Ah, MFB. Maker of wonderful instruments and usually bewildering user interfaces. Today we look at the MFB-503 Drumcomputer To start, press play. My unit seems to sometimes set the tempo of empty patterns to zero causing the pattern to appear to not play. Each pattern has an a and a b section. To select a …
Author Archives: Jack
Mutable Instruments Clouds Clones: Monsoon vs uClouds SE
I mistakenly thought that the Tall Dog uClouds se was an expanded clouds (similar to monsoon) but smaller. This is a not correct. uClouds se is only a shrunk down clouds. I believe my confusion came from the “se”. I previously, mistakenly, thought the InstruĊ uClouds was by tall-dog and that the “se” was another …
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Op-z notes
It’s easy to forget how to use the Teenage Engineering opz if you’ve been away from it. Here are my notes. To select a pattern: Hold the “P” key along the top edge of the opz then press one of the number keys to select the bank then one of the trig keys (the 1st …
Booting an Asus x200ca from USB
Here is the procedure to boot an Asus x200 (x200ca in my case) from USB (ie. to install Linux on it). While booting, press F2 to enter the bios Go to the “Security” tab and disable “secure boot” In the boot tab, enable CMS and Enable PXE boot In the boot tab, disable fast boot …
Juno 106 All notes off
The Roland Juno 106 does not have a built-in midi “All notes off” button or function. If you get a stuck or hung note you need to either turn off the synth or use some outside midi tool to send the all notes off command. I did find a work-around though – if you change …
Programming the MFB Tanzbar Lite
Note: If you have not used the Tanzbar Lite for a time, be sure to press the buttons firmly. They seem to not work well when left unused. After a session of use (and firm presses) they should to start working normally again. Like most MFB products, the Tanbar light is a mix of great …
Modifying and rebuilding an RPM from source
This is a topic covered over and over on the internet and yet I can never find the quick guide I need. Here for my notes are how to modify and rebuild an RPM from source. First, download the SRPM and install it: You may see some errors about groups, you can ignore these. You …
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Finding an expired certificate
I had a strange issue today regarding a particular expired certificate on a webserver. The problem was that the server in question was an nginx reverse proxy that proxied many domains and contained many hundreds of certificates. For various, um, “technical reasons”, I could not locate the exact cert that was bad. I only knew …
Creating a simple, quick Borg backup
Here is how to create a simple borg backup. Something more along the lines of a zip file than a careful backup system. I’m using this method for long term storage. The primary benefits are de-duplication and compression. Again, to clarify – these are not backups meant to be updated each day/week/month. These are simply …
Using a private key file with sftp over lftp
I ran into a few issues trying to use a non-default private key file with lftp. Here is how I got it to work: inside ~/.lftprc put The important items are what is passed to the -i option – this should be the private key you want to use. In my example I’m also using …
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