TIL: There is a cursed color in the Kodak ProPhoto RGB color space which, when converted to sRGB using pre-August-2020-Security-Update Android's image conversion routines, causes an integer overflow and a crash due to a rounding error. Some dude accidentally created an image (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gaurav_agrawal/48746079687/) which contains the cursed color on a single pixel. In 2020 if you set this image as your desktop on a Google or Samsung device, the device would brick & lose all onboard data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXKvwPjCGnY
I think someone in Discord said there's an experimental, unstable feature in nightly that makes this simple, but of course there's always an experimental, unstable feature in nightly that makes things simple
I find myself making good progress with Rust, but also, every so often I have to do something frighteningly high-level to do something simple. For example, it turns out when you access an array member, it locks the *entire array* for mutation. So if you want to put two items A and B, from the array into variables and have both be mutable, you… can't.
Unless you do this very complicated thing with "split_at_mut". Which works. But would someone new to programming have been able to figure it out?
- I need to configure my Korg nanoKontrol2 device - I download the standard Korg Control Editor software to do so - I open the installer - Oh my WORD what is this font
What I'm listening to today: "Sanxion" loader music, Rob Hubbard
The Commodore 64 had an unusually featureful, musician-friendly and *weird* sound chip. It also had a problem: Games took a *long* time to load off tape. The solution was epic and very long (often 10+ minutes) "loader" songs that played while the game code loaded. The loader for "Sanxion", by C64 master Rob Hubbard, suggests an alternate universe where 00s IDM musicians had a knack for perfect pop hooks.
What I'm listening to today: "Meeting in the Aisle"
Radiohead has a lot of odd, interesting corners in their discography, and some of their best tracks are hiding as B-sides. My sometimes-favorite song of theirs is an OK Computer b-side, "Meeting in the Aisle", which in the US was released on the "Airbag / How Am I Driving?" EP. This is one of Radiohead's very few instrumentals and it nails a dreamy, layered vibe. I recommend listening on something with bass.
What I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Strega & Pianoteq Bechstein | Ambient"
So the Strega is a truly remarkable piece of hardware—a collaboration between a synth company and a musician (Alessandro Cortini) that blends "musical instrument" and "toy" in the way my old art-game projects strove to. It's a delay reverb simultaneously uglified and overpowered to make the perfect drone machine. Here it is at its best, tearing apart the spectra of an iPad piano synthesizer:
YouTube has this incredible wealth of people performing little improvised electronic sets pieces in bedrooms and on kitchen tables with whatever equipment they have and this has honestly been most of my music diet the last few years. A lot of these pieces have like 20 views yet are breathtaking. This is a 30-minute(!) ambient piece that starts as repetitive humming tones but finds a captivating hypnotic groove like… 12 minutes in
What I'm listening to today: "Sunset Meditation - Drone for Peace // Make Noise Strega / 0-Coast / 0-CTRL", Jon Gee
This one shows the limits of Synth Jam Improv Youtube. It has so many good elements (the spooky start, the recurring high foghorn note, emergent bells), but overall doesn't seem to hang together. This probably would've worked better in conventional music production where you jam for 10 minutes then edit down to the most structured 3! Still, that beginning…
I made this for a jam on Battle of the Bits way back in 2007; they made a pack of sound samples and challenged us to make a song with it. This ISN'T the song I made, it was a junk file I made during testing that cut up all 25 samples into 1/10th-second chunks and sorted them per a loudness criterion. I didn't publish this one but I still pull it out and listen to it sometimes. It's oddly compelling, with lots of surprising structure and melodic sections.