Project Zebra: Run like hell, you got the shot away, thunder ►
◄ Iron Maiden: the next half dozen albums (1986-1998)
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I must confess like most Lovecraft I've mentally bookmarked to go back and read because the prose is like chewing wood. It's just that his fiction is referenced by other things I've been reading / listening to. And it's mostly music and musings this month.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/04/deadbeef-1-10-release-brings-new-features
I hadn't looked at DeadBeeF for a while, and apparently this is the first version to include a media library that can display by folder. Which is good as the folder browser plugin it had as an optional extra wasn't very functional. Its database doesn't seem to be as responsive to searches as Foobar running under Wine, but I'm happy with the way it works. There are no real configuration options, so it'll either suit people or won't. There also doesn't seem to be any album cover style browser or choice of whether to not use thumbnails on the folder tree. I think the added colour and visual interest is a plus, and not having album art something I don't realise I miss.
Whilst filling album art gaps, I've been surprised by the number of things I've acquired, ripped and not listened to. The last decade or so has been a bit of a blur, particularly the last five years. Have gone on a bit of a Nile kick, hence also rummaging around a bit in Lovecraft who was an influence on them. I also discovered that the PHD movie had a sequel and that I didn't have a copy of Buckcherry's second album. And that Dani Filth had a side project called Devilment, which like Nile is pleasant background noise.
Other music management apps:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/downloads/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/105228/how-can-i-completely-wipe-an-mp3s-metadata
Picard helped to identify some obscure discs, though it may not stay installed, and id3convert helped to batch strip tags from some things I'd processed in error.
Did I mention Foldplay and using Mixplorer as an FTP server + FileZilla Pro to synchronise a collection to a tablet? Better than using a dedicated device that doesn't get switched on much. Wireless speakers are a hit though. The future is now. Sometimes it happens and things get good enough to transform expectations. Speaking of which, picked up an Anker Soundcore Mini bluetooth speaker and we've reached the point at which the driver in twenty quid hardware smaller than a mug outperforms anything portable I grew up with. Balanced sound and generally impressed. It can also play music directly from microSD as well as 3.5mm aux.
Thinking about knowledge gaps... like most people who've ever coded for a while I can 'read' most languages and can write a few with varying degrees of fluency and looking things up for differences in implementations. Ones I'd be interested in learning a bit more about are probably C / C++ / Rust / C#, and Python. The latter I use things written in, seems very popular and occasionally comes up in work-related contexts. The common C variants and successors are basically a different way of thinking about coding to the relatively "higher-level" (more abstracted) run time compiled languages I more frequently use. Since I learned and learn by taking things apart to see how they tick, I don't naturally think in terms of a workflow where separate compilation is a thing, unless it's something very specific like an SQL Server assembly.
This is interesting... Ardour devs forked GTK2. I'm not someone who cares about everything looking the same, as long as toolkits are functional.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215431
https://prohoster.info/en/blog/novosti-interneta/v-zvukovom-redaktore-ardour-8-4-sozdano-sobstvennoe-otvetvlenie-gtk2
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/gtk-2-has-been-deprecated-is-there-a-roadmap-for-removal/105214
Innovation is dead... Microsoft's solution to bloat is to pre-load apps.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/03/27/1727252/new-windows-scheduled-task-will-launch-office-apps-faster
Metaphone 3... As I mentioned some time back https://virtualdebris.co.uk/blog/035ECCD0/some-sql-server-functions-for-string-matching this algorithm for indexing words by pronunciation was accidentally open-sourced about ten years ago. The Double Metaphone implementation in the article is 'better' than the original and Metaphone 3 is a further refinement.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10442633/what-is-the-metaphone-3-algorithm
Versions are included in some open source and some Microsoft products, e.g.
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dlclark/metaphone3
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/machine-learning-server/r-reference/revoscaler/revoscaler
Presumably those implementations are based on the the version Philips released to OpenRefine. TBH, the string-handling functions for various interpretations of percentage similarity have proven more useful on occasion, Soundex and Metaphone 1/2/3 are both blunter and more specialised tools.
How long has browsers letting pages capture Ctrl+Key shortcuts been a thing? It seems to have been a Google "innovation"?
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-create-keyboard-shortcuts-in-javascript/
https://github.com/jaywcjlove/hotkeys-js
More off topic stuff, such as therizinosaurus
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn7v3eln56no
https://www.thoughtco.com/things-to-know-therizinosaurus-the-reaping-lizard-1093801
Mars is cool, but a fever dream -
https://m.slashdot.org/thread/65267583
Naked Gun 2025 trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8-N8IIq_8I
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