Scratch Pad: Forums, TTY, Airplane Mode

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and Threads (threads.net/@dsqt). 

▰ A friend mentioned in passing that he was waiting for a video to “caption.” I knew what this meant but still asked, in order to confirm that, yes, “captioning” serves as a verb describing the process of software turning a video into a transcript that’s then applied to the video.

▰ I joined an online professional discussion group about sound design, and when you first log in there’s a warning to only talk about sound design — not about “music production.” It felt both like an interesting and useful distinction, and like a glimpse at a longstanding holy war.

▰ There’s a simple noise app on my laptop I turn on sometimes when I want to concentrate (I play “airplane” noise). One little thing about it that I appreciate is it doesn’t start or stop cold. It fades in or out, respectively. No sudden transition. A simple but essential detail.

▰ The San Francisco 311 number for reporting downed electrical cables and emerging potholes leads to quite the menu. Once past the language options you’re told “the following tones” are for TTY*, and you’re to wait. Except it seems you can’t hear the tones TTY devices are designed to recognize. Now, that may be an aging-ears thing, but it seems like the TTY tones you’re supposed to wait to end are more like an extended silence you’re supposed to wait through — which maybe is what the instructions should say?

*TTY = “teletypewriter” for the deaf and hard-of-hearing

▰ Honk if half your iPad storage is PDF manuals of music hardware and software.

Then play a loop of the honk using some of that gear as an effect.

▰ I’ve been on Threads since day one and I think I only just now made my first actual, you know, thread — and it was just two posts, and the second was just a definition of a term in the first post.

▰ One good thing about July coming to an end is being officially past the point when I’m regularly typing June instead of July, after having gotten past the earlier annual May/March boondoggle.

▰ This phenomenon isn’t new but if you’ve written about music long enough it can feel new: while reviewing a concert you check some facts and stumble on the entire show online. At least in my current case it doesn’t diverge from how I recall or, more importantly, describe the show.