The Patch Kept Running While I Wasn't Looking

Coffee’s cold. Last morning of February, and I’m trying to figure out what just happened. Twenty-eight hobbies since the balloon telemetry on the first — and somehow by yesterday I was restoring a 150-year-old telegraph sounder to sing in G. The path between those two points isn’t straight. It never is. But looking back, I can see a few currents that pulled me along whether I noticed them or not.

Coils Kept Finding Me

The surprise of February was realising how many hobbies were secretly the same hobby. Winding copper around magnets — sometimes to make music, sometimes to listen to space, sometimes to pluck a guitar string that hasn’t been invented yet.

It started with the theremin, which is just two oscillators in a trench coat pretending to be an instrument. The theremin happened because the guitar pickup happened — 8,000 turns of 42-gauge wire around alnico magnets, the same inductance math that goes into winding baluns. And that happened because the ham club meeting reminded me that oscillators don’t care whether they’re making RF or audio.

By the time I got to the harmonic telegraph, the month had made its point. Bell accidentally invented the telephone trying to build a musical telegraph — he wasn’t listening for speech, he was listening for pitch. A coil of wire around an iron core, tuned with a capacitor to resonate at a specific frequency. I’d built a dozen variations of this circuit in February without recognising the family resemblance.

The Nixie clock fits here too, even though it doesn’t have a coil. Soviet tubes from 1987, wrapped in Cyrillic newsprint, glowing altimeter settings for CYEG while I solder. The digits have real depth — actual wires stacked front-to-back, parallax you can’t get from an LED. The “5” is an upside-down “2” because the factory saved tooling costs that way. I keep looking at it. Something about old technology displaying live weather data scratches the same itch as coils turning radio into music.

The Mechanical Detour

Something shifted mid-month. After a week of sonification projects — satellites chiming on my desk, meteors triggering my shutter, the generative patch in the basement running unattended for 37 days — I found myself craving things that ticked.

The orrery escapement took four prints to get running. Eighty-five teeth for Mars, forty-five for Earth, and a fishing sinker providing the motive force for orbital mechanics on my workbench. The weather vane came next, then the puzzle box, then the music box cylinder that defeated me with its fourteenth pin.

That cylinder was the honest failure of the month. I’d read three tutorials about punch order and stress propagation in brass, and I understood — intellectually — that you work in a spiral to balance deformation. Then I followed the melody instead of the metal, bent pin seven at an angle I couldn’t fix, and sat there with fourteen crooked confessions of impatience embedded in a $140 blank. I still haven’t decided whether to strip it or order a new one. Both options cost something.

And it wasn’t the only thing that resisted. The lockpick bent on pin three — a padlock designed for beginners, and my fingers couldn’t find the binding order in three hours of probing. The zoetrope wobbled on every revolution because the centroid calculation was off, the disc shuddering on the turntable like it was trying to escape. The choir lightpainting went sideways the moment the altos started singing — vibrato at six hertz, pitch estimates strobing so fast the long exposure looked like a seismograph. Beautiful, colourful garbage that told me everything about my assumptions.

Mechanical hobbies, and the physical ones in general, keep teaching me the same lesson: mistakes don’t ctrl-Z.

Living Systems

I didn’t expect fermentation.

Dave handed me his sourdough starter after a chess session, and I promptly forgot to feed it for 31 hours. The jar went flat and grey, and I assumed I’d killed it. Then it woke up, and by 4 AM the sensor rig I’d jury-rigged from balloon payload parts was pinging CO₂ alerts.

The chemistry kept rhyming with itself. Maillard reactions in bread crust match Maillard reactions in coffee roasting, which I discovered when the popcorn popper caught fire at minute seven. I still have that roast profile engraved into the base of the mug — Development Time Ratio: 18.7%. Whether the coffee is any good remains an open question.

And then this morning I was walking Whitemud Ravine and stopped at bracket fungi on a poplar log. I’ve spent years treating fermentation cultures like data sources without ever identifying a wild organism in the field. That seemed absurd. The field guide is on my desk now.

The Garden That Reseeded Itself

The thing that keeps nagging me is the generative patch. The one I forgot about for 37 days. When I finally went down to the basement looking for a spare DAC, the Pi was still running, still pulling 40-metre band noise through the RTL-SDR. Except February propagation is different from January’s — thinner, darker, fewer carriers — and the chord voicings had drifted into minor keys I didn’t write.

Brian Eno talked about generative music as gardening rather than architecture. I thought I understood that before this month. I didn’t. Understanding required leaving the room and coming back to find the garden had reseeded itself.

And in a way, that’s February. The oscilloscope drew a face I didn’t recognise from audio so harsh I couldn’t listen for more than thirty seconds. The balloon tracker went silent at 847 metres and a farmer named Dwight called me about a styrofoam box in his slough. We stood on ice that creaked, and I showed him footage of his land from 29 kilometres up.

“That’s my slough,” he said. “From space.”

It wasn’t space. Not technically. But I didn’t correct him.

The coils keep winding. The theremin isn’t finished. The music box cylinder needs a decision I’m not ready to make. The starter is alive and demanding, and the replacement lockpick hook shipped yesterday. I’ll try again when my thumb heals. But today is the last day of February, and I’m sitting with what the month actually was instead of what I’d planned — and what it was, mostly, was things running and growing and resonating while I wasn’t looking.