The best laid plans…
I started this with the best of intentions which rapidly fell by the wayside. “Keep a journal, I said. Just blog, I said”, but life just gets in the way so what you’re going to get is a bunch of unordered, unscripted ramblings which occur when I somehow manage to find five minutes for a bit of a brain dump.
Field Recordings
So it turns out that a number of years ago, where number is actually decades, I seriously toyed with the idea of becoming a sound recordist. As you’ll probably gather from the tone of my writing, that was one of the things that simply never happened. Things happen, people get in the way, next thing you know you’re 10 years in to a career that you don’t really want to do and then the sunk cost fallacy takes a firm hold.
However, I have Bought Some Equipment. I have a Zoom H5 and a pair of Clippy EM272Z1 (in a handy field kit) on order, and a deep old dive into the You Tubes.
I blame, with some trepidation, Warren Elllis’ newsletter and the rich diet of ambient and other audio delights that this and his RSS feed steadily drip into my brains, for reinvigorating a quite old idea. I’m probably a bit old now for making this a career, but at least it’s an excuse to take off into the hills with a bunch of kit and a set of post-it notes to make sure I actually hit the record button.
What I actually want, and didn’t know it, is something from Sound Devices because that’s the vision of me I always had - they are, unfortunately, a bit pricey.
Amateur Radio
Because sound isn’t enough, I picked up a Xiegu G90 which, like audio, is an example of quite how far things have developed since I last did anything with it. If I ever have any time, I will be bunging a random length of wire out of the window and trying to persuade a computer to let me do some FT8.
Large Language Models
Apparently a Big Thing. Ollama is a way to run models locally, and Meta have released theirs for free. Turns out that, using Ollamarama you can use an old-school (Irssi) IRC client to talk to it. It’s quite nice, actually. The model is surprisingly positive. I can see why people get attached.
Also
If you’ve been looking for a half-decent CLI mail client since Pine got a bit out of hand, can I strongly recommend aerc, and if you’re looking to host mail somewhere and don’t need instant push to iPhone, then Migadu appears to be an exceptional choice, especially if you’re looking at multiple domains. Very Standards, Much Compliant.