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Music Year in Review (2023)
I need a better (simpler?) way to gather this data. At the moment I have Plex and Jellyfin both tapped into Last.fm but the “Top Tracks” that Last.fm reports seem slightly off.. I’m unsure if Jellyfin could be to blame in some way as I see odd time stamps. For instance, the number one track (according to Last.fm) is “How Far Can Too Far Go?” by The Cramps. I had to actually look this up because I’m not really familiar with it (I know I listened to a lot of their album “Smell of Female”)
The “Top Arists” mostly makes sense, the “Top Albums” is also a little off in my opinion. I agree with 2 out of 5.
Top Artists
- FACS
- Cloakroom
- Susumu Yokota
- The Black Dog
- The Cramps
Top Albums
- “The Ancient Truth” by Maara
- “A Date With Elvis” by The Cramps
- “Post-Truth” by The Black Dog
- “Time Well” Cloakroom
- “Actual Sounds + Voices” by Meat Beat Manifesto
Top Tracks
- “How Far Can Too Far Go?” by The Cramps
- “[untitled]” by Rod Modell & Taka Noda (all tracks are titled “untitled”)
- “Oh I Remember…” by Maara
- “[untitled]” by Rod Modell (a few tracks on here are called “untitled”)
- “Concrete Gallery” by Cloakroom
Top Five Albums Released in 2023
As far as my personal top 5 albums released this past year go (in no particular order except for FACS being my number 1 favorite followed by Orbital):
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Not Dead
With winter appearing overnight, the daylight is now consumed by 15:00 (and creeping more towards 14:00). I’ve now been in Sweden for 7 years and the plunge into darkness still surprises me. My sleep schedule gets all out of whack with me nodding off around 18:30/19 along with the kids while getting them to bed and waking up around 21:00 until midnight or so.
Basically, it’s dark when I wake up, dark when I get off work and dark in the evening. On the upside, we’ve been getting pummled with snow! It really helps brighten up the night making it more cozy.
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Sigh of Relief
As an Ohian, waking up to this news was a huge sigh of relief.
Ohio voters enshrine abortion access in constitution in latest statewide win for reproductive rights.
“The future is bright, and tonight we can celebrate this win for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights,” Lauren Blauvelt, co-chair of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, which led support for the amendment, told a jubilant crowd of supporters.
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Playable Quotes
“Playable Quotes for Game Boy” from Joël Franušić and Adam Smith was AWESOME!
This project offers the ability to create and share playable quotes of Game Boy games. A playable quote is a self-contained slice of an original creative work that points to a specific moment in the space of play along with a reference performance of how that moment can play out. The reader of a quote can replay their own variations on the quoted moment to see how the game responds.
Being able to capture a portion of a rom file that ships with the only the bits (pun) needed for others to see/experience was something I had never thought about. They’re not stopping with Game Boy either, there are talks of N64 and a few proof-of-concepts with x86 PC games.
The project homepage is here and I highly recommend checking out this Google Maps-like tour of Metroid II where the little plot point even traces along the map as you watch!
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Tech Antisolutions
Technological Antisolutions: Why Bill Gates Is Cutting Down and Burying Trees to Solve Climate Change via The Luddite
Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.
Nail on the head this one.
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Thoughts on Permacomputing
While searching for info around Uxn, I stumbled across a new blog by the name of Oatmeal (not that Oatmeal). The last portion of this post on permacomputing (a topic I’ve become interested in) stuck out in particular:
A lot of the dialogue around permacomputing that I’ve seen seems intertwined with a certain aesthetic sensibility that is entangled with the demo scene and retro computing communities. While I think both these spaces are kinda rad, I think they’re specifically prone to a certain flavor of navel gazing…a flavor focused on specific tech stacks, and tooling, and apparent minimalism. It’s a flavor that leaves a gap in the conversation around what I’d call the “why” of permacomputing.
Most of the conversations I see are hyper focused on the “how” and “what” of permacomputing. “How” and “what” cover the skeleton, “we use X system running on Y reclaimed hardware.” The discussions that gesture at “why” that I see tend to be like “because it’s the more harmonious way to do computation given that we’re living amidst climate collapse.” And, while that is a great reason for choosing lower impact tools, I think the community generally misses what I see as the most important bit of permacomputing:
Let permacomputing be an invitation to question why and how much computation ought to be involved with a thing, and, if that computation is being used to increase or decrease the anomie between folks…and with what impact to the world?
My take on permacomputing is that it’s a way of approaching computation that’s further distanced from the goals of capitalism. It is an effort to re-imagine our tech landscape, and in so doing enchant it with values that support, for lack of a better word, “balance.”
Though I like the idea of permacomputing, I had yet to see anyone present it in practical terms that could be relatable to normal people. To make technology more intentional, working for you and less about monetization. It’s almost a mindset one has to settle into.
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Listening Habits
I find myself unplugging more and more. Recently, I deleted my podcast app for a much needed break, tired of the constant news and tech cycles.
My podcast subscriptions are quite sparse but the listening time adds up and the content doesn’t change much from week to week (could this be called “shallow listening?”) as in AI this, Musk said that, new shiny app to distract, buzzy coding language of the week, the world is on fire. I already get a lot of this info via my RSS feeds.
I often leave my headphones at home when I go out and try to just take in my surroundings and/or let my brain wander. When I do feel the urge to listen to something other than music or my surroundings I’ve switched to audio books. Though I’m always reading a physical book, It’s nice to offload some non-fiction to audio and listen to a topic on a deeper level that is (usually) better researched.
At the moment, I’m using Libation to “liberate” my Audible purchases and consolidate them along with other purchases using a self-hosted solution called audiobookshelf. It’s working well so far.
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Making Software Last Forever
This piece in the Nixers Newsletter on “Making Software Last Forever” by Dan Stroot is on point:
Why can’t software last forever? It’s not made of wood, concrete, or steel. It doesn’t “wear out”, rot, weather, or rust. A working algorithm is a working algorithm. Technology doesn’t need to be beautiful, or impress other people, to be effective. Aren’t technologists ultimately in the business of producing cost effective technology?
…
When companies decide to re-write or replace an existing software application, they are making a similar decision. Existing software is “retired” or “decommissioned” (along with its cumulative investment). Yet the belief that new code is always better than old is patently absurd. Old code has weathered and withstood the test of time. It has been battle-tested. You know it’s failure modes. Bugs have been found, and more importantly, fixed.
The Unix tool set is proof, compare that to every new macOS release since Mac OS X Snow Leopard…
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Single-File Website
While looking for inspiration on basic HTML sites, I came across this really clever singe-file site via CSS Tricks.
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The Plain Text Life
I finally flipped the table over my frustration with “modern” applications and tech stacks when it comes to simple note taking, calendar and lists.
My current setup is a folder containing the following text files:
- todo.txt
- done.txt
- calendar.txt
- contacts.txt
- self-tracking.txt (helping me rid caffeine and alcohol)
- links.txt
- ideas.txt
- goals.txt
These are kept in sync via Syncthing over my WireGuard mesh on each device. I can open any of the above in any text editor or pull the info I need in multiple ways via in-app search,
ripgrep,grep. There’s no uncertainty in getting the data out, no ties to a specific protocol or app and will work on any operating system.For instance, I live in the terminal so I created the following alias
agendaalong with anechostatement in my~/.zshrcto display today and tomorrow’s entries when I launch a shell:alias agenda='grep -A 1 --colour=always $(date +"%Y-%m-%d") "$HOME/Productivity/calendar.txt"' echo agendaWhich displays the following when launching a new shell or running
agenda:Last login: Tue Sep 26 18:14:08 on ttys000 Today's Agenda: 2023-09-26 w39 Tue @Video 14:30 Boring Meeting. 2023-09-27 w39 Wed 16 Pick-up kids. [✓] >Another example, using tags and the
done.txtI’ve managed to automate an annoying weekly email I have to send to my manager using a small shell script and regex. I’m not familiar with Windows these days, but I’m sure you could rig the above via PowerShell or whichever nonsense they use.I don’t think I can ever go back to CalDAV, CardDAV, ${NOTE_APP} or ${CLIENT}. I can freely move around Neovim, iA Writer, Xed or Sublime Text. No surveillance capitalism or other funny business at play and easy to keep backups.
Links
- todo.sh (If you’re on iOS, I recommend SwifttoDo)
- Calendar.txt
- The Plaintext Project
- 10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desktop for Higher Productivity
- I hate links prefaced with “10 Things You Should Do to X!,” but I genuinely found these useful.
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Intention Is My New North Star
At the end of 2022 I ordered a nice Moleskin “Daily Diary” for the year 2023 in which I planned to keep a day log. I’ve been journaling off and on since 2009 and was inspired by a post I came across on from Austin Kleon. It only took a little over a month and I chickened out. From February 10th those entries exist in plain text in a folder on my server.
Was it a fear of losing the notebook and laziness à la forming the habit of remembering to bring it? Also, would I be able to read my handwriting? Shouldn’t it be kept pristine and only contain the writings of a literary genius? On June 16th I changed my mind. Thumbing through those blank pages and leaving a note to future self saying “These blank pages all exist digitally, I hope you can find them in the future.”
What changed? It only took me ~25 years(?) but I’ve finally admitted to myself I often switch systems and apps as a form of procrastination. jrnl, Vimwiki, Logseq, Obsidian, Anytype, Notion, Evernote, Org mode, Apple’s Notes app, plain-text/Markdown files in folders and on and on… I’ve looked at them all!
I had never asked myself the simple question of “What am I trying to achieve? Do I really need to hoard and organize every little thing?” All of these note “systems” are convoluted and unnecessary, becoming less about the end results and more about getting lost in fine-tuning the process (this is also why I eventually abandoned Emacs).
Needless to say, I’m letting go and enjoying paper more and more. I’ve come to accept that my brain (and realistically most humans) simply does not function like a computer, we have nuance and context. With paper, I can be flexible! Scribbles, lines, lists, quotes, thoughts, smudges, etc can all be jotted, thumbed through and acted on or logged somewhere digitally if I can read my handwriting.
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The Case for Paper Notebooks
I’ve been getting back into paper note taking, here are some links I’ve been revisiting to find inspiration:
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Zen and the Art of Music Making
There’s an artist by the name of Michiru Aoyama who basically releases one album per week and sometimes one every two days! I’ve often thought about doing something like this, a “stream of conscious” collection of recordings, sort of like morning pages but in the form of audio to cultivate a discipline and set deadlines to hone my craft and experiment.
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Thoughts on Computing
I read a lot of tech history. Just this year I’ve wrapped up the founding of Compaq, microcomputers in 80’s Britain and am about done reading a very thorough history of Commodore (pre-Amiga, that’s book number 2 😉).
It probably sounds crazy to the unimaginative mind but I often get quite jealous, not so much nostalgic, of those who were able to experience the heydey of the microcomputer boom. Not because of any future riches (most companies went bust or were gobbled up on the cheap) but the fact that these computers (either assembled from a kit, pre-built or built from scratch) were a foundation, not a pre-packaged experience. The word “Liberating” comes to mind.
Not only did people no longer have to pay for the use of a computer (notice how we’ve already gone full circle here with “cloud computing?”) but these could sit in their homes. They could be extended, tweaked, optimized, bent and on and on. A working embodiment of the individual, not the corporation.
What does it even mean to “compute” these days? Consume? Already a generation is growing up never once having to open up their device to fix or install new hardware. Even Linux has much better hardware support and flashy UI’s out of the box. More often than not, they are handed the “experience” and sold a “lifestyle” to which there is no VIP backstage access.
I think often about the “low-tech/high-tech” (for lack of a better word) in Star Wars. All their devices seem to be very focused, highly repairable and interoperable. Anyone can hit up the Jawas and find a part to fix this or that and most seem to have enough knowledge to go it alone without needing to chase down a warranty or sit on an AppleCare line to be told it’s “no longer supported” or… god forbid… “VINTAGE.”
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HyperCard
Last night I found myself going down a rabbit hole of old HyperCard Stacks on the Internet Archive.
This is a world I missed out on having grown up “PC Master Race,” though I vaguely remember a HyperCard project involving PB&J sandwiches in 6th grade with Mr. Brown.
The stack that stuck out most was the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, it consists of “over 9000 cards connected to one another with hypertext; essentially the web before the web existed, but offline!” and it runs in your browser. I’ll for sure be trying out the “Logan Bread” recipe below.
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ps Kills It
If you want to get in on some fun Unix history and conversation, join the Unix Heritage Society mailing list.
[TUHS] Re: Four windowing systems on SunOS
My favorite SunView story was the day I was working in the Pentagon (I was [email redacted] for a while). One of the Sun workstations had a Sunview screen lock running and the guy I was visiting was on the phone. I told him I’d just unlock the thing myself. I promptly set forth to do so and got it open. He quickly said, “I have to hang up and go check on something,” and came over and asked how I’d done that.
The screen lock was just a very large window forced to the top of everything on the screen. If you hit the hot key to iconify it, you had a fraction of a second to interact before it reasserted itself. So you keep hitting iconify and maybe getting a letter or two typed into one of the one terminal windows at a time. You run ps, find the pid of the screen lock process, and kill it.