Tools

Once I was a freelance (and sometimes not so freelance) consultant type guy, now I’m retired (doing music and helping Marcie with Prairie Haven).  Always building tools for myself.  Here they are, for your viewing enjoyment. Feel free to use/share them.

Musical Tools

A Pretty Good Jacktrip Toolkit — This is the home of my project to document how to configure a Jacktrip server with a graphical user interface on an inexpensive Linode cloud server. The server supports graphical tools such as QjackCtl (for audio routing) and the Ardour DAW (for mixing and recording sessions as well as providing customized monitoring to participants). An inexpensive way to learn and experiment.

Routing Jacktrip audio with Loopback — Here’s a step-by-step post about routing Jacktrip audio using Loopback software on a Mac.  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

Configuring, starting and running a multi-person Jacktrip session with per-person mixing — This post is intended for several audiences. It’s a checklist for me when I want to host several people in a multi-client Jacktrip session and provide them with mixing, both to the final feed and among themselves. It attempts to be clear enough that it might provide an example for others. And it’s a demonstration of many aspects of this approach that could be improved with revisions to software and hardware

Extended Frequency to Note Conversion chart — a chart that matches frequency (pitch) with musical notes on the keyboard.  Most such charts stop at the end of the piano keyboard (C8).  This one goes to A11 (56,320 Hz) which is way beyond human hearing.  I needed it for a bird call to MIDI project.

Management Tools

Mike’s Pretty Good Project Definition Worksheet — a series of questions you can answer when you are chartering a project. A good project charter will keep you out of all kinds of trouble.

Mike’s Pretty Good Business Planning and Strategy Gizmo — I used to use this simple Powerpoint deck to help organizations answer the three basic business-planning questions… “Where are we now?”, “Where are we going?” and “How will we get there?”  Click HERE for the Power Point version and HERE for the PDF version.

Mike’s Pretty Good Instant CIO Checklist Gizmo — Here’s is a one-pager I used when I was asked to come in and give the IS shop a quick once-over-lightly looksee.

Mike’s Pretty Good Information Architecture — my view of how info-stuff used to fit together.   Definitely dated — early ’90s

Mike’s Pretty Good Forced-Pair Ranking Worksheet — An Excel spreadsheet that can be used to rank up to twelve items.  People compare each item with each of the others (in pairs) and pick which of the pair they prefer.  It tallies their choices and identifies their ranking.

Mike’s Pretty Good Status-report Template — good for small to mid-sized projects that just need a gentle tapping sound to keep them on track.  The only rule is that if one of the questions across the top gets a “yes” answer, there needs to be an explanation in “Issues and Concerns” at the bottom.  One copy of this spreadsheet, administered weekly, usually does the trick.  Takes about 5 minutes to fill out.

Tools by others (aka favorite links)

How To Get Rich Without Getting Lucky – epic tweetstorm that is the foundation for an even-more-epic series of podcasts (a link to it is at the end).  A nice companion to Warren Buffet’s Ovarian Lottery.