- entry 2025/03/16

An experiment

I had one on Friday night, and another yesterday afternoon, but only one because the weather has been rude.
If nothing untoward happens, then it'll be something to do with the alcohol. But if my insides try to tear themselves apart, then it'll be something that is in alcoholic drinks.
At the moment, there don't seem to have been any side effects. I will continue the experiment next weekend.

A bottle of neutered beer.

SimpleSeq v0.26d

Anyway, since the last release there has been quite a bit of internal reorganisation of the code. For example all of the MIDI interfacing code is now in its own module rather than being scattered around as needed. It also checks to see if it's my MIDI module in use before trying to work out a port mapping, otherwise it just assumes the ports count from zero (because that's all the Acorn API supports, the mapping is something I added, and I'm not sure if/how Peter's module might report such a thing).

The CLI prompt now properly reports errors and will restore the screen fully on return. So you can now press F12, run a BASIC program to draw your biorhythm in an old-style MODE, and then come back to SimpleSeq afterwards.
And before you ask - yes, you can run a copy of SimpleSeq from within itself. But only one copy. It's due to how much memory SimpleSeq uses and how the memory allocation works.

Changes to the keyboard handling mean that the autorepeat should be more reasonable than before.

Note selection has been implemented. When you Right-click a note, or press Space when the highlight box is within an existing note, that note will turn green.

When a note is selected, you have a more restricted set of keypresses, as follows:

When a note is selected, you can use ^Left and ^Right to change the length of the note.
Here is an example piece of music, from LameDemo.

A piece of music.

If one right-clicks on the long "110" note at the top, it becomes highlighted in green.

A note has been highlighted.

If we were to then press ^Right twice, the note will become two boxes longer, to be a dotted crotchet.

The note has been extended.

We can also set a fixed note value by pressing B, C, M, Q, or S for breve (double note), crotchet (quarter note), minim (half note), quaver (eighth note), or semi-breve (whole note).
Unlike in the normal editor, these will also shrink the note if necessary. For example, if you set a note to be a minim (eight squares) and then change it to be a crotchet (four squares), then the four squares at the end of the note will be cleared.

The next part of the equation is moving notes. For this, just press the cursors when a note is highlighted. Movement will attempt to be smart. Let's look at a minim below two dotted crotchets.

A piece of music with a selected note.

Every note in this example has embedded controls. In this case the sustain key, but other controls would be treated alike. Additionally, the selected note has maximum (127) velocity.
If this note were to be moved Up twice, it will absorb the note on the left, like this.

The note on the left has been absorbed.

Some things to observe here - as much as possible controls in both notes, the moved and the absorbed, will be preserved. In the case where both notes have controls that would be in the same place, the note being moved takes precedence and that control will overwrite the one of the note being absorbed. The new longer note has also been given the velocity of the note being moved.

Moving this note Up twice more will absorb the dotted crotchet on the right.

All notes absorbed.

This probably isn't terribly useful, but I'm describing what happens if you move a note through other notes so there's no misunderstanding of what actually happens.

This has only been lightly tested at this point, so please let me know how it behaves if you use it.

Version 0.26d? Yes. I usually do work on the program in a day, make a release, and then bump the version number for the next day. However as I wasn't planning a release because this work was going to take more than a day, I added a sub-version to bump. This is the fourth day of work, thus 'd'. The next release is planned to be 0.27 but if that takes multiple days it'll have a letter suffix too.

Click here to skip the political grumbling if it isn't your cup of tea.

Where are the obligatory politics?

After all, while Trump/Vance's obvious ambush of Zelenskyy was shocking and odious, Zelenskyy still has some sort of belief in America doing something. And that something was to block aid already agreed by Congress (is that even legal?) and then block military intelligence, then unblock it, then try to negotiate some sort of ceasefire with Russia while at the same time basically saying it's Ukraine's own fault for starting this war.
I mean, WHAT? Reality has shot itself in the head, or shot itself up with LSD. Or both.

Add to this, the numerous comments regarding claiming Greenland, making Canada the 51^st state, and applying tariffs of 10% no 25% no 50% no 200% no maybe tomorrow or yesterday or... who the hell knows.
Meanwhile the unelected foreign-born techbro bestie appears to be trying to fire anybody they can get the names of (is that even legal?), people who may find themselves unfired when a judge intervenes. Maybe.

It's getting to the stage where one must start asking if the current administration is seriously incompetent or if they're actually on the payroll of a hostile foreign power. What is going on must be a wet dream to all those who despise America, and what is becoming increasingly clear is that the world is reacting to an insular America that can no longer be counted on.
Yes, we were generally happy to let America be the world police. Sure, this was an expense to them but it also gave them a lot of responsibility and influence. This is part of the "soft power" that people keep talking about. Now that this is fading away, one must wonder what - if anything - will step into the void? So America doesn't want to help do good things in foreign countries because somebody somewhere might have been given a gender reassignment on Uncle Sam's expense. Well think of all of the good that this used to do, and how helping when help was needed may have improved people's opinions of the country. Now imagine that USAID packs up and leaves and China moves in. What then? Well, now it'll be China who are the good guys and America as the ones who abandoned them. And yes, this may well include an amount of pro-China propaganda, as I'm sure it used to involve some pro-American.
Couple this with the very obvious realisation happening here in Europe that we need to arm ourselves to look after ourselves now that we know the guys who always had our back can no longer be relied upon. A future administration might make moves to reset relations, but that's not a lot of help if Russia wants Poland next year.
While Starmer keeps sitting on the fence because he still believes in the special relationship, I think it's starting to become apparent that it's not much use to bother to negotiate anything with Trump as the touchy man-baby can agree to something one day and then do the exact opposite the next day if he feels you've been "disrespectful", and I put this in quotes as it is extremely hard to quantify but easy to accuse - just ask Zelenskyy.
So in the longer term, the question must be asked - by the end of four years of Trump's presidency (assuming he hands over in four years), what exactly will be America's place on the world stage? I can't help but think that this is a massive self-own.

But we should look ahead and try to predict what the future might look like, because "today" is a highly fluid situation as they say, which means that the only thing that is certain right now is that it's a shitshow. What and how? Well, that changes too often to make sense of. And that's why I haven't written anything political recently. I haven't been scared off, I'm just really confused and - at times - gobsmacked.

Labour playing at being Tories

Where has he been for the past five years? Mental health issues have been slowly rising in the UK, but Covid and the lockdowns were quite impactful. Add that to the state of society meaning that for many nothing is guaranteed any more, a person with a reasonable life could well be homeless in worryingly short time. Liz Truss slaughtering the economy also hit people with mortgages. Inflation is pushing the prices up and up. Water boards mismanage money into shareholder pockets? They get to put up prices to make up shortfall. Councils mismanage money into Oracle's pockets? They get to put up rates. Shrinkflation.
And this isn't counting the massive tide of nastiness that social media has become - especially the effects that it can have on children.
Meanwhile the previous government kept cutting back on mental health support, SEND support, support for community resources such as parks and youth centres and libraries, and it doesn't look like the current government has much inclination to change that. Instead it seems as if Wes Streeting would be happy to make things worse if it would shave a little off the national budget. Because far better to kick those who aren't in a position to fight back than to sort out the tax avoidance of the wealthy. What a complete and utter despicable Tory.

What has my freezer done for me?

Fish and chips.

Sometimes I push out the boat and make some green things to go alongside. My choice of greenery is small firm garden peas and broccoli.

Fish and chips and brocolli and peas.

Speaking of chips, chips are good with many things. Here's scrambled egg and toast with chips.

Scrambled egg and chips.

This mess that looks like the dog threw up is a sachet of Uncle Ben's, battered chicken pieces cooked in the air fryer, and a tikka masala sauce over the top. I think this particular sauce came from the Leclerc as an own-brand. Usually I use Patak's because that's what the local supermarket has. They just did a buy-two-get-one-free so of course I took advantage.

Rice and chicken chunks and tikka sauce.

This was what I ate this morning. The first time I've made myself an actual breakfast (not counting a bowl of cereal for my pre-work sugar rush) in ages. Now you're probably wondering what scrambled egg on toast has to do with a freezer.

Scrambled egg on toast.

Well, it's this. Why did it take until I was fifty one before I found out that you can grate cheddar and then freeze it? I don't like grating cheese. It's a lot better now that I have a motorised Lidl grater which isolates my fleshy appendages from the cutty-uppy bits. But it's still a pain to clean because, well, cheese.

Grated cheese. Lots of grated cheese.

So what I have done here is to grate up two lumps of Seriously Strong, which is around 400g, and pop it into the freezer. Then when I need some cheese, which I quite often wish I could, I now just open the freezer, take out the bag of gratings, and pull out some ready grated cheese.
That scrambled egg? It's a cheesy scrambled egg.
And for my American readers, it's a decadent scrambled egg using four large eggs. Four. Whoa.

Another use for pre-grated cheese is, of course, macaroni cheese. Real macaroni, real cheese. This one is slightly orangey because it's the stuff I got from Lidl - that Irish orange cheddar, which was actually pretty decent.

Mac and cheese.

And, of course, there is some ice cream. Not something I have much call for at this exact moment in time, but I bet when the better weather rolls around it'll be a game changer to walk into the kitchen and walk out with a fresh lemon cheesecake cornetto.
Of course, now I've said that, I'll never find that flavour again. That's how my luck goes.

Blog URLs

• https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20250316

However, you can also access it using a the following virtual URL:

• https://heyrick.eu/blog/entry/20250316

You can also force mobile or desktop version (0 = desktop, 1 = mobile):

• https://heyrick.eu/blog/entry/20250316&keitai=1 (mobile version)

The plan is to transition over to this form of notation so that blog entries all have unique-looking URLs instead of "index.php" with a parameter, but there are many references to the older style notation throughout this blog. It'll need work to sort out everything, so it's not a priority, more a sort of "potential future plan".

Sıcak Kafa (Hot Skull)

The protagnist, Murat, is a linguist who has a degree of immunity to this virus, but at the expense of his head heating up when exposed to jabbering, hence the title. He's a rather annoying protagonist to be honest.
The obvious love interest, Şule, is actually a rounded and independent character on her own. She not only orbits the protagonist, but has her own plot themes.
Fazıl, the big bad, is played with exactly the right amount of menage, and the AEI agent Anton is a great character.

Consisting of eight episodes around an hour apiece, it's a surprisingly fresh look at the "bit virus messes with us" genre, intriguing, and competently staged and filmed. I enjoyed watching it.

Of course, it's Netflix, so the series ends after setting up the next part of the story and... it's been cancelled. Because anything decent on Netflix these days gets the axe. Bastards.

Your comments:

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A tree-dwelling mammal, 16th March 2025, 22:44

Reading from the bottom up, at least the bits I'm commenting on:    Rewriting URLs is good. Certainly the search engines prefer anything that doesn't have a ? in it. At one point Google wouldn't follow query strings, although that's no longer the case. Best to avoid it though.    My CMS has the rewrite engine redirecting everything to /index.php - I then have the following bit of code at the beginning of the index.php file:    require_once($_SERVER[' DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/include/global.inc");  $_MOBILE=ismobile();  $path=explode("/",trim($_SERVER[' REQUEST_URI'],"/"));  header("Vary: User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Encoding");    The ismobile() function just uses user-agent detection and returns a boolean value. You can do other things with that later on. Anyway, you end up with an array $path[] that contains the various levels of the requested URL.    The "Vary: User-Agent" header just informs upstream caches (and search engines!) that the content served may be different for a different user agent (eg a mobile device). It used to be best practice to have www.mysite.com for desktop and m.mysite.com for mobile., but nowadays that's not recommended and user agent sniffing is preferred.    Now going back to Labour playing nasty... As this is semi-anonymous (I know Rick knows who I am, as do a few other regulars on here, but Google doesn't so I can speak a bit more freely without worrying about this post coming up if someone looks up my real name) I can be a bit more open about things.    Yes, I have a diagnosis of Asperger's. It's mild but it's there. I suspect I have mild ADHD as well, but that's not confirmed. I also have PTSD, stress and anxiety (all confirmed by my GP) and possibly mild depression, and I've been assessed as "not fit for work".    I'd love to get back to working full time. Right now that isn't going to happen. At some point in the future perhaps, yes.    Let me give an example. One of the security cameras covering my garden is faulty. I have a replacement unit. Last night I thought "if the weather is ok I'll change it over tomorrow morning". Woke up this morning and just could not get my head into the right place to start.    All I need to do is take down the old camera, drill out the hole for the cables to a larger diameter, possibly drill some new mounting holes (depending on the size of the new camera bracket), thread the new cable through and connect it up. But I literally could not get motivated enough to do it. This is what's called a 'bad day'.    When I say 'mild depression', I don't mean the sort of thing where you're wanting to top yourself, or wondering what's the point of living. The mild form is like the thing with the camera. Or waking up, thinking 'I really should get out of bed', then 2 hours later the brain hasn't come out of 'hibernate' mode and I'm still lying in bed trying to figure out how to get up.    It will pass, I know. But in the meantime, I'm signed off work. And I need that bit of space to try to 'regroup'. The exact thing that the Red Tories, ummm, I mean, nu-Labour, are trying to take away.    Screw Brexit. (I voted Remain.)

Rob, 17th March 2025, 12:28

Need me to do a grep for blog/index.php?    Mammal. Interesting.. I feel like that most days. I'm already on antidepressants, maybe I need to speak to GP again.  Daughter has just come out of autism assessment, and it's been confirmed she's autistic. But it became pretty clear going through this that I am too. As a bloke in my mid-50s, this was never looked into whilst I was young. But my sister went "well, doh!" when I told her this, so I guess it's been pretty obvious. Not sure if going for a diagnosis will help, or change anything. I'm pretty much used to how I am.

William Black, 17th March 2025, 12:42

As a musician, I appreciate this work.    RISC OS is separate from forums. I left the forums due to immaturity from a certain unstable personality. Shame, but you can still use RISC OS without being on toxic forums.

jgh, 17th March 2025, 17:52

America seems to be cosplaying the 192s. Turn their back on the League of Nations, turning isolationist, pissing off Canada, Smoot-Hawley Act, Beuller? Beuller?

A tree-dwelling mammal, 17th March 2025, 19:29

Rob - I'm not on any medication, GP doesn't think it would be effective; it's a reaction to a series of traumatic events that happened. It just takes time to get over things I guess.    William - I'm also a musician. I remember doing a bit of stuff with RISC OS many years back using Serenade and a Casio GZ-50 MIDI sound module (later adding the XG upgrade to my DMI-50S card on the RiscPC). The software always seemed to get in the way of creativity. Plus it would always crash.    Then I discovered Logic Pro on the Mac. Now I am in no way a Mac fanboi. I own a couple of iPods, that's it (and I use iTunes for Windows to load music onto them). But Logic Pro is almost a reason to get a Mac. Almost.    Cubase on the PC is nowadays equally as good (and works on a Mac too apparently).    Adobe Audition? Fantastic for audio editing, but its MIDI capabilities are somewhat limited. It's also a bit clunky for tracking, but is great for doing mixdowns. So, tracking in Logic Pro or Cubase, export to WAV (one per track), load into Audition, mixdown, master, burn to CD (or distribute as FLAC).    Not sure who the 'certain unstable personality' is on the RISC OS forum. I don't post a whole lot on there, only occasionally...

Rick, 17th March 2025, 20:20

I know I have ADHD (well, AD and HD, they hadn't connected the two way back when), and it's part of why I went to boarding school - it was a special needs place. I am pretty sure I have some form of autism, but I'm 51 and I don't see there's any point in spending large amounts of money getting assessed. So I self identify as autistic, not because I want to fit into a category but because I'm trying to better understand myself.    And, yes, I've known people who have worked with autistic people and they tend to talk to me about it before I do, so I guess if you know how autism tends to show, it must be like a flashing neon over my head or something...    I don't need antidepressants [*], I figured out a LONG time ago that life is a cosmic joke that we're the butt of. Just put the kettle on and make a good strong tea. Works for me. ;)    * - I did once, a long long time ago. *Never* again.    Am I depressed? Probably, I mean, aren't we all? Look at the news. Things that once seemed so certain are showing themselves as mere illusions. Ugh. Stop this planet, I want to get off!  My method of dealing with it is, of course, copious amounts of sarcasm. 😉    I don't ever think about killing myself, because reasons, but I do often wonder why the hell I'm here. Like, what is the point of *me*? Oh, the joys of being heavy on the introspection.  But, I had a good day today. Only called myself an effing twat twice. 🎉    Depending on the definition of "unstable", there are multiple potential candidates. I might be one of them. 😱    As for SimpleSeq, apparently MelIDI is great, but it's pretty much nonexistent and never made the jump to 32 bit (despite my efforts). Part of the prime focus for my software is that I just wasn't getting on with turning ideas into notation. I did try with MuseScore which I'm sure is great if notation is your thing. That's why SimpleSeq is a grid like old school tracker editors. While it's undoubtedly kind of lame compared to stuff one might find elsewhere, I'm proud of it, making something from the ground up scratches a certain nerdy itch. And, well, it's not as if there's a lot of choice on RISC OS these days.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 18th March 2025, 16:47

Rick - I've known you for almost 30 years, you definitely have a sign saying "aspergers" in xenon over your head, at least for those of us in the know. (By which I mean those of us in the same boat.)    You know that info-dumping is an Aspergers / autistic sign of affection, right? My current girlfriend is Aspergers - I've learnt to try to look interested when she starts info-dumping to me about something I know absolutely nothing about (the other night I was on the receiving end of an info-dump about Final Fantasy) as it's a bonding thing. (I'm currently doing an in-car audio upgrade on my new ride, every time the gf asks me how it's going I have to hold back on a full-on info-dump. I dont think she's interested in crossover points, filter slopes, DSP settings and acoustic treatments!)    You're not unstable. Unhinged perhaps, but not unstable. There's a difference. ;)    Finally, MelIDI. I tried out the demo of that some years back. I quite liked it, but could never justify the outlay.    I also could never get to grips with writing tracker music. I have great admiriation for those who can. I've never been able to "program" music, I guess this is where I have trouble connecting the "coder" and "musician" parts. I sit down at the piano / keyboard / synth and just let it 'flow'. Although there is a thought process at work. Here's an example:    The song lyric goes like this:    "So tonight the heartache's on me, on me,  Let's drink a toast to a fool who couldn't see,  Bartender, pour the wine,  Cos the hurtin's all mine,  Tonight the heartache's on me."    (Apologies to Joy Lynn White! [1] )    In my head I'm hearing this:    C G7 C C7 / F G7 C C / C7 E7 Am Am/G F / C/G G7 C C    (Am/G means 'A minor over G', ie play an A minor chord with your right hand and a G in the bass with your left. Similar with C/G 'C over G', although that's just an inversion.)    I guess the problem with being a musician is you can't just listen and enjoy it for what it is. You're always subconsciously picking it apart.    [1] Yes I know the Dixie Chicks did that song, but Joy Lynn White did it about 4-5 years earlier. A much better version too IMO.

Rick, 22nd March 2025, 15:34

Rob: Grep? Couldn't this be done by PHP by loading the blog data into a string and doing a simple string replace before handing it to the server to send?

Truth Social, 23rd March 2025, 10:54

Every one is autistic these days its the new trend

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