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Finding a MIDI Note From the Period of a Waveform or Finding it from a String/Fret Grid, That Is the Question!

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Sometimes the internet is wonderful and the search engines just provide what is asked for, a veritable (if not always verifiable) cargo cult of bounty. Then it sometimes isn't. Take this formula, for instance, it calculates the note number for a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) Note On or Note Off command from the pitch of a note. Deriving the nearest MIDI note number from a tone of a given pitch. (Source: Google Search.) This is all well and good if you're talking about theoretical pitches, or working with a high end, high speed microcontroller that can measure a frequency quickly and spit out a MIDI command, but I like my microcontrollers low cost, like the venerable Atmel 328p. You can measure pitch with one of these, but you have to convert the wave's period to pitch, because the processor isn't really up to having a built in frequency counter. The way to do this is to measure the wave's period directly with the pulseIn() command, like so... voi...
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Fingers Crossed (HopefullyI'm Not Jinxing It)

My primary printer, an Ender 3 Pro mk2 that's been an exercise in sunk cost fallacy, Is now running a stock Creality 32 bit board, the kind the E3P mk3 runs. I'd tried an SKR mini E3 but one of the downsides of open source are the manufacturers building with project branding but cutting corners, like using double sided sticky tape instead of a double sided heat transfer adhesive and no heatsink on the heater mosfet! Jesus!!! The board went buggy and started crashing the firmware, board cooling fan never stopped screaming, trying to shift the heat but couldn't. I've completed 5 prints on the new board and 3 of those have been done at 200mm/s! The fans work hard during intensive jobs, like perimeters or top and bottom layers, but infill, even high density, everything calms down and I'm printing at 200mm/s, twice as fast as I've ever got this beast up to! There is another factor to this speed, the linear rail mod. My $250 printer has had another $300 spent on it ...
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We Are Living "The Machine Stops" (crosspost from crunchysteve.dreamwidth.com)

In 1909, 116 years ago, E. M. Forster published the science fiction novella, "The Machine Stops." It tells the story of a future that, having had the story read to me, ironically by a Youtube content producer, is terrifying and already here. It's scarily the most broadly accurate dystopia! While it very much simplifies the world to a single machine that houses and connects humanity, yet runs with little or no human intervention, the priciple of the story is very much the world in which we live in. Lecturers (Youtube content creators and other social media influencers) and their audience of students (fans/followers/tweeps) communicate via what we in the 21st would immediately recognise as "Zoom" calls, live in isolation in single rooms, deep underground. All their food and other needs are shipped to them by the Machine and person to person contact is considered common, even coarse. The Lecturers deliver their "ideas" to their audiences or work on lectu...
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Situationism V. The Spectacle (Crosspost from Dreamwidth)

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Watch this video. I'll wait, but you need to watch it... OK, The Spectacle is this world of manipulative media. Stochastic terrorism, where a "freely speaking" celebrity, with millions of fans, wishes a type of people dead, out loud on TikTok. Distraction, where a minor public figure is shamed to hide the atrocities of a national leader. An ugly court case, hearing domestic violence accusations, becomes a public trial, shaming the victim/accuser and praising the purpetrator. We take sides, we hold opinions, yet we have barely even a parasocial connection to the respondents. Meanwhile, something crawled out of the slime of a dark Scottish Loch next to a golf course and becomes president of the self appointed "most powerful nation" on earth, while his idiot grin offsider wants to take us all to Mars. This was all predicted in 1967. Not literally, but Debord is screaming, "I TOLD YOU SO!" from his grave. We the people are asleep at the wheel. "Oh,...
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And, An Item That Should be Way More Common And Readily Available!

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Modern doorbells are badly engineered, over complicated and many are an info-sec problem due to being hackable. Hackable in ways where you will never know until you come home and find your place burgled because the theives were told you were out. The available products range from simple, cheap and unreliable to overly complex, expensive, unreliable and a way for people to know you're not at home. then there are all the doorbells that use batteries. Expensive disposable battteries. Cue U2's " Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For ." But wait, what?! There is a solution!!! Wireless doorbell set with batteryless button. There's a thing in electrical engineering called piezo-electric effect. If you apply a bending pressure to a quartz crystal, it generates an electric charge across its opposite faces that are perpendicular to the bending force. These devices are used as contact microphones, wind energy harvesters for remote microelectronic sensors intende...
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Siri and AI is the Venture Capital Behind Tech Stealing Culture

Overnight I let my iPhone upgrade, from iOS 18.1 to 18.2, and I was sweating it. I'd checked, when upgrading from 17 to 18, if Apple Intelligence was going to be forced on me. Couldn't get a clear answer, but it seemed not, and turned out to not yet work on my very basic iPhone SE gen 3. Last night, Apple snuck inbox filtering into mail but gave me an elipsis menu switch back to my uninterfered with inbox. Fortunately, as I'd hoped, Apple Intelligence is setup to respect my Siri settings, so GPT was completely turned off. I've been messing around with tech since the mid 1970s, using tech for learning since the dawn of the internet in Australia in 1995 and making my own tech in the mid 70s and since 2007, when I gained more financial freedom after leaving a loveless marriage. I don't need AI and I can find knowledge and learn stuff better than it can. This is not greyhaired Mr. Grumpy-Curmugeon, I have done extensive experiments with a number of AIs. I embrace tech ...
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Threads, Bluesky, Federation and Our Data

As I understand it, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, Threads is connected to the ActivityPub protocol. Nor can I reliably and firsthand speak to whether threads is two-way or just a "data hoover," sucking in whatever it can from public Activity-Pub feeds, but even two-way connections between Threads and the Fediverse is a problem, because Meta use reaction data from online human interactions to target advertising and political manipulation. In August, 2023, I downloaded the entirety of my Facebook data, deleted it completely from Facebook (not that I trust that deletion, I'm sure they have it squirrelled away somewhere) and shut down my Facebook account. It was a hard call to make. Some of the best people I've ever known, and Facebook was my only possible connection to them, are/were there. Have tried to maintain email contact with some, but that has dwindled. I have some limited activity on YouTube but, after a brief period on Mastodon, I stopped taking my...
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