I've had some problems with some of my music videos coming out with the volume too low, which led me down the rabbit-hole of volume normalization.
YouTube and other sites decrease volume on audio based on the "loudness" of the signal as measured in LUFS. While my mixes don't sound especially loud to me, I suspect that the hard-limiting I do (basically just flattening peaks that exceed maximum amplitude) is affecting the loudness calculation.
Going forwards, I'm going to try reducing volume so I don't need to hard-limit and then using "matchering" to remaster the track to have volume/eq profile similar to a known-good track.
Every November for the past four years now, I've been running a project called Songvember. The idea is to write an original song and release a video of it every week for the month of November.
When I first started, I offered a general invitation to the local musicians I play with to participate, and was pleasantly surprised that a number of them did!
We've managed to keep this thing going, and this year there are three of us who've written songs (for the first two years it was just my own material). We favor quick production and the synergy of a band playing together over perfection: we leave in most of the warts. The feel is more like a live performance than a music video.
The complete playlist of this year's lineup is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjCTw7EE69oeQ3gECxTLAqwNGNJg2etOJ
My oldest son was talking to his little brother about strategies for improving his grip.
Oldest: You'll have forearms like Popeye
Wife: But Popeye only has two arms?
Me: Yeah, but he's got massive forearms. Oh, wait...
You may remind friends and family who are pissed off about flight cancellations due to the government shutdown what a stupid idea it was to put a department of the federal government in charge of airport security in the first place. For almost 25 years they've done nothing but inconvenience passengers in the name of security theater.
The obvious solution is to re-privatize the TSA.
Well pumps and furnaces are pretty high on my list. I can attest that hauling big buckets of water uphill from the nearby stream so we can flush the toilets is not a task I relish.
A couple of days ago, what was left of this fairly massive tree came down across my road. I live at the end of a private road (it basically turns into my driveway) so nobody from the town shows up to help when something like this happens and we were the only house of our neighbors that was cut off as a result of this so it was time to break out my trusty chainsaw. After about forty minutes of really sweaty work I managed to cut through it. I was too spent at that point to deal with the portion that had been blocking the road. I basically rolled it off to the side so our cars could pass and then joked to my 14yo son that I wanted him to go out and move it into the woods. I didn't expect that he'd be able to move it on his own but sure enough, the wirey whelp managed to finagle it off the road and a couple of feet into the woods! I think he took it as a personal challenge.
Time to teach the boy how to use a chainsaw.
Confronted with the reality that the project that I'm working on will likely be best served by porting to go, I set out on a half-hearted mission to write a translator to convert go syntax into something I can conceivably tolerate.
Nostr fun for the day: setting up a self-hosted NIP-05 address!
I got a parking ticket a few weeks ago while we were on vacation in the Hamptons. I had parked in a lot metered by the new "parkmobile" app, which I guess is becoming very popular in many towns (including my own), probably because it requires only minimal infrastructure at the site -- really just a sign with the lot number.
I had a boat tour to catch, so I was furiously trying to set up payment through the app for the first time ever on my phone on the walk over to the pier, but I kept getting timeouts connecting to their site. I was able to access other internet sites just fine, but the parkmobile app kept timing out.
Finally, when I got to the boat, my wife was able to arrange for payment from her phone (she'd had some problems with the app, too). This was about half an hour after we had parked.
When I returned to my car, I found a ticket on the windshield. It had been written out _three minutes before_ the payment receipt came through to my wife's e-mail.
Of course, when I returned from vacation I sent a letter to the town court explaining the situation and requesting that the ticket be waived. Cynical codger that I am, I didn't really expect them do so, or even necessarily to reply in a timely manner. So I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I received a letter from them curtly informing me that the charge had been dismissed!
Sometimes we win :-)
Last weekend was "The Hoot," a local music festival we do every September at Little Stony Point. I've been involved for at least the past 4 years, running sound for most of them. My band ("House of the Hog") also played this year.
Long day, but a great time!
GM!
With regards to properties of government, I would argue that rule of law and separation of powers (particularly the latter) have been much more effective at ensuring freedom and limiting the abuses of government than democracy. But even these safeguards are largely ineffective against the cancerous growth of the state. One need only consider the current extent of the US federal government as compared to the authority actually granted to it by the US constitution.
A lot of US politicians lately squak about "protecting democracy" (usually in the context of opposing something Trump has done, however unrelated to democracy that thing may be) but when you come right down to it, democracy really hasn't served the free world very well.
The best thing you can say about it is that it mostly guards against the government creating laws that are vastly unpopular. But if you happen to be a member of a disfavored minority, whether that be stoners, gays, illegal aliens or fundamentalist Christians, democracy is just a tool for justifying your oppression.
Attempting my first shit-post on Nostr... how am I doing?
In consideration of the (still questionable) possibility of a true "AI revolution," in which most white-collar work is replaced by AI, it seems to me that such a revolution would be no different from any other economic paradigm shift. These always involve periods of instability as we respond to the new balance but ultimately always produce greater wealth.
The main thing that can screw this process up is government intervention, both in the form of existing policy and new policy created to address the crisis. For example, we could conceive of a not-too-distant future in which everyone has access to the legal resources currently available only to corporations, governments and the super-rich. Except that this would almost certainly run afoul of restrictions as to who can practice law.
Well, yeah. The lyrics are awesome, no complaints there :-)
TIL about BTC Infinity Day. Also, happy b-day!
I own Pros & Cons (on vinyl, no less!) but I'll confess I'm not wild about it.
Resolving my own question on dealing with divisive subjects: not a problem, everyone here is a crypto-anarchist ;-)
Holding out for a personal back-yard reactor.
I'm back to trying to implement npub signatures (Schnorr signatures, IIUIC) in Crack (https://crack-lang.org).
It's very interesting how much npub borrows from the BTC world, and I'm finding myself pondering a lot on some of the design choices. For example, a number of elements that are folded into a signature are "tagged hashes." These are hashes over both the content and a tag indicating the semantics of the content (for example, a tag of "BIP0340/aux" for the random number used to compute the signature). I can only assume that a lot of this is to ensure that things "break cleanly." So it would be difficult to produce an algorithm that works in test cases but can fail more generally in the wild.
It would be interesting to read through the decisions that motivated a lot of this design.
I've been wanting to experiment with code generation using ollama for a while now, but doing so using the standard client isn't very useful. No support for multi-line prompts, AFAICT, and any generated code needs to be copy-pasted in.
I finally got around to implementing an extension to my editor for this - now I can select a prompt, run the extension and stream the response right into the same buffer.
Let's see what mischief I can make out of this.
Considering whether it's worthwhile to post all of my general interest type stuff on both Fediverse and Nostr. Also wondering how best to deal with more divisive subjects on Nostr (notably politics; I use an alt for that sort of thing on Fedi).
I feel compelled to dive into Nostr by implementing parts of it. Currently working on the crypto bits.
So I've spent some time with Nostr this weekend and, while I still really like the idea of it, the ecosystem could really use a lot of polish.
Maybe it didn't help that my initiation was through nostr.com, which set me up with credentials and sent me to an app on nostr.band, but I ended up doing a lot of stumbling -- attempting to "follow" gave the error "unable to connect to nostr network" (I think "can't follow while in readonly mode" would have been a more useful error), the app recommended nsec.app as a bunker but had a lot of flakiness using it, and I still haven't figured out how to "post" from that site.
None of the other web-clients I tried seemed to work with nsec.app (or it least it wasn't clear how to get them to). I ended up installing the Nostr Connect extension and now appear to be able to post from coracle.social (yay! First real post!)
I suspect that folks who complain about Mastodon being "too difficult" are really not going to like Nostr :-) Though I think most of the issues could be fixed with better guidance and maybe limiting scope to the better bunker technologies.
Trying out this Nostr thing. #introductions