Chandler Swift
About
I’m a lifelong hacker (the good kind!). My parents have a story they like to tell at my expense: At just a few years old, I was interested enough in my Dad’s laptop brought home from work one evening to somehow manage to change the operating system language into German. Of course, I vehemently deny everything. The interest in computers has stayed, though I like to think I require a bit less supervision now, and I like to tinker with hardware and software everything in between. Things I like include C and Go and Linux and Assembly and MIDI and abusing hardware and…! Things I don’t like include: CSS. I run this software on this OS on this hardware. Ask me about my latest project!
As a musician I’m wrapping up a stint as the organist/pianist/accompanist at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Duluth, MN, and another as an accompanist for the Lake Superior Youth Chorus. When I’m in Duluth, I often play for Jazz at Blush on Monday nights (and if you play an instrument, please come join us!). I especially enjoy playing in small ensembles and with other people as much as I can.
In my free time, I try to remain active with my Boy Scout troop (of which I am an Eagle Scout), especially on outdoor activities. I enjoy reading science fiction, though I don’t have as much time for it as I might like. I appreciate XKCD comics, especially about technology.
Blog
Oct 2021 Hacking together a workaround for Audio issues
I’ve had a longstanding issue somewhere in my system’s config where when I adjust my system volume using the hardware wheel, the left and right channels get out of sync. It’s certainly something I can work around, but it’s frustrating to have to either have to turn the volume all the way down, which resynchronizes the channels, or to open alsamixer or similar and manually adjust the right and left channels to match.Aug 2021 Retrieving Kwik Trip Gas Prices
Kwik Trip (a popular gas station in the MN-WI-IA area, if you’re not from the Midwest) has an API to display their fuel prices, among other things. Here’s a short Python program to retrieve pricing of nearby stores.
May 2021 Setting up an ODROID-HC4 as a NAS
I bought a new NAS, a Hardkernel ODROID-HC4! It’s a real upgrade. Before: 6C/12T Xeon processor; After: 4C/4T ARM processor. Before: 12GB ECC RAM, After: 4GB RAM. Before: 6 HDD slots/SATA ports; After: 2. But most importantly:
Apr 2021 Data mining my Spotify history
I have a few songs I listen to very frequently. Enough that I wonder, “Does the amount I stream this song have a noticeable effect on the song’s popularity?” It turns out, yes, there are at least a handful of songs for which that is the case.
