Author: jonathanb

  • Garballed Attractors

    Waiting for a flight home, I stumbled across a Medium blog post on attractors. The example system seemed simple enough and I had some spare time coming up, so I thought I’d try to ape a demo.

    Below is my flawed reconstruction. It’s not an attractor, but similar to a spirograph.

  • Mandolins and Saint Patrick’s Day

    Saint Patrick’s Day weekend was musical and busy for me. BYNRIE, the MMO’s Irish ensemble, played the prelude and the offertory for the Saturday mass at the Cathedral of Saint Paul and a fund raiser for MMO and Sherry Ladig, our composer, cheerleader, and musical guru, at Saint Anthony Lutheran Church on Saint Pat’s proper.

    It’s not common to traditional Irish music, but neither are mandolins and we have so much enthusiasm, Sherry composed harmonies for our set list of jig, reel, and hornpipe medleys, as well as arranged some airs for us. Email me if you would like the dots for anything from the set list.

    • Off to California/Boys of Bluehill/Harvest Home
    • Inisheer
    • Gravel Walks/Silver Spear/Boyne Hunt
    • Katherine O’More
    • Blarney Pilgrim/Tripping Upstairs/Banish Misfortune
    • The Butterfly
    • Maid at the Bar/Star of Munster/Congress
    • Down by the Sally Gardens
    • Madeline Island (by Sherry Ladig)
    • Coleraine/Connaughtman’s/Carmody’s
    • Drowsy Maggie/Dunmore Lasses
    • Eileen Collins (by Sherry Ladig)
    • The Kesh Jig
    • Cup of Tea/Cooley’s/Glory
    • Londonderry Air

    Look out for BYNRIE to play at the 2019 Art Flare Northeast art festival.

  • Onyx Boox Max2 Pro

    Serving PDF

    Using the Boox to read sheet music, I have to adjust my workflow. Previously, I had used a web server, KWS, to provide set lists and sheet-music pdf files to the browser.

    The Boox seems to be highly optimized to conserve battery life, and perhaps as a consequence the web server freezes. I see this happen on my Pixel C, but relatively infrequently — about once every 6-8 hours of use on the Pixel C versus once every 10 minutes on the Boox.

    To make matters worse, the Boox is slow to switch and restart applications.

    Organizing PDF

    The Boox default view is a PDF browser, and it supports organizing files by directory, but the selection process is slow and cumbersome and is opaque in that it doesn’t correspond to actual directories.

    Another idea is to concatenate sheet music into a single-file set list. There are lots of programs available to concatenate pdf, and Apple Preview is one of them.

    Another option is to use a sheet music app running on the Boox, such as Fakebook, Orpheus, or Mobile Sheets Pro. I have used Fakebook before to read chord charts, but didn’t realize it could read PDF, too.

    While searching for Android sheet-music readers, I stumbled upon Musical Android, a site devoted to Android audio apps.

    Bluetooth

    After several tries, I was able to connect my Airturn Duo pedal to the Boox. The process was tedious in that the pedal requires long button presses to send to pairing mode, the Boox only infrequently updates the list of available devices, and the Boox usually displays the Bluetooth address in the place of the device title.

    December, 2019 update:

    The afternoon of a performance, while I was warming up for an orchestra holiday show, the Boox did its best brick impersonation. I scrambled to print out my sheet music before rushing out for the performance across town.

    I was eventually able to return the Boox to usable condition, but only after booting it into safe mode and losing all of my sheet music.