Indiscipline

ReflectorTK: A Leaner GUI for Reflector (Arch/EndeavourOS mirror manager)

Sat, 31 May 2025 10:00:00 +0300

If you’re an EndeavourOS user and were ever surprised why your system update is suddenly pulling in a ~126 MB webkit2gtk-4.1 package that nothing you consciously installed seems to use, then this is for you. I found myself annoyed by this particular dependency enough to rewrite reflector-simple, the GUI for reflector shipped with EndeavourOS. Even though I’m generally comfortable using reflector from the command line, it was interesting to see how much the Python implementation would differ from its Bash counterpart.

The result is ReflectorTK, a straightforward graphical interface for configuring and running reflector to update your Arch Linux mirrorlist. It’s designed as a Tkinter-based drop-in replacement for reflector-simple.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:32:43 +0400

An attempt of a properly styled animated badge prompted by @jsiepkes’s comment on HN:

base64-encoded image

<img src="data:image/gif;base64,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">

Full quote by George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Catalay: automatic catalogue layouts for InDesign made declaratively, slightly smart

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:05:44 +0500

This is yet another release post, this time for Catalay — a free software suite designed to automate the layout of image catalogues made with Adobe InDesign, using simple, declarative, human readable and editable configuration files in TOML or YAML formats as input. The main feature is not just automatically laying out the images in a grid, but adapting the grid layout itself. Catalay preserves the size relationship between different groups of items on each page, scaling them appropriately, while utilizing the page as efficiently as possible given the constraints.

The Mediocre Human Glue: generalists in the age of LLMs

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:00:00 +0300

When it comes to tech, I view myself a “generalist”: a person not excelling at anything specifically, but striving to grasp a wide spectrum of different things and looking at a general picture. Seeing the progress of the large language models, I believe people like me are going to be totally wiped out. Soon. Or, perhaps the 95% will, and the rest will be those lucky ones who managed to fight their way up to the not-exactly-cushy but better-than-totally-unskilled jobs of the AI-operators: be good enough to make a suitable prompt, check the results and stitch them together. It was “the glue” code, now it’s the glue humans.

Rearchiver: prepare your finished Reaper projects for storage

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:26:16 +0500

This is a release post for Rearchiver — a little command line program for preparing your Reaper projects for archiving.

Rearchiver:

Scans the project file for all used WAV files
Finds them in the project directory and converts to FLAC
Changes the links to the successfully converted source files in the RPP file accordingly
Optionally deletes processed source files and their .reapeaks
Outputs the corrected project file

It’s a Free Software (GPLv3) program written in Nim.

About

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 22:00:00 +0300

Hi! My name is Kirill and this is my blog. Isn’t it quite OK-ish?

Sound

I run a studio. Let’s work on your music! thirdhemisphere.studio
I consult on recording and sound processing and can help you with your streaming or podcast.

Music

Check out my band The Grand Astoria, it rocks.
If you don’t mind mellower stuff in a foreign language, here’s my other band: Дом Гнева.
The name translates to “House of Wrath” and the music sounds nothing like it.
And here’s my own bandcamp page: https://thepipedreamsband.bandcamp.com

Guitar

If you’re an advanced guitar player, take a look at this book by Scott McGill which I had the privilege to help preparing: Nova Musica Compendium: Jazz Guitar Studies with Dennis Sandole

Tetronimia: that game of falling blocky thingies

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:08:59 +0300

This is a release announcement for Tetronimia: an implementation of a famous game mechanic for you terminal written in Nim.

Voice recording and processing for talks, streaming and conferencing. The Reference.

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:47:58 +0300

Just in a couple of days one of the biggest software events FOSDEM 2021 will take place, for the first time completely online. Hundreds of talks will originate from behind laptops, phones and workstations. Realization of this fact was the last link in the long chain of events leading to me writing this reference. Being a sound engineer by trade I, presumptuously, hope to attract attention of the speakers-to-be to the sound quality of their presentations. However, I tried to do my best to compile and present a generally useful reference, not a dumbed down step-by-step guide doomed to be rendered inapplicable by slightest variation of circumstances.

#mixing:matrix.org

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 21:29:41 +0300

I’ve drawn a bitching logo for #mixing:matrix.org room. There’s so few people there yet I needed to share somewhere else.

I rarely dig my own ideas but this came together nicely.

Join the chat, it’s chill.

Movie-Thumbnailer. Make wallpapers from your favorite movies for all your devices.

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:48:37 +0300

This year is something special! As you’re probably being a witness of, most of the humanity is stuck on self-isolation or even in strict quarantine, which led to unprecedented media consumption. Streaming services usage spiked so high Netflix had to cut their quality to unload their servers. People binge on movies and series and I’m not an exception here, finally watching some classics from the bucket list. This situation reminded me of an idea I’d spotted a couple of years ago. Someone made a beautiful wallpaper from the “cuts” of the “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which is one of my all time favorite movies. Camera work and production design is second to none there, so every frame is really a painting.

I had to try the same idea with other movies and it was clear that doing it manually is not the way to go.
Enter movie-thumbnailer — command line “glue” for ffmpeg and ImageMagick which generates wallpaper from video files laying out a grid of frames with scene changes.

Click for spoilers!

ffmpeg-loudnorm-helper - simplify ffmpeg loudness normalization workflow

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:40:07 +0300

Post updated for v0.2.0 release at 2023-04-18

ffmpeg-loudnorm-helper is a new ultra-simple helper utility for performing loudness normalization using ffmpeg’s loudnorm audio filter. This awesome filter provides EBU R128 loudness normalization, but it requires two passes to linearly normalize audio, measuring input file on the first pass. The only thing ffmpeg-loudnorm-helper does, is it automates that first pass and formats a complete copy-pasteable string of loudnorm settings for the second pass.

Elvish: the looks

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 16:00:00 +0300

Once you hear there’s a new Unix shell on the block, what do you do? Probably, glance over syntax and try it in your VM. But when this new shell is called Elvish you do this:

(Hover over to see)

“Friendly and expressive”, indeed.

zrtstr - detect & eliminate faux-stereo WAVs

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 14:27:37 +0300

zrtstr is a small command line application for detecting faux-stereo WAV-files, that is, files with two identical channels that should have been saved as mono. Such files are sometimes generated by some audio-editing software and DAWs (I’m looking at you, old Cubase 5). Gotten tired of receiving such files from clients for mixing, as they are using twice the necessary space and require twice the processing power, I decided to deal with this nuisance once and for all. zrtstr is a cross-platform application which runs very fast, thanks to being written in Rust.

“Before” and “after” waveforms:

Download Youtube videos easily. Guide for the "normal" people.

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 15:59:03 +0300

Update: This tutorial is out-of-date.

Since release of Firefox Quantum and subsequent changes to the extension API, launching external commands from Firefox requre installing some additional software, since WebExtensions have no OS level access. If you’re not opposed to this idea, you can still adapt the following instruction to the new WebExtension addons, such as Open With or Send To External Media Player.

Let’s integrate the best tool for downloading YouTube videos Youtube-dl with Firefox for the most pleasant downloading experience! Written for Windows users, as they are usually the ones that need the following instructions.

First, the motive behind this post. Being a musician, one of the actions I might perform multiple times in a day is downloading videos from YouTube. Being able to play them in my player of choice (mpv for now) is a huge convenience in case I need to transcribe some musical phrase, or speed some particularly slow speaker up by an arbitrary amount and having the video on my HDD gives me a slight sense of tranquility and confidence. In the past years people tried every accessible way to get the videos from YT with as little hassle as possible. Not all of these means worked good, and some of the suggestions in the Internet were, in fact, malicious, putting it mildly. As always, community to the rescue. Enter Youtube-dl!

ReaScript: MIDI_Compress_By_Pitch

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 15:39:48 +0300

Reaper is a digital audio workstation that gained a lot of devoted followers since its appearance. What is special about Reaper, apart from its enormous functionality and customizability, is two things: Community and Extensibility. You can check the former on Reaper forums, which is a thriving place, but the latter is achieved via user-coded scripts and open API. Since I’ve started using Reaper as my main DAW, the temptation grew. Then finally a need for a function that wasn’t present in Reaper has arisen.

Architect logo redesign

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 18:00:00 +0300

Architect Linux is an installer for the glorious Arch linux. It is distributed as a live-cd ISO, which boots into pseudo-graphical mode and allows installing Arch via comprehensible script which is updated prior to installation from Architect github-repo.

Hello World!

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 16:55:40 +0300

Everyone and their dog has a blog. Now me too.

Donate

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000