Image taken with Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 with a 17mm/1.8 lens at f/2, developed using RawTherapee with a Fujifilm Provia film simulation
Like always, thanks for viewing.
White ball of wool on blue blanket
Alerta, alerta, antifascista!
Yesterday I’ve read an article (in German) by Elias Raatz titled “Der Sound der Rebellion“, and it was about a band from Heidelberg called Irie Révoltés. That band existed until 2017, and it was lead by two brothers with French roots who sang in German and in French, the music being somewhere between Dub, Ska, Reggae, Punk, Rock, and Rap. On their homepage (and in the article) it was announced that they’ll come together again this year for a final concert tour, so in case you’d want some tickets, you’d have to be fast – some places are sold out already. The article closes with the German lyrics of their song “Antifaschist“, which can be translated like:
“I was born like this, and I’ll stay that way until I’ll die, I was born like this, anti fascist forever forever…”
If I remember it correctly, I had heard it not too long ago while visiting an old friend of mine. And that song would make a cool summer hit in difficult times like this; it’s scary how history seems to repeat, isn’t it? The only hope is that people will not forget about that Italian headline of the resistance of over 100 years ago, and that they will still sing and dance to songs like these…
That reminds me of an interview with Eric Idle, who said about today’s America: “I really think they’re serious about wanting to get rid of liberals and lefties. They’re very crazy”. He also said: “I’ve had a green card for about 28 years. I’d be proud to be thrown out because I’d be in very select company. The last English comedian to be thrown out of America for political reasons was Charlie Chaplin.” – definitely an anti fascist as well, if you think about his “The Great Dictator” masterpiece…
So maybe it’s time for us all to be a bit more anti fascistic, and being proud about it, isn’t it?
Anyway, and like always, thanks for reading.
Bella in black and white
After reading Mike’s post in https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2025/07/15-things-i-like-about-my-camera.html [theonlinephotographer.typepad.com] about his b&w only camera, I decided to become “artsy” – so I set mine to b&w and took a photo of our cat in front of my computer…
The cat’s face has a bit of motion blur, because she was about to turn her head, and I had an aperture of f/4 and as such, the exposure time was 1/60th of a second only. The camera chose ISO2000 for this itself, and I really don’t mind the “grain” – film would have been far worse in that regard (and I only use film with up to 400 ASA). I took that image with the camera held in front of my breast, and the rear display tilted up as some kind of “viewfinder”. Olympus E-M10 Mk2 with the 17mm/1.8 lens by the same maker, and the jpg image is right out of the camera, unaltered.
As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Musicians’ distros
Yesterday I’ve had a brief look at two Linux distributions which come more or less tailor-made and preconfigured for musicians and other creatives, like people who like to make videos, or who render, paint, photograph, and so on.
Both UbuntuStudio and AVLinux are fantastic tools for the job.
UbuntuStudio is now using the KDE Plasma desktop, heavily customised, so it doesn’t look like Windows anymore. I would recommend that one for machines with at least 4GB of main memory, and with a 4 core CPU.
AVLinux is made by Glen McArthur (a farmer if I remember correctly) and is even more quirky, using MX Linux as its base, and on top of that an Enlightenment desktop (see my screenshot above). This one is much more frugal, and the one you see running above was installed on a virtual machine with only 2GB of RAM, and with a dual core CPU. Means that it would run on my wife’s notebook from ca. 2010 🙂
Both come really nicely preconfigured, and as you can see, a bass player like me could start right away plugging his Precision Bass into a virtual Ampeg SVT amplifier, and go and play. Both also come as live images which you can run from an USB stick to see if you like them before installing them onto your hard drives and/or SSDs. Both MXLinux and Ubuntu are based upon Debian of course, which is the granddaddy of many good Linux distributions.
I also looked at the librazik website, which is another distribution meant for musicians, this time from France. But librazik is still based upon Buster, which is Debian oldstable, so I haven’t looked at it.
For Windows users: I recommend having a look at Ventoy, which can hold more than one Linux .iso file, so you can try them all from the same USB stick. And now go and have a look, and start making some music using free and open source tools.
And like always, thanks for reading.
How to use Linux in the studio
Stuart Adams of Musicradar can explain it far better than me – and so he wrote an article about it some year and a half ago. Here’s the link, so go and have a look.
How to install Arch Linux using the Archinstall script
This is a short howto video I’ve made for my friends over at wikiloops.com, and who might be considering switching from Windows 10 (or even older versions) over to some free Linux setup to make and record music with. Sorry about the bad sound quality; I should have used my studio mic instead of the webcam’s built-in microphone…
Like always, thanks for watching and reading.
Gadgetbridge 0.86.0 adds initial support for Google Pixel Buds A
What a surprise:
Of course I had to immediately try it, and bingo:
According to Gadgetbridge, it’s only very basic and initial support at the moment, it only shows the battery status so far. But every journey starts with first steps like someone said, and I’m very grateful for every Google app which I *don’t* need anymore (on Google’s phones you don’t need an app for those Pixel Buds, except when you’re running GrapheneOS like me)… so thank you and bravo to the Gadgetbridge team! You rock!
And like always, thanks for reading.
I made a mix
Yesterday I found a really old track in my DAW. Some of the plugins I had used on that prepared song were outdated, so I had to reinstall those. Then I leveled it to the usual -16 LUFS and -2dBTP (true peak), exported it, and then uploaded it to the ‘loops. I didn’t play anything on this one (yet), just the bare output of my DAW with the settings as they were (I had separated the voice from Shi’s former mix because at that time she didn’t upload a HD file with her vocals stems only):
This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.
Thanks to TN1000 and to Shi for the wonderful music – and thanks to you for listening 🙂 <3
Never use a browser without a built-in adblocker
Oh my… being curious, I tried the built-in webbrowser of the Gnome desktop, which used to be called “Epiphany”, and which is now simply called “Web”. And with that browser, I started viewing a well-known site full of trackers, which is spiegel.de
This got me more or less immediately:
Really? Selling a free product for 0 (zero) Euro? On which you can install Windows in parallel? (Hint: you can’t – Windows always has to be installed first in case you want that)
Oh my oh my – I really hope that no one ever falls for things like these. And most importantly: do never, I repeat *never* ever click on one of those links, in no browser – that these people are up to no good is obvious.
That was a short experiment – and now I’m back to Librewolf, which is a correctly configured Firefox with uBlock Origin already installed. There are others, like Mullvad, Zen, and the likes, or you could even use Firefox itself in case you want to configure it for security and privacy yourself, and don’t forget to install uBlock Origin in that case – you won’t even see that crap like above.
Never again… isn’t it time to overcome capitalism, and to stop all that ad crap once and for all?
And like always, thanks for reading.
Some recommended readings (all technical stuff)
I was just reading some article on Bobby Borisov’s linuxiac site this morning, when another “trending” article of his hit my eye, so I had to open that as well.
That article of his is titled “End of Windows 10: Don’t Worry Be Happy“, and like the title suggests, it’s for the Windows 10 users who still are not sure what to do after October of this year, when Microsoft will end its support for that OS.
Unlike some of his commenters, who – more or less predictably – started pro and con arguments about his recommended distributions, I found his article very clear and precise, and I agree to most of it, so I consider this as recommended reading if you’re in the target group (Linux newbies, Windows converts so to say).
Just some thoughts follow:
His first “con” point is the learning curve this implies, and he is true. This shouldn’t put you off too much tho, and I have examples. My aunt in Cologne is 85 years old now, and when we – my brother Willi (RIP) and me – first installed Ubuntu on a machine which was a present for her, she didn’t like it at all. In the end, she got so used to it that she upgraded to newer versions of Ubuntu herself, without any help from my late brother who lived nearby. And Willi himself was a psychologist, not a computer nerd, but when he changed from Ubuntu to Debian himself (my recommendation), he never looked back. So yes, there *is* a learning curve of course, like with most things in life, but it shouldn’t put anyone off; help will always be at hand (although I also saw the RTFM which one commenter mentioned in regard of Debian) 😉
One point on which I don’t really approve that much is when Bobby wrote:
“And yes, it gets even better: you’re not limited to just one. On Linux, you can install multiple desktop environments side by side and switch between them whenever you like.”
Well… I try a lot, and on my partition with Arch Linux I have both Gnome and KDE desktops, but usually I don’t switch between them that often. The reason is that while you can tell these different desktops to *not* change your desktop – as in the “working area” that much (normally each one would leave more or less its own widgets, symbolic links like folders, or a trash can), it’s still a pain the the proverbial back side, as they all use different fonts and leave more configurations than you would like in your /home directory – so when coming back to Gnome from KDE for instance, it *will* look different than before. And I don’t like to mess around with desktops too much, or to reset Gnome to its defaults, only to apply my own stuff again later.
So to see different desktops I normally use VMs, like here:
What you’re seeing there is my Arch Linux running both the upcoming Debian 13 Trixie (using Gnome and conky on it) and OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is just a rolling release distro like Arch – and it’s getting the new KDE Plasma 6.4 desktop environment which was mentioned in Bobby’s first mentioned article from above.
And yes, like some commenter wrote, I didn’t even have to open a terminal to upgrade from KDE Plasma 6.3.5 to 6.4, the discover service on OpenSuse informed me with a little red dot about those updates. And Gnome on Debian usually does the same.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed (Bobby recommended Leap instead) might even be better than Arch as a rolling release distribution, because you can also roll back easily, while Arch really has a steeper learning curve, and I wouldn’t recommend that to newbies…
But anyway – I just wanted to recommend Bobby’s site, because he writes more often and far better than me about this stuff. I usually find his articles via LXer – there are many more links to Linux-related stuff on that site, so that one’s recommended as well.
Like always, thanks for reading.