Category: friends

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Congrats, thanks, and a busy #caturday

Congrats go out to Peter Hickman who won this year’s “Senior TT” race, and who also scored a new lap record (on a stock machine, not on his superbike!) of over 136mph on average on the Snaefell Mountain Course which is a bit over 60km for one lap. Congrats again to Michael Dunlop as well, who now has 25 TT wins if I counted correctly.

Thanks go out to the Debian girls & guys who at this time are still busy (in Cambridge, England, and all over the world) to release Debian 12 aka “Bookworm”. You can read about their progress in the Micronews site if you wish. Once they are ready, the download link on Debian’s main page will lead you to version 12, as long as it’s still 11.7 it’s still ongoing work. Thanks folks; you rock!

We were busy shopping and treated ourselves with some ice-cream afterwards. And like so often, we also brought some nice little bits for our neighbours’ cat whom we call “Cookie” – and who regularly falls asleep after eating:

I am by the way now also “microblogging”, but not on Twitter – I’ve never even tried that – but on Mastodon. The small server where you can find me hosts the picture above, since I cancelled my Flickr Pro account and therefore I’m now restricted to a maximum of 1,000 photos there. If you want you can also follow me there, but I don’t post that much and that often (yet) as this is all still very new for me. I’m an old school “blogger” as you can see here… 😉

And finally – in case you’d like to visit the Isle of Man for next year’s Tourist Trophy races (take two weeks off in case you want to see everything), here are some great tips from Frank, a Douglas Councillor who named his YT channel “amadeusiom“:

Isle of Man TT 2023 Visitor’s Guide: Info, Tips, Events, Insights & More

I thanked Frank for his very nice reports from besides the tracks, and for his helpful tips, and I asked him if I may embed them here, to which he kindly agreed. Thanks mate!

Thanks to everyone for reading and viewing, like always.

Update from Sunday morning: here it is, as expected:

You can read all about it and how to get it at https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/bookworm-released.html

Again, thanks for reading.

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Looking good…

In two days from now, Debian 12 “Bookworm” (like always, code-named after a character from Toy Story) will be released. The Bits from the Release Team are promising, and like Liam Proven from The Register, I also want a “boring”, or as he put it, “excitement-free” operating system on my computer 😉

What I could *not* reproduce here were his problems with pipewire, maybe because I had used that on Arch before, but on my installation (a fresh one on a new partition), everything worked out of the proverbial box. What I did install additionally were things like pw-jack or qpwgraph, because I wanted to use it together with Ardour to record music – also works fine.

So in case you haven’t tried Debian yet, from Saturday on I’d say give it another chance. This is the system I would recommend to friends and to family. Unlike Red Hat (and soon, its derivatives), it still provides things like LibreOffice in case you choose the “desktop” variant during installation, and unlike Ubuntu, it still provides Firefox (ESR) from its own repositories instead of only as a snap package. Clean & lean is the way to go, I’d much prefer that instead of endless redundancies with snaps, flatpacks, or docker or other “images”. So thanks to the sisters & brothers over at Debian for still doing all that work.

Like always, thanks for reading.

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Saying hello to and thanks for the “Blonde Bop”

Glen MacArthur aka GMaq, farmer, musician, and inventor/creator of AVLinux and the AVL drum kits has decided to give us all a new gift, his “Blonde Bop” drum kit. Here’s kind of a “making of” and explanation:

New Free Drumkit! AVL Drumkits Blonde Bop Kits and LV2 Plugin!

So if your DAW can take sfz or sf2 samples or even better, LV2 plugins, go and have a look – and as you can see, you can – at least in Ardour – even spread out Robin Gareus’ nice plugin over separate channels just like a drummer would do in the studio.

Seen/found in Linux Musicians and the Ardour Discourse, and thank you very much Glen – again!

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One of my favourites

Olivia (OKO) posted this on Soundcloud a while ago, just found it there. We have so many good bass players on Wikiloops, so I feel quite honoured that she chose the version with me on my upright bass:

Pieces by OKO and frineds, lyrics by Eyeless, also on Wikiloops where it originated

Thanks Olivia and friends, what a pleasure to jam with you all 🙂 <3

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Happy New Year 2023

To all our family, friends, and readers of this: have a happy new year 2023 everyone. Be well and safe.

Scene from “Dinner for one” starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, © NDR, Foto: Annemarie Aldag

Like always, thanks for reading.

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The Herring King Band – Second Album

Yesterday the second album from the Herring King Band was released:

I had the great honour and pleasure to play my bass on some of the tracks, but all others are so great – if you like to hear Herbie’s story, please head over to the album page on Wikiloops to hear and/or download it 🙂

Thanks to my friends for inviting me, I’m humbled by all of *your* performances!

And thanks to you for reading, and for listening, or even downloading.

P.S.: the band also asked to send out their Christmas greetings – so here you go:

Merry Christmas, on behalf of the Mermaid, all Herrings, and their King 🙂
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Sian

Thinking of a friend, and as it seems he composed this a while ago. You can also hear him playing the guitar solo at around the 4 minute mark:

Sian · KölnBigBand · Ebo Wagner

Like always, thanks for listening.