Thoughts during the breaks
I had this beautiful track from Tom & Devin on my watchlist since quite a while. And today I could finally add a little something to it:
List of musicians, so far:
Thanks to my friends over at Wikiloops for their wonderful music. And thanks to you for listening. Join us to add something.
Remembering is good. Remembering a legend is a must.
If you never heard of John Francis Anthony „Jaco“ Pastorius III. before, also read the German or the English Wikipedia pages about him. Or any other language which might be linked there.
As always, thanks for reading / viewing / listening.
Sanjay explains it better and faster than I could so have a look and a listen:
I’m on Linux, with an i5/16GB/2TB desktop instead of his MacBook Pro, and I also use another DAW (Ardour) and a slightly bigger audio interface (but of the same brand, mine is a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 2nd gen). Instead of his Beyer Dynamic headphones I’m using Sennheiser, and a condenser mike (Røde NT-1A) instead of his dynamic Shure SM7b. My MIDI keyboard is quite old and has 49 full-sized keys, we also use Zuleikha’s Yamaha Arius piano connected to her notebook via USB. Oh, and my studio monitors are the smallest Genelecs, the 8010 (don’t have more space, but they’re awesome!).
But his biggest and best advice comes at the end, in his last or second last sentence: it’s “Record yourself and share it!”. That alone will improve anything you do faster than anything else, so this is a really good advice. And let me add that for the best possible feedback and tips for your progress, you should consider joining us at Wikiloops.
Hope you liked it as much as I did.
Got this one as a present last week:
I first saw this mentioned in a blog post and thought that it might be a nice addition, much smaller than the 40-150mm lenses we have from the Four Thirds system and which need an adapter, a bit sharper perhaps, and with a faster autofocus. Even image stabilized though we don’t need that on our Olympus cameras which have the stabilization built right into their bodies already. So I had put it onto my wishlist at some big store, not further thinking about it – and what a nice surprise when all of a sudden I had it!
It comes with a lens hood which is reversed on the lens in the picture above (take that, Olympus!), and it is indeed nice & sharp at all of its focal lengths which compare to a (much bigger) 70-200mm lens on a 24x36mm film camera. I used it on last week’s photo of Tuna the cat already:
But this photo is heavily processed with its “in-body” (added by OV3) pin hole art filter. Still, this somehow also replaces my 75mm/1.8 which was stolen in Paris last year.
Today I used it at the longer end and somewhere in the middle (at 64mm) on some flowers on our veranda:
So with its variable aperture of f/4 to f/5.6 which closes down pretty fast when you zoom in it’s a pretty little lens for outdoors – but I also tried it indoors at 35mm already with good results:
Cool. This might come handy for the upcoming documentation project of Zuleikha’s school event, and also for the upcoming summer holidays. How great to have this; thanks a lot!
Also for reading and viewing, as always.
Postr is an app for the Gnome desktop, developed by Intel engineer Ross Burton. It worked fine for me until recently – first Flickr changed their accounts from Yahoo to own ones, then they swapped all of their our content from the Yahoo servers to the Amazon AWS cloud of their new owners, Smugmug. All of that went fine, but as a result, Postr doesn’t work anymore with their new OAuth login method, as this issue acknowledges.
Too bad, it’s a nice little program…
Don’t know if you have read / heard about this. Or this. Both links are in German, I know, but what they say still is clear: both the South Korean government and the Russian army are about to change from Windows to Linux, contrary to what some German lobbyist pushing did in Munich or in Hannover…
… and the question of course must be about the reasons. Well as a long-term Linux user myself, I know about the advantages of course – but could this also be related to politics? To the recently forced boycott of the biggest Chinese telco through Google?
Lots of comments here in Germany were of the kind: time to get rid of anything American – because some lunatic could decide to take it away, or try to blackmail us with the idea. Imagine if the motto of the day would have been: take away Microsoft from those Germans, just because we don’t agree to a war on Iran for instance…
I’d rather run instead of walk towards free software like Linux… (I did so anyway years ago, but not because of fear or political reasons)
One of the highlights in the Youtube channel of KNKX Public Radio is this one:
This track is also on their album ‘Juice’ from 2014, which I just put onto my wish list.
Thanks for viewing / listening.
Another photo of our cat who likes the warm ground. A bit processed with the pin hole filter and a frame effect in Olympus Viewer 3 (like in-camera):
As always, thanks for viewing.
Two photos from our veranda:
As always, thanks for viewing.
Richard fixed the issue with the embedding of the Wikiloops player last night, and he tested it with my post “Blues Knows No Colour” on this blog. Cool; many thanks man!
So now I can try and show/play you the last remix I’ve got plus one that I had made for some friends (with mixing only, no bass needed in that one). So here they are:
Yup; works. And here’s the one I (re-) mixed:
Works as well. Thanks for listening, and if you’re a musician, then join and play with us on Wikiloops!