blog.lmorchard.com

It's all spinning wheels & self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Minnaloushe in cat jail (2026 Week 27)

TL;DR: This week saw Minnaloushe's 'cat jail' reintroduction process, deep dives into live-coding music with strudel.cc (including a cover!), and a major overhaul of the starnet project's audio engine and core mechanics. Plus, reflections on the web's evolution, LLMs, and other miscellanea.

Minnaloushe in cat jail

Minnaloushe has been in cat jail - i.e. behind a tall pet gate, confined to my office. We're hoping to reboot the introduction process that resulted in ass-kicking and bloodletting almost a month ago. It's been surprisingly calm so far, with Cosmo still showing a desire to be friends. We're hoping the gate is tall enough to prevent any escapes, even from a big cat like Minnaloushe.

A black cat sits behind a tall pet gate in a doorway, looking out from a lit room into the dark.
A black cat sits on a wooden floor behind the bars of a white pet gate.

A black cat on a wood floor looks through a white baby gate at two other cats on the other side.

A black cat lies on a wood floor, separated by a white baby gate from a light-colored cat in a doorway.

A black cat and a white-and-ginger cat face each other through a white pet gate on a wooden floor.

A high-angle, first-person view of a black cat resting on a person's lap while they sit at a desk. The cat's paws are flopped over either side of the person's knee

An overhead view of a black cat stretching out comfortably across a person's lap. The cats paws are stretched out into the air doing biscuits

Live-Coding Music with Strudel.cc

I've been really digging into strudel.cc, a live-coding music environment, finding it clicks with my brain in a way old-school trackers used to.

I spent some time throwing together a cover of the intro to "Stripdown" by Agent Side Grinder, which has been stuck in my head for weeks. You can check out my strudel.cc link and listen to my take. The original track is also worth a listen, here.

Starnet Tinkering

That strudel.cc noodling led me down a further rabbit hole: Turns out, it's not too hard to embed Strudel as a library in your own project and Starnet was looking for a music & audio engine.

I'd had an initial version of an audio engine working with Tone.js, but I realized that I was starting to reinvent all kinds of wheels. So, I went from a kind of "hey claude, I wonder if we could..." session and ended with a complete overhaul of the audio engine.

I'm not sure if this game will ever really get to a point where it's worth making much noise about (hah, get it, sound) but I'm having some fun finally hacking on this idea I've had for years.

Miscellanea

  • Kind of along the same vein as strudel.cc, I found a visual livecoding tool made in Picotron called Magpie.

  • My 15-year-old Audio-Technica ATH-M30 headphones are still going strong, despite a cat-nibbled cable. I'm almost daring it to fail now.

    A frayed black electrical cord with exposed copper wires on a wooden surface.

  • I want this t-shirt from the band ACTORS, but it kinda reminds me of the Freejack movie poster.

    Movie poster for "Freejack" featuring the heads of Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger, and Anthony Hopkins over a futuristic blue grid.

    A black t-shirt with a pink and blue graphic for the band "Actors" and the text "Our Love Will Live Forever." Features the heads of the band over a distorted blue grid, kinda like the Freejack poster

  • Neat article on crows and their relationship with humans from Audubon - I still kind of like to think I can be friends with crows.

  • A dive into web history with "The Descent — What Happened to the Frontend While You Weren't Watching" - from HTML to jQuery to React to whatever this mess is that we're trying to deploy in 2026.

  • Musing on the "Legibility of Effort" in the age of LLMs - and how just because something looks like it took care & effort doesn't mean it benefitted from either, and so may not be worth your time & attention.

  • A link to sneakerweb, a CLI tool for browsing and maintaining a local collection of "sneakerwebsites." It's like a pocket-universe web where you have to actually, like, meet people in the real world to exchange packets.

  • A recreation and modernization of the original web forum, WIT (W3 Interactive Talk), dating back to June 1994.

  • OpenTools / OpenPrinter, aiming for a repairable, compact, and robust printer design.

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