Knuckledragger

Not a person, but RIP Juno Download(!) The DJing world has been moving to a subscription model for a while now. djay Pro, one of the most popular DJing apps, is designed around the use of streaming services. From the comments section of a DJ I know:

RIP Marcia Lucas. Not only did she put up with being married to George Lucas, she took the steaming pile that was his ideas and turned it into A New Hope. George Lucas is the definitive example that it is better to be lucky than talented. At every turn, he blundered into meeting people with abilities far beyond his own who could elevate his murky and misconceived visions into cultural touchstones. Peter Crushing was the absolute master class at portraying a bad guy. Sir Alec Guinness could inflect the most hokey dialogue imaginable in a way that resonated with like six different generations. James Earl Jones had the voice of all time. Irvin Kershner was a deftly skilled directory with decades of experience. Unlike George, Lawrence Kasdan actually was an accomplished screenwriter. Also Carrie Fisher was lighting in a bottle. I'm sorry, this is about about George's ex-wife, not The Neck himself.

Nato and EU condemn Russia after drone hits Romanian residential block. Romania is part of NATO.

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware.

"It'd be a lot cooler if you did.

Long story short: Donny Diapers got buttmad because Stephen Tyrone Colbert was mean to him on air. Larry Ellison bought CBS and put his bratty kid David in charge of it. David fired Stephen to stay in Donny's good graces (and to get various corporate mergers approved.) Stephen made an appearance on Michigan public access TV. Stephen put the results up on YouTube. YT is now blocking searches for it(!) There are many guest stars.

Point the first: Generative AI is the devil. Point the second: Locally generated (as in on one's personal machine) is the devil we know. Point the third: I told point the second to render "A Mexican in his mid 40s, with a beard, celebrating his birthday. His head is a giant biscuit." It shat out this: Point the fourth: I am now more afraid of AI than I was before. Point the fifth: Feliz cumpleaños, FATHEAD.

RIP Rapper Rob Base, known for 'It Takes Two,' dies at 59 after private battle with cancer. I was there in '88 when this dropped. It turns out he was internationally known.

I'm having trouble finding a news source, but I learned (from Toby Marks of Banco De Gaia of all people) that Dick Parry died. He was a hell of a session musician, best known for his work with Pink Floyd. His sax solos are legendary.

Necro Part Deux. This will be an exceptionally long walk. As I have said a number of times on this site (and even made a thread about) I shave using an old time safety razor. It's a slow and methodical process. While I do it, I like to have a YouTube video or podcast playing. For years I lugged my laptop into whatever bathroom where I was shaving. I even set up a shelf audio system for the purpose in my old house. Super exciting bathroom pic. Not the power and USB cables at the ready. In my new digs, I have a much less space overall. Going from a 5 bedroom farmhouse to a compact (and energy efficient) ~1200 sq ft house has been an experience. I have an older iPad Pro that I got a while ago. I run the Orion browser on it, and use an adblock extension. I picked up the "iHome iDL 100" iPad dock at a second hand shop last year. It has two Lightning connectors and a USB input. Unfortunately, the design is too clever by half. The iPhone (small) and (iPad) big mounts only work if the iOS device is not inside a case. I keep my mobile devices in protective cases for obvious reasons. The USB input on the iDL 100 works just fine, so for quite some time I kept my iPad Pro mounted on it, in landscape mode, and fired up a YT video while I shaved. It was slow to get started, but it did work. As of a few months ago, Google has won the arms race against ads on iOS and I cannot get the above combination to work. There is only so much I can do against a 4 trillion dollar company. Enter the Alldocube iPlay60 Mini Turbo Android tablet. It's not rooted, but I can side load and patch apps on it. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm using Morphe to patch the official YouTube and Reddit apps to remove all ads. Now both apps are actually useful and not absolute hell. The tablet works like a charm, but the iDL 100 will not connect to it at all. The two Lightning connectors are a non-starter obviously, and also the USB port only works with iOS devices. Also, I had some issues with that port failing to charge the iPad so I'd be hesitant to use it even if it did connect. The iHome does have an 1/8" stereo input jack, but the Alldocube does not have a headphone output. Precious few mobile devices do these days. A while ago, I bought a USB-C DAC maybe by JSAUX that also supplies power. As far as Chinesium cables and accessories go, JSAUX is a better one. I have used a number of their DisplayPort and high bandwidth USB-C cables (as well as irritating but necessary ones like USB-C to mini, not micro, USB-B). They have all worked exceptionally. The JSAUX DAC has a clear plastic top so one can see the chips inside. This is a recent trend that I find to be dumb as fuck. Ignoring the peculiar case choices, I tested it out in my main speaker rig using a 1/8" to dual RCA cable and it sounded ...fine with streaming audio. TBH the only time I ever focus on DAC quality these days is if it's actively horrendous or I'm doing careful listening at night. With that success, I found a 1/8" to 1/8" TRS cable and connected the JSAUX to the iHome ...and was immediately rewarded with 60Hz hum. No amount of fussing with it would fix the problem. The hum was bad enough that it was distracting while trying to listen to a YT video. Cursing, I went on Amazon and found a Y cable shaped DAC on sale for $4. It has a USB-C male on one end, and USB-C female and 1/8" audio female on the other. I swapped the $4 unit in for the JSAUX and no hum at all. Now I can listen to reviews of old manual focus lenses, tales of crypto scams, and how Demented Donnie Diapers is burning down the entire fucking planet while I shave. This has been your hood-fi moment.

I realize this is the Mac thread and not a headphone one. Serious question: Are there a set of BT headphones out there with better noise cancelling ("ANC" as the tech bros call it) better than the Airpods Max(2)? I am now in the market for one.

Gay rights and longtime Democratic Congressman Barney Frank dies at 86. I have mixed feelings about this one. Barney was a trailblazer in a much earlier era. He also had (and I steal this quote) a sense of humor he wielded like a wrecking ball. I have never seen anyone make Republicans so buttmad on the floor as he did. He's also one of the few politicians who ever directly took on Wall St. in my lifetimes. With that said, he spent his retirement years undoing more or less all the good that he did in office. He became a lobbyist for the very financial institutions he sought to regulate previously, he went after trans people directly and in his final act as a public figure, attacked Graham Platner. Way to shit on your own legacy, bud.

NSFW!

Counterpoint to my paean of primes: Modern zooms can be really good. Last fall I bought a stack of lenses from an MV photographer who had gone mirrorless. The least interesting but most useful of the bunch was the 24-70mm F/2.8L II. It's the perfect "walk around" focal range and a vast improvement of the original model (which was more than a bit of a dog.) Also pictured is the 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6L IS II which is an impressive and massive beast, but also a great way to blow copious amount of dust into one's camera body. I took all of the following with the 24-70. It's been so long since I've posted photos in this thread that we're going all the way back to last Christmas. I'll win no awards for framing on this one (especially on a stationary object) but in spite of my snapshotesque abilities with the viewfinder, I really like the the look of this shot. 30 seconds at F/22, ISO200. I really needed to do shots significantly longer than 30 seconds, and I was too stubborn to raise the ISO. At this point I had not been able to locate my remote cable. Blissfully, the remote I bought for my 30D in 2006 works with the 5D IV. This coming Christmas I can do multi-minute exposures. This is the house my father grew up in. It has a big Cyrano De Bergerac portico that juts out into an already narrow sidewalk. For something like 150 years it has served as an inconvenience to all passers-by. I love it. Cool Story Bro: My grandparents were the last private family to live in the house. After they moved out in 1940s, it became a law office and of course it's been a retail shop for decades at this point. Right next to the Vineyard Haven ferry slip. Not pictured: the December wind ripping across the harbor and through my jacket. I will cheerfully take the same picture over and over again, in different weather an lighting conditions. Happy sledders enjoying the first snow of the season. Later afternoon sun on Sweetened Water Farm. There's that patch of woods again. The calm before the blizzard. The aftermath. Ideal lighting conditions at the Oak Bluffs harbor. Still shooting that 1980s car commercial. All good things must come to an end.

Oh boy. Pulled a tick nymph off my leg. It was on there long enough to cause irritation, but not get engorged yet. TBH any length of time is too long for a tick. MV has a terrible alpha gal problem (no, that does not mean women who fancy themselves the leader of the pack.) If I develop those symptoms, I'm jumping in front of a train. Note from legal: MV has no trains. It did have one in the 19th century. The first locomotive to arrive on the Vineyard got dropped into the ocean as the workers attempted to unload it from a ferry. If Knuckles manages to jump in front of any of the above, he's more talented than previously believed.

Tom Kane, Iconic ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Voice Actor, Has Died. RIP. 64 is crazy young.

Shooting with primes will make you a better photographer, but they won't make you take better photos. Modern (as in the last 20 years) zooms are so good that primes are vestigial beasts best left to eccentrics. There are exceptions to this rule of course, mostly super-teles that operate in a range outside of any zoom. Personally, I muck about with primes because I find them interesting. To me cameras are fiddly devices that get between me and the photo I want to take. Lenses are tools to make art. While I use modern (or "modern") autofocus lenses all the time, for me the real joy is ancient manual focus ones. Also, I haven't posted any of my own photos here in like six months. Two of my favorite bits of vintage glass are Asahi Super-Takumars: A 35mm F/3.5 and 50mm F/1.4. It's a tossup which one is more crackheaded. The 35mm, in spite of its woefully slow aperture for its focal length, has a really fat ass and will not fit properly in Nikon or Canon DSLR bodies. It will fit in a Canon cropped sensor body, and presumably most mirrorless ones. I've posted shots with it in this thread many times over the years. I liken the images it produces to a horror movie. The 50mm does the same thing, but much more so. My particular copy is a third iteration (IIRC) and it's notable for being radioactive. Glamour shot taken with my 100mm F/2.8 Macro. The 50 has a permanent warming filter (that gets more warm over time). It's useless for anything serious, but endless fun for goofing around. For me this is definitive example of "Takumar horror." The color temperature, weird rendering of OOF highlights and slight vignetting are all produced by the lens. I did only minor tweaks in Photoshop. The same view, taken with the 35mm mounted to a 7D Mk II. Not really horror at all. First and foremost, I stopped down and used infinity focus. Also the 35 is not radioactive. I have a long term goal of buying a full frame body so I can mount the 35 to it and see how bad the corners are. Yes, buying a $3K body to mount a $75 lens. Makes perfect sense. I mentioned in the snow thread that we got absolute decimated here in February. I promised to post photos and never did. The AF system on my 5D IV was not impressed with the condensation on the outside of our windows. One nice thing about old primes is that most of them have a hard infinity stop. Modern glass often lets the user focus beyond infinity (calm down, Buzz Lightyear) meaning they're a PITA to use in low light and other difficult circumstances. This shot is in focus, but still quite blurry because of the water on the window. Looking out my front door. No giants doing cartwheels or a statue wearing high heels. Quite the whiteout, however. Taken with the TTArtisan 100mm F/2.8 "Bubble Bokeh," which is a Trioplan copy, more or less. I have mostly used it as an actual 100mm and ignored its abilities with OOF highlights. Our poor, battered thermometer. Back to the OG Canon 50mm F/1.8. My ca. 1988 copy is one of my most prized lenses. Back to the 35mm Takumar and 7D II. Not exactly horror movie, but exhibiting how the 35 is not entirely sharp at any aperture. The images it produces have a slight uncanny quality in more or less all circumstances. One of the casualties of the nor'easter, which had some very powerful winds. As of this writing, the boat is still there. The mighty Canon 135mm F/2L. Designed as a portrait lens, it's good at photographing more or less anything, provided the photographer is up to making use of its FoV and DoF. Oh, hey. Actually using the TTArtisan 100mm for its intended purpose. The late afternoon sun reflecting on the pond and some early spring buds.

Feliks Audio also make a few dynamic amps. The Envy (7K EUR) and the Envy Susvara Edition (a paltry 13K EUR) have similar visual DNA to the Bliss. I suspect they share similar design decisions and component selection, if you take my meaning.

Clarence Carter, Soul Singer Behind ‘Patches’ & ‘Strokin’,’ Dies at 90. Also, Clarence Carter was still alive(!)

A redditor's father died and left him this: Also, I was born into the wrong family.

RIP legendary music producer Jack Douglas. Longtime listeners will know I have a fetish for the sound of 70s analogue productions. Aerosmith (a band that I find to be a curiosity at best) posted these photos on their official FB page: That console is a thing of beauty.

^ In that post, I just used the URL posted by the guy on the audiophile subreddit. The following will be more UK friendly. Fuck Nigel Farage. This Scandinavian fella is living his best life:

Sub SnoreWoofer.