detfalskested

Max Cooper

Last month, on a Sunday afternoon, on the train, on my way back home from the other end of the country, I accidentally discovered that Max Cooper would play a concert the same night in my hometown.

I almost didn't go. But, fortunately, I remembered the promise to myself to go to as many concerts as possible. So I bought a ticket and walked directly from Copenhagen Central Station to the venue. And then I was in for a treat I did not expect: A beautiful, 3 hour marathon of a show.

The Max Cooper live shows are marketed as audio visual experiences, which could easily just be a cliche. I already knew about the audio part – the music. But the visuals blew me away. It was some of the best I've seen in a long time, in the ranks of Moderat and Massive Attack. The setup was rather simple: A projection behind him, another one on a transparent screen in front of him and then a couple more on the walls adjacent to the stage. The effects of the layered projections was stunning.

Max Cooper released his new album, On Being, a week ago. Give it a listen. And if you happen to live near one of the cities remaining on his tour, I strongly suggest you go.

Self hosting the Fediverse

It's amazing times for self hosting the Fediverse.

While I'm not necessarily a big fan of Docker, if you're familiar with docker compose (which in itself of course raises the bar to a certain extend), you can easily spin up things in a matter of hours.

A few weeks ago I was trying out Owncast after dinner, and managed to get things running and start a stream from my webcam the same night.

Earlier this week, I set up GoToSocial along with Pinafore, Semaphore and later Phanpy as frontends for it, before I settled on Elk.

I highly recommend trying this out for yourself if you have the required computer skills. Or even if you dont, but are curious – ask your hacker friends for help. Remember, you can have this running to tinker with, while keeping your main accounts somewhere else that you consider more safe, if that's your worry.

Next up for me is to try out something that offers those sweet, sweet custom emoji reactions.

I'm making a PipeWire matrix mixer

Once in a while, you get an idea for something to build that completely takes over your brain and you can't stop thinking about it.

This one scratches an actual itch I have with my music gear. I believe I have all the pieces of the puzzle, I just need to put it together in the correct way. It's a perfect mix of doing things I'm comfortable with and pushing me into unusual territories.

The Erica Synths Matrix Mixer and Conductive Labs MRCC have been on my wish list for a long time. I'd really like to have these, or something similar, that allows for flexible routing of audio and MIDI.

I have a Bitwig template that takes me a very long way there. But I keep falling into the trap of endless possibilities in DAWs when I open Bitwig. So I'd like to be able to route things around without it.

I have a Soundcraft Signature 12 MTK which gives me a lot of flexibility with regards to sending audio back and forth from/to the computer, but it's huge and doesn't fit into a portable setup that can be thrown into a backpack and taken anywhere. I've also been thinking about getting a 1010music Bluebox because of the portability.

No matter what mixing/routing hardware I have been looking at, I have been seeing limitations. Maybe apart from the Erica Synths Matrix Mixer and the MRCC. But even those have a finite amount of inputs and outputs and are the MRCC is definitely not very portable.

A lot of my gear has USB audio/MIDI. And with PipeWire it's technically super easy to route things around in any way I'd like. I'm generally really impressed with how easy USB audio is on Linux with PipeWire, compared to the horror stories I read of hoops to jump through to get the same results on Windows and Mac. I just didn't find any software on top of PipeWire that solved this issue in a way suiting me.

A few days ago, I had a look at the CLI tools provided by PipeWire and then I realised that making an interface on top of these could give me the matrix mixer I have been dreaming of. The only downside is that it requires a computer to be part of the solution. But it can be a laptop or (probably) even a single-board computer. I can live with that. The huge upside is that if I'm running out of inputs or outputs, I can just add more.

I have a bunch of ideas that will really improve the daily quality of life. From the top of my head:

And further down the line, maybe allow attenuation of links and even hooking audio plugins in somehow.

Rødbeder

Rødbeder. Sjældent der hvor man ser dem eller har dem og tænker "Wow, mega lækkert", hva? FORKERT! I hvert fald efter du har prøvet følgende:

Skær dem i grove tern/stænger, ikke for tykke. Sammen med nogle løg i kvarte, lagene pillet fra hinanden. Og en håndfuld fed hvidløg i ca. halve. Salt, peber, en sjat olie. Vend det hele rundt i et fad, og så i ovnen ved 180 grader. Hver ca. 20-30. minut skal de lige ud og væltes rundt i fadet.

Det virker håbløst i lang tid. Og ligner noget kantinen har fundet på da de skulle rydde op bagerst i fadeburet. Men når det nærmer sig et par timer i ovnen, starter transformationen. Det hele begynder for alvor at skrumpe ind og blive rynket og branket og spændende. Prikken over i'et er at du lige smuldrer noget blå ost ud over når det er så godt som færdigt og lader det smelte ud i blandingen.

Og så spiser man det vel bare, tænker du. Og det kan du godt. Og det er lækkert. Men du kan også putte det i en bøtte og gemme det til næste dag. For det smager dobbelt så godt når det er koldt!

Velbekomme.

Impending home server hardware replacement

For a long time, my home server has been a Dell XPS 15 9530 I "borrowed" from the laptop graveyard at a previous job. My important data is stored on 2 mirrored disks that sit in a cheap USB bay attached to the laptop.

Fellow self hosters from data.coop laughed at me when I told them about this setup, but it has served me well for more than 5 years. And I think repurposing an old laptop for this has several benefits:

A few days ago when I got home from a concert, I was met with the surprise nobody likes as a server administrator: What looked like some sort of disk failure. at least the root file system had turned read-only. It was late, so I decided to make a copy of the syslog to another computer and turn the server off over the night. Knowing that solving this could easily take several hours and doing that kind of work during the night is no good.

Next morning I turned it on again and it booted into initramfs. I looked at the syslog copy and found some lines indicating what the problem was:

Nov 25 22:15:23 longtail kernel: [1506099.480485] Aborting journal on device sda2-8.
Nov 25 22:15:23 longtail kernel: [1506099.484147] EXT4-fs error (device sda2): ext4_journal_check_start:83: comm rs:main Q:Reg: Detected aborted journal
Nov 25 22:15:23 longtail kernel: [1506099.484190] EXT4-fs error (device sda2): ext4_journal_check_start:83: comm systemd-journal: Detected aborted journal
Nov 25 22:15:23 longtail kernel: [1506099.486302] EXT4-fs (sda2): Remounting filesystem read-only

While I wasn't able to find out why this has happened, I learned that I could simply run fsck /dev/sda2, let it fix my issues and then reboot back into Ubuntu. What a relief! What I worried would be a full day operation turned out to take less than half an hour.

But this laptop is more than 10 years old. I already started thinking it was about time to replace it, in order to not run into trouble with worn out hardware. This is probably the first warning that I should definitely do that.

Good thing is my previous laptop, a Dell XPS 15 9530 which is only 5 years old, has been sitting on a shelf for a long time, waiting to take over.