Monday, 30th May, 2022
Spent a lot of time down the rabbit trail of high definition audio last night. It started with looking at tape decks as there was one for sale near me. Then I was curious about vinyl, and there’s still many new models of players being sold. Given I don’t own any tapes or vinyl it seemed like a silly way to approach this. Also what exactly is this? I think it’s the desire to actually own the media I have and not just rent it. The price of netflix and other streaming services only seems to go up. There’s competition but prices aren’t coming down. At what point will I stop paying for it? Also, they may decide to stop providing certain shows, movies, albums, songs etc. due to whatever licensing agreements they have. We’ve actually seen it on a particular song that our youngest daughter really likes. We had to make do with a cover by someone random. I have noticed that it’s come back now.
For a lot of things, I don’t really care that we just rent it. Especially TV and films - a lot of them we watch once and then never again. There are some films we do like to watch multiple times. e.g. family traditions at Christmas time or the kids like watching some Disney films many times (I’ll watch them many times too), and we do own copies of a lot of them, for this very reason. Also before Disney+ it was hard to find them on streaming services…and now we have to pay for Disney+ if we want them. I used to be more “hoardery” and want to keep copies of everything. I spent ages copying our DVDs to the computer. Then I realised that it wasn’t all of equal importance and started clearing out the rubbish that we’d never watch again - even if we did have the DVD.
Anyway, I also like the idea of choosing music from a small subset of music that I have. I can stream “every song ever” online but generally listen to two playlists of the same songs. The algorithms don’t work for new stuff as the kids listen to so much crap it ruins it (I’m looking at you ‘fart song’.). So I never find anything new. I also forget about old things that I used to listen to and used to like. Back when I had CDs, many would sit on the shelf and never be listened to for ages but then one day I’d suddenly want to play it and the fact of its very own physical presence allowed me to remember it and play it. Today I don’t have that. I have to actively think and decide what to play, and that’s too much effort, so I don’t bother.
So having, and building a collection of albums and songs gives me the hope that it’ll help me enjoy all the music I used to. This led to looking at high definition players - mostly after seeing Phil’s note about his Sony from 2019. Up until that stage, I never really knew they were things to be had.
And so I ask myself, are these files on a hard drive/device really any better at fixing this than the search function of a streaming app - or spending some time making playlists on it? Is this just a huge song and dance (gettit?) to result in me doing what I like most….researching some new area or tech. Investigating how I could unlock a Japanese import with some custom firmware. Buying something. Particularly buying it on eBay with the thrill of auctions and finding “good deals”.
So what am I going to do? probably still buy something ;)
I’m getting my old computer ready for my sister - cleaned out the dust, and make sure everything is working and reinstalling Windows. I found an old hard drive inside the case. I think it’s my very first “large” hard drive I bought ages ago. It’s 1 TB and used to be where I kept everything - my music, DVD rips, backups, documents, etc. I stopped using it once I setup the home server and it’s just moved from computer to computer. Not sure why I’d disconnected it. It might’ve been when installing Windows in the past and I didn’t want any mistakes, so just disconnected it. Unless it was broken? But then why disconnect and not remove it? Anyway, I’m curious to see what’s on it. Maybe full of hidden gems I thought were lost to time! Pictures, movies, bitcoin wallet with 1000s of ฿…Probably not. I did know of bitcoin in around 2009-2011. I even CPU mined some…feel like it was 0.000xxx with a lot of zeros. But I don’t think I ever bought any, so probably not going to discover anything exciting. Now I might find some old music.
I used to have a lot of music on the computer, but generally poor quality of stuff that friends shared whilst we were at uni. Might be fun to trawl back through though.
I’ve not used my new laptop in nearly two weeks…so much for that. However, I’m using it now as I’m at home and my daughter is on the computer. Plus I wanted to fiddle about with converting tiddlywiki to markdown files to then import everything into this site. This seems promising to do what I want. Well, certainly to handle the conversion to markdown. I’ll still need to setup the correct naming of markdown files but should be fairly straight forward with python to use the tiddler date to generate it. There’s not much documentation with this package but hopefully I can figure it out.
The tiny keyboard is looking at me and I know I should at least finish soldering the M key so that (hopefully) it keeps working. Likewise the raspberry pi zero, I should redo the soldering on the GPIO pins so that I can use it with the inky screen. It’s sat by my little reading/writing area and so I could put something interesting on it. Maybe some quotes or questions to myself - e.g. have you journaled about today? When did you last call your mother? etc. It has buttons on the side, so I could have a few screens and flick between them. If I was super keen I could embed it into a photo frame so it looks nice. Maybe some random art work or whatever too. The possibilities are endless. So I’ll do nothing.
Look at all these notebooks! 😍
This site is very much an online journal. I really don’t care about typos or spelling or nonsensical sentences. It’s for me to write about stuff to a (most likely) imaginary reader.
