Category Archives: Software Engineering

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, […]

Weeknotes: It’s raining sensors

Well, prototypes of sensors. I have been playing around with the piezo sensor to measure the pressure on a surface. I have been using a milk bottle as a testing environment to act as a surrogate for a plastic surface to test the code. This goes with the rain gauge, using the HC-SR04 distance sensor. […]

OpenAI codex

I was sent the link to the OpenAI Codex coding demo on YouTube, which was a lot of fun and interesting. It makes me think of the no code movement. At one level, I really enjoyed it and I like the fluency of the API that is being used. What worries me slightly is that […]

MediaStreams and Media Methods

I have been digging into Web Audio a little more deeply to scratch some itches and came across the Media Streams API. I have been thinking about how it can be used to get the browser to interact with streams and how JavaScript can be used to delve into them at a programmatic level. This […]

A testing time…

Recently, I have had to begin patching a project that I was using. Having found and downloaded the source code from its version control, I looked for the documentation. Not finding any, I started a Jupyter notebook to work out what the methods were and to make notes on the progress. Although that let me […]

Notes on Transmediale (Saturday)

These are my notes from the Saturday sessions. The Friday notes are here. The morning started with “Deplatformization and the Ethics of Exclusion”. Eva Marie Giraud began the session talking about food and its communal politics. From this, she raised the questions about how boundaries materialise and the came back to the point that, as […]

Thoughts on Carpentry Connect

Having left ICAD at some ungodly hour in the morning on Wednesday, I arrived in Manchester for Carpentry Connect Manchester, organised by the Carpentries and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). The opening talk, Learning from the Carpentries, was given by Lex Nederbragt. It focused on building skills with practice, finding the cognitive load, and the […]

Working with Web Workers

On a recent scroll through unread emails, I came across Surma’s post, “When You Should be using Web Workers“. This is a thought that I have been coming back to in recent projects. We used workers in the Compage framework to offset the work done with a data object in the browser. The framework loaded […]

A creaking social media

The Guardian ran a piece by Tim Burrows on Facebook’s Safety Check feature, Safety Check: is Facebook becoming fear’s administrator-in-chief? I do find the social media platform increasingly fascinating, especially as it comes under critique for its social and technical choices. There’s an increasing creakiness that is coming to the fore now. Ruminating on the […]

A day at DMRN

I presented a poster on Joshua Steele at the Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) workshop this week. More on the poster in another post but the day did provide a range of talks. Much enjoyed the keynote by Augusto Sardi about capturing and rendering spatial audio. It reflected on techniques from computer vision and the […]