I was interested in learning about htmx, so I used it to improve the experience of posting comments on my blog. It seems much of modern web development is structured around having a JavaScript program on the front-end (browser) which exchanges data encoded in JSON asynchronously with the back-end servers. htmx uses a novel (or throwback)...
A gift from my brother. Coincidentally I’ve had John Carpenter’s “Halloween” echoing around my my head for weeks: I’ve been deconstructing it and trying to learn to play it.
Whilst researching what synth to buy, I learned of the Behringer1 Model-D2: a 2018 clone of the 1970 Moog Minimoog, in a desktop form factor. Behringer Model-D In common with the original Minimoog, it's a monophonic analogue synth, featuring three audible oscillators3 , Moog's famous 12-ladder filter and a basic envelope generator. The model-d...
Russell wrote a great comment on my last post (thanks!): What benefits do these things offer when a general purpose computer can do so many things nowadays? Is there a USB keyboard that you can connect to a laptop or phone to do these things? I presume that all recent phones have the compute power to do all the synthesis you need if you have the...
It's time to mint a new blog tag… I want to write to pour praise on some software I recently discovered. I'm not up to speed on Pipewire—the latest piece of Linux plumbing related to audio—nor how it relates to the other bits (Pulseaudio, ALSA, JACK, what else?). I recently tried to plug something into the line-in port on my external audio...
Arturia Microfreak. © CC-BY-SA 4 I nearly did, but ultimately I didn't buy an Arturia Microfreak. The Microfreak is a small form factor hybrid synth with a distinctive style. It's priced at the low end of the market and it is overflowing with features. It has a weird 2-octave keyboard which is a stylophone-style capacitive strip rather than...
I've been exploring typesetting and formatting code within text documents such as papers, or my thesis. Up until now, I've been using the listings package without thinking much about it. By default, some sample Haskell code processed by listings looks like this (click any of the images to see larger, non-blurry versions): It's formatted with a...
Although I've never written about them, I've been interested in music synthesisers for ages. My colleagues know this. Whilst I've been off sick, they had a whip-round and bought me a voucher for Andertons, a UK-based music store, to cheer me up. I'm absolutely floored by this generosity. And so, I'm now on a quest to buy a synthesizer! Although,...
The debridement operation was a success: nothing bad grew afterwards. I was discharged after a couple of nights with crutches, instructions not to weight-bear, a remarkable, portable negative-pressure "Vac" pump that lived by my side, and some strong painkillers. About two weeks later, I had a skin graft. The surgeon took some skin from my thigh...