I spent the day listening to old gorillaz youtube videos while working. Once I hopped on abelton I tried re-creating “welcome to the world of the plastic beach” by memory:

It turned out better than I thought after I compared it to the original. (You may notice the beeps from rhinestone Eyes I somehow got mixed up in my head and added to this song).

The hardest part here was the voccoder which I rarley play with and is kinda annoying to get right. So for my future self here’s the voccoder settings:

Here’s the operator that’s driving it

And here’s what’s being played:

Sounds pretty good, I think I could touch up the input noises more and if I got a better brass sound I think it would work better.

Otherwise I spent some time “vibe coding” to touch up the site. Vibe coding is just asking chatgpt to do stuff for you. I can still see why you would need an engineer to do this so I wont say its totally a replacement but damn did it take a 5 hour task and make it like 20 minutes.

(You can only see the above if you’re using a PC on the website) Both the top section and the bottom are custom shortcodes added into the site using by asking chatgpt a bunch of stuff. Here’s the PHP for the category stuff: This also requires a plugin, chatgpt suggested one but I found an older plugin that was open source and asked chatgpt to change the initial code that it gave me to that. It’s pretty crazy how simply that quick reconfiguration was.

//////
//Category Icon List
/////
function shortcode_category_icons() {
    if ( ! function_exists('get_term_icon_url') ) {
        return '<p><em>Icon Categories plugin not active or function missing.</em></p>';
    }

    $output = '<ul class="category-icons">';
    $categories = get_categories([
        'hide_empty' => false, // Show all categories, including empty ones
    ]);

    foreach ( $categories as $category ) {
        $icon_url = get_term_icon_url( $category->term_id, 'category' ); // get the icon URL

        if ( $icon_url ) {
            $output .= '<li>
                <a href="' . esc_url( get_category_link( $category->term_id ) ) . '" title="' . esc_attr( $category->name ) . '">
                    <img src="' . esc_url( $icon_url ) . '" alt="' . esc_attr( $category->name ) . '" class="category-icon-img"/>
                </a>
            </li>';
        }
    }

    $output .= '</ul>';
    return $output;
}
add_shortcode( 'category_icons', 'shortcode_category_icons' );

Also under the title page

That little line above I spent atleast 3 hours trying to get working before I started embracing AI. Chatgpt understood the problem and gave me a solution in seconds. Essentially it was adding a <div> to the “header.php”

Then some java script using another plugin that chatgpt suggested using “WP Headers And Footers” It was so easy that I imagine that it probably isn’t worth blogging too much about. But I see myself getting more into the ai dev side as I go along.

My friend is working on some stuff in rust and it’s popped up in my job a few times so I wrote an asio sine wave generator in rust to familiarize myself.

FYI the code below is not debugged/cleaned up and definitely has stuff that can be taken out.

use cpal::{
    traits::{DeviceTrait, HostTrait, StreamTrait}, DevicesError, FromSample, OutputCallbackInfo, Sample, SizedSample
};

fn main() {
    let host;
    #[cfg(target_os = "windows")]
    {
        host = cpal::host_from_id(cpal::HostId::Asio).expect("failed to initialise ASIO host");
        let devices =  host.output_devices().expect("No devices Found");
        println!("Searching for ASIO Devices...");
        let mut counter = 0;
        for device_from_list in devices
        {
            counter = counter +1;
            let name: String = device_from_list.name().expect("YOU LITERALLY JUST GAVE ME THIS, IF YOU FAILED THE PROGRAM SHOULD HAVE STOPPED WHY IS THIS ALLOWED");
            println!("{counter} : {name}");
        } 
        let searchString  = "Focusrite USB ASIO";
        let device: Option<cpal::Device> =   host.output_devices().expect("we already did this!").find(|x| x.name().map(|y| y == searchString).unwrap_or(false));
        let device_ptr: &cpal::Device = device.as_ref().unwrap();
        let devicePrintName: String = device_ptr.name().expect("How would this not have a name at this point.");
        println!("Connected To {devicePrintName}");
        let config_ptr:&cpal::SupportedStreamConfig  = &device_ptr.default_output_config().unwrap();
        println!("Default output config: {:?}", config_ptr);
        
        //These can by dyanmic but I'm keeping them hardcoded to my fosurite settings.
        let mut audioOut = [0_f64; 1024];
        let mut currentTime: f64 = 0.0;
        let mut freqOut : f64 = 1000.0;
        let mut ampOut : f64 = 0.5;
        let sampleRate : f64 = 192000.0;
        let freqAsRad: f64 = 2.0*3.14*freqOut;
        for (sampleIdx,sampleVal)  in audioOut.iter_mut().enumerate()  {
            currentTime = currentTime + 1.0/sampleRate;
            *sampleVal = ampOut * (freqAsRad*currentTime).sin();
        }
        let err_fn = |err| eprintln!("an error occurred on stream: {}", err);
        let channels = config_ptr.channels() as usize;
        let myStreamConfig = cpal::StreamConfig{
            channels : 2,
            sample_rate : cpal::SampleRate(192000),
            buffer_size : cpal::BufferSize::Fixed(1024),
        };
        let stream = device_ptr.build_output_stream(&myStreamConfig,
            getData2,err_fn,None).expect("Well I'm stummped");
        
        stream.play();
        std::thread::sleep(std::time::Duration::from_millis(1000));

    }

    fn getData2(output: &mut [i32], callbackInfo : &OutputCallbackInfo )
    {
        static mut currentTime: f64 = 0.0; //uhhgg
        unsafe{
            let mut freqOut : f64 = 440.0;
            let mut ampOut : f64 = std::i32::MAX as f64 / 32.0;
            let sampleRate : f64 = 192000.0;
            let freqAsRad: f64 = 2.0*3.14*freqOut;
            for frame in output.chunks_mut(100) {
                for sample in frame.iter_mut() {
                    currentTime = currentTime + 1.0/sampleRate;
                    *sample = (ampOut * (freqAsRad*currentTime).sin()).trunc() as i32;
                }
            }
        }   
    }
}

Anyone who knows rust probably wont like the way I wrote this, but it does what I set out to do. Which brings me to the stuff I don’t really like about rust on first impressions:

1.) It expects you’re going to develop multi-threaded applications: this is totally reasonable as that is the primary draw of using rust. However if you’re trying to pump out an easy single threaded connect + execute style of device control it can be quite frustrating trying to understand how an API functions.

2.) A lot of error handling: I’m cool with this concept but this is probably going to end up with me putting .except() or ? at the end of majority of my function calls.

3.) Optional static typing: this has always been a pet peeve of mine

The plus sides

1.) Cargo is great

2.) Forcing error management is probably a good practice

3.) Explicitly calling out mutability is a positive in my head

4.) Unsafe blocks are smart (because the primary goal is to make everything thread safe)

If you want this code to work you gotta use cargo to clone down cpal and follow the instructions here: https://github.com/RustAudio/cpal