Month: January 2023

LSDJ Tutorial

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Before the Pandemic, I once saw Chipzel play Bit Bash and it was phenomenal. Since I don’t really know much about writing chiptune music, I did some research and found out she uses Little Sound Dj (LSDJ) for some of her more recent stuff. And also a longgggg time ago I messed around MilkyTracker. So I don’t really know what the point of this post is other than to post some resources and reflect openly about how I want to write video game music. Should I compose it like I’d compose for a music theory class? Should I record some instrumental licks and go from there? I have no idea what I’m doing haha

  • Download Little Sound Dj https://www.littlesounddj.com
    • Currently messing with BGB as my emulator
  • Milky Tracker https://milkytracker.org
    • I didn’t need a Gameboy emulator when I used it but the interface is similar to other Chiptune programs
  • Flat https://flat.io
    • I used to use Sibelius and Finale way back in the day but this is basically the modern version of that

Indexing JetBrains Toolbox Application

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I’ve had Alfred search issues on my M1 MacBook Pro when it came to trying to run applications installed by JetBrains Toolbox. I used the Alfred self-diagnostics tool to figure out what was going on with one of the apps, Rider, and received the output below:

Starting Diagnostics...

File: 'Rider.app'
Path: '/Users/bergren2/Applications/JetBrains Toolbox'

-----------------------------------------------------------

Check file cache database...

✅ File cache integrity is ok

-----------------------------------------------------------

Check if file is readable...

✅ Alfred has permissions to read this file.

Unix Permissions: 493
Underlying Type: NSFileTypeDirectory
Extended Attributes: (
    "com.apple.macl",
    "com.apple.provenance",
    "com.apple.quarantine"
)

-----------------------------------------------------------

Check if volume '/' is indexed by macOS...

✅ Indexing is enabled on this drive

-----------------------------------------------------------

Check direct file metadata...

⚠️ Direct metadata is missing, this file is likely not indexed by macOS

Display Name: 
 Other Names: 
Content Type: 
   Last Used: 

-----------------------------------------------------------

Check mdls file metadata...

❌ macOS metadata missing essential items

kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2023-01-20 02:20:40 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate      = 2023-01-20 02:20:40 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode       = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags       = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon     = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible         = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery      = 0
kMDItemFSLabel             = 0
kMDItemFSName              = "Rider.app"
kMDItemFSNodeCount         = 1
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID      = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID       = 501
kMDItemFSSize              = 1
kMDItemFSTypeCode          = ""

-----------------------------------------------------------

❌ Troubleshooting failed

The root of the issue was that the application wasn’t showing up in Spotlight, so I took to the Internet to search for a way to re-index or add the application. It led me to run this:

mdimport ~/Applications/

And while this seemed to do the trick, I was still getting the instance of Rider that exists in ~/Library/Application, but only in Alfred. And Alfred is supposed to ignore it! So knowing that Spotlight was correct — it was only showing the version in ~/Applications/ — I typed “reload” into Alfred to reload the cache and remove the extra instance.

I first became an Alfred user back when Spotlight wasn’t as powerful, and tools like it and Quicksilver were a must-have. Now? I’m not so sure. However Alfred has become a staple part of my workflow, even when it comes to generating GUIDs or quickly opening Jira links when I have ticket ID. And remember Ubiquity for Firefox? Most of that functionality is replicated just fine in Alfred, but I still dream about highlighting an address and seeing it pop up on a map. That was peak Late Aughts.

Edit: I ran into issues indexing core Mac apps — things like Mail.app and Messages.app weren’t showing in Spotlight. It turns out they aren’t actually in /Applications and are instead in /System/Applications — you can easily verify this in terminal using ls on the respective directories. The solution was to delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist and restart, which I found out about through this guide. Now that I know that this file was being buggy, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another buggy casualty of the transfer from my old MacBook Pro.

More Cantonese

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I’m learning more! I modified my first post to include more Instagram links and removed the “resources I want to try” (they didn’t pan out). Below I embed a few videos from creator Adam Tan that I enjoyed because they encapsulate the subtleties in learning Cantonese — things that I haven’t seen explicitly stated elsewhere, even in some of the resources I’m already using to learn.