Another project I worked on briefly at the start of this year was a space-scavenging game in Python-arcade; after thinking about packaging for less technical users I started looking into using Webassembly so it could be browser-based, and maybe learning Go and/or Rust.
Over the last year or so I’ve occasionally worked on some little software projects (todo.txt scripts and webassembly for games) but it was pretty minor so I never posted an update about it. So this is the first of a few belated update posts.
I haven’t used Javascript/ECMAscript much before - did learn the basics in my CompSci undergrad, and used a little JSX when at Kogan, but I was never that into frontend dev stuff. Trying to revise it today, I wrote this JS implementation of the “Let’s Make a Deal” game at the center of the “Monty Hall problem“.
Haven’t made any updates to this site or my “new” blog in over a year until I cleaned up and posted this biology article a few days ago. Even before then, I hadn’t made a post talking about my disabilities and past and how badly it affects my ability to get things done.
This post (originally on the new blog) will explain some of those issues, what I’ve been up to since last year, and what I might be able to do in the future.
In early 2017 I had just gone onto disability pension. Desperate to improve my health despite being broke, I was looking for a way to get the maximum fibre and protein from my food for the minimal cost and calories. I started entering in all the nutritional data from food I bought into a spreadsheet, calculating and plotting those protein:fibre:cost:calories ratios.
Later that year I started to create and analyse recipes which combined different ingredients. This quickly became cumbersome in a spreadsheet, so I started a Django project initially called the Price And Nutrition Tabulation System (P.A.N.T.S) for storing and visualising the data for both recipes and ingredients.
Soon I also realised since I was entering in all my recipes here it would also be easier if I used it as my daily calorie counter and added a “food diary” to the system, renaming it the Price And Nutrition Tracking System.
Example screenshot of the diary view:
Last year RMITCS ran a Algorithmic SATB Composition Competition, to generate a SATB song from arbitrary text. I wasn’t able to get anything working for the competition, but I did learn a bit about generating and manipulating musical scores in Python.
I already had a random chord progression generator in my miscellaneous scripts repo. I tried playing around with using that to generate scores with harmonically pleasing chords. I didn’t have much luck with text analysis; the project shifted into attempt to do some kind of instrumental jazz/bebop generator.
The melody got dropped as well, and the result is the Pseudorandom Rhythm Section, which generates a random chord progression and piano/bass acompaniment. The output is a score in MusicXML with both parts and the chord symbols. Ideal for practicing improvisation or coming up with ideas for composition.
Unfortunately my health somehow got even worse last year, and then took a turn for the yet more worse this summer with the record-breaking heat. I’ve switched up medication a few times and things seem to be improving slightly (although I might have to just take it easy until after summer).
Although I spent most of the year too exhausted to function I did release some software on my github repo in August and January; respectively a jazz-comping generator and my nutrition tracking system.
I’ll be posting in detail about these as soon as I’ve finished dusting off the cobwebs of the software section of the site. Maybe even this month!