This is the fifth year I've done Looptober, a Fediverse exercise where you post a little track every day for all of October. Last year I did as much as I could with the Arduino which made it a bit musically uninteresting. My technical constraint this year was that I …

Over the summer break I started trying to make a set of custom emoji which could be tiled to make geometric patterns in interesting ways, got bogged down in various fiddly issues, and wrote a quick tool using Observable so that I could visualise the maths behind it. I liked …

If you can read this, it means that at least some of the server migration worked properly.

The Dragon in the Sea
The Santaroga Barrier

Frank Herbert

About a year ago my brother lent me an old copy of Frank Herbert's first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, and I hadn't got around to reading it, but after watching the second of the new Dune films I …

Fedivision is an annual song contest held around the same time as Eurovision on the Fediverse. I entered an instrumental in 2022 but this year I wanted to actually write a song with lyrics and vocals. I've tried songwriting many times over the years but have always gotten too shy …

Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with …

Books

• Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• Boswell's Life of Johnson
• In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis
• The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
• Letters from Amherst, Samuel R Delany

I read …

The second half of 2023 was pretty hectic, between work and health issues, but I did get a chance to play with the synths: this is my first stab at a sequencer running on an Arduino Uno and sending out control voltages through an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC.

I also …

About a month ago I had to rest up at home following a medical emergency, and I was looking for a way to distract myself which wasn't getting stuck on the harder levels of Baba Is You or reading Boswell's Life of Johnson (which was good, but sometimes too gloomy …