Is how long it took before he discovered the arcade is actually more than a piece of furniture. He is still figuring out the controls as he is used to the iPad where there is little to no indirection between the controls and the output.
A website to make the meal math easier on the parents
List of current features:
- It uses the USDA National Nutrient Database as the basis for all the foods you can search (your tax dollars at work).
- You can add your own recipes, ingredients whatever else is not in the base database. We find that we add all the foods we use even if it’s just bread because a bread with a label is always more accurate than the generic/average bread as defined in the USDA database. It’s also nice for adding your family specials once and for all and never have to do the math again.
- What you add is not shared amongst users and it only visible to you.
- It tries to learn which foods come back to help pick them later on.
- It remembers which amounts you last used
- Calculates insulin dose on the fly
- Very simple & streamlined navigation for the least work for the parents
This is still very much a work in progress but has made our meals a lot more agreeable already.
Markov chains music generation
Here’s a project I’ve had on the back-burner for many years. Following the natural progression of generating stuff based on Markov chains, I decided a while ago to port the algorithm to music.
Music presents many challenges that I haven’t been able to address well so far. As a result, what the algorithm produces always had a bitter unfinished aftertaste to me, hence why I haven’t published anything about it for years.
- Music is multidimensional, time is relevant and needs it own analysis and subsequent generation
- The interconnectedness of different instruments from the piece is important as well.
- Random generation even based on Markov chains fails to produce any structure. The pieces all sound like a long solo without chorus or any other repetition that would give us what we strive for: anticipation. In other words, it’s perfect for jazz.
I’m hoping that publishing this will give me the kick in the nuts necessary to keep improving it. Without further ado, here’s what I have so far.
Future improvements:
- add to corpus
- clean pieces analyzed of noise
- try to infuse structure