Rick's b.log - entry 2025/04/20

Doing other stuff

SimpleSeq v0.28

The WimpSlot has been greatly reduced because the music data is now held in a Dynamic Area, so SimpleSeq now asks for 188K. This means, of course, that you're now rather more limited to what you can do when at the command line (within SimpleSeq) - you can no longer run it from within itself.

The weird crashes have been fixed. It was due to my revised code to read the number of MIDI ports actually present and their mapping from my MIDI module not taking into account the additional registers that the SWI corrupts. As you can imagine, trampling over registers that weren't expected to be corrupted was... not great. As it happens, in my case the only thing that seemed to show up was that pressing Tab in the "Do you want to quit?" dialogue would cause the screen to blank and a beep to sound. Pressing any key would bring me back to the normal editor view - so you can see why it took some time before I noticed this.

The drumkit names are now no longer gibberish (that also beeps!). This was because in order to draw the new-style piano keys properly, the keyboard is now drawn from top to bottom, but the drumkit naming was not updated to take that into account, so it ended up reading array element 0, then -1, then -2, and so on. 🤦

Now loading a music file with no music data present doesn't reject the file with an error because Squash didn't appreciate being asked to unpack zero bytes.

SimpleSeq now autosaves every three minutes (if the file has been modified and not saved). This file is placed in !Scrap and it is deleted when the music is saved and/or when the application is quit.
If it should crash (which, really, shouldn't happen... ☺) then it will remain.
Upon starting SimpleSeq the next time, if the autosave file exists then you'll be asked if you want to reload it.
Note that saying No will cause it to be overwritten by whatever the next autosave would output.
It is a legitimate music file (with compression), so if you wanted you could go into !Scrap and copy it out.

While Home takes you to the start and End takes you to the end, you can now ^Jump to any particular part of the music.
If you enter purely a number, then it is taken as a bar number. If you enter a non-number, then it will be taken as being <minute><seperator><second>, which means you can use 1:23 or 1m23 to mean one minute and twenty three seconds.
The minute is optional, so you could just as easily enter .16 to go sixteen seconds into the music.

Jump to a position.

Some MIDI controllers provide effects that can be applied to the music. Two that are widely supported are reverb (echo, like being in a hall) and chorus (echo but slightly mistuned, like multiple instruments together) as they are mathematically simple enough to synthesise.
Your instrument may offer additional controllers to further tweak the synthesis. Which ones are present and what they actually do depends a lot on your particular instrument - please refer to your user manual for details (look at the end for the MIDI Implementation Chart).
SimpleSeq offers a way to set and test the following controllers:

• Portamento time / note
• Expression
• Sustain
• Variation
• Timbre
• Release
• Attack
• Brightness
• Reverb
• Chorus

Jump to a position.

You can set whatever values you want into the dialogue and click to try them by playing the selected note (C3, C4, or C5). If you like what you hear, click Finished and you'll be prompted if you wish to insert those options into your music at the current location.

Effects inserted into the music.

There is no way to specifically set Portamento On/Off as it is implied: if the time and note are both set, it'll automatically be turned On, otherwise it'll be turned Off.

Note that Portamento time and Expression both set the coarse value, the fine value is not altered. In fact, on my Yamaha, setting Portamento Fine (controller 37) appears to stop the test note from being played. Don't ask me why...but since it doesn't work anyway...

And, finally, the channel settings now allow you to inhibit playback of a given channel, so you can - for example - listen to everything without the piano melody.

Here is the download.

Here is the updated user guide for SimpleSeq v0.28, it is now four pages longer.

Pea protection

Peas in a pod?

Mastic

My first attempt.

The problem was that the sealant was old and had been in a cupboard for ages - maybe a decade or two. So I put it down, smoothed it, and it didn't look that bad for my first try and exactly zero talent. Unfortunately there was clearly something wrong with the stuff. After nearly two weeks it was still sticky to touch, which meant dust and bugs and whatever was sticking to it.

So I made the decision to pull the stuff out and try again.

Drying thoroughly before trying again.

I got some new sealant from Lidl yesterday and put it in place. Hopefully in a day or two it will have dried. I did notice that there was a rather pungent vinegar-like smell, so clearly this one is "fresh" while the other one... wasn't.

Smoothed out with a finger like before.

I went back a couple of days later to apply another layer, this time smoothing it down with the end of the handle of a tablespoon to give a sort of mitred effect, which I think looks quite tidy, especially as it is much more consistent.

Smoothed out with the handle of a spoon.

Given my lack of talent, I'm quite happy with this.

What is a "woman"?

This ruling, however, should be neither celebrated nor chastised. It is simply a long overdue ruling that provides proper legal clarity over what the terms should be assumed to mean.

In this world there are two realities that we must come to terms with. The first is that there is a huge amount of discrimination and violence against women, and some women may only feel safe in a female-only place. Given that they may well have been subject to violence at the hands of a man, it is perfectly legitimate to allow them the expectation that this female-only place will be a place with only those born female and not the legal fiction of a biological male who has chosen to identify as female. So as much as transgender people may be campaigning for their rights, who is going to raise their voice for those women who may - for whatever reason - not want somebody with a penis around? It is not unreasonable for a biological female to not feel that a biological male has become female - having such an opinion should never have been categorised as "hate speech".

The second reality is that transgender people exist. Whatever one may feel regarding transgender people, the fact is that it isn't going to go away, just as homosexuality hasn't gone away despite the many years of harsh stigma during the '80s (people my age may remember the whole panic around AIDS). There are some people in this world who feel attracted to those of the same gender, and there are some people in this world who do not feel that they fit the gender of their birth.

There is a definite need for more acceptance and compassion on both sides - indeed the reactions towards what are called "gender critical" people, including the cancelling and very public insults, really did no favours for transgender people.
That being said, one doesn't wake up one morning and think "man, I feel like a woman" and then put on a dress. There is a lot going on in a person's life if they decide to reject their birth gender.

I'm not sure what the solution is, if indeed there is one that will work for everybody. Perhaps we ought to have three categories: "Male, Female, Chosen" or something? You'll note that I'm avoiding "Other" which is a loaded word.

As a side note - I wonder how many transgender people don't feel they fit their birth gender role rather than simply not fitting their birth gender? There are still many assumptions about genders and the roles they play in society (look at childhood toys in supermarkets at Christmas, there's the pink aisle and the non-pink aisle) which may need to eventually be addressed by society - after all, is it really a surprise that some biological males may prefer to be anything other than male if the ideals of manhood are as espoused by the likes of Andrew Tate? I myself was regularly assumed to be gay because I was a male Care Assistant and that's just not a job that guys do unless they are gay. As it happens, most of the guys I met doing that were not gay, but it was just the accepted stereotype. And I can't help but wonder if therein lies the problem - people who simply don't fit the assigned stereotypes...

Coffee maker tank

Coffee maker levels.

Apple blossom

Here's an overview of what the tree is like. This is about half of it, taken at a weird angle to try to get the flowers to stand out better because, unfortunately, much of the tree was in the shade of the oaks by this point in the day.

Lots of blossom.

Here is looking closer at the blossom.

Closer on the blossom.

Sweet things

I started by baking two packs of cookies. Yes, they are intended to be rough and chunky - it's the rustic aesthetic.

Cookies in the oven.

When cooled, they were bagged and frozen. I didn't count, but I think there are about twenty.

Now I have cookies.

Next up was time to bake a cake. I decided to do a single layer to keep things simple. The cake was like "nope" and spat out some of itself over the side of the cake tin. So I might need a slightly larger tin. I think the one I'm using is about 22-23cm.

I took a break at this point to watch "Alice In Wonderland" on Talking Pictures TV. It was a BBC screenplay from 1966 that was weird even by the standards of Alice; the lead girl spent a lot of time absentmindedly staring at the camera while the adults (who were characters from the book, but you'd probably not know who was who without knowing the story well) acted in a manner that was fifty one cards short of a full deck.

That done, and me wondering what the hell I'd just spent an hour and a half watching, time to return to cakery.

Once it was baked and cooled, I put together some buttercream icing. So I don't have to keep inventing the mixture, I'll write it down to refer back to it:

• 100g butter - soften gently in the microwave (15s max) and then cream it in the mixer.
• 250g icing sugar - put this into the butter and beat gently (else dust everywhere) to mix up with the butter.
• About 55g of liquid cream - slowly add and when it starts looking creamy turn the mixer up to pulverise everything. I added ~60g but I think this might have been a tad too much.
• Heat some water baby-hot in a saucepan and put the mixing bowl into that to get the icing to be spreadable.
• Throw it on (I have as much talent for icing as for grouting) smooth it with a spoon then throw hundreds and thousands on top so people look at that and not the many imperfections. ☺
• Put it in the freezer until hardened enough to cut but not so the cake is frozen (it'll risk breaking the knife - ask me how I know!).

Let them eat cake.

I wasn't done yet. I got some Mississippi Belle cheesecake mix, so... Unfortunately it was an American product and we all know that Americans use batshit crazy measurements. Like... a third of a cup of butter. Butter, when isn't melted, is a solid. Putting that into a cup is a bit of a non-starter. I translated that into ~70g. Then 2 tablespoons of sugar, which I translated into 25g. That was for the base, it seemed okay.

For the topping, they wanted one and a half cups of milk. This is when I discovered that not only do Americans use weird cup measurements, but there are two (legal and customary). I translated it to be 350ml, which I took as being 350g. The mix was a little bit runny, so I think maybe the next time I should try 330g.

Cheesecake.

Of course, I sampled the goods and, well, I've had so much sugar today that my brain is floating around cloud nine, oh yes.

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Zerosquare, 21st April 2025, 01:45

> one doesn't wake up one morning and think "man, I feel like a woman".    ...unless the station your clock radio is tuned to happens to be playing a song by Shania Twain.

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