I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]
Category Archives: Programming
Porosity, Computation, and the City
David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) […]
A mobile software lab to study software
This week, I went on another data walk in Coventry with some of our students in Digital Sociology. This meant that updating the Unheard City app in breaks while teaching another course. The app needed an update as the target software development kit (SDK) was an old one that also meant an update to most […]
Weeknotes: Tapestry, Robots, and Data
Started teaching this week and the world still moves. Having had conversations with the other staff (that will be ongoing), I sketched out some ways of donating data from the Unheard City project and using phones around it. It is a challenge. No doubt the work will change and move, but it raises some interesting […]
Weeknotes
After a holiday, it has been slow in getting back into gear. I picked up an administration task to help identify the courses that students had chosen. It was for our administration team and I had a few hours to complete it and get it live. It does need some work and there are a […]
Weeknotes: Models and Mentors
I have been having a break recently so not much done. I did start some work on looking at the Maestro dataset metadata for a paper abstract. I have been querying it for the authors and mean times of the tracks (based on MIDI according to the website) as well as working on extracting some […]
Automating documentation using Python
One of the tasks for this week was cleaning up after an infrastructure move and then updating all the documentation. Given that there are many forms of documentation, it was a bit of a task. I ended up putting together a spreadsheet of the main details so that there is a canonical reference. The first […]
Weeknote: AARs and patterns in audio
I’ve been wrapping bits and pieces of the HackRF base app to have some fun. One of the challenges was updating some old code in the AAR that needed a new flag. Next up is to make the gradle build a bit nicer and to add in the name again. I also need to update […]
Weeknote: SDRs, Workshops, and tiny tools
Less weeknote and more occasional update … I celebrated passing my Viva without corrections by putting in a workshop proposal. I heard last night that it was accepted. Now to organise it. While I was working on the proposal and a paper, I wrote a prototype sonification plugin for Gephi. Now that the workshop exists, […]