Welcome to 2026. Already??
Winter break is now the one time of the year I can set aside dayjob demands for a moment and mess around on the old computizing device. This year’s theme was slop-slinging, since that is how we now do things in the late stages of my profession.
- Trained some wavenets as part of Neural Amp Modeler, with which you can plug your real guitar into fake software. I captured one of the sounds from my old Pod and it worked OK — considering that I don’t have very high quality capture equipment and I wasn’t trying very hard — but one of the more interesting experiments was to pass the capture signal through a vocoder to get what turned out to be a weird distortion effect. Wheels within wheels. Guitarix (Linux amp simulator app) can host NAM plugins and this has been my rig over the past 1-2 years.
- Trained a 2k parameter transformer, as an experiment in how small you can make an ML model that can do something (in this case, sort small numbers very inefficiently).
- Soldered together a 6-button USB-C keyboard (pictured below) using a pro-micro board and QMK firmware (no compilation necessary for this kind of simple build). This is for a taekwondo referee trainer, for which I vibe-coded a dumb rhythm game as a placeholder app to test it out. I guess you could make the argument that I built the world’s worst console in just about 2 days.
