Just me alone, noodling around on my bass with fresh strings:
Let’s see if someone likes this enough to play (or sing?) on it 🙂 As always, thanks for listening 🙂
Pomme
Enjoy… and in case you have only time for one song, try this one…
Update, two days later today: just found this nice duo in black & white from almost 2 years ago:
Enjoy encore… 🙂
Have you ever heard about /e/?
Just found its page:
And I found it in an article which in turn I found via LXer and a positive reaction therein.
Refurbished hardware which would otherwise have gotten thrown away, plus free software which supports your privacy – sounds like a good idea to me… plus it could even be installed on my old Nexus 5, which isn’t supported by Google and not even by LineageOS anymore. Recommended reading.
Uh oh… this gets me really nervous…
At work, some bean counters have decided that now that we bought some big Linux company for $$$, any other “brand” should be forbidden. Kind of Mafia-style marketing effort IMHO. But ok, you don’t reach these people, they always have higher powers and can decide whatever they want, simply ignoring the consequences for the workforce. So I thought ok, let’s have a look. Downloaded the image, put it onto a USB stick (you’ll later have to boot from that to install), and took it home over the weekend to have a look without destroying my work machine which I need on a daily basis…
… but at home I ran into another problem: my USB stick booted just fine, however after looking at the first few screens that seemed too dangerous as well – so I decided to have a look inside a VM…
… turns out that this is a problem as well. With Oracle’s (formerly: Sun’s) Virtualbox, you first have to create a vmdk file, and start/run Virtualbox as root (how silly/dangerous is that? Shaking my head in disbelief…). Ok, looking at the first few screens again, now I dared to go one further. But that one, again, was where I stopped:
Unbelievable. And guys who make something like this want to tell me what’s dangerous, and what’s not?
No further comment – as that could cost my job… but I’m still shaking my head – and I’m very afraid at what will happen at work, even with a backup of my /home
You hear me taking a deep breath…
Bass Amplifier
I was asked to join a band lately, what an honour! More to that later, after first rehearsals and after they’ve accepted me as a new player. Plus the Wikiloops members’ meeting 2020 was announced, and I’m very much looking forward to that (like everyone who has attended one earlier I guess).
Time to get a bass amplifier.
During last years’ Wikiloops meeting we’ve had Marc’s small Markbass Mini CMD 121P which is one of the most sold bass combos out there, and it’s incredible. Small, light, loud. You see it behind my right shoulder in this photo:
There was more gear like Gijs’ stack behind me, plus some smaller amps upstairs in the acoustic/unplugged area. But whenever I played I used that small Markbass. It was perfect except that I personally prefer 15″ speakers to the 12″ it had/has built in.
So for the new band, and for next years’ Wikiloops meeting and any other events where I might have to be heard live, I wanted to get something like that Markbass amp, but with a 15″ speaker if possible. And there are several, and I took the cheapest option. Its name is Markbass CMD JB Players School, and its speaker is black instead of orange, and this is how it looks beside my bass:
Fits just perfectly in the trunk of our small Toyota, but not – as I had hoped but not measured – under our small Ikea tables (guess that 12″ would have fitted, but oh well, one has to make compromises, right?).
And yes, I have tested it against the Mini CMD 121P, and in my opinion, for my taste, and with a (fretted) P(recision) Bass it sounded better than its smaller, lighter, but also more powerful and more expensive brother. A propos loud enough: someone on bassic.de assured me that the one I bought is loud enough in a Big Band context, plus all these modern amplifiers have DI-Outs (and the ones in Markbass amps can even be switched pre or post pre amp just as it should be) – so in case it gets really loud, there’s always a cable running from the amp into the mixer (or recording device, whatever).
Perfect for what I need. And cheaper than the lens with which I took its photograph 🙂
As always, thanks for reading.
Walking the ‘prints. And slappin’ them, too.
As usual, I’m late to the party – the following video is from August 2011, so more than 8 years ago. But you’ll hear one of my favourite pianists, and also one of my favourite bass players. Watch, and listen if you have about half an hour:
This was in Poland, the home of Leszek (whom I showed already with Fresco & Danielsson). And yes, Marcus can also play fretless – he was Miles’ bass player after all! Plus imagine my surprise when they played Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’, a tune which I also played when I was slightly above 20 or so (together with Sven Thomsen and Christian Hecker).
And Marcus walks these (foot)prints. And yes, he slaps them, too.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Some recent photos taken around my desk
Working on our server is about finished, with only minor issues left. I have to thank Michael from Frankfurt who is the lead developer of our admin tool which is called ‘Froxlor‘, and who is known as ‘d00p’ in the forums and IRC channel of his program. He helped a lot, also directly on our server (thanks again Michael, and my offer for coffee still stands).
Last Sunday, in between those server works, I took this photo from Tuna from under my own chair, using my 50mm/2 macro lens from the digital Olympus Four Thirds system:
I cropped it into a 3:2 format like from a film camera.
And a few minutes ago I took a photo of our bird feeder from my desk ‘workspace’, through the closed veranda door, using my newly Panasonic Lumix 35-100mm lens fully zoomed out at 100mm, and wide open at f/5.6:
And because this one was taken through a glass door, I tried the ‘Clarity’ and ‘Dehaze’ filters in Olympus’ relatively new ‘Workspace’ raw developer (on Windows). Made a screen shot from these settings, kind of a ‘making of’:
Interesting, isn’t it? Almost like using a polariser filter which we used in the old film days when taking photos through glass surfaces. You still can’t beat them even in digital (laws of physics), but you can come pretty close already.
So this is what I see if I look left from my computer. As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Fading Into Nothing
I played on that awesome track by moonchild and by WhiteDrum55, and I also got a remix from FrankMil already, who also renamed the title to ‘Fading in 2 nothing’. Sounds like this:
List of musicians:
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening!
“Developed” using RawTherapee
I’m still “having fun” with our server, and with some of the software on it. Not much time for music, photography, or any other hobby. So I thought I’d show a photo which I took lately when I had the 50mm macro lens on my camera to “scan” some negatives (from Zuleikha’s films). And while I had RawTherapee open on my Linux box, I decided to use that to make a jpg out of the raw file from the camera. So here’s Tuna from last Sunday or so:
Love the colours in this one. A good contrast between the cat and the sofa. Oh, and I cropped it into 3:2 like all the “scans” I made from Zuleikha’s films.
As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Was working on the server a bit…
… sorry about the short interruption of services. Still not done, but the webs are back, and the mail was pretty much working the whole time during the last days.