• choose theme
    •
    Greenwich Mean Time GMT

    :2023w45

    hello!

    this week I took vacation to work on bento. on Thursday evening I went out to a concert with Gabi. the show was oliver tree at the troxy. there were music videos playing behind every song. the artists mostly sang along with a backing track. it was a good show, but strange and of a future i don't feel part of. it was a tiktok concert. no space between the songs, constant sound. clips, skits, a movie. i think mr. oizo would have liked it. the support act Super Computer was enjoyable. i think they would enjoy quiet party.

    every other hour was spent rewriting the internals of bento to make way for the new features and UI fixes. the rewrite is now released. it has reduced power usage by a lot and fixed some other issues but is otherwise basically the same. i have started adding the new features but i am very tired and not very good at anything today. i've tried all my normal tricks such as playing beat saber, having a shower, and tidying up but nothing has worked. it is bed time soon. in an hour or so i will eat half a buffalo mozzarella and then lie down in bed and read.

    i don't want to go to work tomorrow.

    Greenwich Mean Time GMT

    week 44 2023; praying to whatever god will have me

    i had a bath today.

    i would like to be everybody's diary.

    made some bread out of almonds. got per-step playback speed working on bento (not live yet). i am so bad at math. sorry to everyone who has texted me and to whom i haven't responded. bento has lots of new features (check out grid selector at the bottom), and i've just figured out the math and UI for the next bunch. i think once this next set of features is done (which will probably take about 1 or 2 weeks) i'll pause work on it for a little while, make some music, write a little. i keep reïnventing flight.js.

    i've had to learn so much. i've never worked so hard on anything.

    zeezy is in cairo. hi zeezy.

    i have no regrets this week. i ate cheese in the bath. the almond butter bread was a real highlight honestly. 80g almond butter, an egg, baking soda, a pinch of grated mozzarella, pinch of salt, all blended up and throw it in the oven until clean prong. delicious. with avo and evoo and za'atar. very good.

    i'm awake too late again. time for sleepy rabbit sleeping tiem

    Greenwich Mean Time GMT

    week 43

    listening to radio shows about war

    plenty of new bento features

    disastrous weekend where i did not show up for several people who are important to me

    i don't have room in my mind right now for anything but math and sound and pain and war. no exaggeration i really just cannot think about anything else, i've had to take several days off work

    i hope you enjoy the new features. more are coming, i have a big todo list and a notebook filled with drawings of screens. rn i'm being slowed down by the database stuff

    plenty of regret tonight, hopefullyity it will all be worth it. battery about to die

    British Summer Time GMT+1

    week 42

    I SHOULD BE IN BED RIGHT NOW!!!!

    i'm up late finish a bit of work on bento.

    bento is the new name for the sampler and sequencer i mentioned last week.

    it lives here now:

    https://bento.party

    it has all sorts of exciting new features!

    • recording with the microphone now shows a helpful informative screen!
      • it has an svg tape animation i drew myself in inkscape! i sat with a cassette and a sanyo tape recorder and drew out the best representation i could and then animated it with css!!
    • you can select a region to play back per-step!
    • it shows your step's selected region right there in the square!!!
    • you can drag and drop a square onto another one to copy it!
    • you can drag and drop an audio file onto the screen (waveform screen) to load it! this even works on the iphone! you can drag a file from the Files app into the screen on bento.party!
    • if you you're in safari on your phone you can click the share icon and then Add To Homescreen and it will appear as a standalone app and it looks lovely
    • if you're on latest macos in Safari you can do File>Add to Dock... to add it to your dock and it looks even LOVELIER

    most of this week i just worked on that! so far it's quite popular! everybody loves bento! it's the coolest thing i've ever done! it's really fun!!!!!!omg

    there's also a beta up at https://beta.bento.party which implements local saving (you click the 3 dots and select "save my bento for later" then when you refresh it'll load it back up). i have a branch where i'm adding a screen for selecting pan+volume per-step. you can also reverse samples per-step but i haven't added UI for that yet, so it's kind of a easter egg

    didn't do anything else. took 2 days off work to work on it. have to go to bed now because andrew w.k. will start singing at 5am whether i'm asleep or not.

    everything in the world is awful and sad and infuriating and devastating except for kind people and bento.

    don't go crazy, i need you later

    British Summer Time GMT+1

    Week the 41st 2023

    hello everyone!!!

    i hope it's good.

    let's see... let's see... let's seee...... i went into the office on tuesday... i'm 10kg lighter now than i was on 9/11 (the most recent 9/11 just before 12/9 this year)... didn't go outside apart from that... had to skip pixie's birthday getaway because i am not able to control my sleep, food and money if i don't come home every night... also skipped gabi's early hallowe'en because i hurt my foot and i'm a loser.......... what else what else what else........

    safari has its own valid css value for the appearance rule: -apple-pay-button:

    apple.com but every dom element is the apple pay icon, which is the apple icon followed by the word "Pay"

    i'm working on a cool thing, it's this:

    a screenshot of my sampler sequencer

    https://bento.party/

    it's a little musical instrument for the telephone. it's a sampler + sequencer, and it's really good!

    features:

    • it keeps perfect time!
    • 4 separate single-voice channels, each with their own waveform
    • record new audio from your microphone
    • per-step sample trimming
    • set the bpm
    • per-channel bpm divider (¼×, ½×, 1×, 2×, 4× the main bpm)

    it's fun! it works on phones!

    i have always been thrilled with the idea of making little music programs for cheap, readily available hardware ever since i made prettychips for the nintendo ds when i was a teenager. especially focused at people who don't have any other way to make music. i don't know why it took so long for me to realize the obvious fact that the cheapest most readily available hardware is the one you already own.

    look forward to/be wary of a future longer post about how it works (it's very fancy futuristic computer stuff, v cool v cool). but that will have to wait until after v1. so after this todo list:

    • per-step pitch control (¹²√₂)
    • per-step AR envelope
    • per-step volume control
    • per-step reverse
    • select multiple steps at once for combined operation
    • drag and drop one step to another
    • per-channel base sample speed (fine tune between 50% + 200%)
    • upload sample from disk
    • load sample from URL
    • drag and drop sample onto page
    • saving
    • sharing
    • desktop keybindings for quick ops
    • sync
    • swing

    plus some other optimizations on the computer side of it.

    umm yeah this post is really computery, sorry. i havent really done any non-computery things this week other than drink water and eat tofu.

    sorry thanks