Scratch Pad: Eno, Fog, Obsidian

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ I love when a spam call comes through all glitchy and hard to understand, opening with a phrase along the lines of “This is an urgent message from …,” and it’s briefly like a Skynet warning from the future. Until, you know, it’s just spam about some fake loan.

▰ Among my memories of my grandfather is being left, on visits, to rummage through his desk, which always had many coins, many pairs of glasses, and pencils with erasers so old they’d become useless. I now have a desk full of many coins and pairs of glasses. In lieu of old pencils I have dead gadgets.

▰ Day 365 of Duolingo German. Not sure I’m gonna stick with it, but sticking with it for a year was interesting. We’ll see.

▰ Just been thinking about Steve Albini since the news broke. He was many things, but I realize that I think of him first and foremost as a guitarist.

▰ I get a little (a little) better at guitar when I practice guitar regularly, but I don’t get any better at installing firmware when I install firmware regularly, though I suppose my instruments get better.

▰ If you have trouble keeping a journal, I’d suggest starting a file called “tweets-not-sent.txt” and just put much of your negative thinking there rather than online

▰ More power to you keepers of handwritten journals. I’ve typed for too much of my life, starting with my fascination with my parents’ electric typewriter back in the days before my TRS-80. I’ve tried a handwritten synthesizer journal but I keep going back to markdown files with embedded images.

▰ No idea why I waited so long to really regularly use images in my Obsidian markdown notes, but in any case once you do it’s pretty great. The main thing I need to sort out now is a process for managing the images. Do I use one separate folder, or several, or project-specific, or monthly? I dunno.

▰ There’s a new (2024) Buddha Machine, and the creators, Christiaan Virant and 张荐 (Zhang Jian), who collaborate under the name FM3, put the loops up for free (aka “name your price”)

https://buddhamachine.bandcamp.com/album/buddha-machine-se

▰ OK, let’s see if I can get this podcast rolling again

▰ Obsidian (URL: obsidian.md) is, like, amazing, right? So useful. So efficient.

▰ Of course the fog horns piped up Thursday night: Friday, May 10, marks the birthday of the late Ingram Marshall.

▰ In case there was any doubt, the fog horns are still clearly functioning in the San Francisco Bay

▰ Steps:

make music

buy cables

search “cable management”

make music

buy cables

search “cable management”