My DIY Projects

Re-mulching and other Activities Outside the House

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I have been slacking on my posts, though technically still doing better than I had been. It’s a combination of being busy and just being generally meh overall. One think keeping me busy was re-mulching the flower beds around the house. Not just throwing down new mulch though, I mean raking up the old and putting down new weed barrier. This meant going around the existing plants and the little metal stakes to hold the weed barrier down were a pain because there is a ton of super packed rock in the area that makes them hard to insert into the ground.

In the case of the tree out back, it also meant digging up the ground around the tree to add a new flower bed space completely. We added a lot of new plants to the area as well, though most in pots for ease of use.

Then my wife put all her decor out again.

We also started working on the basic garden set up for the year. In the past we’ve had issues with trying to garden at this house because there is a lot of wildlife that comes around that eat or dig up everything. Right now it’s in buckets, though I plan to put legs on these wooden boxes we have to put the buckets into. Which is part of what the pile of wood behind the garden plants at the bottom is for. We also may use the stairs as a tiered herb garden. It’s all wood that was salvaged from my parent’s deck which they recently had replaced.

Anyway, here are some photos of the completed set up.

Here is a random bonus of the backyard from when I was mowing recently.

Albums

Orla Garland – Woman on the Internet

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I’m a few years behind I suppose, but it’s worth mentioning that Orla Gartland’s debut album, Woman on the Internet, was my favorite album of 2021. Orla Garland is one of those artists that I cam to from another, as she is also Dodie’s guitarist and friend and so listening to Dodie, lead me to listening to Orla. The overall feel and tone of Orla Garland’s music is much different than Dodie’s though, it’s much much more upbeat and rock and roll, though it does share a lot of the structural characteristics of ups and downs and clever lyrics that I enjoy from Dodie’s music. I have no idea if there was any level of cross collaboration there, more that just, there is a subtle style going on that definitely has rubbed off one way or the other, or probably both ways a bit.

Though this is her first full album, Olra has had several EPs previously and regularly publishes snippets and unfinished/unreleased songs on her Patreon. I mention the Patreon only to mention that it’s literally the only Patreon I have ever subscribed to. It’s also probably worth mentioning that though I am only writing about the regular release, there is a deluxe version available as well which contains a few more tracks.

Though there is no track called Woman on the Internet, the album title does show up as a lyric and kind of, underlines a lot of the themes present in this album’s tracks about just how “fake” a lot of online people tend to be about a lot of things and how people try to strive to be like them, even if they don’t realize it. The intro track Things That I’ve Learned, feels like it sets a sort of baseline for this, and the theme is a bit ramped up in More Like You later on and comes to a bit of a head later on the album in Pretending. Pretending is probably my favorite track on this album as well, I really just love the whole theme and tune behind it.

Another good track is track 2, with You’re Not Special Babe, a nice fast paced track that makes clever use of it’s title. It’s not really what one might expect, it’s not saying you’re not special because you’re stuck on yourself, or you’re not special and are a loser, it’s more that, you’re not special, in being the only one with problems and issues. As the lyric goes,

Everyone cries, everyone lies Everyone hates you Everyone’s so scared of the future, it’s true

Essentially, everyone has bad days and times and all in all, you’re doing fine, and it will be better. Another track that kind of runs with this theme of “getting better” is Zombie!, When everything seems awful and just bottle it all up because it’s what’s expected and live like, well, an emotionless zombie.

Another one I particularly like is Codependency, which has some nice hits and ups and downs in it’s structure and an interesting theme that feels a bit like a blame game but then accepts that it’s a problem that goes both ways and that’s why it works out. As a wrap up I also wanted to call out the last track, Bloodline/Difficult Things. Which feels like an interesting topper to all of the turmoil of drama across the album, it has a touch of Orla’s own history wrapped in, but I particularly like the lyric “Skip a beat in the bloodline,” which kind of feels like the idea of breaking a bad family cycle.

All in all I just really dig Olra’s overall sound and I’m really looking forward to her next album. There’s lots of interesting emotion behind the lyrics and a lot of fun structure and shifting to the melodies and beats.

Albums

Evangelion Finally

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While I’ll talk a bit on this album, Evangelion Finally, this also covers the vinyl version of this album. So, a bit of a story here. I really don’t plan to collect up a ton of records for my recently activated vinyl hobby, but I really could not resist this one when I came across it. I was originally looking into albums at Best Buy, because I had some credit, and went to do some price comparisons, then this one, and another came up as recommended. Which has spawned a bit of a new angle of interest for my vinyl buying. Anime Albums, and to some extend, Video Game albums.

I already have a plan to build a narrow wall shelf over my record player space, and this album, will look so nice propped up on the wall. I almost wish I had a good way to also show off some of the records themselves in the display because they are often quite nice looking. This album included, it has two records, both a nice splattered hot pink color. The cover has this very vibrant image of Rei Ayanami on it.

I should probably rewind a bit more on why I care about this album. I am not currently a particularly huge Anime fan, but I used to be one. I really can’t stand a lot of modern Anime, but still like a lot of those old, 90s, early 2000s classics. Evangelion is up there as one of my favorites as well. I re-watched it recently on Netflix and it’s still really good. The soundtrack is also pretty good, though this album is not the complete sound track. It’s mostly just, all the vocal tracks, minus a few dozen versions of Fly Me to the Moon.

Back around the time I was in college, I listened to the complete soundtrack pretty regularly.

While the whole album is pretty good, assuming you are fan of Evangelion and music in Japanese, I find most of the “meat” of this album is front loaded in the first 5 tracks. As one would expect, it opens with the opening track from the series, A Cruel Angel’s Thesis. The second track is a nice version of Fly me the The Moon. Yes, the same song often associated Frank Sinatra. For those who may be unaware, this song was played during the end credits of each episode of the series, though each episode also featured a different take and version of the song.

The third and fourth tracks are from the two movies, Soul’s Refrain and Thanatos-If I can’t Be Yours-. Both tracks are good, but the fifth track is the fan favorite from The End of Evangelion, Komm, Süsser Tod (Come, Sweet Death). This track plays during the Third Impact event as the world ends during the movie, and it’s probably the most upbeat sounding song about death that you’ll ever find. It’s also a bit of an odd juxtaposition of language, the title is German, it’s from a Japanese show and sung by a Japanese woman, but the words are all in English. There is also a Japanese version of this song at Track 12, though it’s a different mix for the instrumentals.

A lot of the rest of the album I don’t immediately recognize, aside from Track 11, Shiawase wa Tsumi no Nioi. This kind of tracks with my experience with Evangelion as a whole. The one track I do recognize was from a Dreamcast game, and while I have never played the game, it would have ended up in my soundtrack pile of Evangelion media back in the day. Most of the other tracks seem to come from the more recent V2.0 Remake anime. I have, sort of watched, parts of this, but I couldn’t get into it as much as the original series at all.

While I admit, I mostly bought this album on vinyl because I want to to hand up among my wall display, it is a good collection of music from the series.

Linux & Open Source

Dead Memory Cards and Using Docker

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More often that it feels like it should, something in technology breaks or fails. I find that this can be frustrating, but often ultimately good, especially for learning something new, and forcing myself to clean up something I’ve been meaning to clean up. I have a Raspberry Pi I’ve been using for a while for several things as a little web server. It’s been running probably for years, but something gave out on it. I’m not entirely sure it’s the SD card or the Pi itself honestly, because I’ve been having a bit of trouble trying to recover through both. It’s sort of pushed me to try a different approach a bit.

But first I needed a new SD card. I have quite a few, most are “in use”. I say “in use” because many are less in use and more, underused. This has resulted in doing a bit of rebuild on some other projects to make better use of my Micro SD cards. The starting point was a 8 GB card with just a basic Raspbian set up on it.

So, for starters, I found that the one I have in my recently set up music station Raspberry Pi is a whopping 128gb. Contrary to what one might thing, I don’t need a 128gb card in my music station, the music is stored on the NAS over the network. It also has some old residual projects on it that should really be cleaned out.

So stuck the 8GB card in that device and did the minor set up needed for the music station. Specifically, configure VLC for Remote Control over the network, then add the network share. Once I plugged it back into my little mixer and verified I could remote play music, I moved on.

This ended up being an unrelated side project though, because I had been planning on getting a large, speedy, Micro SD card to stick in my Retroid Pocket. So I stuck that 128GB card in, the Retroid and formatted it. This freed up a smaller, 32GB card.

I also have a 64GB that is basically not being used in my PiGrrl Project I decided to recover back for use. The project was fun, but the Retroid does the same thing 1000x better. So now it’s mostly just a display piece on a shelf. Literally an overpriced paperweight. I don’t want to lose the PiGrrl configuration though, because it’s been programmed up to work with the small display and IO Control Inputs. So I imaged that card off.

In the end though, I didn’t end up needing those Micro SD cards though, I opted for an alternative option to replace the Pi, with Docker on my secondary PC. I’ve been meaning to better learn Docker, though I still find it to be a weird and obtuse bit of software. There are a handful of things I care about restoring that I used the Pi for.

  • Youtube DL – There seem to be quite a few nice Web Interfaces for this that will work much better than my old custom system.
  • WordPress Blog Archives – I have exported data files from this but I would like to have it as a WordPress Instance again
  • FreshRSS – My RSS Reader. I already miss my daily news feeds.

YoutubeDL was simple, they provided a nice basic command sequence to get things working.

The others were a bit trickier. Because the old set up died unexpectedly, The data isn’t easily exported for import, which means digging out and recovering off of the raw database files. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but its a lot bigger pain, which isn’t helped by not being entirely confident in how to manipulate Docker.

I still have not gotten the WordPress archive working actually. I was getting “Connection Reset” errors and now I am getting “Cannot establish Database connection” issues. It may be for nothing after the troubles I have had dealing with recovering FreshRSS.

I have gotten FreshRSS fixed though. Getting it running in Docker was easy peasy. Getting my data back, was… considerably less so. It’s been plaguing me now when I try to fix it for a few weeks now, but I have a solution. It’s not the BEST solution, but it’s… a solution. So, the core thing I needed were the feeds themselves. Lesson learned I suppose, but I’m going to find a way to automate a regular dump of the feeds once everything is reloaded. I don’t need or care about favorited articles or the articles contents. These were stored in a MySQL database. MySQL, specifically seems to be what was corrupted and crashed out on the old Pi/Instance because I get a failed message on boot and i can’t get it to reinstall or load anymore.

Well, more, I am pretty sure the root cause is the SD card died, but it affected the DB files.

My struggle now, is recovering data from these raw files. I’ve actually done this before on a surver crash years ago, but this round has lead to many many hurdles. One, 90% of the results looking up how to do it are littered with unhelpful replies about using a proper SQL dump instead. If I could open MySQL, I sure as hell would so that. Another issue seems to be that the SQL server running on the Pi was woefully out of date, so there have been file compatibility problems.

There is also the issue that the data may just flat out BE CORRUPTED.

So I’ve spun up and tried to manually move the data to probably a dozen instances of MySQL and MariaDB of various versions, on Pis, in Docker, on WSL, in a Linux install. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING has worked.

I did get the raw data pulled out though.

So I’ve been brute forcing a fix. Opening the .ibd file in a text editor gives a really ugly chuck of funny characters. But, strewn throughout this, is a bunch of URLs for feeds and websites and well, mostly that. i did an open “Replace” in Notepad++ that stripped out a lot of the characters. Then I opened up Pycharm, I did a find and replace with blanks on a ton of other ugly characters. Then I write up this wuick and dirty Python Script:

# Control F in Notepad++, replace, extended mode "\x00"
# Replace "   " with " "
# replace "https:" with " https:"
# rename to fresh.txt

## Debug and skip asking each time
file = "fresh.txt"
## Open and read the Log File supploed
with open(file, encoding="UTF-8") as logfile:
    log = logfile.read()

datasplit = log.split(" ")
links = []

for each in datasplit:
    if "http" in each:
        links.append(each)

with open("output.txt", mode="w", encoding="UTF-8") as writefile:
    for i in links:
        writefile.write(i+"\n")

Which splits everything up into an array, and skims through the array for anything with “http” in it, to pull out anything that is a URL. This has left me with a text file that is full of duplicates and has regular URLs next to Feed URLS, though not in EVERY case because that would be too damn easy. I could probably add a bunch of conditionals to the script to sort out anything with the word “feed” “rss”, “atom” or “xml” and get a lot of the cruft removed, but Fresh RSS does not seem to have a way to bulk import a text list, so I still get to manually cut and paste each URL in and resort everything into categories.

It’s tedious, but it’s mindless, and it will get done.

Afterwards I will need to reset up my WordPress Autoposter script for those little news digests I’ve been sharing that no one cares about.

Slight update, I added some filtering ans sorting to the code:

# Control F in Notepad++, replace, extended mode "\x00"
# Replace "   " with " "
# replace "https:" with " https:"
# rename to fresh.txt


## Debug and skip asking each time
file = "fresh.txt"
## Open and read the Log File supploed
with open(file, encoding="UTF-8") as logfile:
    log = logfile.read()

datasplit = log.split(" ")
links = []

for each in datasplit:
    if "http" in each:
        if "feed" in each or "rss" in each or "default" in each or "atom" in each or "xml" in each:
            if each not in links:
                links.append(each[each.find("http"):])

links.sort()

with open("output.txt", mode="w", encoding="UTF-8") as writefile:
    for i in links:
        writefile.write(i+"\n")
Albums

Raffaella – Ballerina

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Raffaella feels like a bit of an interesting oddity in my list of “artists I like to listen to”. For the most part, to be frank, she feels like kind of a nobody level musician, though not for not trying pretty hard to get somewhere. Though Wikipedia says she was dating Justice Smith for a while and she got a set on Vevo Discover, which is pretty sweet. I’m not really here to gossip though. My first exposure was when she opened for Sigrid in 2019. Before the show I started listening to this album just fro the sake of having some idea of who she was.

I’ve been a fan since then though. I actually listen to more Raffaella these days than Sigrid, which is also amusing. It actually feels like a bit of a shame that she doesn’t seem to be making a ton of traction in her career, because she has a really interesting and varied sound and a lot of clever lyrics going on in her tracks.

The opening track of her first EP, Ballerina, is Sororicide, an airy jazzy track that follows a little story about a girl who seems to both wants to reject and embrace the whole concept of being part of the popular crowd, and how ultimately it’s all kind of a big fake sham. This is a bit of a running theme throughout this album’s tracks. A desire to be part of the cool crowd while trying to reject it for individuality. I really like the use of vocalizations as part of the backing track to the lyrics, with the oooohh and the little do do do that pop up.

It’s followed by Bruce Willis. On a side note, I really like how this is one of those rare songs where the title isn’t just the chorus line. It has a lot of the same feel and themes of Sorocicide, though it has a much fuller sound to it. I like how the hook breaks out the way it does each time from the calmer lyrical sections.

The third track on this EP, NASA’s Fake, has a more upbeat and poppy sound to it, which a much more prominent drum line to it and a bit more synth effects to it. It also has a lot more interesting variety to it’s melodies then the first two tracks with it’s bopping chorus and it’s little break out quiet interlude near the end. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.

The album takes a low key turn for a bit with Hell Yeah (yeah yeah yeah yeah). The airy and light feel returns for this track as well. The title track, Ballerina, picks up the pace a bit and has a nice little inspiration, autobiographical feel to it, but keeps the more light feel up with it’s pleasant piano melodies. There are actually quite a few nice little underlying piano melodies all throughout this album. It gives it a nice light Jazzy feel overall. In the case of Ballerina, it certainly evokes the feel of a ballerina dance. Based on when I saw her on stage, and some of the videos I’ve watched, Raffaella also seems to do a lot of her performance on her barefoot tip toes.

The last track is probably my favorite track, with Balaclava (like the ski mask). It really feels like a nice culmination for the album as it takes a lot of the elements of the previous tracks and stacks them all up for one last hurrah. It also tells a little story about breaking and entering into rich people’s homes, which I find amusing.

I’ll probably do future posts on her second album, but in general, I really enjoy Raffaella’s music, and I really hope she can get somewhere bigger in the future.

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