Another gap of two weeks since my last weeknote. This is getting all too common an occurrence. I think it comes down to time being slightly strange at the moment. Weeks seem to be passing by in a blur right now.

It has been a pretty cold and rainy week this week. Summer is very much over. But today the sun came out a bit in the morning (header pic) for my morning dog walk.

Choirless

More work has been progressing on Choirless. The new sync algorithm I wrote about seems to be doing very well. I also discovered a bug in the volume normalisation that we do. Sometimes we get stereo recordings uploaded, sometimes mono. It entirely depends on the computer, the browser and the recording equipment used. The bug was that we were calculating the volume first before mixing the part down to mono. So when it came to calculating the gain needed to be added to bring the volume to a 'normal' level, we were boosting stereo and mono tracks by different amounts. I had wondered why some parts seemed louder than others, but never worked out why. Luckily the stereo/mono issue was pointed out by one of our users (and IBM colleague) Steve.

I also had a chance to chat to one of our users Cara, who gave a fantastic detailed list of feedback, improvements and suggestions from her use of Choirless. Some of it is already on our todo list and things we will get to in due course. Some of it was some minor wording changes that should help. Cara has used Choirless to record an amazing song she wrote about lockdown.

We have a few more improvements we want to get in before letting in the rest of the current backlog of beta testers (about 150 choirs/bands!) in. But should be Real Soon Now™.

We also had Darryl, who created the Coast to Coast song with IBM Canada colleagues back with a new song:

you may have noticed, I have started another choir, 'GlobaLukes': 10-years back in the 80s, I did a rescue mission as principal of a school in the Himalayan foothills, St Luke's Solan and served as choir guy there. The kids – now all in their 40s and scattered around the globe – have been pestering one to resuscitate the songs they sang back then, hence Choirless to the rescue!!

How awesome is that!?!

Choirless is also being used in an internal IBM team building event this week:

This week I'll also be talking about Choirless at a conference we are running called Code @ Think (see below).

As well as that, I've been asked to do a talk about Choirless at the IBM Technical Consulting Group (TCG), affectionately known as the #TotallyCoolGeeks, meeting next month.

Call for Code Awards Ceremony

Next week is the Call for Code Awards Ceremony which will be presented by Van Jones, CNN political commentator and host, and CEO of REFORM Alliance. With a bunch of featured speakers:

And keep your eyes peeled you might spot a devilishly handsome guy talking about some project called Choirless. ;) Along with a performance recorded on Choirless by a local church band.

[behind the scenes, presenting at an awards ceremony – 2020 edition]

And yes, my house is generally quite chaotic at the moment, but even more so in this photo as I actually had to move everything from one side of the living room to the other in order to create space to fit the lights in and have a clear backdrop.

Hackathons

I wrote last time about a crazy thing I created called Lord of the Pythons for the Github Actions hackathon. Alas it didn't win in it's 'Crazy wildcards' category. But there is another hackathon running at the moment, another PayID one that I am entering. The work has to be new, or substantial addition to an existing project. Well I really like this idea of paying developers automatically on Github commits, so I'm continuing with that. I've just rewritten the entire thing from scratch in Javascript so as to use the Xpring (today renamed RippleX) SDK. That has built in PayID resolution and automatic support for checking payments actually succeeded. This has resulted in me releasing version 2.0 of the payid_xrp_action on Github Marketplace. I plan to implement a number of additional policies as part of the hackathon submission.

Code @ Think

As I mentioned above on Wednesday this week is the IBM Think Digital Summit UK & Ireland. This is a half-day conference on leading digital transformation. Running that afternoon, directly after, is the Code @ Think UK & Ireland conference. This is aimed at developers and is being organised and hosted by my team (the London City team) at IBM. There will be a whole number of great tech talks and hands-on workshops on everything from z/OS to App Modernisation to Data Analytics. Along with the other two developers Sean and Glynn, I'll be giving one of the keynote talks on Choirless. So come along and hear how we built it!

We will also be encouraging participants of the conference to get interactive and actually have a go singing or playing along to a song in Choirless that we'll be premiering at the end of the day.

DIY Light Panels

In my current setup at home at the moment, I do a lot of livestreaming on Twich and a number of live video presentations and workshops. To that end, I have some big studio lighting softboxes on light stands that I use to give decent lighting when broadcasting. The downside is that they take up a fair bit of room. I'd seen some nice Elgato keylight light panels, but they were pretty expensive. So I thought I'd try building my own! I've come up with a design and bought some acrylic, some wood, a reel of LED strip, and various switches, and sockets etc.

I'm going to do a more detailed post on the build once I'm done and list the materials and process in case anyone wants to build their own. But this week, I got the soldering iron out and started sticking the LED strip to the backing acrylic sheet and soldering the wiring up. I gave them a bench test using a 12v car battery I had in the garage. And they work!

By my rough reading with a freebie light meter app on my phone, they appear to be about twice as bright as the current softboxes I have. And they are about quarter of the size. Hopefully that still gives a soft enough, even lighting. I am waiting on a new router bit to turn up to cut the slots in the wood for the frame around them and hopefully will get them finished up in the next week or so.

Anyway, take care all!

-Matt