Reconciliator November 21, 2020
For the past ten years I've been using the same spreadsheet to keep my checkbook balanced because I found
it less offensive than a lot of the apps on the App Store for doing so. I didn't want to have to make an
account. I didn't want to pay for a service. I just wanted a quick and easy way to know how much money
I had including any pending transactions I had going on.
Anyhow, I got bored and made an app to do this. It's called Reconciliator. Check it out.
Earthquake April 17, 2019
At some point, for a job interview, I needed to create a small web-app that could be anything
I wanted, so long as it used a particular earthquake data API provided by the USGS. The couple of
obvious options from that point on would be to either: let the user look through a list of these earthquakes
and display them in a nice way, or perhaps to display them in some interesting on a map. Rather than do the
obvious and boring thing I decided it would be a lot more fun to create something that would allow the
listener to "hear" the earthquake data.
To this end, I originally used the whole screen with a black background and instead of
displaying a map, the user would have to move their mouse around on the screen. The cursor offset within
the screen would then be mapped to a coordinate pair. Then, based on the coordinates and the coordinates
of the earthquakes in the USGS data, a simple software synthesizer implemented using the WebAudio API
creates different types of sound. Based on the number of earthquakes near the cursor and their magnitude, a
low
frequency oscillator is modulated, which in turn modules a sine wave generator and produces an
interesting shaking effect.
While the spherical geometry is not implemented correctly (distance calculations do not
consider their units properly nor do they take into account the actual shape of the earth), I think it
is an interesting toy. Check it our here if you'd like.