Paul Batchelor @paul@post.lurk.org

Just discovered, IMSTA, an organization dedicated to telling people not to pirate music software.

It is a serious problem in our industry. For instance, only 6% of people actually pay for Serum? That's crazy! There are definitely music professionals who can afford to pay for the software they make their livelihood on, but don't. And that is a problem.

That being said, I have yet to see someone from the music industry talk about anti-piracy without sounding like a grumpy old person scolding someone. To be fair, IMSTA has one of the better narratives I've seen from the music industry, but I still feel talked down to (and I don't even pirate).

The ways the music industry tries to combat piracy makes me cringe, too. I suppose I have an axe to grind here. All these years later, and I am still bitter about the iLok. A shitty, third-party USB dongle that you needed to have plugged into your computer to run software like Pro Tools. It was a pain to deal with, and if it broke, you were fucked. It's design choices like these that make me think the music industry as a whole doesn't really have a solid grasp on digital technology.

C99 features don't make sense in C header files, and I don't know why they do it. I often am writing projects in ANSI C with pedantic warnings, and some libraries make the compiler light up with warnings.

In most cases, it wouldn't take much effort to make offending header files ANSI compliant. The JACK api, for instance, only needs to remove C++ style comments and commas at the end of enumerators. (almost tempted to make a PR for this one).

Random idea for an art installation:

Build a robot who has been programmed to slowly destroy itself through mechanical means.

I was thinking it could be a mechanical arm calmly hitting its CPU with a hammer. The arm would be engineered to hit itself in such a way so that the performance would last days/weeks. Designed for its own inevitable destruction.

As a cheap shot, anthropomorphism (such as faces, humanoid voices) to taste.

Bonding with my new minirig mini. After many many months of studio headphones, it is refreshing to hear a sound in space.

Ep 1 started pretty strong. Lots of interesting fringe theories with some evidence, with the ET narrative kind of smashed in there.

Pretty sure ep 2 called king tut an alien, so there was that.

Ep 3 was total trash. So many uneducated people starting sentences with things like "I feel" or "I personally believe". Mind boggling to think multiple people had to sign off on this.

Starting Ep 4. More crazy old white people I am sure.

Oh my goodness. Ancient Aliens. This show. Gets more unhinged with each episode. Wow. Aliens did everything. Or... did they?

Ancient Aliens is such crap. Love it.

Original Amiga deluxe paint source code was on github for less that 24 hours before it got deleted. Didn't have time to clone it. Anyone got any mirrors?

All my friends text me in emoticons now. Makes me feel old and behind the times.

Has anybody here used twtxt before? Looks interesting.

yo syncthing is pretty dope. got it up and running with orgzly in minutes.

My wallet thanks me for not getting into eurorack.

The sound that homer simpson makes when he drools is known as a "voiced epiglottal trill" in the international phonetic alphabet. Pretty sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_epiglottal_trill

Well, my comandline Android dev-setup was a fight to get up and running on Alpine linux. Mainly this is due to the sdk-tools being incompatible with musl libc.

I ended up building a chroot jail around Arch linux. I'm disappointed in wasting 15 gigs of space on this. On the other hand, this means I can bring my 1.1 pound linux laptop around instead of my 5.5 pound mac laptop.

Just got me an Odroidgo yesterday. Made me realize that there has never been a better time for playing + developing 8-bit games:

- A massive catalogue of ROMs to play + nintendo looking the other way
- Several competing retro gaming handhelds (Bittboy, Odroid-go, LDK gamer, etc)
- Even more ROM emulators to choose from
- Well documented specs on gameboy hardware + software
- An active homebrew community for these older platforms
- New open-source hackable consoles like the Arduboy
- Dev tools like GBDK that can actually run on modern hardware

Hell of a hole to fall into these past few days. Hope I didn't hit my head too hard ;)

I miss working with people who are remotely competent. Been a really demoralizing few years for me.