Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there.

As a special treat, I bring you the Dr. Who theme as played on a pair of Tesla coils:

The Filtare SEIII has started shipping to the various folks and dealers who ordered them. It's good to finally see it get out in the wild so people can play with it. I've had a few owners report back and the response has been pretty positive.

Now it's time to wrap up my next project, the Multiplicity XV. It's a 5-in 15-out buffered multiple for Eurorack. There's no degradation as you split your signal all over the place because it gets regenerated at each output. The channels are cascaded, too, so routing is pretty flexible. You can have one input with 15 outputs, 5 inputs with 3 outputs each, or several options in between depending on where you put the plugs.

The Multiplicity XV should be ready by the end of May.

Over at tifr.us there are some pictures of an AT-AT made of bacon. I mean AT-ATs are cool and bacon is cool. A bacon AT-AT is cool beyond the sum of its parts!

Choosing a new smartphone can be tough as I'm finding out. Even before you can figure out exactly which model to get you need to decide which OS you want to run. Windows CE / Mobile / Phone or whatever they're calling it this week has come a long way. iPhones have that shiny Apple logo on them that people get very excited about and there are tons of fun aps for it. Android is quite powerful, provides multitasking, and has an ever expanding app market as well. Palm WebOS is an interesting experiment in cloud computing. These are some of the bigger ones but they're not the only choices by any means.

Thesearethedroids.com has a 3-part series of articles comparing these phone operating systems to each other. Well, the site is Android-biased so they compare them all to Android, but they do a good job of presenting some of the pros and cons of each. They're definitely worth a read if you're trying to find your new favorite smartphone.

Choosing a Smartphone, Part 1: Android vs. Windows Phone 7
Choosing a Smartphone, Part 2: Android vs. Palm WebOS
Choosing a Smartphone, Part 3: Android vs. iPhone

Dr. Octoroc has created a nifty tribute to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, done as if it were an old-school NES game. If you like Dr. Horrible and want to kick it like it's 1986 you should definitely check it out.

This month's AES meeting is all about modular synthesizers and how they're making a comeback. It's happening tonight in Redmond, WA if you want to come see a present-day take on 70's technology.

I don't know how I missed this video for Röyksopp's "Happy Up Here" when it came out, but it's got everything. Space invaders, light bulbs, explosions, sign pr0n, science stuff- you name it. It's a pretty catchy tune, too.

It's kind of a minor hobby of mine to try to figure out where samples in songs originally come from and what instruments the artists use to make certain sounds that I find interesting. The other night I was searching for the famous "James Brown is Dead" sound and I found a sweet article at synthmania.com that listed the origins of a bunch of famous synth sounds. It also listed several organs, loops and other fun things and provided sound samples for most. You should go check it out.

Several folks at the Pacific Northwest Synth Gathering asked me where I got my Syntar t-shirt. They're available at CafePress along with some other random items.

I just wanted to say that I had a great time at the PNW synth gathering today and wish everyone a happy Halloween!