Happy Winter Solstice to all who celebrate š
234 North
For anyone who loves the soundtrack to āA Charlie Brown Christmasā this is a fascinating look at the making of a new vinyl record set.
And yes, I bought a copy.
A bit of a crisis of identity last night, and some rough dreams following, has me thinking a lot about how Iām approaching things these days. Thoughts of change swirling around in my brain all day and I started a list of areas where I want to make some changes. Iāll tackle it one item at a time. Change can be (is) hard and no need to sabotage the whole enterprise with trying too many changes at once.
Holiday catalogs seem to be making a bit of a comeback. Nothing says being a kid in the 1970s/80s like getting the Sears Wish Book or the JC Penney Christmas catalog in the mail and spending days looking through it, lusting after all of the toys. Even into the 90s these catalogs were gigantic, 500-600 pages of stuff.
You want to see one right? Ask and ye shall receive.
Iāve got to say that Iām really becoming a fan of Sabrina Carpenter. She really pulled me in with the Shania Twain covers and the bit of her show bringing Earth, Wind, and Fire on-stage at Lollapalooza. The Twain covers are dead on. Really good stuff.
Same goes for Olivia Rodrigo. Her appearance at Glastonbury bringing Robert Smith from The Cure on-stage was something I never expected to see. Also really good stuff.
I found some of the stuff on the BBC Music YouTube channel. There is some really good content there. Including this Nat King Cole cover from Teddy Swims:
The strings in that are just so unbelievably lush. Really makes me think back to the 1950s and 60s recordings.
Taking a break from tech news/coverage/punditry for a bit. Donāt know about anyone else but for me the tech world has mostly become boringā¦repetitive. There is nothing fun about the latest hot takes on AI, latest outrage over whatever company people donāt like, etc. That counts in music tech as well, with the same old arguments with all of the same people, over and over and over again. In business terms itās completely lost its ROI. So, going to step away from that stuff for a bit and see how normal people live.
Really glad nitter.net is back. Makes it very easy to grab my Cortes header artwork every day.
Loving the āHoliday Popsā channel on SiriusXM. Exactly the type of Christmas music I prefer to listen to these days!
Wrote a post about corporations and āmoralsā.
This Dropbox alternative seems pretty cool, especially since it can be self-hosted at no cost for the software: Seafile
Another cool self-hostable app, this time for photos: PhotoPrism
RogueAmoeba released SoundSource 6. Iāve been using this utility for years. Itās come in very handy many, many times and RogueAmoeba always has a fair upgrade price.
Reading various blog posts as of late on ādumbing downā of smart phones. Not sure what my thoughts are to be honest. Itās an attractive idea to be sure but seems somewhat pie-in-the-sky.
The people complaining about John OāNolan announcing his new, not-related-at-all-to-Ghost, RSS reader project are killing me with the āwhy are you posting about it on Twitter?ā.
First offā¦itās X now folks. Itās not Twitter anymore. It hasnāt been in years. It was a cesspool before Musk took over. Stop acting like it was some sacred garden until that time.
Secondly, X has like 200 million daily users. Get your heads out of your small bubbles because in the real world real people use X, not Bluesky or snort Mastodon.
Amazon asked me to participate in an Alexa+ survey. I gave up after about 6 pages in. Not sure who thought a survey that long was a good idea.
Ars Technica has an article up about the birth of JavaScript at Netscape. Created by Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave. Itās funny that people still rant about Eich and Brave and anything it touches (Kagi was a target for a bit when they started using Braveās search engine for some results) yet seem to be fine with using JavaScript. One of the oddities of the Internet I guess.
On the SiriusXM āHoliday Popsā channel they have a bumper that says something along the lines of āsome of the greatest music of all time was inspired by the most reverential day of all timeā. Iād bet the Jews and Muslims would have something to say about that.
Ashe Dryden writes on Mastodon:
Do not forget the people, companies, and organizations that abandoned their morals during these dark years.
and links to this article on The Verge about Microsoft and their DEI efforts.
She also linked to Jeff Johnson writing something similar about Apple on Mastodon:
Appleās corporate values were supposedly the environment and privacy.
Today Apple eliminated the VP of Environment position and hired as SVP someone who not only worked at Facebook but also helped to write the USA Patriot Act, one of the most egregious violations of privacy (among other civil rights) in US history.
Iām sorry, I know I am a bit of a cynic these days, but why would/should we expect āmoralsā out of legal entities that exist solely as a money-making machine for their investors?
Any āmoralsā that exist are there because the customer has expectations of such. In other words: itās better for business.
That said, smart companies would be continuing DEI efforts because diversity of the workforce ultimately is, you guessed it, better for business. That these corporations arenāt seeing that just shows that management of those companies is sorely lacking in vision.
There is a cool set of command line tools in this list from the makers of the Tower git client:
7 CLI Tools Every Developer Should Install
Itās weird to me that someone would complain about X, or other peopleās use of X, but then ultimately use X themselves to keep up with what someone they hate is doing. Weird shit.
My dad, Edward, when he was stationed at Okinawa during the Korean War. He passed away this day in 1973.