I like instruments and have somewhat of a menagerie. Here are some of the less embarrassing inmates.
Here is a Castagnari Lilly. It’s a small, single-voice D/G melodeon. Because of its size and the fact it has one reed per note, the reeds are mounted directly on the board rather than in a reed-block. It sounds a bit like a concertina. The buttons are much smaller than a normal melodeon so it’s easier to play fiddly things.
After a brilliant Swanage Folk Festival, I got my box home and, to my horror, heard a slight hissing sound. Nightmare. A few seconds’ listening suggested it was coming from behind the grille. So off it came.
Somehow the wax on the pallets had melted and allowed a valve or two to slip out of place. The wax melts at a very low temperature (a bit too low in my opinion). I carefully used a soldering iron to warm the armature (not the wax itself!) in short bursts. It took very little heating indeed to allow me to move the valves back in place.
My third- (or perhaps fourth-) hand Dino Baffetti melodeon has some pretty impressive basses, but the tonics on the chord side (key-note) have slowly started to sound a bit out of tune. Jon Spiers suggested that whilst it might be a problem with the reeds, the shape of the chamber also affects how reeds speak. It was noticeable that the tuning was fine at low volume, but at higher pressure the tone bent up as much as 50 cents. I took apart the chamber and bellows to see if anything was amiss, but it all looks in order. I did notice that the dust filters on the air vents were looking a bit mucky and that that might be causing the problem:
Propolis doesn’t come off. At least the proplis that my bees make. Whenever I open the hive I have to slowly ease the boxes apart, slowly prying them as the glue stretches and releases its grip. It’s known as bee glue for a reason. Like honey, it’s a product of its environment, and its stickiness depends on the trees that the bees have access to. Like honey, it’s produced by a chain
I captured the event stream whilst I drew a circle.
$ ssh remarkable ‘cat /dev/input/event0’ > /tmp/pen-input
This ended up being 22,832 bytes. I then cleared the screen and piped some data back over the connection:
$ cat /tmp/pen-input | ssh remarkable ‘cat - > /dev/input/event0’
Nothing. This was understandable, as the data was all sent in one go, and the tablet likely though that my hand was moving at infinity meters per second.