Work
Continuing writing code instead of normative text, I cleaned up and extended the code that measures statistics about media playback in Firefox. It can now record data about audio: how often is the media played back muted, is the audio content audible anyways, or is it just silence, does the media has audio altogether? I’ll be using the data to decide what to improve first about audio playback. The overall goal is to lower CPU consumption and battery usage, for playback-type scenarios (vs. real-time like Web Audio API or WebRTC applications).
I still did a couple of pull-requests on the Web Audio API specification. We’re mostly focusing on three main features for now:
- Allowing to select the render quantum-size for Web Audio API rendering, instead of it being done by blocks of 128 sample-frames.
- Allowing to choose the audio output
device for an
AudioContext, and to change it dynamically. This has performance and privacy implications, and need to be done carefully. - Allowing to have a sense of the audio render thread load, so that authors can react to an increased load, or simply display a bit of UI for users to be aware of the fact they’re stressing the system too much
Personal
I started digging into electronics again this week, and specifically in my old sequencer project, while continuing to patch the modular system, with increasingly convincing results.
I’m dusting off old code, old schematics, and old prototypes, hoping to have something that works in a few months, to replace the Arturia Beatstep Pro, that is more or less fine but too “normal” for me, and more importantly, not DIY enough.
On the photo side, I’ve started designing a device that will accelerate greatly the drying of negative after development, while ensuring that not a speck of dust gets stuck in the gelatin. I’m just combining off-the-shelf parts from the hardware store, nothing fancy. Maybe a very simple PCB in the end, but a perfboard should do. It should be able to perfectly dry 5 rolls of 35mm film in about half-an-hour, we’ll see. I’ve scanned quite a few old negatives recently, we’ll see about posting a few photos online.
Also I was supposed to go to Balthazar‘s wedding but had to cancel to go to rural Auvergne instead.