Latest Posts

1. Goodbye 2021, Hello 2022!

   12 Jul 2023 blog

   Here's a brief wrapup of the year, mainly for my own sake.
   Last year I've spent more of my freetime doing other stuff than coding or updating this blog. Those have felt a bit like work.

   Much of my freetime was spent with music, one way or another: listening, getting better at mixing, recording, playing, eurorack, studying DSP, etc.
   There's many aspects about music that I find interesting and want to explore.

   Highlights #

   There were many moments that I enjoyed; spending time with friends & family, and enjoying Finnish nature.
   In the summer we spent good times with my girlfriend travelling in Eastern Finland, we did some hiking at Koli and visited Saimaa etc.

   

   During the autumn we did 5 day hike in Lapland with my friends.

   

   New hobbies #

   I can't say I have been doing that long hikes before, but I did enjoy that alot and will be doing more hiking in the future. Next time with better shoes though :)
   I also started e-mountain biking, I got hooked after trying my friends bike. It is such a nice combination of getting excercise and being outdoors in the woods.

   Also bought myself a Bass, I've been playing that for about a month now. So much fun, too bad I didn't start earlier.

   Hello 2022 #

   Here's a live recording to set you up for the following year
   From my eurorack and A4

   j.london · Tammelan Avaruusohjelma - Emergenssi

   This was done by recording Rhodes (VST) into morphagene, and mangling that with LPG, Erbeverb & Clouds and adding some A4 for low freq duties.

   Hope you had a good year, wish you all the best for the adventures ahead!

2. Tammelan Avaruusohjelma - Asettuminen

   10 Apr 2021 music

   My eurorack has grown in size :O
   Here's a live recording with it, straight from the command center:

3. Dawn

   21 Dec 2020 photos

   

   I caught few rays of light one morning with my camera.

4. Isolation experiment

   15 Dec 2020 coding experiment keepthewebweird

   Greetings from isolation!

   Created new multimedia experience with p5js and my modular.
   Just doing my part, #keepthewebweird.
   Check it /flowfield

   

5. I Dream Of Wires

   26 Nov 2020 curated-content

   Recently watched I Dream Of Wires again.
   Great documentary about electronic music.
   This is the document which originally sparked my interest towards eurorack.
   Solid quote from the film:

   I think as human beings we have a lot more fun than we like to acknowledge.
   It is fun, it is fun to make cities, automobiles, musical instruments and huge sound systems.
   We do alot of things just for the pure pleasure of it.
   When generations listen to previous generations' manifestations,
   they want to get involved too, they want to dance with it, use it.
   And I think every generation ought to be absolutely ruthless about stealing the best of everything from the previous generation.
   It is their duty, they have to do it.

6. Mirror Three

   22 Oct 2020 photo
   

   Went outside looked at the tree.
   Took the photo, now here it be. [1]

   [1] slight editing was applied.

7. RGB Ring Control

   21 Oct 2020 coding experiments

   I am going to tell a little story about a sideproject feature creep.
   I've been experimenting with Arduino's for some time, then I bought some RGB ring for experimenting with, when I was shopping for it I noticed they were selling rgb rings with various amounts of indivudally adressable LEDs.
   But I decided to buy one which had 24 LED's.
   I connected this ring into Arduino and looked at some examples and hacked together sime blinking LEDs in circle.
   Coded few different patterns, experimented with different timing and color palettes etc.
   Tried diffusing the lights bit so they would look better etc.

   

   I had some fun programming the few light modes. The limitations of such a finite grid were an interesting challenge.
   Suddenly I found myself creating a React app which could work for getting faster feedback if certain lightning modes would look good on the leds.
   In the app I added some design parameters to the sidebar, wrote few lines of code to change the RGB value of a circle.

   

   Then I got more and more ideas;

   • Serialize the parameter state into hash the URL.
   • Use Web Bluetooth and connect the arduino to the browser and exchange the lightning mode's over bluetooth.
   • 3D design lamp shade

   I got so many seemingly good ideas that I got overwhelmed and put off this project for few years 😀.
   Today I remembered this and figured I should put this Web UI sketch to my Website.
   The actual RGB led ring was quite tasteless as a light, but it was an interesting project and I created & learned things.

   Go experiment RGB Ring CTRL

   Code for the ligning mode's is fairly simple, allthough single letter variables used as challenge from past self 😑

   import { hsl2rgb, rgb2hex } from "../color-conversions";
   class CyclicRainbow {
     constructor() {
       this.state = {
         lVariance: 0.10,
         l: 0.50,
         s: 0.50,
       };
     }
     getFill(point, tick) {
       const deltaT = point.i / point.amnt * Math.PI * 2;
       const baseL = this.state.l;
       const h = deltaT + tick * Math.PI * 2;
       const l = baseL + Math.sin(deltaT) * this.state.lVariance;
       const colorComponents = hsl2rgb(h, this.state.s, l);
       return rgb2hex(...colorComponents);
     }
   }
   

8. New icon

   01 Oct 2020

   Drew some svg so that this site can have a favicon.
   It's nice to see that svg icons are so well supported in modern browsers.
   

9. Dijkstra Quote

   24 Sep 2020 curated-content

   How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

   Edsger W. Dijkstra

10. Patch Notes

    03 May 2020 music

    

    Current status: I have no problems staying inside.
    Actually the time I could spend doodling with music gear seems limitless.
    Here's few recent recordings.

    Experimenting with eurorack #

    J.London · eurorack live recording 03052020

    Experimental stuff #

    Before I upgraded to bigger case. Don't forget your earplugs.

    live jamming with Elektron boxes #

    this time jamming with Elektron boxes, Digitone + Digitakt

11. The new dot com bubble

    17 Nov 2019 curated-content

    I am not the biggest fan of advertising in general, and my appreciation for the art hasn't increased by following how the practices have evolved and into what direction.

    I stumbled into this article via adactio's links, and it delves well into online advertising bubble.
    The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent

    We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. And certainly, live-gaming is more likely to appeal to gamers. But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.
    
    This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.

    The above quote says it well enough, collecting data is fine if it is required for providing the service.
    But at the moment, the practice is to gather everything because it is possible or trendy (Big Data).
    Maciej Cegłowski puts it quite nicely in his Haunted by Data -talk:

    There's a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all the data you can, because they have magic algorithms to help you make sense of it.
    
    On the algorithms side, where I live, they tell us not to worry too much about our models, because they have magical data. We can train on it without caring how the process works.
    
    The data collectors put their faith in the algorithms, and the programmers put their faith in the data.
    
    At no point in this process is there any understanding, or wisdom. There’s not even domain knowledge. Data science is the universal answer, no matter the question.

    Eventhough the state were in with online advertising is strange, the article left me optimistic: bubbles have a tendency to to burst over time. The sooner it will happen, the more private Web we will have left.

    Realistically, advertising does something, but only a small something – and at any rate it does far less than most advertisers believe.

12. From CMS to Static Site

    18 Aug 2019 web stuff

    For the past few years I've been using wordpress on this website.
    I wanted to use wordpress for something where I can experiment freely and learn the most popular CMS.
    Wordpress is fantastic piece of open source software, but for this site it was pretty overkill.
    To get most out of wordpress, Automatic provides pretty nice plugins (Jetpack, WP Super Cache, WooCommerce etc.) and nice mobile app, but resorting to wp plugins when my needs are simple added some overhead.
    Developing my the wordpress theme requires running wordpress locally.
    When working with client-side stuff, I felt like running wp was too much.
    In this site the content is sometimes coupled with the the presentation, in wordpress it means that you need to develop the theme but create the content as you normally do with wp (requires syncing dev env db's to production).
    For these reasons I figured static web site generator would suit my needs better, since after all I have been pretty lazy with my blogging, so this site has been quite static already.

    Previously I have worked with Jekyll when using github pages and it was OK.
    But I preferred nodejs as I have more experience with js than ruby.
    I saw many people from front-end community recommend eleventy and it seemed quite nice.
    I suffer from bundlephobia so I decided to look at 11ty's dependencies, and this was the only thing about eleventy that didn't quite convince me.
    But afterall 11ty produces static HTML with various templating options, while providing development time "nice to have" features (browser-sync etc.), so multiple dependencies can be expected. In addition tiny modules are the norm in npm land, which has lead to issues (security and maintainability-wise), but people have learned and the intent to "do one thing and do it well" has proven itself (see: Isaac Z. Schlueter - Unix Philosophy and Node.js).
    Well at least I am moving away from PHP to static HTML, which will remain portable ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

    Developing the site now is much simpler, layout and content go hand-in-hand and they are both under version control, no need for separate backups.
    The content is written with markdown, which was already the case, but in WP it required Jetpack.
    My theme's Sass stylesheets were pretty much transferable, eventhough my markup slightly changed which was nice.

    The site's performance is un-surprisingly much better as well according to lighthouse.

    While I was at it I moved hosting of this site to Netlifly.
    brb stuck in JAMstack now 🤙.

13. Web Design, The First Hundred Years with Maciej Ceglowski

    23 Feb 2019 curated-content

    Great talk by the “Pinboard” guy:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw&

14. daysoftheweek

    15 Jan 2019 coding experiments

    Created new hobby project, check out daysoftheweek
    Brought to you by svg and js.
    Thanks Wikipedia for sparking my inspiration.
    

15. Experimenting with Web Audio

    28 Oct 2018 coding experiment

    Hi, it’s me again with another experiment.
    This time the experiment is about audio tools on the web, it has few real time audio visualizations; scope, spectrogram, spectrum, it also contains MIDI monitor tool, suitable for inspecting MIDI messages (works only on Chrome and Opera atm), Tap tempo, and a Signal Generator.
    This experiment was on hiatus for a long time, since I had plans to add few more features to it and polish the existing stuff. However other projects have come a long, so I thought I might as well share this as it is now, even though it is slightly buggy (not optimized, cross browser support is lacking, responsive design is missing.).

    

    The experiment was done using Vue.js, vuex & vue-router, for the curious the source can be read here.

    Check audio-toolbox out!

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