2019

Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for November 2019

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Another month, another round of music. There’s not as much need for as much intro this round so I’m just going to jump right into it.

So, while Number 2, 3, 9 16, and 19 are all Sigrid albums, the top spot this month goes to Lusine with Sensorimotor. I’ve been enjoying the whole album, but I’ve had this particular video in rotation on Youtube for a bit.

It’s got a nice sort of ambient feel to it. Speaking of Ambient, While moving the Lusine album to my phone, I remebered I had the Overwatch based Lucio album downloaded. Which puts it at number 5. It’s alright, nothing super stellar, but it’s nice chill background beats. Number 7 also falls into this category a bit. The soundtrack for the anime film Armitage the Third has been a long term favorite of mine. It’s a CD I’ve owned and listened to for probably 20 years now.

Armitage isn’t the only older stuff I’ve thrown in this month. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was definitely my most listened to album back in the 90s. Alanis was one of my first real musical obsessions. I’ve also been listening to more The Who recently as well.

Number 11 has a new comer to my rotations. I was browsing through Amazon’s sale albums and on a bit of a whim, picked up the album Rise by Molly Tuttle. She’s a Bluegrass artist and man she can pick and play a guitar. It also helps that she also has a nice pleasant voice to accompany the guitar.

Also new… ish, is number 8. Kristina Skyberg’s one and only album. It’s all in Norwegian, so I don’t really know what she is singing, but it’s very very good. I say Kristina is newish to the list because Kristina is Sigrid’s backup singer during live shows.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the Native American Flute Lullabies. You listen to one album with multiple artists, and it spams out and fills in three slots. List a little bit annoying. Basically though, it’s exactly what it says, and it’s nice music to sleep to.

Books Organizing

Too Many eBooks and Keeping them Organized

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The nice thing about digital books is that they are easily stored and accessible in very little space. The bad thing about digital books is that it can be hard to find things in a virtual shelf where you can’t easily see covers and authors and topics. There is something to be said for covers, when you can easily glance at a row of books and see the color combination that sticks out as “This is the book that I like”.

Tech books present a different problem, since it’s less easy to make notes or stick papers in important bits of code that you want to reference later. I usually resort to screen shots, but they become hard to sift through later the more screen shots there are. Especially since you usually can’t name files with useful names on a tablet or phone where you may be reading a tech book.

Despite a few tools out there to organize your files for you, probably most notable and easy to use is Calibre, I still prefer to sort things by a basic directory structure.

This is useful for a few reasons, one, if an organizing program ever breaks or I want to upgrade, things are still sorted at a base level. For the most part everything is sorted by base type, though in a few cases they are sorted by source. For example, the Packt eBooks are almost all tech books and almost all of them include zip files of code, so I’ve given them their own directory. Also a lot of them aren’t super great, so, while I like to have them around, I don’t need the clutter in my actual Tech books folders. Most were freebies from when Packt used to give away books daily.

Most of these folders have their own internal structure, For example, the image above is for Tech books. The comics folder has folders for series and publishers, the Foreign Language folder has folders for languages, the Fiction folder is sorted by series and genre. Etc. Etc. Etc.

This whole ball is the core archive. Most of the time I keep working folders with copies of these various books on my laptop or on a portable drive. The comics I am currently reading or the tech books that are actually useful, that sort of thing. All of the books in the archive are DRM free, so I can copy and read them as I want. I prefer to buy DRM Free books, Humble Bundle, O’Reilly, Packt, StoryBundle, Leanpub, Project Gutenberg, probably some others I’m forgetting are all pretty good for DRM free ebooks.

What complicates things are Nook and Kindle, which are both more proprietary. I had an early generation of the Nook for a while, but Amazon tends to have better deals on books, so I ultimately dropped buying from Nook. I hate having my library fractured across platforms. If I am going to buy DRM locked down books, it’s going to be one storefront, and Amazon has better sales. There are way to strip out the DRM but it’s a hassle to do regularly. Occasionally I update a backup archive of Nook and Kindle books to DRM free versions, in bulk, but it’s not worth bothering with on a single book by book case every time I buy a book.

Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for October 2019

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I did a sort of prototyped this sort of post briefly on JoshMiller.net but deleted it because I kind of want to keep that site just being a landing page and not a blog. I also originally considered doing it weekly but that feels too frequent so instead I’m thinking monthly. Anyway, Last.fm, the music tracking app/service. I’ve been using this when I can, since 2005. It’s one of my favorite services out there because I love tracking my music listening habits. I have not been able to use it all the time. For a while I listened to music on devices that weren’t supported, or via apps that weren’t supported. I do always come back to it.

I want to start with last months’ top album Scrobbles.

Most of the bottom half are low number listens but the top half in the top ten or so are the real bulk of listens. Number 1, Number 5, Number 8, and Number 23 are all Sigrid. Sigrid has been my current music obsession. She has quickly risen to like number 3 or 4 in my overall by artist since I started listening to her a few months ago. As part of my music blogging, I want to explore individual artists some so I won’t go into a ton of detail. There actually would be more Sigrid scrobbles but some of my tracks don’t have proper Info attached so they don’t scrobble as anything.

Notable though with Sigrid, this month I went and saw her live, in St. Louis. And it was awesome. The opener at the live show was Number 2 on this list, Raffaella. I bought her 6 track EP, Ballerina, after the show and I’ve been listening to it quite a bit as well.

Number 3 and Number 14 are both Alice Merton. I’ve listened to Alive Merton longer than Sigrid, but I’ve been adding a few more tracks of hers ot my playlist recently. She’s put out a new extended version of her album Mint, so I expect her to continue to show up for a while. Another artists I really enjoy that I’ve been trying to add more of is Kiesza at Number 6 on this list. Kiesza has a pretty amazing voice that I really can’t get enough of.

Number 4 is a bit more mainstream, with Kesha, or is it still Ke$ha? I don’t know. I had been listeneing to the newer single Praying for a while and recently decided to give the rest of the album a listen. There’s some pretty good stuff in there. I particularly like the one about Godzilla.

Anyway, I’m sure I will have the chance to talk about more of these albums in more detail in the future. I want to switch a bit, since this is the first post in this (hopefully) series and touch a bit on my overall 5×5 listing. Mostly to give a bit more overview on my overall listening habits over the past, 14 years.

Like I said above, Sigrid has already jumped way up there, with Sucker Punch coming in at Number 2. The spread here also includes a lot of my other favorites. Taylor Swift gets three albums in this top 25, as does BT. Avril Lavigne and Katy Perry have several appearances, though Katy ranks quite a bit lower. Technically Daft Punk has 3 as well, since they did the two Tron sountracks.

Anyway, like I mentioned above, I kind of want to talk more about music I listen to, both more mainstream and not. Hopefully with some monthly summaries, but also with some intermixed spotlight moments along the way.

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