It’s Christmas Eve once again, which means it’s time for the Song of The Year for 2024. Looking at the new and rediscovered albums for the year, there are quite a few to choose from. The runners up are pretty much all from Lee Resevere, a new artist I’ve started listening to, and includes: Should I Run, by Kristen Martell, arranged by Lee Rosevere Miles Wide, from Synths Working Overtime, by Lee Rosevere We’ve Been Here Before and Hide Your Heart, from Stationary Loops, by Lee Rosevere But there can only be one winner, and this year it’s Oxygene, Pt.

I did a bit of a clean-up of my projects folder yesterday, clearing out all the ideas that never made it off the ground. I’d figured it’d be good to write a few words about each one before erasing them from my hard drive for good. I suppose the healthiest thing to do would be to just let them go. But what can I say? Should a time come in the future where I wish to revisit them, it’d be better to have something written down than not.

Made a slight tweak to my blog’s theme today, to “celebrate” the start of summer. I wanted a colour scheme that felt suitable for the season, which usually means hot, dry conditions. I went with one that uses yellow and brown as the primary colours. I suppose red would’ve been a more traditional representation of “hot”, but yellow felt like a better choice to invoke the sensation of dry vegetation. I did want to make it subtle though: it’s easy for a really saturated yellow to be quite garish, especially when used as a background.

It’s a little over a year since Dual of the Defaults, and I see that Robb and Maique are posting their updates for 2024, so I’d thought I do the same. There’ve only been a few changes since last year, so much like Robb, I’m only posting the delta: Notes: Obsidian for work. Notion for personal use if the note is long-lived. But I’ve started using Micro.blog notes and Strata for the more short-term notes I make from day to day.

While reading Robb Knight’s post about setting up GoToSocial in Coolify, I got curious as to what this Coolify project actually is. I’m a happy user of Dokku, but being one with magpie tendencies, plus always on the lookout for ways to make the little apps I make for myself easier to deploy, I thought I’d check it out. So I spun up a Coolify instance on a new Hetzner server this morning and tried deploying a simple Go app, complete with automatic deployments when I push changes to a Forgejo repository.

Finally fixed the issue I was having with my ffmpeg incantation to crop a PocketCast clip. When I was uploading the clip to Micro.blog, the video wasn’t showing up. The audio was fine, but all I got for the visuals was a blank void1. For those that are unaware, clips from PocketCast are always generated as vertical videos. You can change how the artwork is presented between vertical, horizontal, or square; but that doesn’t change the dimensions of the video itself.

I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb: Hiro @hiro@social.lol @gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far? 2:40 PM • November 1, 2024 (UTC) Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it.

Here’s my answer to another question asked by Annie for WebogPoMoAMA. This was previously answered by Keenan, Estebanxto, Kerri Ann, and Lou Plummer: If you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be? My answer is that I wish I found it easier meeting new people. Not only am I quite introverted, I’m also really shy, and I find it extremely hard to introduce myself to new people in social situations.

I recently learnt that the version of Phaedra I’ve been listening to for the past 15 years had not only the wrong track order, but also the wrong track names. This is not entirely surprising, given how this version was… ah, acquired. But after learning what the order and names should’ve been, I think I still prefer my version. And yes, that’s probably because I’m use to it, but if the official album were to have these names and this order, I think it would actually work really way.

Seeing all the nostalgia for digital watches of the ’90s and early 2000s, following the release of retroest desk clock shaped like a large Casio digital watch, it got me thinking of the watches I owned growing up. I started off as a Casio person but I eventually moved on to Timex watches. I was pretty happy with all the watches I owned, but my favourite was the Timex Datalink USB Sports Edition, which stood head and shoulders about the rest.