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.
I don’t go to a lot of concerts, and of the 7 total I’ve been to of any merit, 4 of them weren’t really anything I would have necesarilly chosen. Three of them were country music that my wife and daughter wanted to see (Toby Kieth & Kip Moore, Lee Brice, Travis Tritt). Though the shows were enjoyable, country music isn’t my first choice in music genre. The main issue honestly is most of the artists I would want to see tend to be at huge venues and cost a few hundred dollars a ticket, so it’s just not really affordable.
So when I was watching some Sigrid on Youtube and there was a little notice below about a show “nearby” in St Louis, I figured, why not let’s see what’s up. It turns out, it was super affordable, and it’s close enough that I could always drive there and back in one round trip, even if it meant a late night. I asked my wife if she wanted to go, and mentioned that it was cheap enough that even if she ended up not being able to, because of her various come and go health issues, the extra ticket wouldn’t be a huge bust or anything. Fortunately, she came along as well.
We opted to make a little mini vacation of it, and I took a couple of days off work. I joked that we were having a Scandinavian vacation, since we went to IKEA (Sweedish-ish) during the day before seeing Sigrid, who is Norwegian, that evening. The day after we also went to the St Louis Zoo.
The show itself was at a little club called The Ready Room. I couldn’t find a ton about the place online before the show so I wasn’t super sure what to expect. It wasn’t a particularly large venue, and the maximum capacity listed was 750 people, so at the very least, it was going to be a fairly small crowd. We arrived around an hour early, plenty of parking available ont he street too which was nice. The excitement of the show kind of got ramped up here as we walked past the tour bus parked on the side of the building. There were a dozen or so people lined up outside, so we walked next door to a sort of open space pizza spot called Pie Guy Pizza for a quick bite to eat.
Doors opened shortly after we had arrived, and the line hadn’t grown much, if any, so we headed on in. The stage area was a mostly black room, but it was also much wider than it was deep, so there was a lot of width to the stage. I ended up standing right up front next to the rail, though off to one side. After a bit more wait, it was time for the show.
So, in addition to Sigrid, there was also an opening act, Raffaella, as part of the show. I’d never heard anything from Raffaella, so in the weeks leading up to the show, I added some of her tracks to my Amazon playlist. Probably my favorite song of the half dozen songs she has out is Balaclava, though in general, I rather enjoy all of her tracks.
I didn’t take any video of Raffaella, so you’ll have to settle for this iteration from Youtube. Funny enough, I had listened to this track enough that I was able to sing along for quite a bit of it during the performance. Her show was decent as well, though due to the wide nature of the stage, it felt a little crowded, since her band was set up in front of Sigrid’s Band’s gear.
Unfortunately, I only ended up with one sort of OK photo from Raffaella’s set. I wasn’t super satisfied with a lot of my photos from this event. My camera’s phone sucks, and I had inquired before hand about the camera policy of the club and got a sort of boiler plate reply that suggested I would not be able to bring my DSLR to the show. I had brought my daughter’s fixed lens midrange Nikon, but in the end, left it int he car, because I didn’t want to deal with if I would be allowed to bring it in or not.
After Raffaella’s set, there was a short intermission while the crew broke down the extra instruments and cleaned up the stage before the main act. I’ve watched a lot of videos of Sigrid’s Sucker Punch tour, so I had a pretty good idea of how the set would go. But still, it was quite exciting to actually be there as Peder, Kristina, Sondre and Kasper came out in the dark to take positions on stage. Then the familiar sort of ambient build up to the opening of Sucker Punch as Sigrid rushes out and starts singing the song.
I just want to say, it’s really something else to go see an artist that you really like, and get to be “right there”. Later, after the show, I commented to my wife that the whole thing made me really want to go see more live shows, but I’m spoiled now because I’ll probably never end up with this perfect combo again.
Having listened to all of these tracks really helped the whole experience as well, there’s something really fun about a crowd of people all singing along with each other all just in the moment. Sigrid puts on a really great show as well. She is constantly moving and dancing around the stage. She makes little call outs to the crowd. Possibly the best one, at one point she jumped out onto the platform on the backside of the railing in front of the stage and someone int he audience totally lost it. Sigrid commented that she “Didn’t expect you to scream like that.”
The band is great too, and sometimes I feel like they don’t get enough credit. Kasper does some great drum riffs, I particularly love him in the track Go to War. Sondre does some pretty good guitar work on the few times he gets to do his small moments to shine. I’m less familiar with Peder, as he is new to the group after some sort of unknown drama involving the old keyboardist. I also really like Kristina as Sigrid’s backup vocals. I’ve been listening to her album “Revet vekk” some recently. It’s all in Norwegian and has a way different vibe than Sigrid, but I find it pretty relaxing to listen to.
Anyway, I also really enjoy how every track sort of feels different. Some of them are heavy bouncy fast paced songs. Then you get more relaxed moments like in Dynamite, where Sigrid plays solo on the Keyboard, or Level Up where it was just Sigrid, Kristina, and Sondre.
My only complaint, which personally, isn’t a huge one, and I have no idea what the actual “blame” would be for it. Holy shit the show was loud. Like, literally, overwhelmingly loud at times. There were many times when I could basically only hear drums. There was a moment, probably during the heavy drum beats of Go to War, that I had resigned myself that I’d possibly be deaf after the show was over. I don’t know if the sound was cranked up too much, or I just wasn’t expecting it, or (most likely) I was standing 2 feet in front of one of the speakers, but it was LOUD. It was a good thing I was already pretty familiar with the music. Also, I suspect it was where I was standing, because my wife, who was standing behind/beside me, just off tot he side of the speaker, didn’t really mention having the same problem, even when I mentioned it.
Whatever the case, I would definitely go to another Sigrid Show, and I definitely want to go to more concerts in the future, though I may try to stick to smaller venues like this one, even if it’s not a band I am super familiar with. I’m going to wrap up here with the one video I did take, of my favorite Sigrid track, Basic.
Recently I purchased an SSD for my wife’s Thinkpad. It wasn’t a big one, 256 gig, but her laptop is a little slow all around and the bottleneck seems to be mostly in the drive, which I am pretty sure is still old school spinning platters.
Unfortunately, the drive in her laptop is 320 Gb, so I couldn’t straight clone the drives. I could have done some partition size adjustments and made it work but she was already fussing and worrying I was going to lose some of her files so I decided I’d just wait and get a larger one later.
I’d already planned to pick up a second one of these drives to add to my Laptop. The main drive is one of those funky newer styles that’s basically a circuit board, but it has an empty bay for a laptop drive. I stuck the new SSD in and went about using it. Nothing hard here at all.
To my surprise, the drive vanished a week or so later. Thankfully I didn’t stick it in my wife’s laptop, it was apparently bad. Or was it?
Turns out that because the drive is a little on the small size, even for a 2.5″ drive, and there isn’t any mechanism inside the laptop to secure the drive itself, it ended up coming lose and losing it’s connection.
It’s probably not the cleanest fix, but I stripped off a half a sheet of paper and accordion folded it and slipped it in between the drive and the Laptop chassis. This applies pressure to the drive, holding it in place.
I haven’t had any trouble with the drive since. Still it’s kind of a crummy design.
As a bit or a change of pace, I did a bit of work on the two actual PCs I am currently running recently. I’ve gone through a lot of desktops over the years, some getting more use than others, for a while I had like 5 or 6 old ones I had picked up here and there just sort of sitting around collecting dust but I’ve purged a lot of that out. Most of what I used to do with those extra PCs I can now do with Raspberry Pis or on my VPS. Everyone in the family uses a laptop, so no more need for a “Family Desktop”. I am down to two boxes now, ok, techniclly 3 but the third is an old PowerMAC G4 that I mostly keep around because I think the case is cool.
First off, my personal desktop. At the moment it just runs Windows 10, it’s sitting on a handful of drives for a total storage of 4 GB, mostly filled with games. I built this machine almost 7 years ago. It’s nothing particularly special, and I have bumped up the RAM since then considerably. PC computing power really hasn’t gotten much better in the past few years and what it mostly needed was a bump up in graphics power. So I swapped out the Radeon 6950 for an NVidia GTX 1050ti card. It’s not a top of the line super card, but it was within my price range and the performance boost is reasonably noticeable.
The biggest change is that I can run pretty much everything at maxed out graphics settings. So far I’ve tested it on Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1 in particular used to throw out an error about my GPU not being supported and GTA V had some screwy artifacting when it rained in game. Also, maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I have noticed that I do better in Overwatch with heroes like Hanzo and Widowmaker who both require more precise long distance aiming.
That work was pretty easy, though I was sort of worried that the newer card wouldn’t work with my older Chip and Board.
On my other desktop tower, which is primarily used as a file storage server to supplement my Synology, I replaced a couple of dying hard drives. I don’t really remember where this tower came from but it’s at least the same vintage as my main PC. It’s set up running Xubuntu with a collection of drives I’ve collected over time from various places and discarded PCs. It’s been complaining for a while on boot that one of the drives was bad, and another would give read errors occasionally. I copied everything off the read error drive, that one was easy. The other bad drive turned out to be the main drive which finally gave up the ghost and stopped booting on me. I ended up making this problem worse when trying to clone the drive, because I apparently accidentally overwrite the drive as a ZFS pool file system. This is mostly notable because I’m not sure how it even happened. I have used ZFS briefly int he past when I was testing FreeNAS but that system was a way bigger chore to use than just Ubuntu with Samba shares so I scrapped it. So I’m not sure what was even cloned to create a 500GB ZFS partition.
Fortunately there wasn’t any important data actually on the main filesystem drive. I think at worst I may have lost am unused Minecraft server set up and maybe a few webpages I had set up messing around with webdev stuff.
So after a ton of reboots on a live CD to determine which physical drive was witch in the machine, I pulled out the two bad drives and replaced them with two “mostly good” drives. I then reloaded Xubuntu. I then, reloaded Xubuntu again because an encrypted file system seemed like a good idea but I don’t want the hassle of entering a password every time the machine boots.
The real hassle here is getting everything configured. A quick rundown of the steps needed to get things to a basic level of use.
Set up the proprietary drivers for the GPU and motherboard, easy
Set a static IP that puts the machine where it’s supposed to be on the network, mostly easy.
Reinstall Synergy. Mostly easy, though I still need to get it to stat on boot.
Install and set up SSH, easy
Reinstall Samba, easy
Get the system to auto mount the other hard drives on boot, mostly easy
Configure Samba to share those drives, mostly easy
Reinstall the LAMP stack
Fortunately, everything went pretty smoothly, other than I havn’t quite figure out the right method to get Synergy to start on boot. This is actually pretty critical, since unless the machine just boots up to a desktop with Synergy, I have to keep a keyboard and mouse attached. Part of the point here is that this box can just be squired away behind the desk and hooked to a monitor. It may already be set up but I’ll probably set up Python on it as well. I still like to be able to putz around with scripts and web stuff so it’s handy to have.
PS, feel free to judge the dusty ass inside of that tower up there.
So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all. Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it. This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it. I still kept up my subscription though. The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos. I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private. I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.
I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked. I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community. This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community. Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.
Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug. I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them. Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.
Or possibly not.
It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted. This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage. This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate. Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year. This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much. I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.
Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine. In my case, the new plans just don’t work. So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part. I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos. Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos. I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway. Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway. It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on. I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.
Ramen Junkie 
