How to Buy Property in New York City
So, it's come to this. You're thinking about purchasing real estate in New York City.
Peter Sobot's Blog
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Patching an Embedded OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
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Machine Learning for Drummers
TL;DR: In this post, I build an app that classifies whether an audio sample is a kick drum, snare drum, or other drum sample with 87% accuracy using 🎉machine learning. 🎉
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Echo Dot vs. Chromecast Audio: An Evaluation
I recently came into possession of both an Amazon Echo Dot and a Google Chromecast Audio, two devices that can both stream music to speakers. While the Echo Dot includes voice control features and...
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Debugging an Empty Spam Email
Despite the best efforts of modern spam filters, we all still receive spam once in a while. When I see a spam email pop up in my main inbox, I often wonder what magic the spammer has discovered that...
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The Cost of Waterloo Software Engineering
This past June, I graduated from the University of Waterloo's Software Engineering program. After 5 long and difficult years, I'm extremely proud to say that I'm a Waterloo grad, and very proud of my...
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The Holiday Party Hack
For this year's holiday party at The Working Group, I helped build something special to spice up the party - a live, music-synced slideshow of the evening, powered by a nearby photo booth. Take a...
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The Architecture of an Infinite Stream of Music
Nearly a year ago, I launched forever.fm - a free online radio station that seamlessly beat matches its songs together into a never-ending stream. At launch, it was hugely popular - with hundreds of...
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Co-Working at The Working Group
Early in my academic career at the University of Waterloo, I was fortunate enough to land a co-op placement at The Working Group. Back then, the team was just over a dozen people. We were taking on...
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Shared State and Customer Confusion
Let's go back to the good old days of writing web applications in PHP for a paragraph or two. When running PHP under Apache or nginx, every HTTP request resulted in a clean interpreter with...
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Pipes and Filters
Pipelines are an extremely useful (and surprisingly underused) architectural pattern in modern software engineering. The concept of using pipes and filters) to control the flow of data through...
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Dangerously Convenient APIs
The modern trend of providing an API for everything is wonderful. With minimal effort, any developer with an internet connection can programmatically access a wealth of data and powerful...
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Interns are Leading the Way
I attend the University of Waterloo, one of Canada's most widely-known engineering schools. Waterloo is famous for a system they call co-op - a regimen of paid internships of 4-8 months in duration...
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Emergency Bandwidth Distribution
Late last week, I officially launched [forever.fm][1], an infinite, beatmatched radio stream powered by SoundCloud. This morning, I was happy to discover that it had been featured in [Hack A Day][2]...
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Introducing forever.fm
I'm very proud to announce the launch of my latest project - forever.fm, an automatic, infinite online DJ. Forever.fm is a beatmatched stream of the hottest tracks from SoundCloud, mixed together to...
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Rewriting in C++ for Fun, Speed and Masochism
A couple months ago, I posted [a blog post explaining my use for low-quality smartphone photos][1]. It involved a smart image cropping algorithm written by [Michael Macias][2], using ImageMagick and...
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The Ubiquitous Capture Device
Every so often, I find myself in a camera store, gawking at beautiful, expensive cameras and lenses. DSLRs have dropped in price, and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras (also known as [micro...
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Using Eight Cores (incorrectly) with Python
One of my web apps, [The Wub Machine][1], is very computationally expensive. Audio decoding, processing, encoding, and streaming, all in Python. Naturally, my first instinct was to turn to the...
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A Site For Dinner
I like to make small, single-serving sites - frivolous sites with only one page, and one purpose. They're intended to be dead-simple to use, fun to play with, and somewhat silly. I've made a...
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Startups: Bands for Hackers
Growing up as a young musician in suburbia, I fantasized about being in a band: playing music in front of thousands of people, signing a record contract, enjoying the successes (and excesses) of...
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A Use for Smartphone Photos
As a smartphone user, I take a lot of photos. Since I bought an iPhone 4 nearly two years ago, I've taken just over 6,000 photos with it. 47GB of memories. On average, 10 photos per day, every day,...
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Software, Art, Music and Games
I am a software engineering student. The exact definition of that varies among my classmates and professors. Some say that it implies an ability to write software. Others argue that it requires a...
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The middle ground between form and function
I've noticed a distinct trend in all of my recent work. Not all of it is useful, and not all of it is feature-complete - but it all places a lot of importance on form over function. Let me give an...
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More Lessons from The Wub Machine
Four months ago, I released the Wub Machine, an online Dubstep remixing web app. It hit Reddit for a couple days, got popular on 4chan, and has since remixed nearly 24,000 songs. About a month ago,...
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The Wub Machine, Revisited
[The Wub Machine][1] was a great little auto-remixer project - some audio hackery in Python to make a neat script. Unfortunately, I can probably count on one hand the number of people who actually...
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A Better Music Workflow?
I produce a lot of music.
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Pushed to my Pocket
As soon as I got my shiny new iPhone about six months ago, I set up instant Push email. This remarkably useful feature has really changed the way I use my email accounts and respond to email. It's...
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What a difference four months makes...
My second year of University has been wildly more productive and interesting than my first, by far. First year taught me how to try to pass exams, while second year gave me material I wanted to know,...
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Macbook & Two Hard Drives
I have a lot of media on my laptop. Roughly 140GB of music, 40GB of photos, 40GB of games, video and other random stuff on my internal drive alone.
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OhLife and Online Privacy
[OhLife][1] is a brilliant site that emails you nightly and lets you keep a journal through email. I've been using the site for many months now, and it's been immensely useful in spurring me to keep...
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Live Status Updates with PHP
If you have a personal website, and you use Twitter, there's a chance you already have a Twitter widget embedded in your site. Most people will opt for the default Twitter-provided (Javascript-based)...