Recently I beat a game that I have owned since about 1997, when I first bought it with my chore money as a kid. It’s time to review Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins!!!
Continue reading “Game Review: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy)”
I’ve been chatting with a good number of folks who are turning down streaming services lately for various reasons. I’ve blogged about this before, and if you’re looking for advice on how to make the switch, I and a lot of others have said things about it in the past.
But the one thing that people seem to struggle with the most is the “discovery problem.” That is, how do I find new music when it’s not being served to me by my “For you” page or its equivalent? Well, it’s not as difficult as it may seem. There are a ton of other ways to find new music that you’ll like, but like all things, they may take a little time. If you’re willing to invest in it, here are some methods that you can use to come across new artists and songs that I’ve found helpful.
Scrobbling and Trackers
A lot of us self-hosters like to track our listening stats via sites like Last.fm, Libre.fm, ListenBrainz, or even a self-hosted alternative. In addition to recording what you’ve listened to and showing you metrics over time, most of these services also recommend artists and songs that you may like based on your current listening. Last.fm has a “Your recommendations” function that is powered by YouTube or Spotify, and you’re allowed to specify which in your settings. ListenBrainz lets you choose between YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, FunkWhale, Navidrome, or the Internet Archive, and Libre.fm does not currently support playback, but does link songs to MusicBrainz if you’d like to play them.
These are great because they’re tailored to your listening habits and can pull up some neat things that are then auto-scrobbled to your listening history. In addition, these sites tend to offer social media-like features that let you click through to users whose listening habits are close to your own. You can pick out the artists they listen to as well and give them a try, which is one of my favorite ways to find new things.
Currently listening threads
Tildes, MelonLand, 32BitCafe, and Lemmy all have “What are you currently listening to?” threads that are pretty active, and you can subscribe to them via RSS:
- MelonLand: What are you listening to right now?
- Tildes: What have you been listening to this week? Posts search
- Lemmy search: What are you listening to? Posts search
- 32BitCafe: What have you been listening to lately?
These are just a few of the places I happen to hang out, but there are other forums on the web that have similar threads. Getting personalized recommendations is always fun and gives the music a personal connection that algorithmic recs just don’t have.
If you’re on Reddit, activity is much higher, and there are entire communities dedicated to music discovery:
- r/ListenToThis
- r/IndieHeads – I’ve chosen Indie as an example genre, since I listen to it a lot, but there are similar subreddits for every genre
- r/MusicRecommendations
…and etc.
Internet Radio
There are TONS of internet radio stations out there, and they’re a great way to find new music. My favorite is Soma.fm, which is completely free, plays no ads, and has a great selection of indie music of all genres. They’ve got an Android app for listening on the go, but they’re always available via your browser too.
Another popular one is Radio.garden, which lets you listen to radio stations from all over the world, via a large interactive map.
Here are a few other radio stations I’ve listened to and liked:
- Kingposs Radio
- FM.Brennan.day – Just recently launched, when Brennan isn’t broadcasting this station plays selections from the Internet Archive
- Jackhouse Radio
- Ryno the Bearded – Note that some AI was used in coding this one, if you’re looking out for that sort of thing.
Bandcamp
Despite the negativity surrounding its purchase by Epic and then subsequent hand-off to Songtradr, Bandcamp still reigns as the place to find and buy music. A lot of folks complain that it offers no way to discover music, but that’s not entirely true, and besides, it’s an unfair complaint. Bandcamp, while it does let you stream music you’ve paid for, is not a streaming service, and were it to become one, I think its utility for both artists and fans would greatly suffer. The lack of a discovery algorithm keeps the company focused on what matters–enabling artists to sell music and gain a following–and away from the toxic attention economy that has ruined the streaming services that we’re turning away from.
That said, there are ways to discover music on the platform if you’re willing to put a little work into it. Bandcamp daily is a hand written (no AI or algorithms!) editorial that publishes interviews with artists, highlights from different genres, and generally just explores what Bandcamp has to offer. It’s a great publication that you can visit as often or as little as you like, and I find it catches my eye every few weeks or so.
Bandcamp also has tagging functionality, and you can always scroll to the bottom of your favorite albums to see what they’re tagged with, and then explore what other artists are publishing in that area. Sometimes I like to type different local cities into the search bar and see what pops up (you can search tags specifically by adding the “#” symbol before your search term).
Random Finds + Other tools
Here are a couple of other tools I found that didn’t fit in anywhere else:
Reddit Music Player – This is a tool that scrapes music links from all around Reddit and sticks them into a playlist for you.
This Reddit user listens to a ton of Indie music and compiles them into playlists for you to listen through. They’ve been doing this for over 10 years!
And of course, don’t forget to ask your friends and family what they’re listening to. They may have interesting suggestions, maybe not, but folks are usually happy to talk about what they’re into, and it increases the time spent with loved ones 🙂
If you have any additional suggestions, please list them in the comments. Like most radical choices, this sort of activity requires a re-training of our habits and senses in order to engage with something in a way we’ve been conditioned to accept passively. If you’re willing to make the change, though, I think you’ll find that part of your life becomes much more meaningful.
This little simplistic device has been making the rounds on the smallweb lately, and I have fallen prey to the hype. That said, I have no regrets and have been enjoying my time with it, so here are my thoughts on the gadget.
The X4 by Chinese company XTEInk is a 4-inch tall e-reader that has probably the least number of features of any reader I’ve seen on the market. It reads ePub and Txt files, has no back or frontlight, and no touch screen. Instead, it has four physical buttons, two on the front (which act as rockers, so have at least four functions depending on how you configure them), and two on the side, in addition to a small power button. The stock firmware is incredibly bare, and does not properly display italics or special characters, and although it does support WiFi, its primary method for adding books is via the Micro SD card underneath the side buttons.
Continue reading “XTEInk X4 Minimaist e-Reader Review + DIY Case”
I’ve been hoarding photos of things outside for a little while in the hopes that I could find some theme to tie them altogether. They’re getting kind of numerous, though, so I think it’s time to put them up. These range from the snow blizzard we had back in the beginning of February, up until just a few days ago, so you’ll see quite the range here. I even got a photo from the latest lunar eclipse!
Brennan.day has been writing about the future of the internet and whether or not our websites will survive into the future. He has a lot of good points, and you should definitely give the article a read:
How Are We Preparing for the Long Web
Several of the points in that article jogged my memory, though, and reminded me of some of the discussions we used to have about 10/15 years ago, and I thought there might be a few points that were worth bringing up again.
I’m making this post today to discuss a musical artist that you’ve most certainly never heard of, and I think that’s a shame. While artists giving their music away under alternative licenses is a lot more common today, this one was doing it back when we were still testing the waters of the Creative Commonsa blog that was under the url Freemusicarchive.org. These days, the site looks a bit different, because its owner got a bit tired of running the blog, and handed it over to someone else, and it became rather corporate. It still does much of the same, it’s just harder to browse, so if you’re looking for newer free music releases, I’d recommend going through their Archive.org collection where you can see just the music itself instead of the “upsells” to their pro services.
Anyways. I found so much music through that wonderful blog, which I still listen to today, most of which wasn’t released anywhere else on the web. I will probably go over more of it in the future, but today I’d like to talk about my favorite artist from that era, a very little-known musician going by the name of Evils That Never Came.
Continue reading “Talking About Music: They’re from California; you’ve never heard of them”
It’s time to look at more stuff that I’ve been building in Voxelibre! Voxelibre is a Minecraft-like game played in the Luanti engine that I spend a lot of my free time in, and I’ve done a lot of different builds in it. If you’d like to see the previous post I made about my Voxelibre world, it’s here:
Luanti build: Roman Bath House
I’ve been busy, and today I have several new buildings to show off instead of just one. Click the link below to read the rest of the post, which lots of pictures of my dead mall, library, neighborhood family homes, and more!
Continue reading “More Voxelibre/Luanti builds – Mall, library, and more”
This is a bit of an unusual post, as I generally don’t write much about my work life stuff since it’s rather boring, and this isn’t really a “professional” blog. However, this one was frustrating enough that I figure it might help some other poor soul out there. Maybe if I do more of these things, they’ll get their own section eventually. Either way, here’s a solution I came across recently.
Here’s an issue I’ve dealt with on every version of Windows I’ve ever worked with, and the documentation on it is so scant, that it took me ages to figure out how to fix it.
So in my line of work I connect to a lot of network shares on the fly. I map a lot of them too, but every now and then I need to grab something that doesn’t require a persistent connection, so I’ll just type the UNC path into file explorer and connect that way.
Occasionally (or maybe more than occasionally), I’ll fat finger the user name or password, and the connection doesn’t go through. Whoops! It happens a lot; I type fast, so that one’s on me. I’ll just go ahead and highlight the UNC path and hit “enter” and reconnect to the share, and Windows will re-prompt me for the credentials, right?
Nope
Windows says “go fuck yourself.” It’s actually cached the incorrect credentials for some godforsaken reason, and when it tries to reconnect, it naturally fails, and tells you there’s something wrong with the share, because those credentials were wrong. Why would you do this???
If you’ve had this problem and searched for a fix online, you’ll find that you’re almost universally sent to look at the in-built Windows Credential Manager and find and delete the connection there, but this won’t work for your issue, because connections on the fly like this don’t show up in the credential manager. In fact, not only do they not show up, but they’ll stay there in their mysterious hiding place until you log off your PC, meaning you’ve got to stop what you’re doing and close everything out in order to move forward.
Solution
So it turns out that shares mapped on the fly like this use the net use command, and you can view every one of the connections you currently have by simply typing “net use” into Cmd.exe.
There you’ll see all of those connections that were supposed to be there, but you couldn’t see. If you need to change or re-enter the credentials for any connection you borked up like me, you can delete them from net use by using the below command:
net use /delete \\exact-unc-share-here\including\sub\folders
That’s it. MS, would it have killed you to make this easier and more explicit?!?!?!
This month’s Indieweb Carnival topic is the “Meaning of life,” hosted by Jeremiah Lee, and although I usually take breaks between participating, this one tickled me a lot. My answer is probably going to be a bit rambly, but I’ve tried to at least form it into some semblance of a through-line, which was difficult to do without sounding completely pretentious.
I have a number of things that drive me forward from day to day. They’re hard won after a lifetime of dealing with depression and anxiety, so I appreciate that I have them. One of them is the principle of non-harm, or non-violence, Ahimsa, which I’ve learned from studying Yoga throughout the years. I’ve grown closer to this concept as I’ve aged; I think sometimes as we get older some of us grow harder and less compassionate, usually through hardship and difficulty (though not always), while others become more empathetic (sometimes also through hardship and difficulty). I’m definitely part of the latter group.
Hello everyone, I hope you are all staying safe and warm! Texas and the rest of the southern United States is experiencing freezing weather right now, and everything is closing early. We are absolutely not equipped to handle snow and ice, and are complete wimps when it gets too threatening out, so everyone I know is preparing to stay indoors. In that vein, I thought it was the perfect time to unveil my latest project: a patchwork quilt I am titling “Geeks in Texas.”
