Tab sweep: eFanzines, data privacy, playlists between two artists

Been a lazy Sunday of doing some light pre-Spring cleaning/organizing and quality time with the cats. Here’s a few interesting sites, articles, and such that have been idling in tabs for a little while. Two on data privacy The Markup has an article about how grocers, specifically Kroger, are...

Mini PC review: Beelink SER5 Pro with AMD Ryzen 5 5600H

About a month ago I bought a Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC and have been using it as a desktop and test machine. I thought I’d give a quick review in case anybody else is looking at one of these for their own use. The SER5 was a bit...

The right way to name music files and my Picard file-naming script

Last year I got deep into using MusicBrainz Picard to help tag music before I add it to my collection. The MusicBrainz database is fantastic, and it saves me a lot of time tweaking metadata. Most of the time I can just look up an album and it finds...

Gratuitous birthday post 2023 style

Chalk up one more orbit around the Sun for me. Another year older and maybe a little wiser. Certainly the stretch between the last birthday and this one has been full of life lessons. Not making much of a fuss about the birthday thing this year, just sort of...

“Major Tom (Coming Home)” – Peter Schilling

I get songs stuck in my head all the time, but usually it’s because I heard a snippet of the song or something that reminded me of the song recently. Other times, a song pops into my head for no reason I can fathom and demands that I give...

What’s the deal with night mode?

At the risk of sounding like a Jerry Seinfeld bit, what is the deal with night mode? I was in a meeting today where somebody touted night mode in a tool as a Really Good Thing™ and I’m perplexed. I’m not perplexed about what night mode (or dark mode)...

Happy Presidents’ Day, President Carter

I was sad to learn over the weekend that former president Jimmy Carter has entered hospice care. But I’m not surprised that President Carter is facing the end of his life the same way he’s behaved his entire life – with dignity and grace. Carter was the first person...

Tab sweep on music tagging

Have been adding music to my Plex server this weekend. Part of that is cleaning up metadata before adding to Plex. Curating my music collection is one of those things that’s relaxing but also frustrating....

Making things vs. making the best things

Nice post I discovered on the Orange site today, “I don’t like making the best things.” Short summary, trying to make the “best” things gets in the way of doing things we enjoy. Specifically the author talks about blogging less often after they discovered they “only want to publish...

Time to update your… cable?

Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal....