WIndows 10 EOL -> Linux Migration Attempt - Part 1

With this week's official EOL of support for Windows 10, the impetus to try to look into migrating to Linux again for my personal desktop workstations has grown stronger again. Especially as I refuse to have my personal machines associated with Microsoft Accounts that will inevitably mean that various personal info gets inadvertently leaked onto OneDrive (including various sensitive files / settings / etc.), it feels like time to give this another crack, now that I'm using actual desktop workstations instead of laptops with weird hardware...

As I documented on this blog many years ago, the last time I tried switching to Linux, things didn't go so well back then. Particularly, as I was on a HP laptop that had a bunch of very-hard-to-support crap, and I was trying to dual boot it. I'm hoping though that things go smoother this time through a number of different decisions!

Tiffany Poon's Vlog on Visiting Ravel's House + Playing His Piano

 What an interesting mashup of two artists I quite like!

1) Ravel is one of my top 5 (maybe top 3 even) favourite composers. The others being Tchaikovsky and Thomas Newman.

I certainly went through a phase a few years ago of listening to his works while plugging through some rather tricky stuff at work (i.e. a "JSON diffing/patching/rebasing engine" *ahem*).

 

2) I've also loved watching Tiffany's vlogs for a long time now. Among other things, I've gained a *much* more thorough understanding + appreciation for piano music and the nuances of piano-to-piano differences + effects of playing technique. (Also, finally seeing how/why people always about spending time "practicing"... yeah, there are some things I could've done different in the past LOL).  Gotta also love the random squirrel / chipmunk sightings too!

 

3) Wow, it's very interesting seeing Ravel's house! That mix of an idiosyncratic little cottage filled with so many little interesting trinkets + art, surrounded by a nice garden with some colourful trees + water features. 

 

4) Also, it's always special getting to see talented artists getting to bring to life the instruments of historical figures. There's always something special about getting to experience a composer's music in the spaces they once inhabited, as they may have first heard them.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWvV62BAhd

Impressions of WOW 2025

As has become a bit of a family tradition in recent years, we've recently popped up to Wellington to attend the "World of Wearable Art" Awards Show (i.e. "WOW") again this year.

IIRC our first one was in 2015 (???), and again in 2016 and 2019  (with gaps in between due to busy years, with lots of other things / other big trips + travel taking place). Then COVID happened, before we finally started heading back the last few years again. So yeah... we've done this trip "a few" times now...

 

Overall Impression: This year was a massive improvement on the last few editions, re-centering the show on what made it great in the past (i.e. bringing it back to what it was like the first few times we came, pre-Covid).

Thoroughly enjoyed it, and more importantly, left creatively re-invigorated + inspired to try to do more awesome stuff again in what little free time I get.

The only real quibble I had about this year, is that I personally thought most of my personal faves were robbed / overlooked for prizes, OR even just placings (as at least in the awards presentation, they only had like a winner and a runner-up, instead of like "Top 3" as in previous years IIRC). Then again, a few of the categories had so much awesome stuff, it was hard to really pin down who *should* have won in that category, so it was tough work to be a judge I guess!   An interesting problem to have I guess!

On "Life's Greatest Pleasures" After A Period of Travel...

One of the greatest pleasures in life is having that first bath / shower after travelling - especially the first one when returning home to your own bathroom after being on the road! 😊😍

~~~

The next best one is collapsing in your own bed again, which I'm feeling is gonna happen very soon.

The "first sleep" will probably not be evading this insomniac for much longer tonight...

What may be a challenge though is staying asleep after waking up in the middle of darkness, still absolutely exhausted and buggered, but also not enough to go back to sleep for longer than a shallow almost-an-hour burst...

We shall see! The land of nod beckons!

 

On "Viruses"... (Biological Sort, Not Digital)

Another day, another headline about discoveries of viruses causing cancer  (and an aggressive one at that)...

 

Yeah... reading that, I'm reminded again of those biology classes where we first learned about viruses:

* Not "alive" in the conventional sense

* "Microscopic Particles"

* Can get into all sorts of weird + wacky places, and do stuff to the cells there (e.g. "bateriophages", and/or how viral genetic material has been detected in various DNA before...)

* As they aren't "alive", they also aren't that easy to "kill" (aka destroy + nullify)

* Oh yeah...and they mutate like hell.

 

Uh huh... 

 

IIRC, I distinctly recall before justifiably somewhat scared of them then (IIRC, it was probably the bacteriophages that really creeped me out most at the time). But also, with what we now know having dealt with (and continuing to deal with) COVID, viruses are truly very nasty + scary things!

Saturday Morning Music Writing Rambling

Since changing my main workstation this year (and needing to run different versions of many of the tools I use), I haven't been writing much music anymore. 

(Well TBH, I'd probably really started running out of steam again last year after COVID. But also, the newer tools having a bunch of nasty design changes that make them uncomfortable and annoying to use doesn't help)

Anyway this morning, I happened to have a snippet come to mind (i.e. the way that most of these *always* start), so I went in to jot it out.

When saving this, I noted that my previous one was already a month ago (and had been sitting open as  "todo to finish sometime"). So, as you do, I opened it up to give it a playback...

While listening to it, I switched back to today's one, intended to get back to work on it, but whatdoyaknow! I pressed play slightly too early, and then discovered that this second thing goes really well underscoring the end part of the other one!

(It did help of course that they used the same ensemble type)

The better part of an hour or so later:
Hang on...  I think I can probably draw the line under this one now 😂 

So yeah... I've now just completed my 1st or 2nd piece for the year LOL 😜 

(I may revise it later for a 2nd polished / extended edition, but this seems good enough for now)

Software Wishlist September 2025

On that note, here's a bunch of other things I wish various software I use often would introduce

Summary:

1) Firefox - "Private Browsing Container Tab Type

2) Desktop Window Managers - Project-Based Application Window Grouping + Complete Window State Restoration on Restart  

 

Mastodon UI Wishlist

As I've mentioned a bunch of times on here, ever since the hostile takeover and demise of Twitter a few years ago, I've switched over to Mastodon (+ posting / reposting stuff on here again).

Here's a list of things that I wish that there was a Mastodon UI that did. Unfortunately, the way things are going, it also seems that I'm likely gonna have to implement all this myself in my own client / frontend to get any traction on it...

MediaSlurper Updates - Ep 3 - Multi Device Support

It's been a while since I've posted any updates about my "MediaSlurper" project...

Well, that's largely a good thing! Given that it was built as a personal tool to solve some very specific bottlenecks in my data management workflows, that means that in practice, it's largely been working very well for my needs (or at least, "good enough!), which is no mean feat, given that I run it at least 3-4 times a day, almost every day!   Granted, there are a handful over "very annoying" bugs relating to the various heuristics in use to avoid making duplicate copies of anything!)... but those only happen in very specific cases that I can always manually enable escape-hatch hacks in the code to work around! 

But yeah, in general, it's been working well enough that I've been able to pause active development efforts to focus on other more pressing matters  (e.g. "Picasa Replacement Project", and/or general life stuff)

 

Anyway, with the recent need to start urgently investigating properly migrating from old phone to new one (NOTE: I actually made the switch early this morning, and apart from a "major heart attack / moments of sinking terror" trying to get the Whatsapp transition to transfer over smoothly), I ended up running both phones for a while, and needing to be able to use MediaSlurper with both. This lead to a flurry of activity for the past few weeks, culminating in some of the final most useful stuff only coming online today, *AFTER* I have already effectively transitioned off the old phone.... 

Nevertheless, given that I don't know when I might need this stuff again (or whether someone else might find it useful if/when I ever release this tool), I have decided to keep plugging away at it to finish the last push of new functionality that should address a bunch of other things I've found myself really needing over the past month or two.

Blender Addon - Hand Drawn Timing Chart Paths to Animation (3rd-Party / Not Mine)

It's been a while since I've posted about any Blender or animation related stuff on here, having moved onto other pursuits these days. But tonight, I'm going to briefly break my silence to link to the following demo clip for an addon that I've gotta say is pretty awesome looking!

  

Well done to everyone involved in making this happen! Very nicely done! Simple yet effective  😍 

 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 4 - Roadmap + Component Breakdown

The other day, I went through and did an initial breakdown of the components that would need to be developed as part of my "Picasa Replacement" project, in order to have a workable alternative.

I made this breakdown as a way of going in more level-headed about what exactly I was about to lock myself into (and hopefully convince myself against rashly diving into headfirst), as I was definitely getting "the itch" to just dive right in and build "just the basic photo management tool" part (i.e. "part 4", with "part 1" thrown in to have anything to show, and part 2 inevitably having to be done to before I could even contemplate setting up part 4), with the idea that the actual non-destructive image editing engine would be more of a slow burn afterwards (i.e. the exposure + colour edits would then be ported over as-time-allows, once I had the functional media management tool that I needed first)

(*) I must admit, I have also been slowly digging through Darktable's source code, trying to figure out how much of the iop code can be harvested + refactored into powering the core of my own pipeline  (as some of those operations are really powerful in the ways I want, but simply using the sidecar files to pass data to it doesn't seem as viable an option as I had though, given the horrid way it handles storing state - i.e. obscure hashed / binary-dump data in the sidecar files, coupled with only the database actually having the most recent settings once it loads a file once) 

Anyway, here is the breakdown notes from my notebook, in case anyone else would like to attempt this (or join in the efforts at some point).

 (TBH:  Seeing this breakdown is and should be very sobering... It is probably a decent 4-5 years of man-effort - assuming semi-consistent progress at a fast rate gets made even - to get to a somewhat useful point.  Hence why I wouldn't really recommend anyone attempts this on a whim!) 

Phone Migration Notes

This weekend, I've finally been looking into finally transferring across to using the new phone I'd gotten a few months ago (*).

As feared, there are currently a whole bunch of "manual intervention" bottlenecks that are not syncing over and require lots of manual effort to fix. Some of which are really silly and should be rectified by various vendors, while others are historical mistakes coming back to haunt