I’m wrapping up the final audio plug-in in my “Loudness Series” which was designed to bring compressors and limiters into modernity by upgrading their circuitry to using LUFS and True Peak in place of RMS/Peak.

The final plugin is an equalizer which will be focused on loudness but expand the filtering to include more advanced equal loudness contours.

https://apu.software

I have been bedroom DJing, and wanting to expand what I can do with the hardware I already have.

Using `midiex` for Elixir I’ve written a fully fledged driver for Ableton Push, letting me use it as essentially a 4-deck version of Pioneer’s DDJ-XP2 sub controller with Rekordbox.

It implements basic statefulness so that the rotary encoders can be used, as well as a paging system so the 64 performance pads can be mapped to different functions. It also supports track browsing and loading, which is helpful if you want to use say DVS with an external mixer and don’t want to be hunched over a laptop dragging tracks around.

It’s also got some additional capabilities which I’ve not seen on other hardware like dedicated faders for stem separation levels.

It’s been a great exercise in combing two hobbies, learning about MIDI as well as being able to personalise my setup for my own use. I haven’t open sourced any of it just yet whilst I’m still tweaking things but I’d be interested in collaborating with anyone who also has one of these devices and has programmed it. I’m looking to use the display on it next, whose protocol Ableton have some (albeit scant) documentation for.

I’ve been building two things that kinda go hand-in-hand to scratch a few personal itches. [1] is an interactive fretboard tool for guitarists. I wasn’t quite happy with the way existing tools approached visualization, so I made my own. Too many felt littered with ads or just didn’t work the way I was hoping for.

It goes beyond just plotting notes there are options to show scales using intervals, roots, note names, etc., plus a chord mode that highlights triads, voicings, and inversions. I’ve found it useful for routine practice start the built-in metronome, pick a voicing or scale pattern, and run through it in time.

There are also pages covering theory topics like modes and progressions, but the fretboard’s the main draw. It’s something I built for myself and figured others might get some use out of too. I plan to keep adding to it as I think of more things I want to reference probably adding support for additional strings or tunings next?

The other solves a very specific problem (mostly out of laziness) I do most of my playing using the standalone Neural DSP application on Windows, but I don’t really want to do any mixing in it. So I built a dead simple recording application [2] that doesn’t require firing up a DAW, but still offers a decent UX. It lets me quickly capture riffs and ideas, and later I can just send them to my Mac for mixing if anything seems promising. Haven’t shipped it yet, but I’ve been using it daily and having some friends try it out.

[1] https://www.theorycrvft.com/fretboard

[2] https://theorycrvft.gumroad.com/l/otocapture

I'm working on a calorie & macro tracker called FitBee. Tracking my food has been tremendously helpful in terms of improving my health, but it's always been kind of a PITA. These past couple of months have been really exciting as I'm leaning into using AI to make it less of a hassle to track & provide more insights.

https://fitbee.app

I'm thinking about how to properly test AWS Step Functions. The problem is that I can either mock the entire response for every state in JSON only, or call out to a lambda. What I want is to type check the evaluated JSONPath payload and the mocked JSON response, to ensure that my tests always adheres to global contracts/types written in JSON Schema.

I think it's doable by dynamically creating lambdas based on test cases I define in one way or another, perhaps like mocked integration services, that does nothing but validate if the event from SFN matches a schema, and that the mocked response also matches a schema.

My concern is that I can't find prior projects doing this. My use case is mostly (exclusively at the moment) calling out to lambdas, so perhaps I can get away with this kind of type checking. But it's just weird that something like this doesn't already exist! Past experiences have taught me that if no one have tried it before, my idea is usually not that good.

Let me know what you think!

(Would have liked to use durable execution which totally solves the typing issue, but can't in this case)

Working on the Monokai Pro website for my color theme for code editors, and the Monokai Pro plugin for JetBrains, which has just been released. Working out some optimizations, which will be pushed in the next update.

Monokai Pro has been running for more than 5 years now for VSCode and Sublime Text, and the original Monokai almost 20 years.

https://monokai.pro

I've been working on a library for Node (using TypeScript) that encrypts environment variables and generates typings for accessing said environment variables.

e.g. you init a project (`obelisq init`) and use `obelisq set -k <key> -v <value>` (e.g. `obelisq set -k SERVICE_KEY -v ABCDEF`) to set your environment variables:

  OBELISQ_PUBLIC_KEY=0344ecbf96c3e01262402247b97231a22c0197d17121dd9c7d1b999faed1d54ac4
  SERVICE_KEY=047ca044c1a59114246d5c5122ad1bdecfafa3c999fae5629181df54[...]
  MY_SECRET=049072d4ffc233ed77f8d682d9fe3a75114987d496b06d44269600e8be[...]

When you run `obelisq generate`, code will be generated that allows you to do this:

  // `get` is type-safe, `mySecret` is number
  // decryption of the value occurs when `get` is called
  const mySecret= obelisq.get('MY_SECRET')

Partially inspired by my own article: https://www.carlos-menezes.com/post/type-first-config

Working on adding features to my app. I wrote BVCalc because I wanted a calculator that would show not only the numerical result value but also show the corresponding algebraic expression that I entered so that I could check for entry mistakes and more easily keep track of calculations. I also wanted this feature to work even when the calculator is in RPN mode. That is, I wanted to be able to use RPN entry, and have the calculator show both the result value and the corresponding algebraic expression (displayed using infix notation, not RPN) for each item on the stack.

I was surprised that such a feature was not available on any existing calculators and so I wrote my own. Runs on macOS, iPhone, and iPad.

BVCalc Lite (free version, no ads): https://apps.apple.com/app/bvcalc-lite/id6544784034

BVCalc (paid version): https://apps.apple.com/app/bvcalc/id6560108221

- A FOSS Python package for record linkage and deduplication at scale called Splink: https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/splink/

- A library for fast, accurate matching (geocoding) of UK addresses that uses Splink under the hood: https://github.com/RobinL/uk_address_matcher

- An npm library that generates maths mental arithmetic problems that align to the UK national curriculum, that can be used to power maths games: https://github.com/RobinL/maths-game-problem-generator

- A breakout maths game that uses the above: https://github.com/RobinL/maths-game-problem-generator

This week I got back into Zig. I wanted to build a Zig library from end to end to find out all the wrinkles in publishing it as a package. Ended up building a topological sorting library that does the followings:

- Build dependency graph from dependency pairs.

- Generate the topological sort from the graph.

- Ordered parallel task sets (i.e. subsets of nodes that can run in parallel, within the overall topological order).

- Cycle detection and reporting the cyclical nodes.

https://github.com/williamw520/toposort

It's feature complete, but I still have problem publishing it as a library. Kept getting "unable to find module 'toposort'" error when importing it in a separate project.

Edit: Alright, finally figured out why the module was not published. The default project creation template in Zig 15 uses createModule() in the generated build.zig, which creates a private module. Switched to use addModule() to create a public module and my library can be imported and used by other projects.