Weeknotes 26
- We watched Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield on Thursday night. We really enjoyed it. Dev Patel is fantastic in the lead role, and other actors in the Iannucci-orbit such as Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton play a host of wacky characters. Surreal, heart-warming, escapist fun.
- I’ve been mostly doing front end work (React and CSS) for the last month on our project for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. CSS Flexbox and Grid are both new to me (almost all projects I’ve worked on where I’ve need to do frontend work in the last years have used some variation of bootstrap). Joel pointed me at the excellent CSS-Tricks cheatsheets for grid and flexbox. I’ve used React more recently so that’s not such tough going, but there’s still plenty of occassions when I don’t know how to solve a problem in React. This seems to happen quite a lot when trying to integrate some non-React library into a project (for example Chart.js in the project we did for Oxford Uni).
- I recorded a piece of music everyday this week apart from Thursday. I’m mostly using Koala Sampler. I start by selecting some samples from a google drive folder and “sharing” them with Koala - this is a pretty quick way of getting them loaded in. I then create an 8 bar loop, I’ve mostly been writing lofi, house-y music at around 120BPM and I can just about tap in simple rhythms at that tempo. I use the piano editor to add extra percussion. I’ve been creating variations of the core pattern and then using the performance mode to do a “live” recording of the finished track. I only spend at most an hour on these, so they’re pretty unpolished, but it’s really interesting to listen back to them and think of ways to improve.
- My norns shield arrived (4 days to ship from New York!). I’ve put it together (very straightforward) and had a little play. So far my favourite script has been mx.samples loaded with the Kawai Felt Piano that I was previously using in sforzando on my laptop. It’s great to have a dedicated device that lets me play a few chords quickly.