Spatial Scare

I bought some AirPods recently and they’ve been great — good sound and comfortable to wear. They have this thing called spatial sound that’s supposed to create something like a surround sound effect. I’ve only really noticed it when watching a movie and I turn my head to one side or the other and the sound shifts. It’s pretty subtle and feels like a bit of a gimmick because practically all the time I’m watching a movie on my MacBook I’m staring straight ahead at the screen.

The other night I was watching an episode of the recent show Mr and Mrs Smith. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were having a fairly intense talk about whether having children would be a good idea when there is a tapping at the door. And it sounds like it’s coming from right the glass door right behind me so my heart does a mid-chest flip. I pull out the AirPods and look outside and it takes me a moment to realise that it was just the show.

I rewind a bit and start watching again and about a minute later I hear the tapping from behind me again and I jump out of my skin again even though I’d just gone through the same thing not ten minutes before. Spatial sound may well be a bit of an afterthought now, but if someone put a lot of thought into it, they could create something pretty great.

Posted in Life, RSS Tagged
Posted on 21 April 2024

Making decisions | A Working Library

From Mandy Brown on A Working Library:

There’s a really important thing that sometimes nervous people like me don’t realize — that the expression “to make a decision” is perfectly accurate: a decision is something you create. There’s an inclination to think that with enough research and thinking and conversation and information, it’s possible to determine what the correct decision is; to think that decision making is an intellectual puzzle. But generally it’s not. You make decisions. Something is created when you make a decision. It’s an act of will, not an act of thought.

Posted in Links Tagged
Posted on 8 March 2024

Sometimes

I was thinking of posting a youtube link to My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes, which I think of as the acoustic track from Loveless, although it obviously isn’t acoustic at all. It wasn’t a single so didn’t have a proper video but someone had put one together using scenes from Lost In Translation. It makes sense, because Kevin Shields contributed to the soundtrack, which was the first music I’d heard from him since Loveless.

I haven’t seen Lost since it came out. I was living in Tokyo at the time and totally connected with the feeling of excitement of being an outsider from a much duller town in a vibrant and pulsating cityscape. I remember thinking it was cool to see Scarlett, who at the time I thought of as the minor character from Ghost World, in a lead role. It was fun to see Bill Murray doing his thing before he had become ザ Bill Murray.

Putting this on my very long watchlist of things to watch again.
I also need to check out Somewhere and The Beguiled.

Posted in Music Tagged ,
Posted on 6 March 2024

Cult of the Lamb: Inventory Bug

Last night, after thoroughly enjoying the demo, I was raring to give the full version of Cult Of the Lamb a go. I was happily working my way through the opening tutorial scenes when I got my first piece of gold and was prompted to open the inventory by pressing tab. When I pressed tab again to close it, the game froze.

After playing through the opening a number of times and trying to do things differently but still getting a freeze, I gave up and went to bed. This morning I found the answer. It’s a bug, of course, that seems to affect the Mac version mainly whether you’re using the keyboard or a controller. Instead of pressing the same button you used to get into the inventory, you have to press either F, for keyboard, or the B button equivalent on a controller.

Hope they sort out a fix soon because this doesn’t happen in the actual demo and I’d hate to think how many people would give up basically before the game has even begun.

Update a few hours later: Darn – another freeze after delivering first sermon. I’m sure this stuff must have worked before so I’m sure they’ll get it working again soon. Right?

Posted in Games Tagged ,
Posted on 1 March 2024

Bring the Noise!

One of the main reasons I recently updated to a newer laptop was to run Lightroom at a less lugubrious pace and to be able to use its new machine learning enhanced selection and noise reduction tools. On my decade old MacBook I could, with a lot of patience, make some use of the selection tools. Trying to use the noise reduction however reliably crashed the program. Not only that, it logged me out of my user. Very weird.

Happily, the new machine performs both tasks with ease. I’m especially impressed with Lightroom’s ability to clean up noise from high-ISO shots taken with my ancient Canon 5DII. Click the image below to see the before and after in more detail.

Posted in Life, RSS
Posted on 29 February 2024

Pavement – Witchi Tai To

When Pavement played the first show of their recent reunion tour, they finished off with this cover of Native American jazz pioneer Jim Pepper’s Witchi Tai To. Such a lovely and positive vibe with which to end the show and start their awesome year-long tour.

I will forever wonder why Bob was left out of the band intro. Nothing sinister, I reckon — probably just Malkmus forgetting what he was going to say. Bloody slacker.

Like all other Pavement covers they make it sound like their own song.

Posted in Culture, Music Tagged
Posted on 24 February 2024

Gyoza Moments

Some things I like and don’t like about making gyoza —

Chopping Chinese cabbage is my least favourite part, mainly because my chopping board is a bit too small, as is my knife, so I end up with bits of cabbage all over the kitchen. It seems like I chop for an hour or two without making much progress then suddenly it’s over and I have a large heap of finely chopped cabbage. Nice.

Salting and squeezing the cabbage is probably my favourite part. Basically you take the chopped cabbage, put it in a bowl, stir through a couple of spoonfuls of salt, put that into sieve over a bowl and wait for twenty minuets. The salt will draw water out of the cabbage so there’ll be quite a bit in the bowl. Most of the water will need a bit more encouragement, so you put the cabbage in the middle of a tea towel and wrap it up and squeeze it as much as you can to extract as much water as possible. I don’t know why I find this so satisfying. Maybe its because there’s nothing like this in any other recipe I make. Anyway, it’s fun.

Bonus second favourite part — getting a nice deep dark crust on the underside of the gyoza. Without it, I’d consider my gyoza a failure.

If you haven’t made gyoza and want to give it a try, go for J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe.

Posted in Food, Life Tagged
Posted on 14 February 2024

think of the big picture

From Elle on Mastodon:

whenever my boss says “think of the big picture, elle” I’m immediately an astronaut floating silently in space tethered to my ship looking down on earth, and nothing he wants seems important or even relevant really so this strategy has backfired on him more than once is what I’m saying

Posted in Links
Posted on 14 February 2024

Just Some Buttons

I want to get a new non-phone eReader — although I love my iPhone Mini’s size I’d like to see more than seven words on a page — and the main feature I care about is that it have page-turn buttons. Seems like that’s a high end feature these days. The two choices are the Kobo Libra 2 for $300 or the Kindle Oasis for, ahem, $420. On all the more reasonably priced options you have to tap the screen to turn the page. I know from years reading on a phone and some time with a Kindle Paperwhite that I hate tapping the screen.

So, should I spend $120 more to be able to read my fairly sizeable library of Kindle books? Should I throw my hat into the ring with the non-Amazon crowd? Most likely I’ll end up deciding, as I have in the past, that I could buy a lot of books with even the $300 that the “cheaper” option would cost and that reading on my phone is not really that bad.

Anyway, back to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. A terrible thing has happened to Marx and I hope he pulls through.

Posted in Culture Tagged , ,
Posted on 13 February 2024

Yesterday Is Not Today

From Louie Mantia’s Yesterday Is Not Today:

Everything has to change, every day, forever. That’s how it has to work. If not, we have determined we were smarter yesterday than we are today.

Posted in Links, RSS
Posted on 10 February 2024

Really Really Light

The New Pornographers is a band I never listened to mainly because their name made me think they were a kind of sleazy Strokes ripoff. Turns out they aren’t. Since getting my AirPods Pro I’ve actually started to listen to music outside of my car and I’ve been really enjoying a lot of the stuff the Apple Music Discover station has been surfacing. I’ll always give more weight to the recommendations of an actual person, but maybe there is a place for algorithms after all.

Anyway, one of the songs that popped up was The New Pornographers’ Really Really Light from their newish album Continue as a Guest. It’s catchy, has those obscure lyrics I can’t resist, and features a wonderful interplay of male and female vocals. Can’t wait to dive deeper into their sound.

Posted in Links, Music Tagged
Posted on 10 February 2024

Trying Obsidian

I finally got around to trying Obsidian and, with the Things theme installed, it seemed to do everything I wanted. Mainly, I really like the way it displayed checklists and dimmed the text if you checked something was done. And being able to add little icons to the mobile toolbar to move items up and down is also great.

One thing I didn’t love about the theme was that on my iPhone it put a big blue dot in the bottom right hand corner to let me change from one kind of view to another but also got in the way of the words I was trying to write.

After a bit of head scratching I worked out how to turn it off. You have to install a plug-in called Style Settings. Once you’ve installed and enabled it, there will be an option in the general settings to allow you to make the dot disappear along with a bunch of other little tweaks that you can make.

Things seemed great until I tried it out on my Mac using Voice Control, my preferred text input method at the moment. And for some reason, unlike almost every other app on my computer, nothing happened — no text appeared. I’m not sure why, but there is some kind of disconnection between Voice Control and Obsidian. This seems to be something of a known issue with some people reporting that it works about 10 per cent of the time and fails the other 90 per cent.

So, back to Bear it is.

Posted in Technology Tagged ,
Posted on 13 January 2024

MarsEdit media manager issue (and how to fix it)

If you use MarsEdit and its media manager is showing hardly any of your photos, the problem is most likely your setting in the Photos app for iCloud Photos.

You have two choices: “Download Originals to this Mac” or “Optimise Mac Storage”.

If you have it set to download originals, all your pictures will show up. If you have it set to optimise Mac storage, you’ll just see a random smattering of images.

While troubleshooting this with Daniel Jalkut, the author of MarsEdit, he mentioned he was looking at ways to address this including, perhaps, using a newer Apple facility to access the Photos database. As SSD space on Macs remains limited and image resolution on iPhones expands, I hope Apple will make it easier for developers to deliver what users expect.

Posted in Technology Tagged , ,
Posted on 25 December 2023

Like Kings

This is a great point. So much coverage of tech focuses on the wrangling of aristocrats.

This is not a fully formed thought, but I have a visceral reaction to seeing coverage of Altman’s firing treated as a top-left news headline. It feels part of the hagiography of these dudes, that we cover them like kings and we cover their companies like nations, but somehow we don’t cover what their tech is going to do to real people.

Mandy Brown

Posted in Internet
Posted on 19 November 2023

New Love Glow

What kind of monster, when meeting their brother’s ex-girlfriend at the pharmacy, would casually mention that he’s got that new love glow?

Posted in Culture, Music Tagged
Posted on 13 November 2023

Gardening in the Rain

I have accidentally left cleaning up the garden to the day before our rent inspection and now it’s raining. Looks like I’ll be living a real life version of that early REM song “Gardening in the Rain”.

Posted in Life, Music
Posted on 12 November 2023

Shush

Although Mastodon is the social media thing that feels most like home to me, I’ve been dipping my toe a little into the slightly murky waters of Bluesky and Threads.

One thing that has surprised me is the primitive implementation of the mute feature. I use muting to temporarily make my feed a bit quieter and stop it being dominated by people who are being particularly vociferous. It’s more of a “shush” than a “mute”.

Neither Threads nor Bluesky lets me do that. I can’t just remove someone’s posts for a day and have them start showing up tomorrow, which is pretty much all I want to do. You can mute someone, but you have to manually unmute them to see their posts again. It’s more of a way to quietly unfollow someone without them knowing. Maybe that’s what people want or maybe they’re planning on adding more granular controls.

Oh, and neither has keyword muting yet either. So if you’d like to take a break from hearing about the Cybertruck or whatever, they can’t help you there either.

Posted in Internet, Technology Tagged , ,
Posted on 12 November 2023

Thunk

I love the soft thunk you get when you drop the kettlebell on the grass at the end of a set.

Posted in Life Tagged
Posted on 12 November 2023

Super Spicy

So if you buy your daughter some super spicy chicken wings at the Taiwanese chicken place whose supposedly non-spicy chicken is too spicy for you, it’s a bad idea, when you put the super spicy chicken wings into the oven to heat up, to plunge your hand into the bag, bring out an assemblage of crunchy chicken bits and the super-spicy spice mix and put it in your mouth. You will not be happy. Lesson learned?

Posted in Food
Posted on 10 November 2023

TAR

This was great — just so full of great scenes and much less straightforward than I’d expected. After just one watch I don’t really feel I have a handle on what this film is about or trying to say. But I do know I’ll watch it again.

Some things that stood out for me:

  • Lydia pretending to find her partner’s blood pressure medications upon returning to Berlin when she actually stole them in the first place. A pretty clear signal that she is not a good person.
  • The whole white male cis composer scene — that student’s bimbou yuzuri is off the charts.
  • Her threatening a child — “No one will believe you because I’m a grown up.”
  • Her gradual increasing sensitivity to sounds — screams in the park, ticking metronome and the like. I need to be more aware of this on the next watch.
  • Noémie Merlant just disappears halfway through the film when it’s clear to her that she has fallen from favour — no dramatic confrontations.
Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures Tagged
Posted on 9 November 2023