If Beethoven Wrote Variations on Children's Tunes

A few days ago I came across this incredible impression of the familiar tune “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” played à la Beethoven by Polish-Canadian pianist Daniel Vnukowski, and it's so good I simply must share it. I've listened to enough Beethoven over the years—he's one of my favorite composers—to tell that this is absolutely spot-on:

Variations, or variational forms, were a great favorite of Beethoven's judging by the number of them he wrote, though he didn't publish many of them suggesting it was something he did for fun. The Diabelli Variations are probably his most famous among the ones he did publish, though I especially love the Eroica [Heroic] Variations, both the version for single piano and how they reappear in the final movement of his third symphony, the ‘Eroica.’ Anyway, apologies if this song gets stuck in your head as it has mine, but there are certainly worse pieces of music to have that happen with. A hui hou!

Flowery Australian Flora

This past Sunday, due to loosening lock-down restrictions, I went over to some friends' to catch our church livestream and have lunch. As I was leaving my house, the surprisingly nice weather caught my eye and caused me to take a few photos of some of the plants in the front yard with rain from the night before still sparkling on them. The Sun was unexpectedly out—it's been rainy or overcast the past few days—and it lit up the raindrops in a really lovely manner.

I haven't been taking too many photos the past few months, so I felt like playing around a bit and experimenting with angles. Here's a bottle-brush still be-speckled with raindrops, with the blue sky in the background. A lot of stuff is blooming out-of-season this year, which is strange: apparently, in the first four months of the year, we've had more rain in Melbourne than in the entirety of 2019, and were even on track for having the wettest such time period ever. And we missed breaking the lowest recorded temperature on May 1st by a single degree (Celsius)! So it's not like it's been unseasonably warm or anything, plants are just blooming at strange times.

I don't know what kind of plant this is, I'm afraid, other than that it's different from the previous one. I was really feeling like pushing the limits of how close I could get a photo, and with the Sun shining brightly on the water droplets this came out pretty nicely I think.

And here's the culmination of my attempts to get up-close-and-personal with the plants. This is, yet again, a different plant from the first two, and I similarly don't know what it's called. (Edit: Whoops! I checked my front yard this morning and realized this is actually part of the same bottle-brush plant from the first photo.) I love the back-lighting of the fine hairs on the leaves, though!

I'm sure for my northern hemisphere readers this flowery foliage is nothing special as you head into summer, but I thought it looked nice, so have a helping of Australian flora! A hui hou!

A Magnetic Birthday

Today the Earth marks another revolution about the Sun and I turn a year older. Or is the act of turning older less of a discrete moment and instead spread throughout the year? Is a birthday merely the observation of—and subsequent collapsing of—the waveform?

Sorry, that got a bit philosophical. As I expect many of you, dear Readers, are, I've been working from home for about two months now. Since I'm spending a much larger fraction of my time at home, I've been ordering a few things online to make it a more pleasant experience, such as the office chair I got from Ikea to replace the borrowed kitchen chair I'd been sitting on.

This week I had two different packages come in on the same day in a sort of early-birthday-present surprise, and I wanted to share a bit about the contents of one of them, from a Kickstarter campaign I backed late last year by a company called Chargeasap. (If you're curious, the other was a pair of arm warmers to keep me warm as we go into winter in the southern hemisphere.)

For a bit of context (bear with me), I've had a heightened interest in magnets for about half a year now, ever since I bought a pair of wireless headphones back in August or so. In those headphones the battery resides in one earpiece beneath a molded plastic cover held on by a pair of magnets. For whatever reason, I found this to be a particularly elegant solution, and started noticing magnets used in various other places.

I first came across a company called Zubits which makes these nifty magnetic clasps which you can thread your shoelaces in such that you can replace tying your shoes with snapping a pair of powerful magnets together. This inspired me to make a piece of artwork involving magnets back in November, which I still think is a fantastic idea and which I'm eager to use in future projects somehow. I also picked up Xvida's wireless charger with automatic magnetic alignment, which I wrote about recently. For Christmas my brothers got me a Tie Mags magnetic tie clip, to hold your tie in place magnetically without needing to pierce it with a tie tack or something similar. And the list goes on, you get the idea. Magnets are a great way to hold things in place as firmly or weakly as you need without fading over time.

Anyway, the point of this long digression was that I came across a Kickstarter campaign back in September for what I thought was a really good idea: a set of cables, with a USB Type-C plug on one end, and a universal magnetic connector on the other which could connect to tips with either Apple's Lightning connector, Micro USB, or USB-Type C. These tips could then simply be left embedded in the thing to be connected, such as a phone or laptop. To make a long story short, I backed the project, and despite some slight delays from the unforeseen pandemic currently ravaging the world I got the cables I'd pledged for this week.

I was impressed with the standard of the packaging. Very professional-looking.

Chargeasap isn't the first company to come up with the idea of these universal, interchangeable, cables, and this also isn't their first iteration on the concept; I think it's their third or fourth. These Infinity cables incorporate a number of improvements from their previous designs, such as the brightness of the LED in the cable end letting you know it has power being lower so that it isn't as distracting if used to charge your phone overnight. The cables themselves are very nice-looking, being braided nylon in construction with durable plastic caps at both ends and the thoughtful inclusion of a little rubber strap to help hold them in place when coiled up. They feel very high quality, and seem durable enough to hold up to lots of abuse.

The (unfortunately a little blurry) photo above shows the end of a cable, with one each of the USB Type-C and Micro USB tips magnetically stuck to its sides. You can see the 10-pin design which allows the cables to transfer data as USB 2.0 speeds. Which I think I forgot to mention, these aren't just for charging, they'll fully be able to transfer data as well. In fact I used one while writing this post to get these photos off my phone, and they work very well.

They're also quite capable on the power front, however, with Chargeasap promising Power Delivery (PD) standard charging of up to 100 watts, enough to power and charge a laptop as I was testing above. In fact, one of the inspirations for these cables was Apple's old MagSafe connection for its Macbooks, which allowed the charging cable to come unattached instantly if snagged on something, without bringing the laptop down with it. (Chargeasap makes a special longer cable, two meters long, which is pretty much made for being used as a laptop power cord.)

Anyway, that's probably enough of me rambling on about cool new tech gadgets. I've had a few Kickstarter campaigns where I received the finished product and while it technically worked as advertised it just wasn't quite as cool or interesting as it'd seemed, but with these Infinity cables I'm still just as excited about the opportunities I can think of for using them. Unfortunately some of the things I'd like to connect are still at my desk at Swinburne, but I'm sure I can come up with something. I especially like being able to connect my phone to my computer with a single snap!—it should get me to actually transfer photos off it a bit more often as it won't be quite as much of a hassle anymore.

Stay safe everyone, and if you do decide to check out Chargeasap's lineup just be aware that they're based in Sydney so orders from overseas will be a bit slower to go out most likely. A hui hou!

Ecossaise in E♭ Major by Beethoven (WoO 86)

Back in February I posted about the new hobby I've picked up of engraving music using the LilyPond markup language. I've thought for a while now that it would be nice to share what the music I'm engraving sounds like (especially for the musically non- or semi-literate such as myself), but it turned out to be more complicated process that I expected. Turning MIDI output into a waveform file format which I could include in a video is a bit tricky if you're coming to it fresh like I am, but I have a provisional method of doing so, so I made the short video below as a proof-of-concept for eventually making longer videos of some of the things I've done since. And I have been busy, but I'll leave it to a later post to go into more detail.

For now, just enjoy this short melody (seriously, it's less than thirty seconds long), and play along at home if you're so inclined and able. A hui hou!