HiWire

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic – Foxygen I think this album is much better than their 5th album, Hang. The songs have more energy, cohesiveness, and authentic emotion. Also, for Foxygen, this album shows some restraint where their later albums crossed a line somewhere.

City of Thieves by David Benioff (Game of Thrones showrunner) – the adventure of two young men set in the siege of Leningrad, this book has a bit of everything – action, history, literature, the absurdity of war, but most importantly, humor

If you have the budget, I'd look at a refurb 2018 Mac Mini. The RAM is user-upgradeable and you can even hook up an eGPU. The 2014 was handy for a while, but the 2018 is more future-proof (in terms of macOS compatibility cutoffs) with a lot more CPU power, a little more GPU, and the refurbs aren't much more expensive than the 2014, depending on your config. The 2014 Mini should have optical audio out of its headphone jack, unlike the new one. Minis make great always-on boxes, whether you're using them for TV or more general server duties. I can't say the same for iMacs or MacBooks – they aren't designed to be left on all the time.

Thanks, guys. I follow this thread but don't post as I only have a Timex and a Swatch at the moment. The millenials don't seem to wear wrist watches any more.

I'm looking at something fresh for the remainder of the summer:

I never felt bad when the bad guys put bullets into the Aztek (Ass-tech) in Dark Angel.

2016 Atomized – The Raveonettes I've only got Chain Gain of Love and Pretty In Black, so this is a big update for me... the Raveonettes' latest album sounds much more modern, to my ears. A lot of ear candy in this first listen.

I'm not a big fan of streaming TV, and this article will probably date badly in a year, but we appear to be at a crossroads: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/streaming-race-netflix-hbo-hulu-amazon.html

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – follow-up prequel to the Golden Compass trilogy (His Dark Materials) in the new trilogy, The Book of Dust One of the best novels I've read in the last few years – can't wait for the next book to come out. The 2nd book in the trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth, is due this October:

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

It sat on my bookshelf for years – it's a long book, but it's easy to read because Bryson is a great storyteller. Highly recommended.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson – a great science book for non-scientists:

The White Stripes (1999)

The History of Fraggle Rock (my favorite children's show):

I was listening to music from my 2011 MacBook (from my Alessandro MS-1 out of the headphone jack – RIP mini Toslink) – I turned the volume up one click (to 4 out of 16) on a short pop music track and it nearly fried my ears (ow ow ow). Don't underestimate the volume level coming out of modern pop music – going to give my ears a headphone break until tomorrow. ? I think I'll turn the iTunes volume down to 1/2 to reduce loudness with headphones from now on. There are some huge jumps between volume levels on the Grados. I was lulled into complacency after I listened to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations (Zenph).

Lost (2004), Season 2 – hard to believe so much time has passed

Porsche announced the new 6-cylinder 718 Cayman GT4 and Spyder (with 6-speed manuals) – this might cause the price of the older 981 GT4 to finally drop a little and some of the more conservative owners might take them out of storage: https://www.evo.co.uk/news/22794/the-porsche-718-spyder-and-718-cayman-gt4-are-finally-here

Congrats! Might be worth getting the Linn fixed later as well. My Arcam CD player's tray broke a while ago and Arcam refused to repair it. A local electronic repair shop was able to fix it.

It sounds like a recipe for fun if I ever heard one. I like that Aston has been earning their credentials through racing since their big comeback in the early '00s – taking on established giants like Porsche, Ferrari, and team Corvette, especially in endurance racing, is a tough job for a smaller company. Their cars from the 80s and 90s were kind of like living fossils. TV presenting and production must be lucrative in the UK. That's quite a collection of rare cars that Chris Evans has assembled.

Here's one of my dream cars, peak Aston Martin (the V12 Vantage V600 with 7-speed dogleg manual) – why are the best cars always the rarest?

Is Anna Holmwood the translator? I've been getting around to starting the series, but the books are expensive import editions.

I looked up the "nano-texture" matte option on the display... it's an interesting idea. I wonder if they'll look at offering it on the other products later. Who is going to be able to use the display without the stand? Almost makes me glad I have a spare VESA arm under my desk.

AMD's partners have been showing off PCIe 4.0 on their motherboards lately, so that's an option if Apple jumps to Ryzen and Threadripper in the next Mac Pro update.

Looks like it will be very powerful (it's definitely very expensive). I'm glad they designed it with fewer thermal and power constraints. I hope they are working on making Metal more efficient, as there is still a bit of a performance gap between similar applications running DirectX vs. Metal (it would be a shame to run Windows 10 on this box). They will probably jump to PCIe 4.0 (or 5) as soon as possible... I'm wondering if Intel's Optane will work in the new Mac Pro. The lack of Nvidia support means they are going to lean hard on AMD to execute on Navi's performance potential in the short term.