"He Wears Black and Has a Beard"

2012: Year in Review

Toby Roworth

Dec 31, 2012


Trying to construct an opening paragraph for this year is difficult - so much has happened it's hard to summarise without mentioning everything. With over 70 posts this year, with a wide variety of flavour and topic, it remains hard to decide what this blog's about, above "Things that are Toby".
It's interesting to see how people have interacted with the blog over the past year, with nearly everyone coming from Facebook and Google+ links, representing a tenfold increase in page views. A whole two people actively subscribe to the RSS feed, one being myself. Most interesting have been the people who've seen the link here in my email signature, and then replied with a favourite post.
In the subject of favourite posts, here are the top five from 2012, chosen by magic:
Bedford Rascal: Moving House
Both a popular post statistically, and a nice example of my favourite van, this post documents me moving all my tech stuff home from uni. It should be noted, as an update, that the second trip filled the van with soft furnishings, to the point where I couldn't see, on a very windy day, leading to one of the scariest drives down the M4 in my life!
Casio SA-8: Line out mod
The only post I've done so far to include videos, this post shows a lot more views that I expected. It documents the changes I made to an old synth, so I could plug it into my mixer. Future plans include adding MIDI IO using an FPGA, so I can use it as a bass effect. Maybe far future...
Portfolio: Uganda
This post was one of the first I linked on Facebook, and saw an appropriate spike in views. I've yet to put up any more portfolio pages, but this one is the one I show to people most often. The kids in Uganda remain close to my heart, so it's nice to be able to have a visual aid to tell people about them whenever possible.
Mead Two: The Honey's Revenge
Mead is good - a whole four people agreed by +1ing it on my blog, probably thanks to +John Rogers. I never wrote the post to finish the second mead saga, but here's a summary: appley, sweeter, good, what you'd expect "Honey Wine" to taste like.
Ceiling-mounted wardrobe
Last, and by no means least, is the ceiling mounted wardrobe post. This is the one that people have mentioned most in conversation, the post with the most views overall, and has been Google's top result when searching for "Ceiling mounted wardrobe". The wardrobe may have gone, but it's legacy continues...
And, coming up soon, I've got a few posts I'm working on at the moment, to arrive early in 2013. A couple if reviews on design books will probably come quickly, as they're quick to write. I'm in the process of working on a sound gig report for what I'll deem my largest, or second largest event yet. If I can rescue to files from the hard disk partition I wrecked, or the backup that won't mount any more I'll post my video work for Dreggs Café, possibly with screencast/hangout.
Thanks for reading - to end, here's a photo from today's engine work. Happy New Year!
Valve gear of Rachel's Engine