerican

Producers: Various

With 25 songs, styled as a double album, War Story, is Alabama’s own Yelawolf’s eighth studio release. One part of the album focuses on Yelawolf’s upbringing, which is more personal and more vulnerable; whereas, the other side of his LP delivers more of his classic “Trunk Muzik” flair, which made Yelawolf who he is today. War Story is more than a double album, it’s a synopsis of Yelawolf’s musical evolution. It’s a curated blend of truth with revolution and subjective stories with beats that match.The post Album Review of "War Story" By Yelawolf (7/10) first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

AI ‘Skeleton Key’ attack found by Microsoft could expose personal, financial dataAside from being wary about which AI services you use, there are other steps organizations can take to protect against having data exposed.

NASA and Boeing deny Starliner crew is ‘stranded’: “We’re not in any rush to come home”NASA and Boeing officials pushed back against recent reporting that the two astronauts brought to the ISS on Starliner are stranded on board. The companies said in a press conference Friday that they are using “the luxury of time” to learn as much about the capsule as possible before it returns to Earth.  The two […]
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2024 Business Card Challenge: POV Fidget Keeps Your Info In Their HandsSo what if we’re halfway through 2024? People who needed to fidget all along still need something to do with their hands. So why not hand them a solution with your information on it?
Not only will this spin nicely, the spinning action will use magnets to energize PCB coils and light up LEDs for some persistence of vision action. Designing the PCB was easier than you might imagine thanks to KiMotor, a KiCad plugin to automate the design of parametric PCB motors.
Mechanical testing went pretty well with the bearings and magnets that [mulcmu] had on hand, along with a scrap PCB as the sacrifice. Although a bit difficult to hold, it spins okay with just the bearing and the shaft. Once the boards arrived, it was time to test the electrical side. So far, things are not looking good — [mulcmu] is only getting a few tens of mV out of the rectifier — but they aren’t giving up hope yet. We can’t wait to see this one in action!
Hurry! This is the last weekend to enter the 2024 Business Card Challenge! Technically you have until Tuesday, July 2nd, but you know what we mean. Show us what you’ve got!

Why Angus1 is no longer playing by the rules of the music industry“When I go into the studio, my little ritual is to hit record on the mic and just sing or say whatever comes into my head, for too long — like, to the point where I’m bored of it and I’m thinking ‘Okay… This is ridiculous.’ Then I’ll push beyond that discomfort for maybe 15 minutes.”
Angus1 doesn’t have the most orthodox approach to music-making. His dull experiences of playing the bassoon at school — an instrument he calls “limiting” and “ridiculous” — led him to shun the traditional conventions of music and make his own way. It’s actually fitting for him, then, to record his vocals in this anguishing manner.

READ MORE: How Nahre Sol brought beatmaking into her classically-trained world: “I began to understand the appeal of sampling”

“I could just be saying the same word over and over again, but it’s that, like, popping the hood on my brain that I want to achieve,” he explains. “The whole reason I do that is so the judgmental part of me doesn’t stamp out ideas before they’ve been born. I’m like, ‘Well, you’ve said stupid shit already, you’ve embarrassed yourself, you can’t go any lower than that now with whatever you write.”
Angus1, real name Guy Tarento, is speaking to us from his hometown of Sydney, Australia, which he says is a city of “homogeneity — experimentation isn’t really valued.” His vocal recording approach might sound a little woo-woo, but the 32-year-old is a down-to-earth realist with a suitably dry sense of humour. After our chat, he’s heading to the pub for a cold one with some friends.
Open For Business EP by Angus1
His latest EP, Open For Business, was self-released in April in a similar environment: a listening party that hosted around 70 pals , beer for everyone, and a conversation about each of the four tracks after they played. Guy admits it was a weird experience — “ordinarily, you’d only open up in that way to one or two friends” — but found that being open about the project was helpful to gauge honest responses.
The brash opening of the intro track, also titled Open For Business, is reminiscent of the crunching and gritty distorted bass sounds of Justice — we ask how he created such an erratic synth patch. It turns out it’s actually an old “cringy vocal recording” that he slowed down, pitched, reversed, and “distorted to fuck.”

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A post shared by Angus1 (@angus1_)

Guy flits through different styles on the EP, seemingly effortlessly. In Run, lush, enveloped synth stabs complement a chopped-up Desi vocal loop over breakbeats; The Path takes a more emotive angle, with Fred Again-esque vocal stutters, woozy pads and UK Garage beats; The Hunt, for which Armand Van Helden’s You Don’t Know Me was a mix reference, is a four-to-the-floor indie dance banger; and Over The Hill features French-style sample chopping and Toro Y Moi-style vocal production.
“I appreciate a lot of different types of music,” he says, “and rather than letting them be their own discrete thing, I will childishly, try to smush them into one [track]…I just want to go weirder and wilder and continue exploring.”
His efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by key tastemakers . He’s released tracks on prestigious alternative labels Kitsuné Musique in 2020 and Future Classic in 2020 — the latter of which we both jape as a rite of passage for Australian artists. Does Guy consider these high-profile cosigns validations as an artist?
He sighs; “They are…I’m learning to wrangle my own ego and expectations as I go along. It’s really nice getting a nod, and it helps in some ways. But ultimately, the only relationship that exists is with the listener and me. If the music starts to bleed into too many other areas — one of which is to make me feel good about myself and get a tip of the hat from the right people — the music isn’t as much at the forefront. But, yeah, I’m not an overly confident artist, so when you do get those little wins, it’s great to celebrate them.”
Angus1 in the studio.
Guy assures us that it’s not such an easy path to those wins — as an artist, there’s often a lot of rejection and uncertainty before these triumphs come by. Besides, as an independent artist without a team, he isn’t so bothered by the influence of labels and tastemakers. In fact, one of the reasons he ended up producing his own music and releasing a debut single in 2019 was thanks to a bad experience with a label.
It went like this: While DJing in his late teens and early twenties from 2010 onwards — before he knew how to properly use a DAW — Guy started dabbling in writing tracks with a producer friend. One they wrote ended up on the friend’s EP, who “had a bit of a buzz going,” Guy says. Though he was involved in making one of the songs, the label seemingly had little interest in paying him his dues.

“The label just tried their best to get me out of the way, both in credits and contractually [because] I wasn’t anyone. I was just some young guy,” he explains. “I get it from a marketing perspective, but they went about it the wrong way. It could have been way more respectful. They were trying to get me to sign a licencing agreement only for the instrumental but, I’m like, ‘You’re not releasing the instrumental, therefore there will be no royalties from the instrumental.’”
Guy dismissed the agreement as “dog shit” and decided that he wasn’t going to let that happen again. His end goal was always to have a career in music. The best way to achieve that, in his mind, was to teach himself how to produce, make his own music, and not rely on other people who apparently knew the music industry better than he did.
Angus1 in the studio.
That put several items on his to-do list. Firstly, he parted ways with DJing as an outlet for creativity. He gradually came to find it uninspiring and says that, in Sydney, “subcultures aren’t really valued, so our club scene isn’t particularly interesting; someone will be upset about [me saying that], but I lost myself along the way while DJing in terms of thinking I had to play trash to please people.”
Second on the list was to learn to use a DAW, properly. Although Guy tinkered with GarageBand to procrastinate from his short-lived career as a bassoonist, he needed more expertise. Fortunately, he had music theory knowledge but turned to YouTube to learn how to use Ableton Live. “That world has exploded,” Guy says, thankful that there are tutorials for “literally everything.”
He also needed a studio space and managed to figure that one out pretty quickly, too. He reached out to Jack Prest, a mix engineer and studio owner, who he later enlisted to help as a mix engineer on Open For Business, and whose studio he began sharing. Despite being independent, Jack has become an invaluable collaborator for bringing “a creative, human approach to mixing,” Guy says.
“Jack and I have a really good relationship, and I usually will let him know early on, like, ‘With this one, go wild with it; With this one, the mix is basically there. Just give it a nudge; I want the hi-hats to fizz like a coke, not a ginger beer.’ We can talk about music in an abstract way, because sometimes it’s hard to put it into words, so we’ve got a bit of a language going.”
There’s another big item on his task list, though: getting the live act down. Guy wants to tour his music but is still figuring out the logistics, and politely asks if we have any advice on the matter. In his mind, the Angus1 project could be a band, but the vast palette of sounds and arrangements means it could get complicated.
In his productions, Guy often samples his own recordings, building a collage of sounds in a way, he says, like The Avalanches or Daft Punk might bring multiple records together in one song. He chops and processes snippets from old recording sessions and builds textures out of them — triggering those in a live setting is essential.
Angus1 in the studio.
We land on a solution of bringing Angus1 to stage as a two-piece — a collaborator will join him onstage with another laptop running Ableton Live and other hardware, all connected via Ableton Link.
“That’s the thing, it’s about giving me freedom to sing. Like, am I Thundercat? An incredible bass player who can just rip while I’m singing as well? No,” he laughs.
But the Angus1 project needs vocals — it’s vital for Guy to convey his emotions in this way. From those self-embarrassing moments in recording sessions to turning his vocals into basslines, and, crucially using lyricism to understand himself better. “Often, I will come to an understanding of what I’m thinking or feeling after I have written a song. Some ideas come out of it. It’s like, I think that’s on your mind and now you’ve blurted it out, and you’ve gotta now you have to deal with it.”
Guy has more to do, more to discover. But he’s certainly not looking in the rearview mirror with Angus1. Funnily enough, the label who offered him the “dog shit” contract later reached out to him after he started the Angus1 project, not knowing who he was. They offered to work with him again and Guy’s answer was, naturally, ”no”. With a tight-knit listenership, a plethora of interesting ideas and only himself to rely on, we imagine Guy is sipping his beer in triumph.
 
The post Why Angus1 is no longer playing by the rules of the music industry appeared first on MusicTech.

Reviving a Free 1990s Millport CNC Vertical MillWhen faced with the offer of free machining equipment, there is no realistic way to say ‘no’. This is how [Anthony Kouttron]’s brother [Thomas] got to pick up a large 1990s-era CNC machine as a new companion for his growing collection of such equipment. The trickiest part of the move to the new location was getting the machine to fit through the barn doors, requiring some impromptu disassembly of the Z-axis assembly, which required the use of an engine crane and some fine adjustments with the reinstallation. With that [Thomas] and [Anthony] got to gawk at their new prize in its new home.
This Millport vertical mill is effectively a Taiwanese clone of the Bridgeport vertical mill design, though using an imported servo control system from Anilam. The most exciting part about a CNC machine like this is usually the electronics, especially for a well-used machine. Fortunately the AT-style PC and expansion cards looked to be in decent condition, and the mill’s CRT-based controller popped up the AMI BIOS screen before booting into the Anilam S1100 CNC software on top of MS-DOS, all running off a 1 MB Flash card.
Which is not to say that there weren’t some issues to be fixed. The Dallas DS12887 real-time clock/NVRAM module on the mainboard was of course dead. After replacing it, the BIOS finally remembered the right boot and input settings, so that the CNC machine’s own controls could be used instead of an external keyboard. This just left figuring out the Anilam controls, or so they thought, as a range of new errors popped up about X-lag and the Distribution Board. This had [Anthony] do a deep-dive into the electronics cabinets to clean metal chips and repair broken parts and floating pins. After this and a replacement Anilam Encoder this Millport vertical mill was finally ready to be put back into service.