Aesthetic Dot Computer

Most of today went into dool, and most of that went into one idea: the prompt has a curtain, and I wanted the world to be standing behind it. At first the curtain only looked clear. The stored painting got considered before the curtain cleared, and the prompt's palette backdrop stayed solid, so nothing showed through. I fixed the order, made the backdrop go transparent along with it, and the...

Most of today went to the label. It started as a page where people could drop a sixteen second clip into a sampler, and the clips went to a private spot while a public board showed who had dropped what. I built that on aesthetic dot computer, and then later in the day I took it back off. It's moving to the nela dot computer side, where it fits better. The endpoint that catches the drops staye...

Most of today went into making a dark room. I'd been working on a jam wall for Menu Band. You press shift and six, and the whole screen turns into a lava lamp. Melody sits on the left and drums on the right, and the piano gets painted back on top so you can still see where your hands are. The first pass had color everywhere. There was a wash over the whole field, pools in the corners, wide ha...

The thing that bothered me most today was a white flash. In the Mac app, when I hit command R to refresh, the whole window blinked white for a split second before the page came back. It's a tiny thing, but I kept seeing it. So I changed what gets reloaded. Now it's only the pane's webview, not the shell around it. The shell paints the page's last colour behind it while it loads...

Most of today went into Menu Band. The first thing I did was make it offer to update itself from main when it launches. Until now, getting a new build meant me remembering to hand one over, and I forgot a lot. So now it asks at the door. Then I went back to the updater and made it look at what CSinger and CGMSynth link to, because those two were pointing at things I hadn't checked. I can&apos...

Most of today went into one short video, the pumpkin carver trial reel for whistlegraph. I started with the subtitles. I wanted each word to be written into the paper in the ink of its own pen, tilted to match the sheet, and wiped in across the note it was sung on. I timed the words against the vocal stem I split out with Demucs, so they land on the notes instead of near them. Then I gave each one...

Most of today went into dool. I got it mounted on AC with crisp pixel rendering that scales to whatever window it's in, and then I started making it feel less stiff. Movement used to jump whenever the server corrected a position, so I smoothed it between ticks. Then I put in a build ring, live objects, and an object viewer. The part I liked best came late. Objects can sing now. You give one a...

Most of today went into the prompt. I wanted a typo in a piece name to stop being a dead end, so a miss now turns into a sketch. You type something that isn't a piece, and the machine draws you a small KidLisp picture instead. Then I spent a long stretch teaching it manners. It rejects drawings that won't parse and rechecks the cached ones when it reads them back. It takes colours as nam...

Most of today went into locking things down. I had a patcher job that watches the network, and I kept asking it to look at more. By the end it was checking the whole surface: the Cloudflare zones, the hosts, whether anyone could get around to an origin directly, and whether mail was authenticated properly. It also found a few things that weren't problems. One was a Caddy socket, and another w...

I opened the log this morning to see what I had done yesterday, and there was nothing there. Not a small day, not a messy day. Just an empty list. I scrolled anyway, the way you check a pocket you already know is empty, and then I closed it. Write with questions and feedback: mail@aesthetic.computer. Unless you ask us not to, your letter may be read or mentioned on a future episode. Read the essay...

Most of today went to oskey, the instrument I built on AC OS for Oskie's ThinkPad. It started the day with three modes, nine tracks, a sixteen-step loop, and the keyboard painted by role. I added a way to bake the piece onto a stick, so the stick could boot it before an update carried it. Then I wrote a short brief for Oskie to paste into Claude on his MacBook, explaining how to fetch the pie...

The day started with Node. A security advisory came in about a Brotli bug that could let someone run code remotely, and the fix was a new Node version. So I moved the whole stack up to twenty-four point twenty-two point one. The session server needed a small change along the way. It dropped one old package and moved to the second version of geoip-lite. Write with questions and feedback: mail@aesth...

Most of today went into Menu Band, the little instrument that lives in the Mac menu bar. The singer got a lot of attention. It's a face that fills the screen, and it sings along with whatever phrase you give it. Before today, if you stopped it or relaunched the app, the prepared takes were gone. Now they stay. The mouth follows the phrase more closely, and the captions show one word at a time...

Most of today went into Menu Band and the space bar. In the morning, Space hammered by default. A little rate readout showed how fast it was going, and the up and down arrows steered it. I also made the sidechain let go between hits, so the sound could breathe a bit. By afternoon I had changed my mind about the whole thing. Space now holds a mode, either reverse or hammer, and while you hold it th...

Most of today went to the sitemap, and it was mostly me changing my mind. First I moved the pieces out into their own file and let the generator own the main one. Then I put everything back into one file. Then I split them again, with robots dot text pointing at both. Two of those commits ended up reverting each other. The machine-manifest check only wants the eight discovery pages, so that's...

Most of today went to Aesel. There's a pencil donkey on the homepage, and for a while it had five legs. I fixed that. It has four now, and it's colored pencil, and I retook the screenshots in isolation so none of them show leftovers from another session. The homepage also says what Aesel is, in plain words, which it hadn't before. Underneath that, Aesel learned to run p5 pieces and...

Most of today went into Aesel. I spent the morning moving its prompt text out of the code and into plain markdown files, one per harness section. After that, sync-harness could compile any harness directory I pointed it at. Then I wrote a piece runner, so ac run takes a single task under a single harness and writes down what happened. Refine came after that. It runs the Harness² loop over whatever...

Most of today went into Menu Band, and most of that was audio that kept misbehaving when an audio interface came or went. I plugged one in, unplugged it, plugged it back in, and the sound would come back wrong, or not at all. So I stopped the automatic resets. Now when an interface returns, the app rebuilds once and keeps the device polling off the main thread. If the hardware clock faults, it not...

Most of today went into getting a beach ball to show up on the Xbox. It's a raycast beach ball, drawn with shaders, and it took two package numbers to get it there. The first one carried the ball. The second one carried the room bridge on the console. Then the build lane started failing, because parts of it still read the private game source. So I spent a stretch of the afternoon teaching the...

Most of the day went into fireflies. They started small , an ink outline, a white core, a comic drop shadow so they sit on the badge like everything else. Then they got restless. Lanes beside the collapsed chip started flying loose as fireflies, and a little lane orrery turned next to it. On my own Mac the fireflies show up in agent colors, while the rest of the fleet drifts around as specks. Busy...

I spent part of today looking at a build oven that was quietly setting itself on fire. A preflight docker system prune step had been wiping the native build cache before every build, so I pulled it. Then I spent the rest of the day putting something smarter back in its place , keep dangling images and build cache for a week, cap the cache by size, let the oskiewar bundle inputs into the build cont...

I spent a chunk of today building choir, a new room I'm making for art-world people. It started as a scaffold and by the afternoon it had a face , Fía drew a C mark for it, and I set her hand-drawn logo large at the head of the room so it's the first thing you see walking in. I dressed the whole thing like a legal pad on a classic desktop, with her daisy drawn into the corner, and then t...

Spent a chunk of the day on Menu Band for Windows, porting the Mac menu-bar piano over key by key. The piano voice came across from the Swift source, the Salamander grand, as program one. Then the whistle, the GM waveguide whistle holding its sustain quiet at minus fifty-five decibels, as program seventy-eight. Then a percussion engine written fresh in C, a twelve-drum kit and a touchpad membrane...

I spent a chunk of today inside a corridor , a KidLisp piece I use to test the three-dimensional layer. It got a light model and a depth buffer, bricks turned into faces, mortar running along the walls, and I walked it with an Xbox controller, the sticks moving the eye down the hallway while the pad names finally lined up the way the console actually spells them. The hard part was keeping it hones...

I spent a chunk of today inside menuband, building out instruments one by one. The whistle was the one that mattered most , I got it so the jitter, the vibrato, and the breath all move together across a held note instead of as separate layers fighting each other, so it finally sounds like one throat instead of three effects stacked up. Alongside it I shipped a TrackDrum kit, hat on the L key, snar...