Today I’ve tried it on the bicycle, and came home with mixed results: my bicycle has a steel frame and no dampers, so that’s too hard even for the (electronic) image stabilisation in the Google Pixel phone. And then there’s wind noise, hadn’t thought of that as well… so I’ll show a few photos I took using my camera instead of videos:
As you can see I didn’t clean my bicycle before trying it, I really wanted to test just the mobile phone holder on it, and if I could take videos. Well, no, not really – so that holder would only be good if you’d want to use the phone for navigation (which should never happen on a bicycle anyway – can’t go that far from home)…
The bicycle is a very nice T-300 from Fahrradmanufaktur, a bit like this one, but instead of a Gates belt drive mine has a capsuled normal chain drive, like this one. Very nice bicycles, easily recommendable – and I really should use (and clean) mine more often…
Back to the car: we took the car out to Rödelheim, and I’ve tried to take videos from that drive again – but today as it seems it was perhaps a bit too hot to do that – the phone switched off in both directions after some 17 and 10 minutes, respectively. I couldn’t really read the cause of that, because I had to concentrate on the road, so heat is my guess… have to try if it does that when used as navigation device (with Android Auto, or with Google Maps) as well… if yes, then another mount for the car’s cooling slots would possibly have been a better one. But no, I won’t return anything because of that. “Lehrgeld”, as we say here in Germany. Education isn’t always free.
Yesterday we’ve had both neighbours’ cats visiting us at the same time, Mitchie calls them “Cookie”, and “Milka”, and they’re both tomcats (I think, haven’t really looked that closely). She took a few snapshots using her mobile phone, a Google Pixel 4a 5G, and then sent them to me via Signal:
Still missing “our” Tuna each day… couldn’t think of a better and more loyal chief mouser…
Later today, we’ll have another one of these virtual meetings where everyone sits at home in front of their work notebooks with built-in webcams, speaking into headsets, well I guess most of you will know the experience of that, it has become pretty normal since the last 14 and a half months or so.
What’s not normal about today’s upcoming meeting is that it’s about saying goodbye to 5 colleagues with whom I’ve been working since the last 13 years or so.
Very sad to see everyone go, and the rest of us will follow 3 months later, so all I can do for now is to wish them all luck and all the best for their future.
I’ll miss you, ladies & gents, and it has been an honour and a pleasure working with you all. Thanks for the good time.
Yesterday my work notebook got an upgrade from RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 8.3 to 8.4 – normally not a big deal you would assume, but when dealing with internal IBM images, you’ll also download a complete Win10 virtual machine (more than 80% of the 8.8GB download), and while more or less everything is being drawn out of a VPN it all trickles down with about 5 MBit/s maximum speed – takes all day, although my cable network line could have handled 135 MBit/s… oh well…
“Well”, I thought after work, my son Jeremy advised me to try out Arch Linux years ago, and because that’s what they call a “rolling distribution”, it’s always current and comes with the latest and greatest packages, so let’s have a try. And so I installed that into a (kernel-based) KVM machine on my computer, giving it just 4GB of RAM, a 20GB part of my hard disk, and 2 CPUs.
And yes, it is what it says on its homepage – a “simple, lightweight distribution”. I installed the Gnome desktop environment, and so for the first time I saw the upcoming Gnome 40 (only rolling release distros like Arch plus the new Fedora have that one). It even came with the default background(s) from the Gnome guys, so it more or less looked identical to their image:
Gnome 40 desktop view
So if you’re curious how Arch looks, and like me you prefer the Gnome desktop to others, have a look at the Gnome site.
Other than that it’s really pretty minimal, so I see Jeremy’s point – you more or less build (or install) what you need, nothing else, nothing less – the default environment even doesn’t have a printer. So sleek, minimalistic, yes it is. And sexy somehow.
So I tried and installed tools like Firefox, Thunderbird, and Ardour using Arch’s internal ‘pacman’ tool, and yes, all the latest versions including Ardour 6.7 which is only a few days old while I’m typing this. So this is a very easy and convenient way to getting the latest of everything indeed.
Would I need or even recommend it? Well about recommendations: for beginners, no – it’s much easier to recommend a standard Ubuntu or even Linux Mint (based upon Debian/Ubuntu but with more non-free stuff) to beginners than this – this is more for tinkerers who know exactly what they’ll want and/or need, and what not.
For me? Well having the latest and greatest does have its charm, but then there’s also not that much difference to, say, a Debian ‘Sid’ (unstable), and this. Both will give the latest stuff, and both will be managable by users who know their way around Linux, and how to react should things break or not work out immediately (think of greater transitions like from Gnome 2.x to 3.x) – but do I need this in my day-to-day usage of my own machine? I think not. I’m not that much interested in the system(s) per se, but want a reliable and configurable environment on which I can run my photo and music apps, handle mail and basic web browsing, all that day-to-day stuff. It’s not that sexy if you first have to deal with and fix your latest updates/upgrades rather than beginning whatever you wanted to do right away. So for me, a current Debian stable is just the way to go. Or, if you want something more recent, take Ubuntu (although the upcoming Debian 11 ‘Bullseye’ will be newer than the 20.04 LTS of Ubuntu of course), or any of its derivates (a friend from Paris takes ElementaryOS, a strikingly beautiful descendant of Ubuntu which looks a bit like MacOS).
To each their own as they say. Anyway, very cool and interesting to look over the proverbial fence, and to try out Arch. Somehow I still love its simplicity, and the idea behind it. So, if you want to see it, try it – recommended indeed. At least you’d never have to install a new version anymore… 🙂
Philosophically, Arch is a bit more lax compared to Debian concerning the ‘free’ (in free and open source), but both are more or less the opposite of ‘Enterprise’, which I like a lot. Both Arch and Debian are even a lot less commercial than Ubuntu, and unlike that (which is built by the staff from Canonical) they’re not companies, so they can’t be bought, sold, and ruined in any way, and I love just that. It’s a thing called ‘freedom’, and that has values far beyond monetary ones. Think about it.
As always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: While I’ve been at it, I could of course also have had a look at KDE Plasma – but ok, there are more rainy days to come, so… 😉
I wrote about buying both Reaper and Harrison Mixbus, but at the moment I’m back to plain old Ardour for my audio mixes – and I still keep changing things, like:
I changed from the version 5.12 which is the current version of Ardour in both Debian stable and also in KXStudio to 6.6 which will be the second last of the 6.x versions of Ardour (with the latest version being 6.7, soon to be released). This looks a bit like Mixbus which is based on Ardour 6.x, except the bells & whistles and the built-in eqs, compressors, and such.
I also changed from using lots of Calf tools to alternative ones which are making use of better (programmed) DSPs – those Calf plugins look nice, and are easy to understand, but sonically there are better ones I think.
In my latest remix I experimented with using 96kHz sampling rate while working, and used plain old CD quality 44.1kHz (and even the mp3 format which Ardour now can also write) for exports, except my single bass stems which I still exported as .wav files. This ‘oversampling’ is done more or less automatically by some better plugins, so I’ll go on working with 48kHz which is the norm for video and also the one used by many mobile devices (like phones).
Just in case you’re interested, at the moment I’m using:
Of course, I’m also still experimenting with Harrison Mixbus, but can’t do everything at once and for all projects – I still want to make music a bit as well… 😉
So much to learn, so little time… but I still love it when/if I approach better output quality along the way. One important thing to keep in mind is for instance gain staging – make very sure to not saturate your outputs too early, and to get your signal into the next plugin already too ‘hot’ for it to handle that signal… drive it hot at the output, not while still working 😉
As always, thanks for reading 🙂 And also thanks to those who donate their precious free time into developing awesome tools like the ones mentioned above, for free. Help them with a little donation if you can, they need the nice feedback like every other musician/technician as well…
Got my first vaccination against the COVID-19 disease on Monday evening, with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Just like our chancellor and vice chancellor who both had the same as well.
Tuesday morning I felt nothing at all, no side effects – but that changed quite a bit during the day: first I felt cold and feverish a bit (didn’t measure anything tho), then I developed a real headache which also didn’t want to go away after taking an Aspirin 500, and around the evening there was also sickness involved, couldn’t really eat.
So I went to bed early, at around 9 or so, and slept through, dreaming some wild stuff, but next morning (Wednesday) I was back to normal again, and since then I’m more or less without any further symptoms.
Too early perhaps for a conclusion, but yesterday a friend from Paris reported almost the same – he wrote “i feel a bit like i’ve been trampled by a herd of buffalos this morning…”
My wife and a colleague of hers who both work in a Kindergarten had their dose a few weeks earlier, and just continued working, unlike their boss who suffered as she told me with a remark like: “Men…”
So let’s see. To feel sick and bad for half a day is still far better than catching that virus, that’s why I would recommend getting the jab to everyone who has the chance to, and is offered one of those.
And what fits to both the headline, and to my feelings about it is Shi‘s actual pick for her New Year’s song which she uploaded on the 3rd of February 2013 (her date of entry at Wikiloops), called “This time”:
What a wonderful song of my three friends from the ‘loops. I had this one on my first album on Wikiloops, without own contributions yet – and I’ve added “The cool cats from the loops – Hit singles” to the widgets area on the right of this page now so that you can find and download it. As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
