Advanced Mortgage Calculator

 

 

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After my first post about a simpler mortgage calculator now I developed a more advanced one, especially designed to compare different mortgages, and calculate which one lets you pay less interest over time.

The app can be found here

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Compared to the last tool, which just calculated the total interests and the installment amount, this app offers these other features:

  • charts of the installments over time
  • capability to add different types of events:
    • interest rate change
    • time renegotiation
    • amortization on time
    • amortization on installment amount

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Adding events makes this tool extremely versatile and allows for simulating complex scenarios. You can compare a 10 year mortgage with a 20 years one in which you reduce the time amortizations with annual cash deposits, or a combination of different interest rates which may happen in some situations. The charts are updated automatically, and there is a comparison chart to make it easy to compare the two mortgages over time, focusing on the interest amount paid.

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Plani3D – Planimetry/map to 3D model

In the last days I’ve been working on this helper software to make it easy to turn a planimetry of a house into a simple 3D model to make it easy to visualize it or any modification you would want to make.

 

plani3deditor

Plani3D

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The functionalities are extremely limited and it may be buggy – it was only coded to suit my specific needs.

So far it lets you:

  • Load a custom image (planimetry, map)
  • Define a scale (so the 3d model will have the right measures)
  • Draw 3 types of entity with the mouse
    • Walls
    • Windows
    • Doors
  • Change thickness of walls
  • Generate the 3D model
    • saving the link will let you see it in the future too, the model gets encoded in the url (which could get veeery big)
  • Export the generated model as a GTLF file

Note: no deletion of added walls is possible at this time. Not even editing the generated model. It’s more a rapid prototype tool, doesn’t let you make things precisely.

The project can be tested here.

 

Teenage Engineering PO-33 KO drumset loader app

While there are some projects I’ve been doing lately that I’ve not written here yet, this is one of those I want to write up while it’s still hot – I could easily forget about it.

I recently bought a PO-33 KO by Teenage Engineering, which I think is an incredible music making device. It’s basically a handheld sampler, very easy to use, even if it has some limitations. I’ve been enjoying very much playing with it lately, but that’s not the point of this post! You can go see all the videos out there if you’re interesting in what it is and what it does.

The point of this post is that if you’ve been using it, you know it has some beautiful features, among which there’s the possibility of recording samples with the microphone or the line input. Everything is really fine while recording the melodic slots, but when it comes to recording drum slots, it begins to be a bit difficult to make the PO detect the various slices correctly. There’s a bit of frustation about this in the community, as you can find various videos on Youtube giving tips and tricks on the matter. In the end, it seems to be understood that the process is somewhat buggy, and it’s become accepted that you should probably use some of the available workarounds, like recording first in the melodic slots and then copying the slices to the drum section. By the way, these workarounds are slow and kind of impractical if you want to quickly move some drumset you’ve got on your PC to the PO.

I’ve seen people already doing this in various ways, trying to tackle the problem using other hardware or software which is not specific for the PO, but still the solutions seemed to me a bit suboptimal.

That’s why I wanted to try and solve the problem with a very simple webapp which basically allows to upload a series of sounds and then plays them in a hopefully PO-friendly way. It’s still in very early developement, but I’ve already been able to use it to upload some sample drums I had on my PC to the PO.

Right know it’s still pretty raw, but you can find it here: http://app.dmnk.cloud/po33-loader/

or on the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cloud.dmnk.po33loader2&hl=en_US&gl=US

Some quick instructions:

  1. press the buttons and select some  audio files representing your slices. You can select multiple files at once and it will place them in consecutive slots. The first sound is placed in every slot because as I understand it’s needed to play all 16 slots if you want a clean slicing.
  2. when you’re ready, press the desired destination drum slot (9-16)  plus the record button on the PO (as normally when you want to record there), and at the same time, start the playback on the app by pressing the red button (you’ll find it in the place of the record button on the PO background image of the app).
  3. you shoud hear all your sounds playing one after another and hopefully if either you’ve connected the PO with a jack-jack cable or you’re just placing it close to your speakers, the PO should be able to slice the sounds correctly.

You’ll notice that the sounds get cut in some cases, that’s because in my tests longer sounds have always been split by the PO in more slices. I decided that this tool should be only used with shorter sounds, more appropriate for the drum slots. If you need something longer, you’d better record it separately on a melodic slot and copy it manually to the drum section afterwards.

I hope this thing will be useful to someone! I may or may not make some improvements in the following days and then I may or may not update this blog post accordingly.

NotesLearn

I recently bought an alto saxophone. It was quite a while I haven’t seriously been playing an instrument, so I came across a little challenge when it was time to read a music sheet. You know, that thing with a pentagram and some notes of various shapes drawn over it.

Since playing a note on the saxophone is not straightforward as it would be on a piano, I actually had two separate challenges: the first was to recognize a note on the pentagram, the second was to play it well (it means play the correct note steadly for some seconds – and in tune).

So I decided to code a little app to aid me doing so. The app is pretty simple: it shows a (random) note on the pentagram, and then listens to the microphone waiting for a note, identifying the pitch and, after some seconds of playing, says if the played note was correct or not. This app has proven quite useful in the process of improving my reading accuracy and speed, and I guess it might be useful to someone else too.

It’s published here: https://dmnk.cloud/noteslearn.

Technical infos

On the technical side, it is entirely coded using Javascript, and has been a cool challenge to code since it was the first time for me interacting with the microphone data on a web app. It uses some advanced Audio features of HTML5, based on the AudioContext component. Recognizing the pitch was a minor issue, obtained by playing a bit with the FFT of the signal, some other challenges included volume thresholding and octave recognition (less trivial).

In the end, the result is pretty usable for my alto sax, even though it may be less accurate if used with other instruments I didn’t test. The piano version is not perfect, for some notes it needs to repeatedly play the key to make the app recognize it. I guess it should work best with constant-volume-notes kind of instruments, like violin or flute, but as I said it was only fully tested with my alto sax.

KangaMex

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last wrote a piece on this blog, since that a lot of things changed, but I still want to share some of my experiences with the world.

I’ll be making some brief posts to track some projects I’ve been working to in these almost 2 years of absence.

This post is about KangaMex, a messaging platform which idea is really simple, yet I didn’t find something like it when I needed it. The app is a delayed messaging service, or a service to send messages which will be delivered only at a specified date and time in the future. You write your message, set the unlock date and time, the recipient’s username, and send it. The recipient will be notified that he/she has an upcoming message, but will not be able to see it until the unlock time has come. Very simple, nice way to send delayed messages.

The app is at mex.kanga.life.