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  Building the ChordCaster Stomp: A Peek Inside My New Harmonizer Pedal Every once in a while, a project grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go. For me, that project has been the ChordCaster Stomp - a compact, musician‑friendly harmonizer pedal built around a Teensy microcontroller, a custom audio front end, and a handful of ideas that have been rattling around in my head for years. I wanted something that didn’t exist yet: a pedal that could grab a single note, understand the musical context, and generate harmony that feels intentional rather than robotic. Something that could switch between diatonic intelligence and unapologetically synthetic fixed‑interval parallel harmony. Something that guitarists, synth players, and experimentalists could all use without needing a theory textbook. So I built it. Here's a very quick & low effort demo of it in action. I plan to put together a full tour at a later date. The Hardware: A Custom Brain in a Custom Box The first prototype...
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An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...
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The Hellscape that is Google’s Web in 2023

Alternate title: "were we better off in 2015 2007?" Time now for another anti-capitalist, “get off my lawn” posting for all the folks out there who won’t see it anyway, because they don’t read real blogs for the reasons specified in this very article. The web has existed for 30 years now. One would think our ability to access information on it would keep getting better. However, I watch as web search is instead devolving every year, to the point where people are giving up and hoping for the next thing.  While this sounds dire, this kind of behavioral change has historical precedent. Remember running your own mail or web server, or better yet, having a phone that you might actually answer calls to, even if you don’t recognize the caller’s number?  Yes, those ideas are gone too. It's all thanks to the uncontrolled thirst for advertising. Let’s walk through the experience of someone doing a simple Google search for “how to control poison ivy”.  The desired outcome would be...
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GWSMO and Outlook Version 2303: Can't select "From" Addresses When Composing New Message

I found a bug/incompatibility with GWSMO (Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook, the Google Workspace sync integration for Outlook).  Here's what I found: Steps to reproduce: Install Outlook 365 Version 2010 (I'm using click-to-run build Build 15726.20202) Test with a Google user that has multiple Send Mail As addresses configured properly under "Accounts and Import" tab in Gmail settings. Install GWSMO from .EXE using recommended settings. Follow the steps to authorize with your Google account via OAuth/browser Allow at least 5 minutes after everything is installed for GWSMO synchronization to progress far enough for Google account settings to propagate to Outlook Click on "New Message" in Outlook Click the From: dropdown to select one of the alternative send addresses Observe that the list of available addresses matches the list of Send Mail As addresses in Gmail settings Close Outlook, go into Windows Control Panel->Mail and remove the profile. ...
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So Much To Know...

I once spent an inordinate amount of time with a friend of mine, who I consider to be a master of recording & sound engineering.  He has been at it for decades, paid his dues, and worked with some greats.  He executes his craft with the utmost care and caring ... (something I have come to realize is what separates the true pros from the learned hacks). Anyway, I remember watching him in do his thing in the studio as I assumed the role of a quiet observer.  Despite his obvious adeptness and ingenuity, he would always play the part of the  Absent-Minded Professor, as opposed to the James Bond smooth-operator type.  I think it was partly a schtick to make people feel more at ease, but there was a genuineness and willingness to be vulnerable, as though allowing himself to be human probably made the job less fatiguing.   I distinctly remember my favorite phrase of his.  On a couple of occasions, while turning knobs and fixing some problem, in a won...
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RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...
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Windows 10: Get rid of Microsoft Teams Auto Startup (from a script)

Situation: You have installed Microsoft Office on your computer.  Whenever you logon to the computer, you see a Microsoft Teams splash that asks you to login, which you have to close every time if you choose not to login. Possible remedy: You can go into task manager, click the "Startup" tab, click Microsoft Teams, right-click and disable.  However, this doesn't work permanently as it will come back if you update or reinstall Office.  Also, other users who login to the computer will still get the Microsoft Teams thingy loading automatically at startup. "Real" fix: Add this to a user logon script, such as your domain logon script*: REM Delete Microsoft Teams Auto startup reg key   reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v "com.squirrel.Teams.Teams" /f That second bit is all supposed to be on one line. *if you don't have a domain logon script, you can just put this in a .bat file and stick into  C:\ProgramData\Micr...
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