My nifty new BirdOMatic bioacoustic data analysis system is up and running!  To celebrate, I asked ChatGPT to SWAG how long my Apple II would have taken to analyze the bioacoustic audio data.  Pretty much fun.  Scroll to the bottom for the punchline….

By the way, ChatGPT had to be coaxed through this a little bit.  It got the calculation of the compute ratio between the Apple II and the Mac Mini wrong by a factor of a thousand (those darn millions and billions…) the first time through.  You probably don’t want ChatGPT to reconcile your checkbook without looking over its shoulder.

Here’s the prompt to ChatGPT:

compare the computation, memory and disk specifications of my current 2024 Mac Mini (M4 processor, 24 gb RAM memory, 80TB of disk) with my Apple II (purchased new around 1980, 48 kB RAM memory, 16 kB language card).

then ignore the many impossibilities and estimate the approximate time it would take the Apple II to process a one hour WAV file of bird calls — a process that takes about 4 seconds on the Mac Mini.

then note that i have about 40,000 audio files in the dataset. using the prior estimates, extrapolate how long both computers would take to process all the files.

Here’s the response:

1. Hardware comparison

Computation

Compute ratio (order of magnitude):

~100 billion×  10 million x more computational power for the Mac mini (ChatGPT goofed on this one)
(very conservative for signal processing workloads)

Memory

Ratio:

~400,000× more RAM

Disk / Storage

Ratio:

~570 million× more storage

2. Single-file processing time

Given

• 1-hour WAV file
• Mac mini time: ~4 seconds
• Ignore all practical impossibilities for the Apple II

Extrapolated Apple II time

Using the ~10,000,000 × compute gap:

4 seconds × 10,000,000
= 40,000,000 seconds

Convert to years:

40,000,000 ÷ 31,536,000 ≈ 1.275 years

🐦 Apple II: ~12–13 years per file

3. Dataset-wide extrapolation (40,000 files)

Mac mini

40,000 × 4 s = 160,000 s

Conversions:

• ≈ 44.4 hours
• ≈ 1.85 days

✅ Mac mini total time: ~2 days

Apple II

1.27 years/file × 40,000 files
≈ 508,000 years

🦖 Apple II total time: ~500 thousand years

4. Final summary

5. Perspective

One weekend on your Mac mini equals half a million years on an Apple II.

I made a video version of this that you can watch here:

But I like this kinda thing as a blog post, so here is is.  Click on the pictures to embiggen them.

It starts out with the build (and takes a detour into revising the assembly the Vevor rake I bought to sit in my quick attach 3 point hitch setup). Continue reading →

Got this in the mail today.  It turns out this is a tradition here in Wisconsin when there’s a tight election like the one for a critical Supreme Court justice.  Since the guy who publishes it is shy and doesn’t include any information about himself, here’s a link to help you out.  Summary: it’s fake.

Catholic leaders say Wisconsin Catholic Tribune is political mail not authorized by the church

And, since he doesn’t have any copyright notices in his propaganda, here’s the whole thing.  Thanks for all your help you jerk. Continue reading →

Huh!  Didn’t realize I published this one….

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Here’s a summary of an analysis I did to understand the impact on me (as a grid-connected solar member) of a recent change in rates at the electric coop (Riverland Energy Cooperative) that I belong to.

My conclusion in a nutshell: I accept the new rates as they stand.  They seem fairer to coop members as a whole and I’m happy to carry the impact that my solar panels have on our shared infrastructure. 

I looked at three rate-change puzzlers: Demand Charge, Annual to Monthly True-Up and Rate of Return.  The rest of this post goes through them at a high level, and there’s an 18-minute video at the end that goes into more detail.

UPDATE: There is a new version of the spreadsheet and an additional video on how to use it at the very end of this post.

Continue reading →

A quick post about getting X/Y Pal connected between an iPhone 15 and an M1 Mac Ultra.

Connecting over the wire (USB in the documentation) didn’t work, but using a Network MIDI connection did — with the advantage of not having to be tethered to the Mac.  Here’s a 45 second video that shows the following steps:
Continue reading →

Document wish list:

• NTIA funding – both power increase and Bedford St. move
• CPB-qualification
• Bedford St. deal
• Board minutes from that period

Continue reading →

Distractions led me to falling way behind on these two chores and I had to relearn a lot of stuff.  So here’s a list of notes to aid my failing memory. Continue reading →

Scratchpad — reminding myself of the steps needed to remove the pulley and key in order to drop the blade hub out of the mower.  Really boring, don’t read any further..

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This is really fast/early draft stuff.

The puzzler:  Building a 20-person mix-delete audio routing template in my Pretty Good Jacktrip Toolkit crashes (moderately-sized) Linode servers.  They seem to crash when automating large numbers of Jack-connection adds or deletes — issuing a delete-all with JMESS for example.

The hypothesis: Jack works OK, it’s the number of connections per endpoint that’s causing the trouble.

The idea to get around this (so far): split the mix-minus routing in two by putting players in sections.

Continue reading →

Clogged sandpaper leading to burns in the wood has always been a big problem with my PerformaX (JET) 16-32 drum sander.  I’m hopeful that this is the fix — replacing the cover to provide a connection for a 4″ dust collection hose (from the current model) rather than the original one which connected a 2.5″ hose.  Here are the pictures — which started just before COVID and end…  today, almost a year and a half later.

Starting point — March 1st, 2020 — the old cover

The new cover arrives – March 7 2020

Continue reading →

UPDATE: September 2023

This post is for a person using command-line connection to Jacktrip and Qjackctl to manage Jack (which is the way we did it back in March of 2021).  It creates a single virtual device to route audio to and from Jacktrip.  This makes Qjackctl a lot easier to manage by providing a single interface that can be used for both input and output.

These days JackTrip has a terrific graphic user interface (GUI) that can manage audio input and output devices directly through RT Audio (eliminating the need to use Qjackctl).  In that case I would suggest creating a separate Loopback devices for audio being sent to Jacktrip and audio being received from Jacktrip.  It’s much easier to keep things straight and just as flexible.

Here’s a step-by-step post about routing Jacktrip audio using Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback software.  Loopback is a for-money successor to Soundflower and similar to BlackHole.  I like it because it is more visual and does more stuff.

The goal of this post is to get a person with a 2×2 interface going with a setup that will let them join a Jacktrip session reliably, without having to “rewire” things each time.  It also covers things like routing audio into and out of other audio software like Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Max and Zoom.

Alas, this is for Mac folks only.  Windows audio puzzles me.  I don’t have a clue how to do this on a Windows machine.

There are links to short videos that “animate” each of these steps and examples.   Click on the pictures to embiggify and read them.

Step 0: Assumptions – Click here for video
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Here’s the rig that that Marcie uses to take pictures of things at microscope scale.  We took a long journey through a lot of attempts that were unsatisfactory — perhaps this post will save you some steps.

Here’s a picture of the whole setup (click on the photos to embiggen).

Here’s the recipe: Continue reading →