mstdn

bsky

tiny lil home on the web

you are here

github

eggg-uk

codeberg

eggg-uk

a lil further info

background

• work in legal IT, specialised in business systems / SQL / Data / BI.
• music and video game enjoyer

current focuses

• learning live coding
  • for fun
  • to improve my programming knowledge
• improving at photography
• learning more physical electronics
  • building a couple keyboards atm
• learning to make my own music
  • music theory is hard lol

We had a fiber to the property install last week as openreach offer it in my area as of a few months back.

We definitely don’t need it but this 1.6gbps is cheaper than what we were paying for gigabit previously!

notes at the bottom on the settings which let me run the ONT directly into my unifi stuff, skipping the EE router altogether (which was not well documented, so i figured i’d post what worked for me :) )

how did the installation go?

The engineer took around 4 hours, I didn’t appreciate that it came in overhead from the telegraph poles.

They went and fetched some rolled up fiber from the telegraph pole

drilled their ladder into the wall (for safety!),

added an anchor for the fiber to come in to, i think along with some metal stranded cable (so as not to stress the fiber itself presumably)

attached and tensioned this between the telegraph pole and the house

ran the fiber down to the ground floor, presumably so that neighbours can be split off from there, and then ran a cable back up to the first to enter the property.

The fiber comes in to a tiny box (the openreach ONT)

A few trips into the house during install for the engineer, checking the install location, drilling the hole and passing out the fiber cable which presumably gets spliced onto the incoming cable from the telegraph pole, and a final check of the connection in to the ONT (and a line light level reading which I was told -25 is the limit and mine was -16, which is strong, dunno what the unit of measurement is, but given it’s a negative i’m going to hazard maybe dB still.)

The amount of engineer time and energy was impressive; they advise 3h or so, our installation took just under 4

openreach ONT

behaves as I would expect a modem to. Mine has three ports and a power button, plus four lights.

• the ports are fibre in, 2.5GBE out, power in
• the lights are power, PON, LOS, LAN

configuring my unifi stuff to work with this directly

So we have the unifi UXG fiber for routing at home; intentionally chosen a few months back for a likely fiber upgrade to our incoming connection.

I was hoping to either put the EE router into modem mode, or run direct from the ONT into my unifi stuff.

Thankfully, after I found the EE router has no modem mode, and after establishing that things were working on that device, I popped it back in its box and plugged the cable straight into the WAN port on the UXG.

Rebooted a few times to no avail, found this page on EE’s site

which states :

1Fibre and Full Fibre 
2    Username or login name: bthomehub@btbroadband.com
3    Broadband password: BT (or leave blank)
4    Authentication: CHAP
5    DNS: Auto or Obtain from ISP (we'll automatically provide these when you connect)
6    VLAN: Active (Full Fibre only) 
7    VLAN ID (802.1q): 101 (Full Fibre only) 
8    VLAN ID (802.1p): 101 (Full Fibre only) 

Unfortunately, this didn’t work.

With some trial and error i found that removing the VLAN tag fixed. Overall my settings changes to the internet section in the unifi menus is :

 1Advanced: Manual
 2    VLAN ID: unchecked
 3    MAC Address Clone: unchecked
 4    Smart Queues: unchecked
 5    UPnP: unchecked
 6
 7IPv4 configuration
 8    Connection: PPPoE
 9    Username: bthomehub@btbroadband.com
10    Password: bt
11    Additional IP addresses: blank
12    Auto DNS Server: checked
13
14IPv6 configuration: 
15    Disabled

might revisit IPv6 later, since the EE hub definitely defaulted to having that enabled when i was looking at it.

loud btw, do turn vol down before pushing buttons

I’ve uploaded (or am uploading at time of typing this) some potentially otherwise lost episodes of an incredible mixtape podcast series.

you can find them here on archive.org

initial post:

Post by @eggg@hachyderm.io

View on Mastodon

my knowledge of them

So I’ve no clue how i found these years ago, but this mixtape series was incredible.

Might try and export all my last fm data and make it searchable later

the internet’s current knowledge of them

There are little remnants across the web here and there of them, but no archived copies that I can find.

there are 8 later ones on mixcloud

three are mentioned on a site called mixesdb

I don’t know what happened to livejournal and won’t link to it as it seems riddled with malvertising these days but there’s remnants of an old board relating to them there

the original site (radarr.kiev.ua) seems to be cloudflared at the moment

they have literally one mix on an old soundcloud

some of the artists have uploaded theirs to youtube

I found some emails from their mailing list from like 2009 and there was a podcast feed

and a link to the 26th one radarr.kiev.ua/forums/index.php?showtopic=123966

sadly there was some anti leech protection in place

archive.org upload

So after posting one of them which i found on youtube after hearing a song i only know because of them (masto post above)

I decided to see whether any of them existed on archive.org, and they don’t!

Me to the rescue.

As I’ve recently been organising (or trying to) my photo library, I decided to use exiftool which I’ve been learning as part of that, to fetch the metadata for the archive.org upload:

1exiftool . -fileOrder filename -Artist -Year -Duration

======== ./002-rdrr_podcast_dp-6-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : DP-6
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:18:07 (approx)
======== ./003-rdrr_podcast_crab-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Crab
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:00:07 (approx)
======== ./004-rdrr_podcast_guarana-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : GuaRANa
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 0:56:57 (approx)
======== ./005-rdrr_podcast_schmove-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Schmove
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 0:46:00 (approx)
======== ./006-rdrr_podcast_d8-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : d8
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:01:09 (approx)
======== ./007-rdrr_podcast_roman_k-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Roman K
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 0:59:18 (approx)
======== ./008-rdrr_podcast_tapolsky_and_beauty-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3.mp3
Artist                          : Tapolsky & Beauty
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:17:09 (approx)
======== ./009-rdrr_podcast_plato-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : PLATO
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:12:11 (approx)
======== ./010-rdrr_podcast_iq_live-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : IQ (Live)
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:09:26 (approx)
======== ./011-rdrr_podcast_pablo_honey_and_finger-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Finger & Pablo Honey
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 0:55:55 (approx)
======== ./012-rdrr_podcast_korablove-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Korablove
Year                            : 2007
Duration                        : 1:12:42 (approx)
======== ./013-rdrr_podcast_rustam-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Rustam
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:16:09 (approx)
======== ./015-rdrr_podcast_suhar-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Suhar
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:02:53 (approx)
======== ./016-rdrr_podcast_s.peres-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : S.Peres
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:00:26 (approx)
======== ./017-rdrr_podcast_valta&minikin-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Valta & Minikin
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:17:22 (approx)
======== ./018-rdrr_podcast_krazia-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Krazia
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:02:02 (approx)
======== ./019-rdrr_podcast_tina_valen-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Tina Valen
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 0:48:52 (approx)
======== ./020-rdrr_podcast_nadto_sonna-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Íàäòî Ñîííà (live)
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:09:52 (approx)
======== ./021-rdrr_podcast_magic_b-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Magic B
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:06:05 (approx)
======== ./022-rdrr_podcast_glacial-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Glacial
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 0:59:55 (approx)
======== ./023-rdrr_podcast_udjin-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : uDJin
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 1:17:17 (approx)
======== ./024-rdrr_podcast_tonika-radarr.kiev.ua.mp3
Artist                          : Tonika
Year                            : 2008
Duration                        : 0:45:27 (approx)
    1 directories scanned
   22 image files read

I’ve resisted learning sed… maybe someday soon….!

in the meantime, I chopped this up with replace in a basic text editor to format it

they are currently uploading at an alarmingly slow rate (2GB in total to upload, 108MB done so far in about 45 mins)

you can find them here on archive.org

The visuals got way better than this but i forgot to take more copies

 1shape(P("2 3 8 20"))
 2.color(P(".1 .2 .6 .9"),.5,.7)
 3.repeat(20,16)
 4.blend(o0,P(".5 .5 .5 .9"))
 5.scrollX(.1,.1)
 6.modulateRotate(osc(P("1 3 5 7")))
 7.brightness(.1)
 8.diff(o0)
 9
10.out()

Doctoring it slightly to get it to run in hydra below (removing the P() stuff which is a flok function)

 1bpm=130
 2
 3shape([2, 3, 8, 20])
 4.color([.1, .2, .6, .9],.5,.7)
 5.repeat(20,16)
 6.blend(o0,[.5, .5, .5, .9])
 7.scrollX(.1,.1)
 8.modulateRotate(osc([1, 3, 5, 7]))
 9.brightness(.1)
10.diff(o0)
11
12.out()

source code is all on codeberg if you want to check

Hopefully this will help me to understand what aspects of info browsers provide unprompted to sites I visit (which could be collected)

very much a work in progress

 1//eggg live visual set 2025-11-05 at algorhythms (Zoeya on audio)
 2noise(P("100 3 8 32 128 30000 640000 2147000000000"))//more numbers pls
 3.sub(shape(P("2 3 8 32")).repeat(8).modulateRotate(osc(8,.1)))
 4//hi
 5.colorama(P("1.76 1.5 [8 3]"))//1.76 best value. nobody understands this. if you do,,lmk?
 6.add(voronoi(30,0.5).color(0.1,0.2,0.5))
 7.scrollY(0.1,0.1)
 8.thresh(.75)
 9.modulateScale(osc(0.1,0.5))
10.blend(src(o0).pixelate(P(1,16,32,64),12),.3)
11//sorry in advance?
12.add(shape(3).color(.6,.3,0).repeat(16,12).modulateRotate(o0).scrollY(.3,-.2))
13.blend(o0,.8)
14.out()
15//someone kept using P()
16//IT TIES BACK TO STRUDEL THX LU

Doctoring it slightly to get it to run in hydra below (removing the P() stuff which is a flok function)

(yt link with timestamp) I was taught how to use this and what it was mid set.

 1//eggg live visual set 2025-11-05 at algorhythms (Zoeya on audio)
 2noise([100, 3, 8, 32, 128, 30000, 640000, 2147000000000])//more numbers pls
 3.sub(shape([2, 3, 8, 32]).repeat(8).modulateRotate(osc(8,.1)))
 4//hi
 5.colorama([1.76, 1.5, 8, 3])//1.76 best value. nobody understands this. if you do,,lmk?
 6.add(voronoi(30,0.5).color(0.1,0.2,0.5))
 7.scrollY(0.1,0.1)
 8.thresh(.75)
 9.modulateScale(osc(0.1,0.5))
10 .blend(src(o0).pixelate([1,16,32,64],12),.3)
11//sorry in advance?
12.add(shape(3).color(.6,.3,0).repeat(16,12).modulateRotate(o0).scrollY(.3,-.2))
13.blend(o0,.8)
14.out()
15//someone kept using P()
16//IT TIES BACK TO STRUDEL THX LU

$: s("- [- cp*2],bd*4").bank("TR909").duck(.8).room(.3).roomsize(3)

$: s("cabasa:4*8").delay(.5).sometimes(n=>n.press()).ribbon(3,2)

$: s("white(-11,16)").clip(.05)

$: n("- -  [- <1 3 5 2>*4]")
  .scale("g:mixolydian")
  .sound("sawtooth")
  .delay(.3)
  .coarse(16)
  .fm("<1 2 2 .5>").fmh(1.01)
  .transpose("0,<-7 -12 [-12, -21] -21 >")
  .pan(rand)
  .postgain(.7)

$: n("<1 -3 3 0>(<-3 7 5 3>,8) -")
  .scale("f1:minor")
  .sound("pulse,sine").attack("<.1 0 .05 .1>")
  .postgain(1.5).jux(rev)//thanks yaxu

$: s("compurhythm1000_cp, bossdr550_misc:1").speed(.25).striate(12).coarse(sine.range(10,200))

1. use firefox if you can https://www.firefox.com/en-GB/ and use reader view within firefox if a page is particularly noisy
2. install ublock origin https://ublockorigin.com/ the website above should detect your browser and send you to the appropriate place to install it from (typically the add-on store for your browser) the default settings in the addin are typically fine for most people.
3. use a privacy respecting default search engine over google/bing/etc: https://duckduckgo.com/

intro / reasoning

Writing this initially off the back of a scouts evening covering “digital citizen” in which the scouts aired their grievances about web popups, adverts and whatnot and I had some suggested actions.

The idea here is that I’m attempting to provide advice which is straight forward to follow with links to help avoid potential pitfalls.

This guidance is aimed at users on mobile devices as well as desktops or laptops.

The main point here is to improve your experience on the web

added side effects of the three actions here are that your browsing will be slightly less tracked than before, and big companies will have a marginally harder time building their profiles on you.

detailed recommendations:

1. web browser choice

I anticipate a lot of people use the default browser which comes with their device.

on an iphone this will be safari

on most android phones this is usually chrome, but on a samsung device it’s “samsung internet”

on windows this is probably edge

my general recommendation here is to switch to firefox.

firefox is a browser which isn’t owned by one of the large tech companies who would like to collect LOTS OF information about your browser usage.

where to install from:

If you’re using an iphone/ipad, the link is: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/firefox-fast-private-browser/id989804926

on android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox&hl=en-GB

on any other device: https://www.firefox.com/en-GB/

further info

you don’t need an account, it may offer you one when opened for the first time. This is optional. I do use it however, to keep tabs in sync between my devices

firefox does still collect data, but is more transparent about what it is, and more limited in what they collect.

even if you don’t do this step, you can do the ublock portion on most modern browsers too… but the experience is significantly better outside of chrome/edge.

firefox is by no means perfect, but it’s a far better option than the defaults on most mainstream devices

google (chrome) has a huge monopoly on browsers currently, and their cracking down on ad blockers within their ecosystem is a pretty serious overreach in my opinion.

reader view in firefox

This feature is killer, if you ever get sick of going to a webpage to read something and seeing:

• a bunch of videos autoplaying
• JOIN OUR MAILING LIST
• cookie popups
• etc

reader view shows on some (but not all) sites and collapses the page into pure text and images, without all of the clutter, bloat, and distractions

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages

2. ublock origin

if you use multiple browsers, you can likely get this for -all- of them.

I have it on chrome and firefox on my home pc, firefox on my phone

It is -less- good on chrome or edge or safari which is why I recommend firefox.

Apple and google (who own the aforementioned browsers) have cracked down on extensions like ublock because it is probably in their interests to serve you adverts.

where to install from:

install ublock origin https://ublockorigin.com/

I’d recommend doing so on all browsers on all of your devices

the default settings are fine, no config or further steps needed. Enjoy ad free web browsing.

limitations

obviously this doesn’t work on e.g. instagram which is a purely app based experience. That’s by design. sorry.

and youtube (the website, rather than the app) does have its ads blocked by this at the moment, but there is an active battle going on between google and ublock, where google tries to degrade your experience to make you turn it off.

• I’ve seen:
  • videos occasionally failing to play immediately
  • occasional skips or jumps forward

The experience is still significantly better than using it without.

3. search engine use

setting your default search engine to a privacy respecting search engine is strongly recommended

I use duckduckgo: https://duckduckgo.com/

Google wants to raise the price by 2-3x annually so I thought I’d take stock

history:

2018

I bought a Nest camera on amazon in September 2018 for £162

My email history shows me at the time subscribing to “Nest aware” on November 1st (after a free trial) at £40/year for 5-day (24/7) video history

2019

It renewed at £40/year in 2019 with the same benefit

2022

I’m missing a couple of years of history, but in 2022, I can see that google had taken over collecting payments, and were charging me £100/year for 60 days of events and 10 days of 24/7 history:

2023

£100/year again in 2023.

The camera stopped working around here and I replaced it. 5 years is not -terrible- innings for something exposed to the elements. Paid another £169 for basically the same thing but with a battery in it (which makes no diff as I’ve got it wired in)

Email 2023-09-01: We are putting the price up to £120/year:

2024

Then nest aware became part of google one, which I was forced or encouraged to join in March 2024 by a broken payment system, in order to continue having a functioning camera

so i got back to paying about £80/year which revoked the 60 days of history and 10 days of 24/7 I don’t recall what the 24/7 cost here, but it was evidently more than I was willing to pay.

2025

My next payment is showing as an upcoming £80/year in march

but today (2025-10-03) I received an email telling me they were revoking the only thing i subbed for as at Oct 2026:

 As a Premium Google One member, you are currently receiving Home Premium and Fitbit Premium as part of your plan. These benefits will no longer be offered with your Premium plan effective October 1st, 2026.

Here is what this means for you:

    As long as your existing Premium Google One subscription remains active, you can continue to enjoy Home Premium and Fitbit Premium as part of your plan until October 1st, 2026
    On October 1st, 2026 the benefit will be removed from your plan and any remaining Home Premium Advanced add-on credit (if applicable) will be refunded
    To help with the transition, we are offering a special 50% discount on our Google AI Pro plan for 1 year, an upgraded plan which includes Home Premium and Fitbit Premium, plus Google AI features

subscriptions now:

So I went to inspect the damage - the nest/home/whatever bit is missing now from the benefits of this subscription altogether

The current standard home subscription (Google home premium standard) just gives you clips where it detects something, rather than the 24/7 history.

It has NEVER been particularly good at this, and hasn’t really come along at all in the near-10-years I’ve had the camera and an active subscription. Given that that processing all occurs server side, friends, if you’re selling a device with a subscription and the cloud based elements don’t improve with time… where else could the benefits be for anyone who isn’t a shareholder I wonder

What we’re after is the advanced (Google home premium advanced) subscription, to see why something randomly appeared in frame when it doesn’t pick things up.

I had an initial rummage for the cheapest subscription they offer with the advanced plan, and initially only found it available on none of these annual prices: £190 £200 £480 £960 £1440 but rather, according to their desktop site, you have to subscribe to GOOGLE AI ULTRA 30TB for (after the bargain first three months half price): £2446/year

Cost overview

Over the 7 years i’ve owned the device, I’ve spent:

• £162 on a device in 2018
• £169 on a replacement device in 2023
• £40 (2018)
• £40 (2019)
• £40 (2020 assumed)
• £100 (2021 assumed)
• £100 (2022)
• £120 (2023)
• £80 (2024)
• £80 (2025)

totalling £600 on subscription and £331 on devices

Conclusion for the moment:

I have found an option with the 2TB subscription, for £228/year for what is equivalent to my £80 To get the 24/7 stuff, tack on another £96/year for the advanced features.

This puts you at a min of £324/year for feature parity with what was originally £40/year in 2018.

I’ve just cancelled altogether, and have now about 5 months on the clock to set up my own re-streaming or IP system but I do feel terrible for those who would be less willing to try and do so themselves. Doubling/Tripling the price of a subscription for a physical object while also degrading the subscription to bump people up tiers is a bit much

OK I started with a grand plan to make a cheat sheet but quickly found myself learning a different way. Given this now seems to be quite high in search results i’m gonna leave it here.

For an excellent list of strudel resources, check this nicely curated list by terryds on gh: link

my path towards learning strudel

Honestly the thing which has helped me the most in learning these tools is spending time participating on nudel.cc

If you’re not familiar, you should first visit pastagang.cc which should tell you a bit about all this

instruments and synths

Listed under sounds in the right side panel on strudel.cc

very useful resource for discovering new sounds, synths, etc

categorised under samples, drum-machines, synths, wavetables, user, import-sounds

a few effects with brief explainers

 1//todo: more examples
 2
 3//drums:
 4$: s("bd!4,cp?*8") //plays a bass drum sound and sometimes (?) plays a clap sound (on eighth notes)
 5  .bank("RolandTR808") //from the 808 bank of drums
 6  .gain(.75) //lowers the volume (default is 1)
 7  .speed(-8) //plays the sample at 8x speed in reverse
 8
 9//plays some notes. items between angled brackets 
10//Commas are kind of an "and", thus there are two patterns playing at once
11$: n("<0 - 1!2>, <3 -  4!2>")
12  .s("sawtooth") //the sound for this note is a sawtooth
13  .scale("G2:minor") //the scale applied to the notes
14  .fast(2) //the pattern plays through twice as quickly in relation to everything else
15  .speed(1) //default speed is 1
16  .gain(.6) 
17  .transpose("<0 -7>".slow(3)) //transposes the notes in the scale down by 0 or 7 semitones
18  .fm("<1 2 8>") //rotates through a few values for frequency modulation, 1 is the default
19  .ply("4 8") //fires each note 4 or 8 times instead of the default 1 
20
21//crow(s):
22$: s("crow -") //plays a crow sound intermittently
23  .speed(-1) //backwards

 1//young buck - get buck beat/tuba
 2setcpm(80/4)
 3
 4$: s("bd - - bd cp - bd - - - bd - cp bd - -")
 5.bank("RolandTR909")
 6
 7.early(.02)
 8.gain(.5)
 9.room(.25)
10
11$: note("b1 - - b1 - - c2 - b1 - d2 - d2 c#2 c2 - ")
12.s("gm_tuba")
13.gain(1.25)
14.crush(4.5)
15.delay(.15)
16.sometimesBy(.1,n=>n.jux(rev))

Nudel has features beyond the native tools

Such as Spagda and Hubda.

• if you’re exporting what you found into strudel you may need to import additional js to use some of the code you exfiltrate
• the latest version of this lives here on codeberg for the raw js behind it
  • or here from a docs perspective

changelog

[2025-03-26] began to write up instument/effect detail

[2025-04-18] updates as i prep for posting

[2025-10-03] Lil bit more stuff included, if you find yourself here, sorry it’s not more fleshed out :-)

[2025-12-29] found out yesterday that someone found this and was put onto nudel by it so figured i’d nudge it more in that direction. yes it’s not really a cheatsheet

to do list

• add to some of the nudel docs on codeberg rather than here
• mybe explain the things i struggled with such as getting the syntax right for feeding a synth with a scale or a chord

Usually something non traditional which defies your expectations and is likely silly in some way. It may not quite have the broad appeal that most more well known games do. Often single player.

common themes

• flow state inducing
• speed run / time attack encouraged
• rhythm action
• mischief
• Incremental
• Bullet hell
• Controls which feel good / impactful
• peculiar
  • gameplay
  • themes
  • art style
• smaller budget

jon games

• Trombone champ
  • because it is unadulterated silliness all the way through
  • also rhythm games are great
• Return of the obra dinn
  • Lucas pope just has a great eye and puts in so much work and polish into his creations
• Mars after midnight
  • ditto
  • this was such a charming game
• Golf with your friends
  • i have some awful friends who really love to punish you when you’re doing well
• Arctic eggs
  • was bought this by a friend because… eggs… did not expect it to be anywhere near as charming or compelling
• untitled goose game
  • top tier mischief
• Neon white
  • proper flowstate game which nudges you into a speedrunning mindstate
  • super smooth gameplay, which allows for creative routes
• Donut county
  • mischief, just pure mischief
• The gnorp apologue
  • incremental games have always scratched a hell of an itch for me, but none of the others have cutie gnorps
• Jazzpunk
  • of everything i’ve played in the past few years, I think this one made me laugh the most often
• Teardown
  • mischief sim
  • with cool voxel destruction
• Thumper
  • rhythm / flowstate
• I wanna be the guy
  • been a long time since i played this now but i struggled at this for years and years. classic. Don’t think i actually finished 100% but i recall beating the majority of bosses
• Nidhogg II
  • only played this for a short time, the combat is brutal and fast
• I am your beast
  • another flowstate / speedrun encouraging game
  • really rewards learning the weapons and maps and pushing for quicker completions
• Cryptmaster
  • very silly concept, executed really well.
• Firewatch
  • very uncomfortable setting without being jumpscareish
• Speedrunners
  • there was a period of time when I played this for hours a night with a great group. I miss those nights
• Battlebit remastered
  • mandatory open mic as you die, and a less toxic community than similar large scale FPS games = players acting out their deaths over hot mic
• Sayonara wild hearts
  • gorgeous art style and soundtrack
  • smooth and unpunishing gameplay
  • rhythm
• Lethal company
  • not much to say, many good jumpscares and holes to fall in among friends
• Thank goodness you’re here
  • slap
• Gun frog
  • name is a spoiler
• Tuna hakes underwater
  • psx era gfx and music style thps gameplay style but you’re a fish doing flips
• various playdate titles in season 2
  • chance’s lucky escape is fantastic
• Sektori
  • hard techno x bullet hell
  • excellent controls

upcoming

• Big walk

some historic games which contributed to my taste

• Liero
  • local multiplayer, one player uses the left half of the kb one uses the right
  • enormous multitude of pc hardware punishing weapon effects
  • basically realtime worms (though that undersells it)
• jazz jackrabbit
  • one of the greatest soundtracks of all time (yt link)
  • only had the demo/shareware version of number 1 as a kid
• elite beat agents
  • probably my most played ds game, definitely the rhythm action game which got me hooked

other suggestions

I would love to hear of other stuff which should be on my radar, mayhaps @ me with reccs?

todo

recall and list more historic games which left a mark

I migrated to mastodon a little while back, and fully weaned myself off the old place last year some time. I found myself following lots of people I knew from the old place, and then seeing them reposting further interesting people. I seem to have unconsciously developed a rule of if I see a post by someone I don’t follow, I have a gander at a few of their other recent posts and follow them if their posts are interesting to me. So presumably after some time of doing that i have run into some strudel/algorave content posted by one of the awesome champions of the medium. I’ll track it back some time.

what is keeping me here?

the community of live coders have been INCREDIBLY welcoming, friendly, accepting of anyone at any knowledge level.

Multiple times I’ve been encouraged to try things I wasn’t yet comfortable with, and given nudges/guidance in the right direction, which has really helped to accelerate my learning, and kept me super keen to keep participating.

the events being organised by truly awesome folks who are organising events which they themselves want to attend and perform at

what’ve i been doing?

self guided practice

playing around on nudel and separately on strudel and hydra reading the ref docs and sounds/synths/etc lists on strudel reading the short and sweet api ref on hydra’s site trial and error picking apart things I’ve seen performed online or in person and trying to understand how the code and its parts work

functions/commands i learnt and like, maybe by date:

//possibly a separate post tbh

hydra

• modulateblah (2025-03)
  • honestly just throwing a few modulates (scale, rotate, scroll x / y ) fed by osc/voronoi/noise/other outputs can yield some visual beauty
• fft (2025-04)
  • still trying to figure the full power of these but i love what others are achieving
  • syntax a little weird
• blend (2025-04)
  • pablo showed me that if you feed the whole thing back into itself with a high (e.g 0.99) figure, you get some very cool effects
    • .blend(o0,0.99)

strudel

• fm and fmh (2025-03)
  • right after march algorhythms, specifically due to the code block below, i read up on fm, fmh, and frequency modulation in general. I had been aware that it existed but lacked any kind of understanding of what it does and how it works. Not saying I get it now, but maybe I know a bit more than I did.
  • I’m using these a hecking lot now, they turn triangle/sine waves delicious
    • supersaw blows up if you use them on it though
• s(“bd(5,16)”) (2025-04)
  • still trying to figure out how or why this works, but it creates such a satisfying drum pattern. is it being quantized? Dunno. does it bop? heck ya
• off() and press() (2025-04-14)
  • off is an offset command, in seconds, to allow you to add more notes and things to a single block of stuff, with a time offset
  • press shifts everything by a small offset so that it arrives half way through when it’s supposed to.

going to and watching events

algorave dec-2024

Anyway, I bought a ticket for the algorave in December at Corsica studios because well dang its £7 how could I not? Then I got grossly sick with some neverending flu or worse and avoided going and polluting the air. Gutted. Moreso on seeing the awesome videos afterwards.

winter solstice stream 2024 (online)

The solstice stream provided me with some huge inspiration, the variety in what the artists were putting out there was amazing. Shout out to switch angel who’s album I immediately went and bought on bandcamp. So when more events began to pop up with a regular cadence I decided to commit to going.

algorhythms feb-2025

The first I went to was on 2025-02-05, it was an Algorhythms event hosted £free at Carpet shop in Peckham.

I showed up super early to chat to folks and see how things ran, and then it kicked off. I shan’t do a full writeup because I don’t have that good of a memory but towards the end during the pastagang set, I was watching along on my phone (not participating) and blown away by how a concept so chaotic could possibly sound so good.

algorhythms mar-2025

Last time was brilliant, So I went again. It was brilliant again. The artists and organisers did an incredible job. There was a couple who performed together using i think LSDJ on some gameboys. There was also a custom gb studio(?) game being projected Right towards the end there was a bit which I transcribed from one of the post event videos which has stuck in my head ever since. I can’t explain why this sounds so good/fun/cheeky to me, but it’s brilliant. thanks pastagang.

1$: note("<g3 g3 c3 bb3>")
2.pdecay(.5).penv(5)
3.fm(1) //1
4.fmh(3) //3
5.ply(8)
6.lpf(2000)
7.clip(.65)

I might’ve been handed a mic and said some animal names into it moments before we got asked to finish by the venue staff. Probably unrelated.

algorave apr-25

TWO rooms of algorave? no way. Wandered in super early and had a looksie around the venue, headed to room two and found Daniel and some other organisers chatting, maybe a little surprised to see me and a few others wander in to say hello. We then got an unplanned demo of synte(lang), and the open room 2 slots kicked off One of the early artists performed with a “speakspell” sound in i think tidalcycles (rather than strudel), and the chops / beat they made from the vowel sounds were SO much fun. I have since found out that this was Heavy Lifting, who is Sheffield based There was a lot to love throughout the event, though I’m gutted that i couldn’t be in both rooms at once. I ended up mostly staying committed to room 2, but I did catch a good portion of the official synte set when I popped for a beverage. The pastagang set was about to begin when I got back to room 2, and with a little nudge from someone I went and set up in a gap at the table.

should be accessible here

it highlights the zone you’re in (if applicable) and uses some reasonably straight forward js/html

I could probably drive the js file further in the future

The code can be found here

Migrating domains to a new domain registrar

porkbun seemed reasonable value and I’ve seen others using them lately. (certainly a saving for me, for .uk and .co.uk)

steps

• Signed up at porkbun
• read their kb article on transferring, which led to another on transferring a .uk
• followed the steps:
  • tell porkbun the domain to transfer in,
  • set their requested txt DNS record on UK2
  • hit finish on porkbun
  • then initiate the transfer on UK2
    • this differs from most other registrars, dunno why we have to be different…
  • this took around 2-10 mins for each domain I transferred
  • Once that was done, they let me know with each site
• I then reconfigured each of my sites’ DNS.
  • Thankfully UK2 retained my config and didn’t drop it instantly on transfer, but if I were to do this again I’d look to take copies of all that info ahead of time!
• I then checked on my email provider’s end to ensure that they could still see my domains no problem
  • I screwed up one mx record, which it found
• I sent some test mails to my email addresses, to see if they made it through
  • most did, but one didn’t have an A or AAAA record, which gmail seems to denote as a failed lookup, even though the MX/TXT stuff was all there
    • quickly spun something up for it to point to and this fixed

summary

all in all, took me a good while, but I’ve not done this in an awfully long time. shout out to porkbun’s documentation tbh.

Here’s a brief script I’ve built as part of an excercise from Nature of code’s ch0 - Randomness

very cool so far.

 1<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.11.1/p5.js"></script>
 2
 3<script>
 4function setup() {
 5  createCanvas(windowWidth/3, windowHeight/2);
 6  background(8,38,59)
 7}
 8
 9function draw() {
10  if (mouseIsPressed === true) {
11    fill(random(255/2,255));
12  } else {
13    fill(random(0,255/2))
14  }
15
16  circle(mouseX,mouseY,100)
17}
18</script>

Purpose is to ensure that I have automatic links between posts, tags and other useful features while keeping things reasonably lean

picked bearcub theme because it looks nice and simple to work with and auto creates RSS feed

probably gonna aim to do the github actions thing, which is reasonably new to me too

looks like that worked, though it was more iteration than I had expected. 8th time’s the charm.

Quite fun to have put together

will continue to be updated

#todo - add missed/cancelled gigs (covid/etc) maybe in a diff table

updates:

[2025-10-03]: the table markdown was a bit of a travesty, I’ve tried to tidy it a little. I’ve also added more gigs both past and present [2025-11-08]: couple updates to gigs

a table of approximately all of the gigs I’ve ever been to

the API reference is a fabulous resource

important note

colorama() is a mystery

learning

Honestly the thing which has helped me the most in learning these tools is spending time participating on nudel.cc

If you’re not familiar, you should first visit pastagang.cc which should tell you a bit about all this

Some examples:

example 1

example 2

example 3

more

Reading docs, playing around, having a good time.

Inspired, obviously, by algorave/jams I’ve been going to and joining in a little bit at.

Gonna write my own personal cheat sheet for each tool, since wading through the docs is sometimes a bit slow at the moment!

If you click through on these you’ll see further posts about them

strudel

hydra

• now contains some live set outputs / notes :)