Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Sketching Sound Software over Platforms using Linked Data

A while ago, I was asked to contribute to a forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Sound Studies. The contracts have been signed so the entry on Computer Science and Sound is being written. One of the things that I have been playing around with is creating a Linked Data graph of programming languages, what facets exists, and […]

Getting power usage from Mac ARM

I have recently come back to exploring energy use while certain Python scripts run, such as machine learning training. I wanted to see if it could be sonified while the training happened. Yes, this does raise numerous questions regarding CPU/GPU use of the measuring device and representation while measuring the data. The pyJoules library came […]

Crate-clicking and reading liner notes

Pitchfork have an article on a crate-clicker, Music Place, on YouTube. It sound like an eclectic mix of stuff, but the thing that I liked was that the owner focuses on the found music. Crate-clicking, as a term, intrigues me as someone who enjoyed digging in boxes in record fairs and second-hand shops. On a […]

Vibe coding, liability, and prototyping

Ars Technica has an intriguing post on vibe coding from two different models that I think lays out an interesting question if this was done on production data. The article, “Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes“, discusses two models creating code and then wiping data or code. Both […]

GraphRAG and Linked Data

I have recently started looking at retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for some project ideas and came across the concept of GraphRAG. My understanding is that it uses knowledge graphs rather than vector stores to identify additional information to create context for onward processing and Large Language Model use. It seems interesting and I am curious to […]

Sound as Pure Form (sapf) – a new sound language

I have just come across the sapf (Sound as Pure Form) language (github source) from the creator of SuperCollider. I am currently looking through some of documentation and videos before diving in and exploring it properly. However, the examples are intriguing enough to want to investigate further and see where it might all go. More […]

Common Circuits

I heard about Luis Felipe R. Murillo’s Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford University Press, 2025) on a Digital Labour list. I wasn’t able to attend the advertised talk but did pick up the book and read on the flight to Lisbon for a conference. I have become slightly wary of Hackerspace books either […]

Illusions of the Thinking Machine

I read Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip last week as I am interested in the history of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). I did find it frustrating in that it is another great Silicon Valley man history, which is a tired trope really, but interesting in what […]

Archiving Sites

One job that I have been taking on over the last few weeks is archiving some old project sites using a CMS. We tend to render a copy into static HTML to keep them alive, but no longer updateable. Normally, I would use wget -r <site here> to flatten the site. Occasionally the –no-check-certificate option […]

Off to Lisbon

I had the fortune of getting a paper accepted for this year’s Digital Humanities conference, which will be in Lisbon. I will be talking about computational audible infrastructures as extension of Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s audible infrastructures. I will follow this up by talking at the MoCREN event that is straight afterwards. I will […]