I exhausted myself driving around yesterday looking for connectors and other electronics parts for some halloween projects. Vetco, radio Shack, frys were all strike outs as were the local hobby stores.

Lynxmotion is the place to go, they have all the stuff I needed. Should have started there. I wanted instant gratification but just got frustrated.

I’m working on creating some surround sound effects for my halloween setup this year. I’ve been looking for software to do this cheaply but no such luck so far.

I am starting with regular stereo flac files from various sfx discs i’ve purchased over the years. I’m using the 5.1 panning features of Sony Acid Pro to create a static path for the sound thru my listening space – this is pretty easy once you understand the complexities of Acid Pro. This leaves with an AcidPro-proprietary format ffile which you can play with AcidPro. For my purposes this might be good enough.

However it would be nice to create AC3 files that could be played on arbitrary PCs, burnt to dvd, etc. AcidPro will render AC3 files but it is another $199 for the codec pak to do this. I haven’t found much on the web for a free way to render AC3 – one thought tho is to loop back the spdif output from the pc to another soundcard and capture the incoming spdif stream – this post suggests how to do that. But this is not going to be cheaper than just buying the codec pak.

I’d like to find some filter that could capture the spdif stream before it leaves the pc.

Another issue is playback. I am using winamp for playback (because i am playing with the discolitez plugin) and winamp doesn’t natively support ac3 playback. WinAmpAC3 looks like it may do the trick tho.

MethodzofMadness.org :: Index

Kurt mentioned to me what a draw his Flying Crank Ghost was. Motivated me to look more deeply into. Here are the key resources I found:

• of course, phantasmechanics . The mother lode. They provide a written guide to building your own; kits for you to assemble; or completely assembled props. And they are super responsive on email.
• The Iron Kingdom. A bunch of FCG and FCG-derived kits, plus some other great prop kits.

• A whole gallery of finished FCGs at Kick The Fog.

• A plan for a crypt to house your FCG
• A scary ghost to hang off your mechanism
• Ebay has a ton of FCG related auctions – or better yet here is the Mpire page analyzing FCG auctions

I have no idea how good the database is behind this tool – Check Interactions - DrugDigest – but a nice idea.

Another great halloween supplier – Wholesale Electronics – I ordered a bunch of random relays and had them delivered in 48 hours.

Spent time today helping a friend do this…the google site is pretty good, but doesn’t really give guidance on what to do if your pop client keeps getting rejected. google has a anti-robot test you need to complete involving a captcha. perhaps this is just for new gmail accounts.

I’ve been working on my halloween soundtracks and I needed some new thunder sounds. I’ve been using some thunder tracks off of old sfx cds but they have a lot of ambient hiss – sometimes by design to sound like rain, sometimes just crappy recorded. When you amp up these tracks for outdoor usage, the hiss is just too much.

I wanted some clean thunder tracks and so went to Sound Effects, Production Music, Royalty Free Music, MP3 AIF WAV Sound Effects. Great experience – they have more choices than you can possibly imagine, and they deliver in just about any encoding form you could want. And to reward me, they sent me a free sfx after I ordered – pretty smart, the marginal cost of them doing this is basically nothing and they have made me happy. Recommended.

Prior to MT3.3, I was using a plugin to automagically convert keywords into categories, and basically using keywords as tags. now I am trying to switch to the mt3.3 official tags feature, but i’d still like the feature that autoconverts tags into categories. i just want one set of descriptive words which gives me the features of tags and categories. is there a plugin that keeps tags and categories in sync?

One vendor kurt reminded me of was EFX-TEK . I ordered some stuff last night and these guys have killer customer service. Fast email response, they seem to be working 25 hours a day. Recommended.

Our new copier in the office has this killer scanner. Great sheet feeder, and willl email yoru scanned docs as a pdf to you.

Given that I have scads of storage available now, it has made me realize it is now time to start scanning and saving all important documents. I always have trouble finding various personal legal documents. Well no more.

A question I have tho is how to manage all this content. I am going to end up with a lot of imaged documents. I wonder if all the free photo management apps like Picasa can handle pdfs? i’d love to have all the photo management features – tagging, timeline view, etc.

Upgraded to 3.31. Also migrating all my keywords to tags. Probably some funkiness until I figure out all the tagging stuff.

Met Kurt today – Grimvisions.com – another Seattle Halloween enthusiast. Some great stuff up here and some stuff I should have thought of – bending PVC with a heat gun instead of just depending on finding the right fixtures. Also in person Kurt gave me another great pointer – Sculpt or Coat to weatherproof props.

la la - View Album – Psoriatic by Scott Walker. Probably needs voice to be ,uddied.

Early look at some stuff for next summer – Minnesota Vacation Rentals - VRBO? is Vacation Rentals by Owner Minnesota - Minnesota Hotels, Minnesota Lodging, Minnesota Travel and Tourism – Ely rentals – Grand Ely Lodge – Superior charters

UPDATE: homeaway.com from today’s wsj is another site. Also lakeplace