fuck it! posting this one slightly early in the hopes that it motivates me to update my linux and cooking pages in the spare time i've carved out

three albums / more mp3 player blathering

this has been the first month with some decent musical discovery in a little while, which makes no sense because i've been unbelievably busy. it was definitely encouraged by the arrival of a new hiby m300. i lost my last one in japan and replaced it with a sony walkman nw-a105 - when i first got it i was excited to have something fairly cheap (~120 aud secondhand), slightly smaller, with a nominally sleeker design and ever so slightly classier android stock setup. it was also the only thing i had during my holiday because i lost my m300, as mentioned previously. it unfortunately experienced a crack in its 3.5mm jack (somehow?) meaning that the plug would lean away from the pins and cause you to lose audio in one ear. nw-a105s are fairly easy to open up and the 3.5mm port is thankfully not soldered to the circuitboard, which would make it an easy replacement if the part was actually something you can buy, which it appears not to be. i gave in and coughed up the 230 aud for a new m300 direct from hiby's store on aliexpress, and i can now give a very direct A/B comparison of the two devices.

the thing that hit me immediately is the battery life. the nw-a105's battery is impressively small and its android 10 operating system chews through power even when the device is completely idle, in airplane mode, with all non-essential services forcefully removed from the system. we're talking about 15% of the battery every hour, with the device doing absolutely nothing. the stock workaround is to have the walkman turn itself off if it's been idle for an hour, which is cute, but the device takes more than a minute to start up again and even longer for all of its services to open. comparatively, the hiby sat in my pocket with wireless communications turned on for three hours with nothing playing and lost 0% of its battery capacity. cool!

(it also has just enough juice to play balatro)

the hiby is slightly larger, which is technically a matter of taste but practically makes it actually useable, it comes with android 13 which means i can make podcast apps save to the sd card, and it is actually kind of crap free, software wise! on that note i've started using niagara as the launcher app which works great with this kind of device - it only shows the apps that you want on the front screen and a now playing widget. i'm using poweramp as my player - it has quirks but works pretty seamlessly - and audiobookshelf. the latter is a bit less seamless and doesnt have a "download all" button for my podcasts, so i have spent a fair bit of time manually selecting episodes to download. i would love to use lissen as my player because it is much slicker, but the creator doesn't want to support library location selection. ah well

anyway, apologies for the ramble. here's my lastfm report, my playlist (in text form) and some albums that i thought were cool

lastfm report

luz negra by richard galliano

(sorry i don't have a non-spotify version of this, but the official one got taken off youtube and it's not on bandcamp)

this album is frankly amazing - it's a combo of richard galliano on accordion and a string quartet and despite him being the first billing, and the accordion having the potential to take centre stage due to its novelty, it's a really balanced final product. the violin tends to play as a the main melody with the bass thrumming along behind, and the accordion kicking in to harmonise when it feels right

hedningarna by hedningarna

[click here to load the youtube video]

i threw this on while making laxpudding with my partner (along with a bunch of other weird swedish folk) and i was pretty surprised at A. how universal some of these sounds are between different cultures and B. how much this reminds me of both the witcher and unraveled soundtracks. the sound is dominated by the swedish bagpipes which give a really harsh droning sound, and is complimented by a huge list of strange stringed instruments. the fiddle plays a big part (and i learned that the hardanger fiddle is actually sweden's national instrument!) as well as the hurdy gurdy which i was super excited about. it's unfortunately not the most amazing background music due to just how cutting the bagpipes are, but it's a fun experience nevertheless

addherall by fem&m

it's pretty hard to not make a comparison between this artist and femtanyl, but there is still enough of a difference for it to be a unique experience. fem&m is a bit less harsh in general and i think they suit the "happy hardcore" genre a little more than femtanyl's breakbeat. the basslines and drums are bouncier and it feels more inspired by older electronic / techno works. the first song, its a vibe, reminded me of anamanaguchi and boot me up sounded just like the random soundcloud tracks i would find in high school

other music thoughts

i grabbed a boatload of music this month including a good variety of jazzy and funky stuff, the discographies of slow attack ensemble, fem&m and stomach book, and some swedish folk music. i also finally got around to the new sound by geordie greep, which really had me torn; one of the core parts of the albums is the characters it builds for its lyrics. the song holy, holy is a great example of this where it depicts a depraved and insecure man bragging about being a womaniser in a way that is altogether uncomfortable. it's a really hard experience to sit through, which is a shame, because the instrumental elements are incredible, as is greep's vocal ability. it's also kind of the point, but that doesn't mean i want to listen to it any more

i also checked out percepticide by pixel grip, which has some tracks that gave me a huge crystal castles vibe, and not tight by domi and jd beck, the title song of which gave me really fun nintendo wii vibes. unfortunately neither of these albums quite had the chops to stand out on their own so i'm talking about them here instead. oh well!

degoogling

i've been trying to get away from using google (and other big tech multinationals) in my everyday life for a while now - this is a big of a big job because a lot of these systems are so well designed or play together super well (google maps and the gmail + google contacts + google calendar suites are both quite hard to drop) but i've been steadily moving in the right direction.

this months degoogles have been google translate, which i replaced with deepl, and google photos, which i replaced with immich. i also shifted over to librewolf!

the former is pretty straightforward and works surprisingly well. i'm gonna have to do some more fiddling to work out where i can integrate it more cleanly with apps and browsers and the like, but for now its good when i just need to translate something quickly

immich was a move to jump away from google photos, which i've become more and more suspicious of as google continues to roll the ai hype train. self hosted software can sometimes be a fiddle but i was incredibly pleasantly surprised that immich is one of the most straightforward pieces of software i've set up on my server. i added the storage locations to the docker compose file and it literally just worked. on a similar note, it's amazingly straightforward to pick up because they've literally just copied the interface of google photos. if photos can do it, immich can do it, and the buttons are probably in the same place. one of the most future-feeling functions of google photos was its context recognition (allowing you to search images based on their contents) and facial recognition and grouping. one would assume this would take immense resources from googles vast server farms, but my single server with an i5-7500T was able to process about 10 000 photos in about an hour, and most of that process was just recognising the location of faces in frame - the machine learning takes just minutes. massive 10/10 for immich

the final changeup was librewolf. i've known about mozilla's slow and quiet corporatisation that's been happening over the last couple of years - the firefox project is funded by google, which seems counterintuitive, and mozilla has been introducing more tracking and callbacks into the default browser of basically every linux distribution. librewolf provides a really simple option to install firefox with all the nonsense taken out and some smart privacy settings on by default - a couple of them go a bit far and make the system harder to use for privacy reasons that seem a little paranoid to me, but they can be disabled pretty easily. all in all, the transition from firefox has been smooth and the new browser does the trick! i just wish it didnt have a blue logo. i'm definitely gonna make a post about how i have it set up

doodads

i gave my m300 insights in the music section, but i also grabbed a new mouse because my last one got busted in my most recent house move. i found the glorious o2 pro forge really nice and the only reason i wanted to replace it was that i had broken it in a dropped bag, so i decided to take the easy move and get the regular o2 pro (the forge versions are no longer sold). it works pretty well but is giving me a handful of gripes - the buttons aren't as nice as the forge version being the first, and probably something i'll get use to. my bigger issue was with the software. i originally got the o2 pro forge because i was sick of mouse software that had to be running in the background and he o2 was recommended due to its ability to hold all settings on-device (this honestly should be the standard). i was then horrified to find that the o2 non-forge seemed to misbehave with the software turned off, and also would magically lose its settings if you decided to plug it in to charge. great. version 1 solves all these issues and is thankfully still available on the website but it does make me wish i'd done some more research when making my replacement

i also put this keyboard together! it's an aeboards praxis that i got for a sweet deal close to a year ago and left in its box until last week. i had these big plans of waiting to find the perfect matching purple keycaps, but i decided to slap some cheap (but still extremely good) jwick 67g tactile switches in there, and put on my universal set of pbtfans white on black keycaps. i knew that spacebar set would come in handy one day! i'm not absolutely crazy about the placement of the super keys and i wish they were placed near the middle hhkb-style, but getting the muscle memory hasn't been too difficult. getting the muscle memory for the three bonus switches on the top left, however, was too difficult and i gave up very early. i should find something funny to put in the spaces

this cool blogpost

link

a friend in an art discord server that i frequent made this blogpost and i think it's really fucking cool! super in-depth breakdown of how road systems work and how cyberpunk 2077 uses its roads to communicate its world (and where it kinda messes it up)

cooking

i started putting recipes on my website this month! i'm still working out a lot of the kinks, such as the best way to standardise the layouts and how to deal with the fact that home cooking photos tend to look a little ugly. i'll figure it out though!

i've also been making a cooking journal list! this is basically just a record of the things i made and on what days, with notes of the recipe, modifications i made, and the overall success. it's amazing for going back and checking what worked and what didn't and avoiding losing recipes. i might talk about this technique in some kind of cooking masterpost!

for this month though my highlight was probably the laxpudding i made with my partner

i wrote about it in the recipe post itself, but this was super homely and fun. it did also make me somewhat understand why my european mother enjoys quiche so much, though that is still a sentiment i'm unlikely to share in the near future

müjin

[click here to load the youtube video]

i've been watching a lot of this dude this month - he's a great entertainer, and also does a huge variety of interesting things. i happily stood and watched in silence as he spent days pouring concrete in his basement, sucked wasps out of his house and scraped paint off his old fireplace. his new stuff is awesome but i picked this one because it's his most eyecatching thumbnail and most watched video - how could it not be with that photo

gender

i remember when i was early in on tumblr and beginning to learn about transgender identity and genderfluidity and not really getting it. it was the mid 2010s and the modern concepts of transgender people were only just beginning to hit the "mainstream" - toilet-pearls-clutching was in its infancy, and jk rowling hadn't shown all of her cards yet. around this time i was introduced to the concept of "ftf" and "mtm" trans people, a concept that seemed insane back then, but has seemed more and more reasonable as i've continued figuring out my own gender and being surrounded by other lovely genderqueer people

this moment came back to me during the first session with my new electrolysis tech - when i described how i wanted a full removal of my facial hair she asked if i was "changing my gender" and the gulf between how i used to think about being transgender and how i think now became incredibly clear. i think to the uninitiated it seems like someone has been one gender for all of their life and they suddenly realised that they want to try something else, like the other option seems like a better one. for me, as my internal identity began to crystalise, it also became clear that my external identity didn't match. it wasn't like i became non-binary per se, it was more that i realised the feelings i'd had on the inside the whole time had a name, and once i'd figured that i wanted the rest of my life to match (i hope that makes sense lol)

i also went to an artists talk by a really cool enby about their gender-focused exhibition - it was awesome, for reference - but it made me think about how a lot of visual representations of genderqueer-ness seem to focus on fluffy shapes and pastel rainbow forms. i'm suddenly kind of interested in artistic gender expression that is somewhat the opposite - can i show my feelings with a drawing that's dark and spikey and not at all ethereal? i think i could do some super cool human forms with this idea, but also something more somber - perhaps like someone moving through a dark misty mire a-la middle earth?

i also watched the silence of the lambs this month and hoo boy that is a can of worms. the concept that a character feels like they're a woman but isn't because of trauma is a bit weird and doesnt really hold up by modern standards. id be pretty confident that this film was an inciting incident for a lot of people associating transgender people, especially transfemmes, with sexual violence which, uh, is uncool