Knuckledragger

I've never heard of "Ambient Coconut" before. I've had Tricky's Ambient Pumpkin in my record bag since 1995.

Cramped temporary setup. 19" rack mixer hanging precariously off the table.

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

I've been neck deep in tax hell this week, so I've regressed to the mid 1990s: White Zombie - La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One (1992) White Zombie - Astro Creep 2000. (1995) Rob Zombie: Hellbilly Deluxe (1998) I've noticed that it's become very popular among current metalheads to hate on groove metal. For the life of me, I don't understand why. I'm not huge on the genre, but I do love me some vintage WZ and Pantera. Dimebag Darrell was a better guitarist than ...well, nearly anybody but certainly anyone who played in Zombie. His riffs were on another planet in their ferocity. The key difference between the bands is that Rob Zombie is a decent frontman and Phil Anselmo is a cancerous growth. This translates to me listening to a lot more Zombie than Pantera in my senior years.

Related.

Russian warship Moskva has sunk - defence ministry.

Everyone's favorite high pitched, hyperactive Canadian tech dropper does a deep dive on the guts of the Mac Studio. It turns out that with considerable work, it is possible to user service the SSD. Much more interesting to me: there are at least two different PSU designs for the Studio, and they are interchangeable.

A couple shots of Paul Lawler's studio.

Russia has defaulted on its foreign debt, says S&P.

Oh hells bells. Those of you who have been around here ...since I created this thread in 2008 may remember I used to do a lot of mucking about in HDR with a small army of apps. The one that I used the most was Photomatix. At first I pirated it, but liked it so much I paid for it not long after. I don't remember the price anymore, but I think it was around $25 in early 2006. For that sum I got the app as well as a Photoshop plugin (which I found to be of limited use, but sometimes handy.) My license got me through many upgrades of Photomatix, to the point in time that I stopped using it. To be fair, this was several laptops ago. Tonight, while editing some photos I took in 2006 (more on that later) remembered Photomatix and decided I wanted to give it bash again. Well, there is a current version, which is nice. It's native to M1/Monterey, which is essential. Also my serial is ancient and no longer valid for the new version. Understandible. I have paid for an upgrade for Little Snitch at least 3 times in the last dozen+ years. LS's devs give me a discount because I have an older license and (this is the key part) I can still run the old version on my other, older Macs (I maintain a number of Minis, which I find to be insanely useful.) By the by, any HCers out there using Macs, I cannot recommend Little Snitch enough. It's my favorite firewall app. As I was saying... I get no discount for owning an old version of Photomatix and CRIKEY have their prices gone up. $99 for the base app and more on top for the PS plugin. Naturally my serial still works on old versions, but they won't run on Monterey (or any other recent version of MacOS.) That's ...more than I'm willing to pay to re-up a program I previous purchased just to futz with it for a bit. So... Yarr har fiddle dee dee! 🏴‍☠️

Kyiv region: police confirm deaths of 1,222 people killed by the occupying forces.

Related:

OWC makes a nice Thunderbolt 4 dock. It's unobtanium. "Ships in 98 Days." The CalDigit TS3 dock, which is built like a brick scheisshaus, is now OOP and going up in price on the used market. It's only Thunderbolt 3 (meaning it works fine with Macs, but will have weird incompatibility issues with Winders laptops) but it has an optical digitial audio output (which is appealing to an incredibly narrow demographic that includes me.)

Doing a soft launch of my show tonight, as much of a technical test as an actual radio show: http://mixlr.com/illuminator/chat

Okay so I had a NAP today which, means I'm wide TF awake RN and therefore attempting to work on my show. This new version of Traktor has some strong "is that a feature or a bug" energy to it. Tonight I discovered 100s (of the 6600+) tracks I have in my record bag are not displaying key text. That's bad because I love to mix in key, but I am a dumb DJ and not a muscian so I need to know if that song is in Cm or not. Currently running a background process scanning the songs in questions. 1h10m remaining. I tried this once before and Traktor cheerfully ran the process but didn't write any tags. I futzed with config settings and I'm unsure if I actually fixed anything. I have a third party key detection software (the open source KeyFinder), which can write tags. Unfortunately, Traktor doesn't recognize those tags.

Ground what?

Was listening to Queen's 1977 album News of the World and reflecting on its cover art. The cover art was done by Kelly Freas, based on his cover for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. There's an alternative cover for NotW, which was also inside the gatefold on some versions: Freas' artwork is kind of creepy, unsettling, quite vintage looking but also weirdly futuristic. I remember seeing it as a kid and not being sure what to make of it. The music is pretty spectacular as well.

Dark AF Polandball:

In spite of my considerable reservations as to his character, it turns out that the current on hiatus status of The Grand Tour has left me wanting more freakishly tall British jackassery in my life so when the Prive Video splash page (bless its heart) suggested this to me last night: I started watching. True to form, Jeremy is bad at everything. Also this show was filed right before Covid started, which certainly gives it a vintage feel. It's like watching pre-9/11 films in 2002.