sangsara.net

Tag: Singapore

  • Week 19.26

    Week 19.26

    Brian was kind enough to think of me when he had an extra ticket to see Kraftwerk at their one-night-only local show on Friday. I was not even aware they were still alive, let alone touring. Turns out it’s just one co-founder left holding the project together, Ralf Hütter. After some drama with the tickets — for a moment it seemed like we might not get in — we were treated to an hour and a half of classic electronica.

    One effect of having a discography that spans five decades is that the music varies to an extreme degree. Their early material is rigid, with an almost classical approach to using synthesizers. Everything builds without resolving. This was electronic music before The Drop was invented. But Kraftwerk are necessarily more important than they are fun, which I mean as a compliment. Seeing where the structures and traditions originated helps you understand why what came after sounded so liberating. Their newer material has more swing, more layers and polyrhythms. I think Computer Love and the stuff from that era was my favorite of the night. As Brian said, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see these OGs in action, and when I listened to Daft Punk’s Discovery on the way home I heard it differently.

    The week was also marked by a dentist appointment I’d been dreading for awhile. It was just to get a filling done, but I was told there’d be an injection and drilling involved. The visit was a rollercoaster: it started with an x-ray and the suggestion that the cavity might be in a difficult to reach location, and ended with a closer inspection (in which an injection and drilling were sadly involved) that found… no apparent cavity after all. The tooth has now been sealed with some material that will surely leak microplastics into my mouth, and we’ll monitor it over future x-rays to ensure there wasn’t really anything going on in there. Fingers crossed.

    In other sad news, Amazon Singapore has decided to sunset their Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. It’s not my main source, but I appreciated their “free” (with Prime) next-day delivery and used it maybe every 4–6 weeks. Lately, they’ve been a primary source for sardines, pasta, and ice cream, if you wanted to know how balanced my diet is. The evil multinational corporation giveth and taketh away.

    I’ll still keep subscribing to Prime though, because it’s letting me do terribly wasteful things like see English language editions of Brutus magazine while in a Tokyo bookstore last week, decide that I don’t want to carry them around all day and get creased, and so order them online for delivery to my home a week later — for virtually the same price. High off the Snoopy Museum visit, I also ordered these two big, lovely Made-in-Japan mugs that will be my daily tea delivery vessels.

    Kim got me a copy of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on vinyl for my birthday but it’s only just arrived. I have yet to play it, but the artifact is heavy, substantial, important. It’s no exaggeration to call it one of the best albums of all time, and I think it’s consistently raised my goosebumps for the last 15 years.

    Peishan and James also got me a couple of records, and one of them was a Record Store Day ‘preview’ of two tracks from some upcoming John Coltrane releases that were not on my radar. The Tiberi Tapes are a legendary collection of secretly recorded live sessions of Coltrane in the 1960s, made by saxophonist Frank Tiberi. The recordings were imperfect, but new digital technology has made them fit for release, and Impulse Records is set to unleash a bunch of them soon (it’s Coltrane’s centennial year).

    A few weeks ago, I released Orchids, Once. and several people independently told me that the procedurally generated music was good for having on in the background while they worked. That gave me the idea to make something designed to sit in a browser window on a second screen (or in the background) keeping you company throughout the work day with music and visuals.

    My first idea turned out to be too ambitious — way beyond my current abilities in terms of graphics and animation. I got a prototype working but it wasn’t worth going further. So I pivoted to a new idea yet again leveraging the orchid models I’d already made to get started quickly.

    Window Box is the result. It simulates looking out the window of an apartment, seeing a planter box of flowers set outside the windowsill. I’ve never actually seen one of these in real life; I think I first encountered them on Sesame Street as a kid and thought they were cool.

    You can currently choose to be in Singapore or Honolulu. There’s dynamic real-time weather and lighting pulled from the Open-Meteo API, to reflect current conditions in either location. There’s an incredibly beautiful (if I do say so myself) rain animation system, along with environmental sounds. I also came up with a neat blending technique to transform the photographic backgrounds to reflect time of day and weather.

    Instead of doing more procedurally generated music, I decided people would want real music, so there’s a radio tuner with a handful of curated stations. That includes Apple Music Radio just because I think more people should listen to their shows! There’s also a great Hawaiian station, KAPA-FM, which is a treat when you’re using the Honolulu location.

    And just for you readers of the regular blog, here’s a hidden feature: click the app title in the top left 20 times and it’ll unlock bird sounds to complete the scene.

    Media activity

    • We watched Season 2 of Beef on Netflix. I was primarily excited for the casting of Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, and Oscar Isaac, but wasn’t keen to see more of the same petty adversarial conflict from the first season. Well, be careful what you wish for — my chief complaint is that it has so little connection to the first season and the concept of beefing, that I think it should just have been a different show. This one raises the class warfare stakes tremendously, goes much darker, and then ends in a tonally unexpected way. Maybe the best Netflix Original in awhile.
    • I’ve been playing more Path of Mystery: A Brush with Death, the new Japanese murder mystery adventure game on Switch that I mentioned back in January. It’s an above average game for the genre, and I’d readily recommend it. The chapters are structured and presented like television episodes, which makes it perfect for playing in a couple of short sessions. Each one opens and ends with (skippable) animated credits, and there’s a short “next time on…” video afterwards to give you a preview of the following episode. I haven’t seen this done before, and it adds to the enjoyment of the story that is both interesting and occasionally funny.
    • Speaking of episodic anime, I got back into Frieren to try and finish the first season now that a second season is out. Previous episodes were pretty easy to space out across large spans of time, but the final arc with the First Mage exams is surprisingly addictive and bingable. I watched the last 11 episodes in 24 hours. I’m not one for fantasy settings but Frieren is brilliant — especially how it explores the perspective that comes with a longer lifespan and outliving all your friends.
  • Week 18.26

    Week 18.26

    We had a pretty good week in Tokyo and are now back with painful foot and leg muscles that haven’t been worked this hard in a while. There was one notable moment of weakness where a decision was made to take a taxi back to Ginza from Meguro, rather than deal with the evening crush in the train system. Surprisingly, it was only about S$30 — one more sign of prices equalizing between Singapore and Japan. You may have seen the same reports I have on the rising cost of living there, and how convenience store onigiri now starts around the ¥200 mark, nearly twice what it was a few years ago. But while the onigiri in Japan may soon cost nearly as much as the versions we get in Singapore 7-Elevens, the two are still incomparable in terms of quality.

    No surprises here, but alcohol continues to be significantly more affordable than in Singapore. I posted a picture on my Instagram of Buffalo Trace bourbon (750ml) going for about S$25 in Meidi-Ya, a nice supermarket. That’s about a third of the price you’ll find in Singapore, if you can even find Buffalo Trace at retail. I’m beginning to form an alcohol and lifestyle arbitrage theory that says if one earns in dollars AND drinks enough, it may make financial sense to live half of each year in Japan.

    Maybe one could sell an apartment in Singapore and fund two small apartments, one in Tokyo and the other in Thailand or Australia (depending on said value of initial apartment). Australia’s reverse seasons might make it possible to live in a perpetual fall/winter state, with an occasional summer when you get too depressed.

    Or when your skin gets too dry. I’m no good at moisturizing, so after just a week I’m beginning to feel my skin noticeably drier. However I’d take lotion any day over the stifling >80% humidity and gloominess that greeted us upon return. Apparently it rained most of the week we were gone; the kind of tropical heat that makes you feel sweaty in every crevice. “Why do we live here again?”, I asked Kim on the way home. Oh right, zero capital gains tax and responsible governance.

    It’s also been a week since I touched my MacBook so I may have broken the app development habit. I just have one tiny improvement I need to make to Crumbs now that I’ve used it to log my locations on this trip…

    Some things I remember doing:

    • I met Michael for lunch on Monday, and like a good friend he brought me to a Sapporo soup curry joint in Yotsuya. There’s always the risk of splashing and curry stains with soup curry, but I think he exaggerated the mess he made because I’ve seen people come into the office with far worse. I think we ended up talking for two hours, and we didn’t even get around to John Ternus and rumors about upcoming products.
    • Kim came out to meet me later and since we were already in the area, we decided to walk down to see the iconic steps featured in Your Name (2016). I cannot believe it’s been 10 years, by the way.
    • At the National Film Archive of Japan, which I might be visiting for the third time, we saw a small showing of Japanese film poster art. It was excellent, and just ¥250 including the permanent exhibition. I instantly recognized two of the earlier posters: Philip Glass’s score for Koyaanisqatsi (1984) was the inspiration for some of the music in my DataDeck project, and I just watched Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) last week on MUBI.
    • We bought advance tickets to the Ron Mueck show at Mori Art Museum, his first showing in Japan in over 15 years iirc, which was a refreshingly tight collection of 11 sculptures. Some of his work is massive, like In Bed, and the level of detail is so astounding you can easily spend over an hour just looking at them.
    • I say refreshingly because there’s a tendency for exhibitions to pack so much in that your mind just goes numb. That’s what tends to happen when I visit the National Art Center in Roppongi. Still, I love the idea of a building with massive exhibition halls that are regularly rented out by “amateur” art and photography groups showing off their members’ works. I think having such a venue fertilizes the hobbyist landscape and reinforces the value of art. Singapore would do well to have more such places and encourage a forward-looking, arts-attuned society instead of, say, building yet another temple to our origin story.
    • The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Meguro is still one of the best. I’ve missed it the past few times we were in town, but there’s nothing like looking at great photos after too many paintings. The free exhibits at Fujifilm Square in Roppongi are also consistently excellent, even as their product lineup becomes more ossified and oversold.
    • We also visited the Snoopy Museum Tokyo in Machida which I will freely admit was a highlight for me. It’s the only official one outside of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, and a very well-designed facility — exactly the right size, with something for all ages. When I told Michael we were going, he remarked that it was interesting how relevant and popular Peanuts remains, compared to the likes of Garfield (no shade). I said it was because of how much storytelling latitude it has built in, in no small part thanks to Snoopy’s flights of fancy. Whereas Garfield is reducible to a few things, like a love of lasagna and a hatred of Mondays. To which he observed how it’s weird Garfield hates Mondays at all, because he’s a cat without a job. He just says he hates them to be relatable!
    • Did you know that it was only after 20 years of the Peanuts comic strip that Snoopy stopped walking on all fours like a normal dog and started becoming the odd character he is? I learnt that off a little fact card at the museum, where Schulz is quoted as saying “It was one of the best things I ever did.”
    • I’m more of a cold shower and cold anything kinda guy, and my heat tolerance is very poor. Like some of the hotels we’ve stayed at before, the one we booked this time had a sento, a hot public bath, and after being urged to by Kim I thought I might as well try it. It was fine. Going by how it appears in film, I thought maybe people stayed in the water for quite awhile, but I was ready to get out after 10 minutes, and it seemed the same for other people. Funnily, one guy said goodbye to his wife as she went to the women’s side, and then spent 15 minutes washing himself in the stalls and never even got into the water. Maybe he was another anti-hot tub guy who just got tired of saying no and pretended to do it. Like those salarymen who get fired but don’t tell their families and sit in parks all day with their briefcases.
    • Speaking of the hotel, I’d initially booked us into the same hotel I stayed at back in 2012 when I went with a couple of colleagues from Sweden and the US. The day before our trip, we looked at recent photos online and decided it was probably not sufficiently well maintained, and booked a nicer place nearby. Free cancellations on Hotels.com are a fantastic feature. The new hotel was great, and although our corner room was billed as having 30 sqm of space — an almost suspicious amount for central Tokyo — a lot of it was used for a hallway area. Nevertheless, it was useful for keeping our suitcases out of the way and for the drying of umbrellas. I would definitely stay there again.
    • We had a nice walk through Yoyogi park and Kim used one of the famous transparent toilets. Despite having already conquered public nudity with the sento, I did not experience them myself (there was someone waiting and I didn’t need to go).
    • We were on our way to a coffee shop in Ginza one morning when we spied a line of people waiting to get into a tendon restaurant when it was due to open at 11am. Following the Singaporean/Lemming instinct of letting social signals decide what to eat, we abandoned our plan and joined the crowd. It was very good, foreigner friendly, and great value. ¥1,600 for a large bowl with conger eel, two shrimp, a squid/clam mix, half-cooked egg, shishito pepper, and seaweed.
    • Will told me about the Creative Museum Tokyo in Kyobashi, so we stopped by for the Sorayama retrospective that’s currently on. You may know him through his work designing the first Sony AIBO, and the cover art for Aerosmith’s Just Push Play. His work isn’t for everyone, but I loved how this guy just loved drawing naked female robots, did it all his life to the point of mastery, and now brands like Dior are just dying to collaborate with him. No selling out on his part, the dude just loves his gynoids.
    • At the above venue, I noticed the same phenomenon I saw many times over the week: a lot of people employed to do mindless, redundant work. Like standing at an obvious door to point you in a very obvious direction, or posted near a small bump telling you to mind your step. I hope that this is just what extra labor is deployed to do during downtimes, and that they actually have more to do most of the time, but I’m skeptical. Still, AI can’t take your job if your job wasn’t necessary in the first place!
    • Some time was spent revisiting shops I tend to drop by every few years, like the Nintendo Store in Shibuya, or Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa, or Tsutaya books at Daikanyama T-Site. The latter two are always fun because there’s so much stuff I would buy if I could teleport them home immediately. If I ever buy that Japanese apartment someday, I fear it might be filled to the edges with magazines and useless tchotchkes.
  • Week 16.26

    Week 16.26

    We attended my aunt’s funeral on Tuesday. My complaints about the Mandai Crematorium mostly still stand, but they’ve at least moved the ugly signs printed on office paper away from the viewing windows so you can see the casket on its way to the… furnace?

    As I said last week, she was 93 and the family was mostly prepared for this. But there were tears, and some meaningful words were said, and despite my irritation with the undignified air of the Crematorium’s processes, I was struck at a mostly subconscious level with a sense of loss. Because a couple of days later I was thinking about orchids.

    Since I was a child, I’ve known orchids to be a part of my family’s story. My paternal grandparents were enthusiastic orchid breeders as well as co-founders of the Mandai Orchid Garden, where they helped raise the profile of Singapore’s orchids at home and abroad. I was surprised to learn while writing this that orchids are still an instrument of Singaporean diplomacy. Although I never had any interest in them myself, my late grandmother is defined in my memory by her fondness of them, and several other relatives (including the aunt who just passed) had hybrids named after them, created by my grandfather.

    As mentioned last week, I have been experimenting with generative art and it entered my mind that I could try to simulate orchids — creating infinitely unique flowers and plants in code. Now, this is nothing new. Humans have been trying to reproduce natural processes like botany with algorithms almost as long as we’ve had computers. But the more I thought about bringing millions of digital orchids to life, the more I thought about where they would go after. To create a beginning is to guarantee an end. The result is a digital artwork I’ve called Orchids, Once. and it’s a sort of meditation on impermanence.

    You can summon a new orchid into existence, but know that you’ll be the only one who ever sees it. When you leave or reload the page, it’ll be gone. Does the fact that there are potentially billions more make it less special? Or that it cost nothing? Or that it’s not technically “alive”? In any case, I hope people will cherish the brief amount of time they spend with each flower. I didn’t design a “retry” or “new orchid” button because the responsibility of ending a session should rest with the viewer.

    Orchids, Once. also stems from the generative music experience I gained while making DataDeck, and features an ambient soundtrack that’s created in real time as the orchids turn and sway in the digital wind, as unique and unrepeatable as the flowers themselves.

    I had to work with both Gemini and Claude to get this thing in shape. I didn’t save enough screenshots of the development process, but here are two from the prototyping phase that AI would have you believe were good enough to ship, and that look like orchids.

    Many hours of refinement later and I had models that could pass for plants, but had a nasty habit of growing backwards into themselves, or occasionally mutating into unholy jagged messes. I thought they were finally getting somewhere, but then we took a trip to a plant nursery nearby for a little field research. I spent some time looking at dozens of real orchids and taking pictures, and came home with lots of changes to make. I have learnt more about orchid anatomy this week than I had from decades of being in an orchid-breeding family.

    I also can’t help but reflect on the past few weeks of making things in code with AI — this only started on March 1, but it feels like months ago. Orchids, Once. is my 10th “app” (but the 9th released).

    The first few toyed with pulling data from online sources: Collagen pulled album art from iTunes, Urban Jungles pulled weather data from Open-Meteo, SkySpotter pulled air traffic data from OpenSky.

    Then the next few pulled data from online sources and tried to make something new out of them: Library Supercollider mashed up texts from Project Gutenberg, CommonVerse let you play with words from a dictionary, DataDeck generated music from public Singapore data feeds, and Crumbs let you build your own “maps” with location data.

    The most recent ones? They’ve been about generating their own assets out of nothing, without drawing on external data: the GenArt wallpaper/image maker I’m still working on, daily 3D mazes to escape from, and these orchids. These shifts weren’t conscious or planned, but it’s curious to look back and notice it.

    I’ll stop at 10 for a while, and maybe pick things up again after I get back from my holiday.

    One bit of housekeeping: I found the time to revisit my first app, Collagen, and make some improvements I’ve been wanting to see for a while. You can now use images in different aspect ratios, not just squares. And each image can be zoomed and cropped really easily with a new editing overlay. You no longer lose images if you change the grid size, text cells can be edited, and the UI has been given a mild glow up. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot since then, and this v2.0 brings things up to date.

    Media activity

    My book club finally finished reading Michael Crichton’s Sphere and I gave it three stars on Goodreads. In the end, my vague recollections from reading it as a teenager mostly held, although a slightly racist and sexist worldview permeates the text, and I’m sensitive to how much that would not fly today. I’m eager to see how the film adaptation handles that when we watch it together next week, as it was made a decade later.

    The second season of The Pitt ended after 15 episodes and damn I’m going to miss it. This is a show that alerts me to how ignorant I am of certain (most?) social dynamics and other signs people tend to give off.

    Speaking of the series in general so I hope this doesn’t spoil anything for anyone, but suicidal ideation is a recurring theme that I didn’t take very seriously — which is the whole point of the show’s handling of it.

    I go on Threads after every week’s episode to read people’s takes and interpretations, and I’m always learning something. This week some people got mad that men don’t take this suicide stuff seriously, or can’t see it at all and can’t talk to their friends, and I guess I’m a little guilty of that. I didn’t know the character on the show was thaaaat serious, and thought “eh, they’ll walk it off. It’s no big deal, everyone imagines it sometimes.” Apparently not.

    Unintentional death theme continuing: I watched a Japanese film on MUBI: Super Happy Forever (2024). It’s about a widower who goes back to the seaside town where he and his wife met on holiday. It jumps back and forth in time and does a few other things that should yield more emotional impact than it does. I wrote on Letterboxd: I think the ingredients of a proper 4-star movie, the kind you rewatch every five years, are here but not properly assembled. Nairu Yamamoto is so lovely, so magnetic in all of her scenes that she redeems her supremely annoying partner like the best of people do. Shame.

  • Week 13.26

    Week 13.26

    I finished my sixth app: DataDeck. It simulates a fictional hardware music player called the DataDeck SG-01, or more accurately, a music generator. It reads live, open data feeds from the Singapore government’s data.gov.sg portal and translates them into unique musical compositions.

    My first prototype ingested the tourism stats for International Visitor Arrivals to Singapore since 2008, and when I first experienced the silence of the Covid years, with the beat gradually building back up again after 2022, I knew I was on to something. Data sonification is a cool term for nerds, but hearing the stories stored in the numbers is something anyone can understand and appreciate.

    At about ten days of development time, it’s the biggest project I’ve delivered so far with the help of AI — there’s no saying how long it would have taken me to do on my own. A million years? Instead, in just 10 days: parsers for 10 different datasets, 10 varied musical styles, and 10 switchable themes.

    The inspiration for its interface was the kind of hardware devices my dad had in the 70s and 80s: calculators, microcomputers, and tape decks from companies like Braun, Sharp, Sony, and Texas Instruments. A sort of Rams-ian, Bauhaus-ish modernist school of industrial design. The different color schemes you can choose from evoke specific brands or devices, like Apple’s Snow White-era or the original Nintendo Game Boy (DMG-01) and the Roland TR-808. I especially enjoyed working within the constraints of an imagined hardware UI, so when you switch to a dataset mapped to Singapore’s physical geography, the drum pad buttons get remapped to move a reticle around the map. It makes it feel more real, imo.

    The idea of playing with procedurally generated music using software-synthesized Web Audio was probably seeded years ago when I collected the 0xmusic series of art NFTs, which generated endless musical sequences from code on the Ethereum blockchain. I dare say that DataDeck is more advanced, and with better sounding musical output than those. Plus I’m making it free, and you don’t have to risk social judgement by going anywhere near crypto.

    I’m especially proud of the app’s design and musical qualities. There are a hundred little details in this thing I could mention that were cool to implement, but users don’t have to know or care about. Although it’s an app made for myself by myself, I’m still inordinately satisfied with and impressed by it. I’ve helped deliver a few apps in my career (some of them even won awards), but DataDeck already feels like one of my favorites.

    I think that’s because designing in the real-world is all about the navigation of compromises — technical debt, financial limitations, organizational will, and a lack of time all get in the way of polishing features you know could be great, or fixing annoying bugs that other stakeholders don’t seem to mind. Personal projects are not like that, and acceleration with AI makes them even less so. I made this thing how I wanted, and was able to tweak the mix or rebuild a cassette’s music logic from the ground up twice a day if I wasn’t happy with it.

    I’ve also been thinking about how narrow the term “vibe coding” is. On one hand, one-shotting an app by asking Claude to “build me a kitchen timer” is vibe coding. But using AI to create a complex tool where humans design the screens, sweat the UX, and look after the details is also kinda vibe coding. I talked recently about how the distinction between designing and developing will fade, and making stuff is all that will matter, and so it stands to reason that eventually coding with AI will just be called coding.

    I spent Friday afternoon with Jussi meeting up with two separate friends, both also middle-aged men, who are similarly interested in this evolution of design/development work, and who are working on their own projects with Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and other tools. We’re all at different levels of familiarity and sophistication, but it was good to meet for a little co-working + Show & Tell time at cafes on a weekday. I think there’s value in forming a little “late boomers’ coding club” for fellow initiates.

    In any case, I’m hella tired, guys. I started on my next app idea but immediately got hit by fatigue on Saturday afternoon and needed a nap. Switching gears from audio generation to working on more visually-oriented functions was too much context switching to do over the weekend. Think I’ll finish reading a couple of books first before getting back to it.

    I know it’s been app-this and app-that around here for the last month and so maybe some readers (or a future me who’s been thrown in ethics jail for AI use) will appreciate hearing about other things. Let’s zoom all the way out then, into outer space.

    The film adaptation of Project Hail Mary is getting such great reviews and most people in my book club have already seen it. Unfortunately, I have to wait because Kim has finally started reading it, about three years after I told her to. Hopefully she’ll finish before the local IMAX run ends, but nothing in this life is guaranteed.

    There’s just something about stories of people in space, either lost or stranded, alone or in a small team, solving problems with limited resources, all the while confronted by the massive universe-facing perspective of being so small and meaningless. Andy Weir’s The Martian really resonated with people, and Project Hail Mary is having its moment too. I also enjoyed Daniel Suarez’s two Delta-V books a few years back. But the ultimate one that has yet to be beaten for me is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves.

    The book I’m reading now might be a serious contender though. I’ve had Samantha Harvey’s Orbital on my list for the better part of a year, knowing very little about it, except that it’s about astronauts. Now that I’ve started, I don’t want it to end, I want more of everything, more words from this magnificent brain. You’ll know by the end of the first three pages whether this is a book for you. It’s intensely beautiful, unusual writing. It borders on poetry — perhaps too melodramatic for some — actually it steals over the border by moonlight and maps the territory. I don’t know how Harvey knows what it feels like to be in space, and what astronauts think about as they look down on Earth, but she absolutely does. You can’t write like this unless you’ve stowed away on an ISS mission and been through it. It’s a monumental work, and the best book I’ll probably read all year.

    Literally on the other end of that spectrum, the book club has decided to read Michael Crichton’s Sphere, which is set at the bottom of the ocean and probably isn’t very beautiful or philosophical. I read it once, maybe thirty years ago, and thought I only remembered the contours of its plot, plus flashes of the 1998 film adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman. As I read its opening pages, I was shocked at how familiar some of the writing and scenes were. It must have made an impression on me.

    Since the moratorium on spoilers has probably passed, I think it’s okay for me to mention what I recall: it’s about a mysterious ship that a bunch of scientists are trying to study in a deep sea lab. As time passes, they experience unnatural events, and it’s revealed that the titular sphere onboard has been “having an effect on them”. It’s a mashup of The Abyss and Solaris, essentially. I don’t want to rush Orbital, so I’m going to put that aside and work through Sphere as quickly as I can.

    Speaking of space, the deep sea, and being packed into tight metal containers, I picked up a can of my usual Ayam-brand sardines in extra virgin olive oil the other day and felt a weird “thunk” as I turned it over. I’ve handled enough of these cans now to know when something feels off. Opening it, I discovered only two fish instead of the usual three. That sensation was them loosely rolling around in the oil. It wasn’t like these were two large ones and there wasn’t room — someone on the packing line simply neglected to fill the available space and closed it up. At first I was incensed, and then I tried to let it go. We all deserve to make mistakes, and some sardines should get to enjoy a little more personal space. Be good to yourselves, and I’ll see you next week.

  • DataDeck

    DataDeck

    Introducing the DataDeck SG-01.

    Turn on, tune in, and nerd out at datadeck.app.

    Singapore generates (and publishes) an extraordinary amount of data about itself — temperatures, taxi coordinates, dengue clusters, carpark availability, ticket sales at major attractions. Numbers that civil servants read in spreadsheets and the rest of us ignore entirely. The DataDeck asks, “but what does it sound like?”

    Each Data Cassette draws live government feeds from data.gov.sg and renders them as distinct genres. There are ten cassettes in all, each with their own acoustic logic and ways of interpreting the city.

    The Climate cassette pulls real-time NEA temperature and humidity readings across 12 geographic sectors and converts them into lo-fi hip-hop — with chords deepening as humidity climbs, and the scale drifting toward Lydian as the heat rises. The Transport cassette tracks unoccupied taxis plying the streets and generates a relentless 303-style midnight techno. HDB carparks become polyrhythmic Afrobeat, and the movements of the stock exchange drive a satisfying hip-hop groove. Get money y’all! Check out the sound of visitor arrivals during the COVID years: like musical crickets.

    TEN beautiful themes inspired by vintage hardware and er… mechs

    The controls? Three knobs shape density, tempo, and atmosphere. A mix fader redistributes the instrument balance. AUTO mode hands navigation back to the machine. There’s a user manual built in, should you get lost.

    It’s a music player with no music files. It’s a data dashboard you can close your eyes to. It’s Singapore, rendered in sound. Put your headphones on, and press play.

    An adaptive display panel for different data types

    Pro tip: If you really love DataDeck, you can save it to your phone’s Home Screen, which gets you a nice icon and a full-screen mode that shows the whole device at once without distractions.

    Disclaimer: I made this with the help of Gemini 3.1 Pro because I’m just an old designer who hasn’t coded stuff since GeoCities. I take no responsibility for any damage you cause yourself or others with this. Thank you.

    Related blog post: Week 13.26

  • Week 12.26

    Week 12.26

    Another busy week, and I’ve been like a caffeinated creature hunched over its keyboard with bloodshot eyes. You may notice I’ve updated the navigation bar on this site to point to a dedicated page listing all my apps. This takes the place of a page that pointed to all my custom GPTs on ChatGPT (that never really took off, did it?) and before that, my NFT experiments. Those are still around, though!

    You may call it AI slop but I’ve generated key images for each of the apps on that page, which I like to think of as analogous to game box cover art, those evocative artistic representations that used to stretch truths to their breaking points, back in the days when games looked like Lego.

    Here they are, just so you can admire them.

    HEIFer
    Collagen
    Urban Jungles
    SkySpotter
    CommonVerse

    The latest for now is CommonVerse, my daily magnetic poetry app. Give it a go!

    I’m writing this paragraph on Thursday after another failed attempt to stop vibe coding and focus on other pursuits. So far I’ve mostly finished one project and started on another that I meant to leave aside until next week. What is this feeling? This need to actualize a new ability that I’ve always wanted but never had to worry about not having?

    Instead of being able to recognize that I’ve already accomplished a lot, and “taking the rest of the week off” to go watch movies or something, I’m sucked into continually iterating and improving upon these apps like I’m on a deadline. It’s that paradox (mentioned here last May) where new technologies don’t decrease our workloads but only make us busier instead.

    Productivitymaxxers will say this is fine. This is how it’s supposed to be: you can do more, so you work just as hard and get twice as much out of it. Why would you want to work half as much? And they’re not wrong — that’s the engine of progress. But it’s also how you end up making six apps in three weeks and treating it as some kind of baseline rather than a miracle. As predicted, my capability has grown but I got desensitized to the satisfaction.

    The discomfiting shock to the system as I struggle with this resetting of scale, and feeling addicted to realizing more ideas, is an adaptation crisis. Adapting to life at a new speed and learning to balance capability with sensibility. Astronauts and pilots have to train to handle G-forces, in which the G stands for gravitational. I’m suggesting that working with AI has its own G-force, where the G is gratification. You can suddenly manifest many of the things you can think of. That’s a very powerful impulse to get under control. How do you engage with life’s responsibilities, appointments, or your growling stomach, when there’s always just one more prompt and revision to make? After getting home from a few drinks on Friday night, I found myself on my laptop in bed after midnight, fighting with a procedural audio generation engine that wouldn’t trigger drum sounds for any obvious reason.

    The next night I did the same, staying up to 3:30 AM because I had some new ideas that just could not wait. My Apple Watch sleep score is in shambles. But App #6 is certainly shaping up to be my best work. I’m going to sit on it for a whole week and keep polishing, instead of putting it out and moving on to the next one. That’s my strategy for slowing this down — it’s all I’ve got.

    Over the weekend, I also attended an Apple Store photo walk activity on a sweltering afternoon (up to 36°C next week) with Cien and Peishan. I hadn’t done one of these in years, but always keep meaning to. This one was conducted by the staff at Apple Orchard, and was a walking tour of Emerald Hill — which in reality is just a tiny street off Orchard Road. I’ve been there dozens of times over the years, but never saw the details just sitting there in tiles, old paintwork, and ornamental doorframes. Going to a small area with the intention of taking photos, and giving it more time than you’d normally allocate, can be a really fun and creative exercise.

    There’s no reason one couldn’t do this themselves any time, anywhere, of course. But these free ‘Today At Apple’ sessions are a good excuse to get off the couch. The other two local stores have their own programs, and I might check them out someday: Apple Jewel Changi Airport looks at the indoor waterfall, and Apple Marina Bay Sands has a night photography focus.

    Another nice touch is that they’ll lend you an iPhone 17 or 17 Pro if you don’t have one, and they’re incredibly relaxed about handing them out. No paperwork to fill out or deposits to pay. That’s the great thing about Find My protection, I guess. A comment was made that in the UK, those phones would disappear the instant the group left the store — even if just for parts. But they must do these sessions worldwide, so I’d love to know how it’s dealt with.

  • Week 11.26

    Week 11.26

    If you thought I was going to stop after last week’s two apps, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve been having poor luck staying focused on new hobbies and pursuits over the past year; they all just seem like too much work for too little payoff and I drift off. Vibe coding seems different so far because it lets me start making weird things that I want to see, without being dependent on anyone else’s time or generosity.

    If you think in terms of music albums/careers, then Collagen was the mixtape that I put together to see if I could be a real musician. Urban Jungles was a big leap forward, the debut album, if you will. It had way more polish and was usable by almost anyone (whereas Collagen had what you might call a niche audience).

    Which brings us to the sophomore curse or slump. The second album tends to be over-ambitious, myopically conceived, and underwhelms audiences looking for more of what made the debut good. There are exceptions to this mythical rule, like Radiohead’s The Bends, Lorde’s Melodrama, and D’Angelo’s Voodoo. By this logic, my next app was statistically going to “fail” by being a harder one to get into.

    I ended up making two apps again this week: SkySpotter and Library Supercollider. Each one has a separate page on this site that shows and explains what they are, so you should stop here and go read them before coming back.

    Concept vs. Product

    Like a sophomore album, SkySpotter probably reached a little too far. It took the real-time weather data angle from Urban Jungles, added the more complex dimension of real-time air traffic data, and then threw in rendering a first-person 3D world as a bonus challenge. I started refining the concept and prototyping it on Sunday afternoon, and then worked on it for two full days on Monday and Tuesday. I literally forgot to eat lunch, and was still messing with it at 11pm both nights. It was like a job.

    Gemini 3 struggled. The Canvas chat became so long and convoluted that it won’t even load now in the iOS apps — I have to use the web interface. It hallucinated making changes, and introduced new bugs each time I made an improvement. It built planes with reversed wings and nose cones pointing backwards. Working with bugs in a 3D app was so blood-boilingly frustrating that I wanted to give up.

    I actually did give up… on implementing a VR mode for Apple Vision Pro. We got it to half work but the skybox sphere was too far away and would keep turning black. Rather than risk corrupting the working regular version any further, I decided to cut it.

    I’m proud of SkySpotter because it’s pretty damned cool to lie in the virtual grass and watch real planes go by. Even as someone who doesn’t care about planes more than the average person! But it was a technical challenge first and a passion project second. So if that was my over-produced sophomore studio album the label breathed down my neck for, then the next release would be its opposite: a scrappy, self-funded back-to-roots project recorded directly to tape in a Nashville studio over an inspired couple of days.

    Concept vs. Product

    Library Supercollider was an idea that came to me all of a sudden after I’d finished SkySpotter. I’d been interested in the concept of cut-up poetry since I was in university (popularized by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs around the 1960s), and I believe it occurred to me back then that someone could make a computer program to cut up and mash two classic texts. I just didn’t know it would be me, twenty years later.

    I expected it would take me the next couple of days to get working, being that it requires the somewhat complex-sounding downloading and processing of entire ebooks in the background of a web app. I didn’t know if it could even be done. So imagine my surprise when I had a working prototype by lunchtime on Wednesday. But between polishing the experience and overcoming download limits with Project Gutenberg servers, I wouldn’t be done until Saturday morning, making it a longer project with different challenges — comparatively less frustrating, more educational.

    I understand that it’s not an app for everyone — you might read a page and conclude that it’s worthless gibberish. Maybe it takes the sort of person who likes abstract art and free jazz. But personally I’m so pleased with this project that I’ve bought two domain names to go with it: librarysupercollider.com and the superior smashmybooksup.com, which I’ll retain for a year as a ‘marketing URL’.

    In all seriousness, I think this is the finest work of my two-week career as a builder of software! The user experience for remixing and reading the resulting texts is brilliant, if I do say so myself. The steampunk UI and animations are completely unnecessary but bring me joy (notice the moving gears in desktop view). I had to come up with caching and proxy solutions to make the app more reliable under load. I even got a little into the weeds: installing node.js and Vite on my Mac, running scripts in the terminal, trying to compile a macOS port to get around problems (eventually unnecessary).

    Even if I were a skilled and experienced developer, I can’t see how I would have made these apps in two weeks; from writing to designing and coding them up, plus preparing documentation and website copy (plus one very dubious video ad). Deploying Library Supercollider to its own domain made the reality click for me, a feeling kinda like publishing your first thing on the App Store. It says: this thing is now real and can be used by real people.

    Then I came across this article in the NYT Magazine, entitled “Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming As we Know It”. It notes an interesting inversion of what we’re seeing in other fields — AI is taking away the drudgery of programming and leaving the human, soulful (and fun) parts.

    “The work of a developer is now more judging than creating.”

    In that way, I may not have magically joined the ranks of coders overnight, but I could probably say I’m developing. At my job, I used to direct the form of apps in a way so removed that I could only claim the role of design, but not the larger making. Part of the handwringing in design circles today is precisely about how designing and developing are merging, and soon only making will remain.

    Not everyone will bother to turn their ideas into reality, and fewer still have the experience and vocabulary to prompt polished apps distinct from the models’ averaged-out defaults, but those who persevere will be bringing tools and toys into existence the likes of which you may have been waiting decades to see.

    What’s next? Well, I might have a couple of ideas…

    —

    One thing all this app-making has done is bring me back to my Mac. I usually spend most of my computing time on my iPhone and iPad, but there’s no substitute for a Mac when it comes to managing local files, running scripts and compiling code. I’ve had coders like Michael make this point to me before, but I never got it because I never needed to sync a local repo with GitHub or anything before.

    So a side effect of spending long stretches of time on my five-year-old and long-neglected M1 MacBook Air is that I’m wondering “Why did I ever stop? This thing is great!”

    It’s worth noting that this week Apple’s newly released MacBook Neo has been getting a ton of praise on my social feeds for being an affordable and all-round capable machine at an unbelievable $599 price point. I got a tear in my eye as I read this essay by Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You” — it perfectly encapsulates what it was like to grow up on computers and teach yourself things, even on PCs.

    Too much screen time is awfully bad for you, so on the weekend I touched some metaphorical grass by taking our niece out to Disney on Ice at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. It’s extremely well-timed, with the world still coming down from Alysia Liu’s gold medal, and Singapore being in the midst of a Disney craze — a Disney Cruise offering has launched after delays and is now at the local docks, with fireworks and drone shows along the bay at night.

    These were Live Photos of some stunts

    I have no deep affection for Disney IPs but appreciate the amount of effort and coordination that goes into making magic, and it clearly works with so many adults into this stuff. What’s interesting is that while ice-skating can get pretty boring after awhile — it’s all the same moves over and over, around a static rink — adding a layer of characters and storytelling works to keep it fresh over an hour and a half.

    Oh, and our niece is 9, and by way of introducing her to the MacBook Neo, I asked her what computer she uses. I swear, her response was not far off the punchline in that Apple ad that everyone but me seems to hate, in which a girl who’s been using her iPad all day for creative things is asked what she’s doing on her computer, and she responds “What’s a computer?” Will iPads become open enough to support kids learning to (vibe) code? Or will nature heal in a post-post-PC revival led by the MacBook Neo? In any case, that ad was prescient.

    Bonus: Steve asks the same question in a different context (around 1:30). You must watch this video, it’s breathtaking. He’s 28 at this point. In addition to confidently describing things like Street View, mobile wireless computing, LLM chatbots, and the App Store, there’s a part near the end where he says “What we need to do is get away from programming. People don’t want to learn programming, they want to use computers.” He was talking about providing more finished software products to customers, because writing custom software was the norm then, but it’s an eerily relevant quote!

  • Week 9.26

    Week 9.26

    • The featured image above is the result of having Geese’s Au Pays du Cocaine in my head all day. The line about a sailor in a big green boat and a big green coat made me think of Puffer Jacket Snoopy, and of course I had to realize the joke.
    • We got the sad news that Deliveroo is shutting down operations in Singapore. This comes on the back of an acquisition by DoorDash who must have run the numbers and decided that a 7% share of the local food delivery market after a decade wasn’t worth investing further in. We use it all the time and prefer it over Grab and Foodpanda — it is by far the better app and their subscription service is better value for money, but we’ve seen this movie before. It’s like how Uber lost out to Grab; the market doesn’t always choose efficiently.
    • I will probably switch to Foodpanda because Grab as a brand has the same icky halo as, say, Facebook or Spotify.
    • Google released Nano Banana 2, the new version of their hit image generation model. This one is cheaper to run and kind of almost as good as Nano Banana Pro, so they’re making it the default for everyone. Paid users can still access the Pro model, but it’s hidden behind some menus. It’s a regression in quality, a slight improvement in speed, and most importantly, a boost to Google’s bottom line. Since I only do silly things with these tools, it doesn’t bother me tremendously, but imagine the same happening at an enterprise level for more important work.
    Screen recording of an AI panorama
    • One of the new things Nano Banana 2 can do is generate very wide panoramic images, so I asked it to render some “panoramas taken with an iPhone” in various locations. I then upscaled those and opened them in my Apple Vision Pro. They don’t have the photorealistic quality of images from Nano Banana Pro, and the resolution leaves a lot to be desired, but they’re still immersive and impressive when viewed in this way. You can see where this might go.
    • There’s been a lot of talk lately about how AI vibe coding could upend the SaaS market, if not replacing dependable enterprise tools with individually created ones, then at least giving IT departments a billion more unapproved apps to worry about. A viral essay from last week posited that AI coding could kill DoorDash, though I’d say they did a good job of that themselves out here. The other oft-discussed idea is that AI could replace the App Store, and everyone will just make their own apps instead of buying them from developers. Michael has been blogging about vibe-coding his own to-do list app based on Clear. I’ve been wanting to try this myself, making more little tools of my own to solve niche problems, but the opportunities have been slow to materialize.
    • This week the right idea presented itself and I made a web app using Gemini: an album cover collage maker that searches for the artwork or lets you upload your own. I’ve looked online for something like this before but only found a few that were quite lacking. Making one to my own specifications took maybe five minutes of prompting and testing. Then I thought it would be nice if you could drag the images to different locations. Gemini added that feature like it was nothing. I’m pretty hyped that even someone like me with zero current coding knowledge could will this into existence. If you’d like to try it, I’ve deployed it at usecollagen.netlify.app.
    • Otherwise it was a sort of decompression week where I just read a lot, listened to the records I bought/ordered last week, and was regrettably glued to my phone watching day trading losses (Chekhov’s gun has fired!) and social media feeds.
    • It took a couple weeks of dawdling but I finished John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, his first novel featuring the spy George Smiley. I may continue reading the series, seeing as his son Nick Harkaway (whose work I really enjoy) has decided to continue his father’s legacy and written one more already: Karla’s Choice. This one was a little dated and not particularly thrilling, but a fine introduction and scene setter.
    • It was immediately followed by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Expert System’s Champion, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother which I read at the end of last year. I recommend both as examples of sci-fi stories set so far in the future that humanity has looped back around to the beginning. It reminds me of the “middle chapter” in Cloud Atlas, if you remember that.
    • Then I read Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, a modern memoir that reportedly did well in China when it came out in 2022. It details the author’s dual career as a writer and on-and-off gig economy worker, which is made more interesting by also being a portrait of what it’s like to live in the lower brackets of Chinese society today.
    • I also had time to tackle Rob’s recommendation of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which was written in the 1960s but doesn’t feel that way, unlike Le Carré’s spy novels. He called it the best book he read last year, so I could hardly say no. It starts off like an intriguing sci-fi novel: a woman visiting friends in the Austrian alps wakes up one morning in the log cabin to discover she’s alone, and there’s an invisible wall separating her from the outside world. Things then focus on survival and what it means to live and be human in solitude, and in nature. Which, given that I’ll be home alone next week while Kim is away again for work, means I’m already in the appropriate headspace.
    Some of the better books I’ve read this year