Braintube

Sad to read that Vangelis passed away. His music definitely influenced my interest in synths and music in general. 🎶

The last Android device I purchased was a Nexus 6p. It was the last of the Nexus line and marked a shift for how Google does devices. It was also the beginning of my “degoogling”. Anyhow, the 6p wasn’t a very good device and most of them started boot looping, mine had not yet experienced this, but Google was nice enough to send me a Pixel 1 replacement. I’ve had this mostly in a drawer as a backup device since then. Today I decided to wipe and replace Google Android with LineageOS. Lineage has great instructions and the process was mostly painless. Now I have a mostly Google free Android device(no gapps) and have been installing the apps I need from F-Droid. I also spun up Syncthing and used KDEConnect for some clipboard sharing to get things setup,. These are great tools for local cross platform file sharing and device control.

First episode of “Strange New Worlds” nailed it. The title sequence, theme music, plot, characters… all of it. This is good Star Trek. 🎥🖖

Excited to discover that we have both, Downy and Red-bellied woodpecker nests in our backyard.

Been a while since I hung out at the “Second State Coffee” downtown location. ☕️

Nice to see solid official apps available now. Glad he explained why he choose to omit the local and federated timelines. blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/04/o…

Our Flame Azelea starting to bloom.

Recapturing your youth does not mean getting wasted all the time, it means having a regular bowel movement and sleeping like a normal person.

Solid wisdom from Merlin Mann

Our recent addition is very snuggly.

With the brew folks heading to web3 I guess it’s time to look at nix again.

Epic Games is buying Bandcamp. This is terrible news. www.theverge.com/2022/3/2/…

Probably time to mark Firefox as “done” and move on, blog.mozilla.org/en/mozill…

Had to enable my first “mute” on micro.blog today. Nothing egregious, but no time for that nonsense.

Grabbed the five year Write.as deal and had to do something with the ten blogs it gives you. Decided to dedicate one to our cats, meow.camp .

Wasn’t that impressed with spatial audio when Apple introduced it, but I recently revisited it with some newly released music. Blown away at how good it sounds now, both with AirPod’s and a surround system. Not sure if music is being correctly mixed for the format now, or Apple has improved things, or both.

Was out on my morning run this week when this little one walked out to ask for help. He has some eye issues and very underweight, but seems to be improving. Oliver, our dog, loves him but not sure what to do with him.

Have been with Fastmail since 2004. Their service is and has been fantastic, but this will be my last month with the service. I have moved my email domain over to iCloud+ and it’s worked out to be… OK. The biggest missing feature for me with iCloud+ is robust server side rules. It has them but not near as flexible as what Fastmail provides. I can live with it tho and it’s worth the $40/year savings.

Picking up some plants yesterday and found this little one.

Josie enjoying the new cat cave

I may have purchased a new domain to try out iCloud email with custom domains.

Anyone tried Mela? A delight to use and has me considering a switch from my current recipe/grocery app. Also not the first time I’ve wished we had a file format/standard for recipes, that these types of apps could use for import/export. Somehow a single developer can build beautiful and fuctional native apps for macOS/iOS and yet a well funded team like AgileBits needs to resort to non-native toolkits.

Two Crows on the fence playing with something. Thought it was a butterfly but it was this Luna moth.

For almost as long as I’ve been in computing I’ve used Emacs. At first almost stock with a few customization, then shifting into Prelude, pulling Magit and org-mode into daily usage. Over time, work duties forced me into more and more Vim usage, due to frequent remote editing. I ended up bouncing between Emacs and Vim all the time, learning to love Vim’s model style and way of editing, but missing the power and kitchen sink of Emacs. This drove me to look for a compromise and landed me on Spacemacs, where I have been happily editing for a long time. But… times change and new tools come along, like VSCode.

I had dabbled in VSCode over the years and it never seemed like a good fit for me. Even with a good Vim mode it required too much mousing and lacked tooling I relied on. Then I discovered VSpaceCode and a little later VSCode added remote editing support. Finally, edamagit appeared. These take VSCode to something very close to how I used Spacemacs. Continuing to dabble with this setup, things improved, more of Spacemacs was implemented, until last week, a milestone for me, I spent a whole day in VSCode, happily editing, almost unaware I wasn’t using Spacemacs.

Picked up Sagan’s “Broca’s Brain” in a little library the other day. It’s been years since I last read it and had forgotten how good it was and what a gift Sagan was.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite escapes from the small southern town I lived in was, “Echoes” on public radio. This show introduced me to so many artists and genres of music I probably would have otherwise never heard. The show has been going for 30+ years and still airs daily. Recently, I discovered that the show has a long running podcast that’s mostly the interviews from the radio show. It’s been a great addition to my podcast subscriptions.