Unfucking audio with "AI"

Thursday February 20 2025, 1434 words — Using machine learning to unfuck broken audio recordings.
Filed under: Software, Machine Learning, Audio

Ok, I fucking hate “AI” and the corporate horse it rode in on. Machine learning though? I guess that’s kinda useful?!

I’ve been helping out my friends at KKTO with their project Minute/Year for almost a decade now and a while ago we had run into a peculiar problem. I spent the last few days finally cleaning up the mess it caused and I thought I’d write up what I’ve done cause I’m pretty proud of the result.

In 2023 an audio interface had failed and corrupted a whole bunch of our daily recordings in a subtle yet annoying way. It took us a few days to realize what had happened at which point we power cycled the audio interface and everything went back to normal but it left us with a bunch of corrupted recordings that needed to be fixed.

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Raspberry Pi Media Player

Thursday October 10 2024, 1832 words — Building a minimal Raspberry Pi based audio and video player for exhibitions.
Filed under: Software

A pretty common task for exhibitions I support is to have some kind of tiny unobtrusive media player box that can play a bunch of video or audio files on loop for anything from a small listening station with some headphones to a 4k projector showing a feature video.

Since this has come up again and again for me and I’ve had multiple different versions of a setup like this for which I’ve somehow managed to loose all the source files I’ve decided to write this blog post in the hopes that when I have to do this again I’ll actually remember how I did it this time.

I’m not gonna go into every detail here, like how to set up systemd services, but if you want to take a closer look all the scripts and files are available for download at the end of the article.

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Making cyanotype glass plates

Monday April 15 2024, 1757 words — A simple gelatin free and vegan process for making cyanotypes on glass!
Filed under: Cyanotype, Photography

Cyanotypes are cool! But you know what’s even cooler? Making cyanotype negatives on glass plates directly in camera!

As I’ve talked about in a previous article I’ve developed a fairly reliable process to create in-camera cyanotype negatives on agar coated glass plates. They not only look great but also have a much higher resolution since they don’t have the rough structure inherent in paper negatives. On top of that having a negative on a transparent backing opens up the possibility of using it to directly make positive prints from it, which is very exciting.

Let’s talk about my process for making them!

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Investigating Cyanotype Developer Absorption

Sunday November 5 2023, 1994 words — Or, why *are* those damn things so slow?!
Filed under: Cyanotype, Photography, Chemistry

If you’ve read my previous article you know that there were some loose ends I was meaning to tie up using good old science, specifically the significant loss in sensitivity observed when mixing the classic potassium ferricyanide “developer” with your ammonium ferric citrate or ferric ammonium oxalate.

So let’s do that!

A quick recap

Before we get into it, a quick recap of how the “classic” cyanotype process and formula works!

We usually start out with two compounds, ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferricyanide which get dissolved in water and brushed or otherwise coated onto some kind of substrate, usually paper.

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Making better cyanotypes

Friday August 11 2023, updated: Sunday November 5 2023, 4041 words — Bringing 19th century photography into the 21st century. Maybe.
Filed under: Cyanotype, Photography, Chemistry

Hi!

This blog post is roughly based on a short talk I gave at HFG Karlsruhe early this year and this is my attempt to finally expand on it a little and make the contents publicly available. It’s not really a tutorial on how to actually make cyanotypes, but more of a general overview of different techniques.

I’ve spent the last 8 years working with cyanotype and have developed some stuff that I think could help make other people’s cyanotypes better. Maybe.

I mean, what even is “better”?

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