Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Yesterday was the birthday of a very talented young Lady from Argentina, Cande Buasso – so happy (belated) birthday, dear Cande! Hear her from 2 years ago:
Love her version of “Tuyo” (the last of the songs at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoxKkGpRbtk&t=818s). As always, thanks for viewing.
Got a wonderful remix on the ‘loops lately. Hear Lady Anne singing the Blues on a track from Don_T, peatric, and myself:
Thanks dear Anne – and thanks to everyone for listening.
Okay, only one picture of the cat this time, a black & white one again, with her sitting outside on our veranda:
This month I got into a cat fight again, for the second time, and also for the second time I’ve got some marks to show. The first time was in the beginning of this year when the neighbours’ cat bit me in the foot, this time it was Bella who was scared enough to really bite my hand. “Only a scratch” I thought after the bleeding stopped, but then the hand got swollen, and I had to see the doctor to get another tetanus shot (after 20+ years), and had to take antibiotics until yesterday. This is what my hand looked like after my second visit to the doc, taken with my mobile phone:
It’s much better already, but like my wife said, that should probably teach me a lesson… 😉
Other than that, I still walk and have my little step counter on while doing so. And Gadgetbridge gets better and better and with each version it supports the device a little more. I started playing around with the software in January, but since end of January I also set my goal to 10,000 steps a day, which I’ve kept since then. This is from two days ago:
Not a miss since 60 days, and a total of some 800,000 steps since I use this software, which with a step length of pretty much exactly 75cm translates to 600km until now.
Not as much as Andersen’s Knud (from his “Under the willow tree” or in German “Unter dem Weidenbaum”) who went from Kjöge (near Køge in Denmark) all the way to Nürnberg and Milano and half way back) but seeing a radius of 600km from our place still makes me kind of proud:
If there would be a straight way to walk, I would have reached Vienna by now (Aaahh, Vienna, that reminds me of Billy Joel’s famous song about it – read the story here or listen to the original here).
Or I would be short before Genova by now, or – if you’d grant me a ferry ride since I can’t yet walk on the water – London. Pretty cool thought. So I’ll keep walking (Billy Joel has more songs about cool places, how about “Zanzibar” for instance? And yes, I know that he probably didn’t mean the island in this song, but still) 😉
Anyway, in case you’re a Christian I wish you Happy Easter, and in case you’re Muslims then Happy Ramadan instead. For all others, like always, have fun, and thanks for dropping by and reading.
Murakami-san’s “Kino” brought me to Coleman Hawkins’ “Joshua fit the batte of Jericho” – and man, did it pay off to briefly interrupt my reading for it! Enjoy…
Looks like this:
Oh, and of course I’m also running the latest jams on the Wikiloops radio. You can participate in these if you like, why not give it a try?
Like always, thanks for viewing, reading, listening, and all that 🙂 Happy holidays 🙂
Update, from Wed Dec 20th, 2023:
According to the German security expert Mike Kuketz, GrapheneOS is the gold standard of all Android operating systems. His article is in German, only the parts where he cites Daniel Micay, founder and lead developer of GrapheneOS are in English.
Privacy Guides has the same opinion and recommendation. See also at Eylenburg’s comparison. And at AndroidAuthority. And maybe the best one at PrivSec.
Be aware tho that in case you reject all Google services and apps, you’ll also lose some of their “AI” and capabilities. Your choice. In that case, user profiles might help – one owner profile without, and a user profile with Google services (still sandboxed in GrapheneOS). And thanks again for reading.
Yesterday I told people in the Wikiloops Shoutbox that in case they’d need help and none of us moderators is online, they should instead consider to call the Wikiloops Support Line… it’s free, and it’s fun! 🙂
I found this wonderful:
Found in the Fediverse (Peertube), see more about it here:
Annette Hanshaw – Wikipedia, Sita Sings the Blues – Wikipedia, Nina Paley’s blog, the film’s homepage, and IMBD (where its current rating is 7.6/10, and mine was 10/10). Like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, or Roger Ebert I found it really charming. But see and hear for yourselves, and have fun! 🙂 Loved the cats btw… 🙂
I haven’t done much on Windows the last 20 years or so, but through a thread post on recording.de I stumbled upon Pete Brown’s “Unofficial Windows 10 Audio Workstation build and tweak guide” which I found nice, and which could be helpful for those who make music and try to record themselves using machines with Windows 10 or 11.
I knew for instance that the Cubase support staff recommends to switch off the so-called “E” (for “efficiency”) cores on newer (12th gen and up) Intel processors, but that’s true only for Windows 10, not 11, as the commenter on the thread also wrote:
“Steinberg empfiehlt an anderer Stelle auch, die E-Cores zu deaktivieren, mit dem Argument, der Audio-Thread würde als “Hintergrund-Thread” sonst am Ende dort landen. Für Windows 10, dessen Task-Scheduler noch nichts von der P-/E-Core-Architektur von Intel weiß, mag das sogar einen gewissen Sinn haben. Bei Windows 11 ist das aber auch auch Bullshit, denn der Audio-Thread ist eben KEIN Hintergrund-Thread und als Vordergrund Task mit hoher Priority landet der IMMER auf einem P-Core. Unter Windows 11 die E-Cores zu deaktivieren bringt nur Einbußen, weil man einen großen Teil der CPU-Ressourcen schlicht lahmlegt.”
Pete from Microsoft explains that in more detail, so have a look at his 3-part guide which started on my birthday in 2021 and was finished in December. Pete’s history, of which he spoke a bit in the first embedded video there, ran parallel to my own one for a while – like him, I also started with a Commodore C64, and later had an Intel 286 processor in my first “real” PC, first with DOS, and later with Windows 286, a predecessor of Windows 3 (and the better known 3.11). But I gave up on all that while he joined Microsoft to work on their audio-related components, which is much more than the “pro audio” stuff we musicians care and think about.
Interesting guy, and I hope that these links are helpful for some of you.
And like always, thanks for reading.
LinuxMusician amc252 just provided some new piano samples, and wrote about them here. I had the original samples by Dore Mark already, but still downloaded the Fazioli 308 for my daughter to try it out. Cool; thanks man! 🙂
If you make music and even record yourself and care about sound, you should have a look at the Youtube channel from Dan Worrall, a senior live mixer and sound engineer from the UK.
Dan is using the really cost-insensitive (read: cheap but worth it) DAW Reaper, and he also works with the guys from FabFilter. These are professional tools, although he also often checks the “stock plugins” from DAWs like Reaper, Ableton, or Cubase, and compares them to the more expensive ones.
On the FabFilter channel he has some great tutorials about “The Philosophy of Bass“, and also one of the best guides about compressors I’ve ever seen, the “Beginner’s Guide to Compression (part 1)“. Really recommended stuff if you care about making a singer or a voice-over heard. And even if you’re using just the “stock plugins” of your DAW, you can achieve great results if you know what to do…
I myself very often use the Linux Studio Plugins, which are free and open source plugins for – as the name says – Linux. On Arch, I have the newest ones as the listing shows:
unfa (from Poland I think) shows the LSP 16-band stereo eq here, and the LSP Project has their Youtube channel as well of course. So go and have a look at Dan’s and unfa’s, and enjoy your mixing.
Like always, thanks for reading.