My new favorite Keyboard Maestro shortcut allows me to toggle between audio outputs (Built In Output device and my USB output). The Built in volume controls my iMac speakers, the USB output controls my Amp. So, combined with the superb Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource, I can easily bounce back and forth between controlling my music volume (Roon, Spotify, archive.org) and my Zoom volume using my keyboards volume controls. This sounds like it would be easy and it is, sort of, by using switchaudiosource-osx (available as brew install switchaudio-osx from command line).
Anyway, this is a huge problem solver for me. Stoked. Click pic below for larger version if you want to see the actions.
Someone posted a question about how to do this on the Day One Community site so I thought I’d build up a little iOS shortcut that:
– checks to see if you have an entry for today, if not it creates a blank one and then prompts you to choose a photo, resizes that photo and then appends the photo to today’s journal entry.
Here’s the shortcut, you’ll need to choose which journal to use and how large you want the inserted photo to be.
My new gig at work is keeping me insanely busy and so it’s been a while since I’ve gotten around to updating here. Here’s a few of the links I’ve saved this week. Linking ≠ endorsement.
Free Speech Prevails at Princeton | Robert P. George – This is a time of testing for our nation. We were already in the midst of dealing with a pandemic—trying to protect public health while respecting basic…
How to Plan Your Week Like a Boss – If you feel that your productivity has been hitting a slump, I highly recommend planning out your week ahead of time. Getting clear about what you’ll be doing…
The American Death Cult – A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual…
Save Them All, Let the Algorithms Sort Em Out – Smartly serving up content amidst information overload M.G. Siegler Follow Jul 16 · 4 min read Every day is exactly the same. Even before the COVID lockdowns,…
What Makes Us Happy? – For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage…
I can’t say enough good things about this book. Saunder’s Catholicism-informed Buddhism is on full display. The detailing of Lincoln’s transformation of grief is one of the best things I’ve ever read on dealing with loss. The re-animation of the souls stuck in bardo through their metta/lovingkindness engagement with the departing Lincoln, also great.
Also highlighted many passages about how, at the time, people thought Lincoln was a horrible leader, horrible parent, etc. and history holds him in an entirely different regard than his contemporaries.
We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited being.
Also, the passages about what the dead will miss about daily life (the specificity. pasting a long one here):
Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain. Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth. Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease. A bloody roast death-red on a platter; a hedgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse. Geese above, clover below, the sound of one’s own breath when winded. The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one’s beloved’s name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger. Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead. Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it. Loon-call in the dark; calf-cramp in the spring; neck-rub in the parlor; milk-sip at end of day.
— this seems right out of William Carlos Williams’ edict of no ideas but in things. meaning Saunders’ specificity of things in this passage is what makes it so damn powerful.
amazing book. have already read Saunder’s stories, looking forward to more novels from him for sure.
Whoa, this was driving me nuts, so glad I got it sorted.
When I used Remote Desktop on my Mac’s Parallel’s VM running Windows 10, every time I typed the pipe key (|) I got double quotes (“) and every time I typed a backslash (\) I got a single tick (‘) and my quote (“) key gave me a tilde (~).
Made it very hard to work in putty while shelled into a remote machine on the remote machine because I couldn’t type | pipe character which is kinda important for Linux. Anyway, I found the answer on the Parallels forum from a guy in Italy who was having a similar problem.
I had to edit the keyboard settings on the version of Windows running in Parallels (not on the Remote Desktop machine) to use just US QWERTY instead of US (Apple). Logged out, and everything is working!
On facebook the other day, a friend asked for some Grateful Dead live show recording suggestions the other day.
I can’t imagine a show that I wouldn’t listen to but I list some recent favorites down below.
There is always gold to be mined in every show, somewhere.
That said, for the past year I’ve been really enjoying matrix recordings of live shows, where an audio engineer takes a really good Soundboard recording and one or two really good audience recordings and layers them on top of one another.
I go through phases where I really just like audience recordings and sometimes when I like the clarity of really good SBD but matrix recordings are another world entirely, sort of the best of both worlds but greater than the sum the parts if you know what I mean.
Generally I categorize shows into a handful of eras -early w/ Pigpen – shows with just billy on drums-my favs, good Wall of Sound recordings circa ’74, good ’77 shows when jerry was at one of his peaks of creativity and dexterity and then the later stuff-mid 80s onward into the 90s which probably has about 3 sub-categories e.g. with Bruce, etc. but all of these categories are generally meaningless.
Sometimes in the 80s jerry plays like he did in the early 70s. He was really a magical guitar player whose catalog of ideas were like lines of poetry that he would go back to mine again and again and again. But anyway. I have been listening to about 20 or so different matrix recordings this year. Some of them standout, but they’re all standouts to me and I would have loved to have been at any one of these shows. So here’s a little sample of some matrix recordings worth listening to:
All of this working from home has meant that I have not spent this much uninterrupted time behind my personal computer since I do not know when. This is to say, over the past few weeks I have dialed in my personal setup in a way that is super-useful to me and I thought I’d share the apps/tools I’ve started/revisited using since working from home during the quarantine.
I’ve never owned headphones with active noise cancelation before but, man, where have these been all of my life???? Right now, there is a huge racket in my house from one of my kids shooting hoops in his room with a nerf basketball. I can feel the ball bouncing but my concentration is not broken because I can not hear the sound of the ball bouncing. This is AMAZING!
Throughout the day I am bathed in the warm nothingness of active noise cancellation. On occasion I’ve noticed that I do not even have music playing, I’m just enjoying the near-silence that they offer. If you need to concentrate in a noisy house, highly recommended.
Audio/Listening/Zoom
Over the past few weeks I’ve evolved a somewhat complicated Zoom/music listening setup on my iMac. At work, we live in Zoom and I’ve had to do some refactoring to balance my music and Zoom needs. I’ll detail a few of those tools here:
Triode: I listen to The Current throughout the day when I’m not actively listening to music from my collection. Triode is *the* best radio playing application, ever. If you listen to internet radio stations, hard to imagine life without it.
I want my music to play through my Kinter Tripath amplifier to my external speakers but want my Zoom/Facetime audio to go through my iMac display. This black magic wizardry is achieved through an application called SoundSource from Rogue Ameoba. Combined with a cheap dongle, I can easily send audio from any app to any output. Awesome application, highly recommended.
As an aside, I have been using this time while trapped in my office to re-rip some CDs into Lossless (ALAC) format and am using XLD running on an old, headless Mac mini to do so.
Other apps for maintaining sanity:
DayOne Journal. I’ve been using this application for years but making notes about what it is like to experience this quarantine has felt important.
Waking Up. Sam Harris’ meditation app has been my meditation app of choice for about a year now. I have less time to use it now that we are all at home but every time I use it, I feel better.
I’ve got a few other notable mentions like Parallels, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive which have all made getting real work in a Windows-centric environment less unproductive. Also, I just started using GeekTool to pipe some useful outputs to my desktop but the jury is still out on how useful that is. If time permits I’ll circle back in a few weeks to update here.
If you’ve spent anytime at all on YouTube watching videos of guitarists you know that they range in quality from quick and dirty iPhone videos to more elaborate multi-screen, multi-track presentations.
Until this week and being quarantined and all with the Coronavirus pandemic, I had never really given much thought to posting my own videos or how one might even go about doing so.
Over the past few days, I’ve hit on a pretty good middle-ground between the quick and dirty iPhone video and the more elaborate, high-production quality videos and figured I’d share how I do it.
Here’s an example of a video I recently recorded of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright using the setup detailed below.
I’m going to break this HowTo into 3 sections:
Part 1, recording guitar and vocal into GarageBand on iPad using 2 external microphones
Part 2, recording the video component
Part 3, synchronizing the audio and video component and publishing the final product.
Part 1
Recording guitar and vocal into GarageBand on iPad using 2 external microphones
I record my audio using Garageband. By design I don’t do a lot of tweaking to the default settings. I use the preset “lead vocal” setting for the vocals and the default “nice room” setting for the guitar. I don’t fiddle with the EQ.
Recording into an iPad Pro with external microphones requires some kind of Audio Interface to convert the XLR or 1/4″ inputs of your microphones into USB for the iPad.
I have an older Zoom H4n Pro that does double duty as field recorder and an audio interface (here’s how to set it up). I got lucky, I had no idea it had the audio interface feature when I bought it, but it does.
So I didn’t need to buy an interface. If you need one, for under $200, the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is referenced on a lot of websites/videos as being a good safe bet.
Once you have your microphones and XLR cables, here’s a diagram detailing how I get them into the iPad.
Once you have all the hardware hooked up, you can just record into GarageBand.
You can, of course, go down some really deep rabbit holes of which microphones to use, mic placement, eq, etc. Feel free. I’m using a Shure SM-58 and a Sennheiser 609 that I usually use for mic’ing up my amplifier but seems to work just fine for vocals. Very easy to start chasing marginal gains with this kind of stuff. My advice is get it good enough and start recording.
There are a couple of minor settings changes you need to make in GarageBand to do simultaneous multitrack recordings. This guy has a fantastic video. If you’re not super-familiar with GarageBand and don’t want to through your iPad out the window trying to sort out multitrack recording on your own, I highly encourage you to sit through this guy’s tutorial.
Ok, so that’s the audio part! I’ll write up the video and synchronization stuff as soon as I can.
We are on mandatory lock-down here in NJ to help flatten the curve. Yesterday, late in the afternoon I made the mistake of looking at Facebook. I should have known better.
Facebook just seems to bring out the worst in people. So I figured I might try to tilt the scales a little bit more to the positive and record a song and post it. I am going to try to do more of these while we are locked down at home.
The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]
“Under the worst conditions, what’s the most important thing to have?” He replied: “Friends.” Source: Recording: After the Election – Four Ways We Can Respond […]
Top news shared by the people you trust Sill streamlines your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to give you a clear picture of what’s happening. — Direct link
Uncover the insidious ways in which our daily lives are being surveilled by the state. In a gripping chase, Ronan Farrow travels across the world following breadcrumbs and finally exposing a dark world of spywares, hacking, and peddling of private information, where activists and journalists are persecuted, and no one is protected from the watchful and vicious eyes of authoritarianism. #API #Actors #Actresses #Cast #Credits #Movies #Photos #Ratings #Reviews #Shows #Streaming #Synopsis #TV #Teasers #Trailers #User — Direct link
Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target politicians, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Could it happen here? Ronan Farrow reports. — Direct link
"to be clear, I’m a fan of the Bluesky leadership and engineering team. With the VC money as fuel, I expect their next 12 months or so to be golden, with lots of groovy features and mind-blowing growth. But that’s not what I’ll be watching. I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator." — Direct link
"I have been impressed with the tools that the open source development community is building to bridge the gap between the AT protocol and ActivityPub, and I’m hopeful that some mixture of Bluesky and Mastodon will eventually serve most of my needs as a social media user and, hopefully, as someone who co-owns a website" — Direct link
