Saturday Morning Music Writing Rambling

Since changing my main workstation this year (and needing to run different versions of many of the tools I use), I haven't been writing much music anymore. 

(Well TBH, I'd probably really started running out of steam again last year after COVID. But also, the newer tools having a bunch of nasty design changes that make them uncomfortable and annoying to use doesn't help)

Anyway this morning, I happened to have a snippet come to mind (i.e. the way that most of these *always* start), so I went in to jot it out.

When saving this, I noted that my previous one was already a month ago (and had been sitting open as  "todo to finish sometime"). So, as you do, I opened it up to give it a playback...

While listening to it, I switched back to today's one, intended to get back to work on it, but whatdoyaknow! I pressed play slightly too early, and then discovered that this second thing goes really well underscoring the end part of the other one!

(It did help of course that they used the same ensemble type)

The better part of an hour or so later:
Hang on...  I think I can probably draw the line under this one now 😂 

So yeah... I've now just completed my 1st or 2nd piece for the year LOL 😜 

(I may revise it later for a 2nd polished / extended edition, but this seems good enough for now)

Software Wishlist September 2025

On that note, here's a bunch of other things I wish various software I use often would introduce

Summary:

1) Firefox - "Private Browsing Container Tab Type

2) Desktop Window Managers - Project-Based Application Window Grouping + Complete Window State Restoration on Restart  

 

Mastodon UI Wishlist

As I've mentioned a bunch of times on here, ever since the hostile takeover and demise of Twitter a few years ago, I've switched over to Mastodon (+ posting / reposting stuff on here again).

Here's a list of things that I wish that there was a Mastodon UI that did. Unfortunately, the way things are going, it also seems that I'm likely gonna have to implement all this myself in my own client / frontend to get any traction on it...

MediaSlurper Updates - Ep 3 - Multi Device Support

It's been a while since I've posted any updates about my "MediaSlurper" project...

Well, that's largely a good thing! Given that it was built as a personal tool to solve some very specific bottlenecks in my data management workflows, that means that in practice, it's largely been working very well for my needs (or at least, "good enough!), which is no mean feat, given that I run it at least 3-4 times a day, almost every day!   Granted, there are a handful over "very annoying" bugs relating to the various heuristics in use to avoid making duplicate copies of anything!)... but those only happen in very specific cases that I can always manually enable escape-hatch hacks in the code to work around! 

But yeah, in general, it's been working well enough that I've been able to pause active development efforts to focus on other more pressing matters  (e.g. "Picasa Replacement Project", and/or general life stuff)

 

Anyway, with the recent need to start urgently investigating properly migrating from old phone to new one (NOTE: I actually made the switch early this morning, and apart from a "major heart attack / moments of sinking terror" trying to get the Whatsapp transition to transfer over smoothly), I ended up running both phones for a while, and needing to be able to use MediaSlurper with both. This lead to a flurry of activity for the past few weeks, culminating in some of the final most useful stuff only coming online today, *AFTER* I have already effectively transitioned off the old phone.... 

Nevertheless, given that I don't know when I might need this stuff again (or whether someone else might find it useful if/when I ever release this tool), I have decided to keep plugging away at it to finish the last push of new functionality that should address a bunch of other things I've found myself really needing over the past month or two.

Blender Addon - Hand Drawn Timing Chart Paths to Animation (3rd-Party / Not Mine)

It's been a while since I've posted about any Blender or animation related stuff on here, having moved onto other pursuits these days. But tonight, I'm going to briefly break my silence to link to the following demo clip for an addon that I've gotta say is pretty awesome looking!

  

Well done to everyone involved in making this happen! Very nicely done! Simple yet effective  😍 

 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 4 - Roadmap + Component Breakdown

The other day, I went through and did an initial breakdown of the components that would need to be developed as part of my "Picasa Replacement" project, in order to have a workable alternative.

I made this breakdown as a way of going in more level-headed about what exactly I was about to lock myself into (and hopefully convince myself against rashly diving into headfirst), as I was definitely getting "the itch" to just dive right in and build "just the basic photo management tool" part (i.e. "part 4", with "part 1" thrown in to have anything to show, and part 2 inevitably having to be done to before I could even contemplate setting up part 4), with the idea that the actual non-destructive image editing engine would be more of a slow burn afterwards (i.e. the exposure + colour edits would then be ported over as-time-allows, once I had the functional media management tool that I needed first)

(*) I must admit, I have also been slowly digging through Darktable's source code, trying to figure out how much of the iop code can be harvested + refactored into powering the core of my own pipeline  (as some of those operations are really powerful in the ways I want, but simply using the sidecar files to pass data to it doesn't seem as viable an option as I had though, given the horrid way it handles storing state - i.e. obscure hashed / binary-dump data in the sidecar files, coupled with only the database actually having the most recent settings once it loads a file once) 

Anyway, here is the breakdown notes from my notebook, in case anyone else would like to attempt this (or join in the efforts at some point).

 (TBH:  Seeing this breakdown is and should be very sobering... It is probably a decent 4-5 years of man-effort - assuming semi-consistent progress at a fast rate gets made even - to get to a somewhat useful point.  Hence why I wouldn't really recommend anyone attempts this on a whim!) 

Phone Migration Notes

This weekend, I've finally been looking into finally transferring across to using the new phone I'd gotten a few months ago (*).

As feared, there are currently a whole bunch of "manual intervention" bottlenecks that are not syncing over and require lots of manual effort to fix. Some of which are really silly and should be rectified by various vendors, while others are historical mistakes coming back to haunt 

Public Transit Audio-Only Recordings - A Fun Travel Keepsake

A discussion with a friend yesterday about portable audio recorders had me thinking about something fun to do while travelling that I only really recently realised I should try doing more of.

That is: Recording short audio clips (in addition to any video clips I'm already capturing, though again... more random clips from different places are again something fun to have) from various places during my travels - and in particular, doing it for any public transit route you end up spending a lot of your time during the trip using. 

Reaction to "Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUD's" - i.e. Thought Provoking Ideas on Reframing the UI / UX of AI

I just read a very thought provoking blog post from Geoffrey Litt, based on some ideas pitched some 30-ish years ago by Mark Weiser

Blog Title: "Enough AI Copilots, We Need AI HUD's"

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-we-need-ai-huds


My (Non-AI Powered) Summary, with additional spin on top: 
1) The industry at large is going about this all wrong!

2) The "me too" industry frenzy currently of just piling in on top of the "tasteless" (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) zombie train of building digital versions of Tom Riddle's horcrux-diary is stupid.  

    I'm with Mark on this - as those who've followed me for long enough know, I'm very much against all this "chat" and "agent" style crap that all the AI-TechBros are currently all still hyping up.

3) HCI + Interaction Design specialists/experts such as myself should really be stepping in and stepping up to meet this challenge head on - to get back in there to steer the ship as it were, instead of being backseat passengers to an almost certain trainwreck - by doing what we do best:

    a) Taking a step back, and asking the essential basic questions about what exactly we're trying to really achieve, and **WHY**...

    b) Crucially, not letting the existing framing cloud our judgement, and obscuring our own personal ethical + philosophical principles on the direction that we wish to steer technology in

4) What is it that we have to offer then?

   A) Show Don't Tell - If your tech is really that fancy, it doesn't need to be in our faces all the time. We shouldn't *need* to be constantly "conversing" with it, like micro-managing a third-rate annoying minion

   B) An Assistive Superpower - (Now where have we heard *that* before?  ;)    Yep, the emphasis here should be on the tech taking care of the mundane stuff, while using its strengths to highlight stuff we can't figure out as humans...

*NOW* we're talking.
  i) Harnessing tech to help people do what they couldn't otherwise do
  ii) Augmenting + Building Up, NOT Replacing + Subjugating!

These are indeed very much things that are right in my wheelhouse, and problems that I can get behind!  (Whereas the "AI" discourse to date has very much been a very alienating, and unpalatable soup of world-destroying slop that make me and countless others sick to our very core)

Thanks for the reminder Geoffrey!

 

As for the rest of us:   It's high time we started getting cracking, and righting this ship! There's lots of work to do!

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 3 - Some Easy Wins

In the latest installment of my ongoing series of posts about my current "Picasa Replacement Project", a few days ago, I managed to make a few more easy wins:

1) First, by applying some of the simpler manipulations to a "calibration" image, and trying to match the results - This has quickly revealed some starting points for working with the "Tilt" and "Color Temperature" sliders (even if the values obtained still seem a bit odd / weird, and may still need some fine-tuning)

 

2) It turns out that during an earlier search session, I had in fact managed to dredge up a bunch of very useful posts about the various formats used - especially for the on-disk thumbnails / preview images databases (which will prove useful for having a way to batch-test some of these filter calibrations later  (i.e. the thing apparently uses the standard Windows "Thumbs.db" format, for which libraries do exist !!!)

However, to protect all this info, I'm gonna have to make sure I save off all of it on the various archive sites (in addition to having already grabbed copies for my own stash, in case they disappear before I manage to do even that)... So yeah, I'm not going to publish the list of links until I have secured them. 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 2 - Initial Working Parser

It's taken a few more days than originally planned, but I've just reached a first concrete milestone:

The rudimentary parser for Picasa.ini settings file is now able to fully parse the settings file for the test folder I chose from my collection!   (Albeit, this was one of the newer ones that I haven't applied as heavy edits on as some of those in the full collection... but it's still a starting point!)

There's lots more to do still to make it actually useful, including:
* 1) Set up a Git repo for this project, so it can be used by others  

EDIT:   The code can be found here            https://github.com/Aligorith/picasa_lib_utils 

* 2) Need to unpack how a handful of other filters I've sometimes used on other photos have their parameters done too

* 3) Figure out what the pixel-level operations some of these were actually doing (i.e. most critical is the "finetune2" filter though that is the hardest; but even something like the "tilt" filter will need translating into a concrete rotation angle)

Late night musings on Pixar's relative "downfall" in recent years...

What follows are a bunch of late night ramblings + musings about things I can't help wondering after seeing seeing a YT rabbithole analysing the relative downfall of Pixar in the last few years...

 

(Disclaimer:  As some of the topics here are apparently contentious, I will be moderating any comments on this post heavily as I see fit... you have been warned)