Piano Booster ✶: Software that reads Musical Instrument Digital Interface files and takes input from the MIDI instrument connected to your computer displaying the musical notes as you play. Windows, Mac, Linux versions. Open source.

Saturday, 7 September 2024

To create for the ages combine art and engineering ✶: As I watched him paint, dad taught me that art was not about being decorative, but was a different way of communicating ideas.

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

…

Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

…

Actually, I doubt that it was “progress” that most interested Richard. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

Friday, 6 September 2024

Is my toddler a stochastic parrot? ✶

Beautiful illustrated story by Angie Wang about so-called artificial intelligence, in The New Yorker.

What we say is not weighted by probability alone but is given its heft and color by our wish to share our lives.

Mere mimicry is not enough. … You’re human, too. You understand love. With that in mind, surely you understand how even the most useless tiny people on this planet are more real than any probabilistic word predictor, and how you must be, too.

Via Aviva Michaelov.

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Compound interest ✶: Or the wheat and chessboard problem. A little bit goes a long way.

Tuesday, 3 September 2024

Piano Chords

❦ Tuesday, 3 September, 2024

While learning to play piano (or keyboard, or synthesizer) I couldn’t find chord diagrams that fit the way my mind learns music, which is finding the chords for songs I like and then playing them by ear. ¹

So I sat down, stood up, did some research, and made this one.

Download it for personal use or buy a copy in various formats including posters, artboard prints, and notebook covers to have handy in the real world instead of on a screen.

Milton Glaser’s Baby Teeth was chosen as an abstract yet still readable typeface to encourage the right side of the brain.

The extra C is there because I find it helpful to see B by C and
E by F with no sharps/flats in between. Letter, or any kind of musical notation, is strange to me because, I think, it turns on the left side of my brain too much! ²

Piano Learning Resources

PianoChord.org · Online chords reference.
Piano Booster · Software that reads Musical Instrument Digital Interface files and takes input from the MIDI instrument connected to your computer displaying the musical notes as you play. Windows, Mac, Linux versions. Open source.

♫ Thanks to Matthew De Ver, Stefano Giaccio, Amber Paulen, and Michael Pirnot for their feedback on the piano chords poster design.

This is like working on a personal project to learn something instead of practicing for its own sake. The song, that you chose because you like it, is the project, and you learn the chords to play the song. ¶ While studying the chords and listening you learn the notes in them and their relationships in time, leading to rhythm, melody, and harmony. ¶ When you can play the song, you’ve completed the project and can learn or write another one. ↩︎
Everyone learns differently, and it’s reassuring to know that many excellent musicians don’t know how to read musical notation, or made up their own which fits their mind. Eventually you may want to learn, or invent your own, so you can read and play and write songs on paper, but this is not necessary to play music. ↩︎

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Friday, 30 August 2024

Building a community based on trust ✶

Ben Werdmuller, writing about the implications of artificial intelligence adding things that never happened to a photograph:

Ultimately, the biggest counter to this problem as a publisher is going to be building a community based on trust, and for an end-user is finding sources you can trust. That doesn’t help in a legal context, and it doesn’t help establish objective truth. But it’s something.

See also Ken Thompson’s classic paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust: To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.

Saturday, 24 August 2024

Jerome Bruner ✶: Bruner also believed learning should be spurred by interest in the material rather than tests or punishment, since one learns best when one finds the acquired knowledge appealing.

Added to to-read list: The Culture of Education.

Thursday, 22 August 2024

Awareness of being a collection of traits and behaviors ✶

From a fascinating question and answer session with software pioneer Alan Kay:

Neil’s idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we’ve accommodated to by winding up at a “new normal”.

The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science “The world is not as it seems”. Here, it’s “As a human being I’m a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress”. Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them….

And, Neil points out — in books like “Amusing Ourselves To Death” and “The End Of Childhood” — we have cravings for “news” and “novelty” and “surprise” and even “blinking”, etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with …

Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.

Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there’s a good chance they will lose the 21st century.

See also The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.

Starfield Update ✶: Played it a bit to try the new surface vehicle and updated my ongoing review which now has a list of potentially interesting mods.

Friday, 16 August 2024

Ambient Garden ✶: Found via a discussion of about just intonation.

Thursday, 15 August 2024

Blonde Redhead ✶: Live on KEXP.

Tuesday, 13 August 2024

Zynthian ✶: Open source, open hardware music-making computer based on Raspberry Pi.

Friday, 9 August 2024

GTA and Noita Updates ✶

We managed to play Grand Theft Auto without lag yesterday, so the GTA series of streams are on, usually Thursdays at 9pm NYC time.

My Noita review is also up, and it feels good to be back on stream!

Saturday, 3 August 2024

Dark mode website theme switcher with CSS and JavaScript using localStorage instead of cookies

❦ Saturday, 3 August, 2024

A dark mode CSS/JS theme switcher to help reduce eyestrain in different lighting conditions, such as changing colors to light text on a dark background at night.

Try it by clicking on the sun and moon ☼ & ☾ icons.

Your setting preference is saved with web browsers’ localStorage instead of cookies to help avoid needing “Accept Cookies” notes.

Here’s how to add it to your website:

Put data-theme="light" in your <html> tag:
```
<html data-theme="light" lang="en">
```

Set theme colors as variables in your linked stylesheet.css:

<link rel="stylesheet" 
      href="/css/hypertexthero.css" 
      type="text/css" />

Sample CSS code:

html[data-theme='light'] {  
  --bg: rgba(221,221,221,1);
  --color-link: #1976d2;
  --color-text: #111;
  --code-bg:#fafafa;
  --code-text: #111;
  }

html[data-theme='dark'] {
  --bg: rgba(51,51,51,1);
  --color-link: #81d4fa;
  --color-text: #eee;
  --code-bg:#252525;
  --code-text: #fafafa;
  }

body {
  background-color: var(--bg); 
  color: var(--color-text);
  }
a {
  color: var(--color-link); 
  }
code {
  background-color: var(--code-bg); 
  color: var(--code-text);
  }

Add a toggle link to the HTML (see the ☼ & ☾ icons above):

<a id="switch" title="Toggle website lights.">☼ & ☾</a>

Link to the following theme switcher JavaScript code before the closing </body> tag of the page

<script src="/js/lights.js"></script> 
</body>

The JavaScript code:

// localStorage to remember light/dark theme preference 
// Based on code by Phina Kersly linked in lights.js  
// Keywords: mdn localstorage
  
let theme = localStorage.getItem('data-theme');
const lightswitch = document.getElementById("switch");
const changeThemeToDark = () =>{
    document.documentElement.setAttribute
      ("data-theme", "dark")
    localStorage.setItem("data-theme", "dark")
    console.log("Dark theme set")
    }

const changeThemeToLight = () =>{
    document.documentElement.setAttribute
      ("data-theme", "light")
    localStorage.setItem("data-theme", 'light')
    console.log("Light theme set")
    }

if (theme === 'dark'){
    changeThemeToDark()
    }
  
lightswitch.addEventListener('click', ()=> {
    let theme = localStorage.getItem('data-theme');
    if (theme ==='dark'){
        changeThemeToLight()
      } else {
        changeThemeToDark()
    }   
});

See it working by clicking the ☼ & ☾ icons above.

Try refreshing the page after switching to light or dark mode to see that the browser remembers your setting by using localStorage, without needing cookies.

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Monday, 29 July 2024

♫ Echolocation ✶: Transporting song by La Cerca, a band I saw at Central Saloon in Seattle on Saturday night.

✶ Linked List
❦ Articles

HyperTextHero is no hero, but plays one on the internet, flying between work and play to brighten the day ☀️ Seeing the video game art form through graphic design, photography, drawing, writing, music, and LOL.