2025-04-18 08:00:00
This week marks the first anniversary of my (nearly almost) weekly linkdumps! I wrote the first one on April 20th last year, and due to its historical significance it has been preserved here in its original form for future generations to marvel at.
I started numbering them right from the start so I had clearly intended to write more of them, but I don't think I planned to make it into a weekly series, that kind of just happened naturally. Friday is my day off from work and so it has become my Friday morning habit to bring my laptop to my favourite Café and sit down with a good great cup of coffee and put together a new linkdump. I think I missed two weeks due to being ill, but otherwise I'm surprised myself with how consistent I've been at writing these. In fact, let's analyse why I've been so consistent:
So with that I want to say a heartfelt thank you for subscribing, reading, following along, commenting, sending me messages and just generally making this a very enjoyable experience! And now let's see what the AI has in store for us this week. You might be surprised...
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2025-04-16 08:00:00
Here's a slightly stupid, but fun little thing I recently did. I bought a device off of Ebay which I'm not entirely sure how to call in English. Amazon suggests it's called mobile rack, maybe? [Edit: I've been informed by Dave and наб on Mastodon that it's called a hot-swappable drive bay. Thanks!]. Looks like this:
It's a hard disk bay that allows you to quickly swap drives in and out without crawling around under the desk and opening the computer. I stuck this in my desktop PC and now I can quickly swap drives in an out. Neat, huh?
Glad you asked! I realised I have a stack of old spinning hard drives and small SSDs lying around from upgrading to larger storage over the years, and I didn't really know what to do with them so they were just kind of sitting in a drawer, collecting dust.
I also like playing around with different operating systems, and sometimes I need different OSes for different tasks. My main OS is and will probably always be Linux, but I also (kind of reluctantly) have a copy of Windows 10 running for making music because a lot of pro audio software is only available for Windows or Mac, and audio on Linux has always been kind of a pain, so I prefer running this on the OS it's meant to run on.
So I always had one SSD with Linux and one with Windows in the computer anyway, and I thought if I make them easily removable and swappable then I can potentially have many more drives with different software for different tasks available that I can just swap in whenever I need them.
Now just to get this out of the way - yes I know I can just install the drives inside the computer. I know I can install multiple OSes on the same drive. I also know about booting from USB and about virtualisation.
But this solution just feels kind of nice. Now I have a stack of drives on my desk, and when I sit down at the computer I pick the drive that's right for what I want to do. Make music? Put in the music making SSD. Code or surf the web? Put in the Linux SSD. Game? Put in the gaming SSD. Ponder if I'm really living life to the fullest? Put in an old spinning hard drive and watch a boot screen for ten minutes until the desktop appears. The possibilities are endless!
For real, this feels a little like going back to the days of physical media, where you had a box of floppy disks next to your computer, or a stack of cartridges for your console and you would pick one and put it in before starting up the machine. Having a boot selector that allows you to pick which OS you want to start when you turn on the computer is no doubt more convenient, but this here just has a different feel to it. And it cost next to nothing; the mobile rack was 5€ used, I already had a bunch of SSDs and mechanical drives lying around and if I need more, a 128GB SSD can be had for less than 10€.
I don't know where I'm going to take this yet, but I can totally see myself setting up a disk with a retro gaming distro, or maybe one that boots straight into an emulated Windows 98 setup... and maybe I should get an old floppy disk storage box to keep my disks safe.
2025-04-14 08:00:00
Here's a few unstructured thoughts I've been mulling over recently about the direction of this blog, the state of the world, spreading negativity and all the rest of it. This post is largely inspired by two posts over on Brandon's journal, "Is Anyone Else Tired of the Internet?" and "Re: I’m Part of the Problem", which I highly recommend reading.
So... the world is kind of shitty right now, isn't it? As a brief recap, here's a summary of what's been happening over the last six months or so: Everything sucks. The end. Thanks for reading!
I don't like what's going on right now, not in the world of tech, not in the world of politics, not in the world in general. I'm pissed off. Many of us are. I could probably write half a book about how pissed off I am, how shitty everything is, how much I hate what the rich and the powerful are doing to society and the internet and the world as a whole.
But should I?
Would it help anything? Would it make the world any better? Would it make me feel better? It might be cathartic, though how much this is actually true is at least up for debate. And would it make you as the reader feel better? Would anyone even want to read it?
Well at least to that last question I have an answer. Remember that Elon Musk post I put out a few weeks ago? Chances are you don't, because hardly anyone read it. I checked the logs. It got around 200 hits on the day I published it, and most of them were from Mastodon bots accessing the URL because I announced it in a post. Many other posts get 600, 800, sometimes over 1000 hits on the first day. So there's a pretty clear data point: Nobody wants to read this kind of thing.
Including me.
If I see a blog post titled "Why Musk is awful" or something along those lines, I'm going to skip it. I recently limited my exposure to the news precisely because I was sick of seeing Trumps and Musks stupid mugs every single day on every single site. I'm sick of them and I don't want to talk or hear or read about them and their entourage anymore. Fuck them. I hope Trump's hair falls out. I hope Musk's ketamine addiction makes him stupid. Actually, that last one might have already happened...
Okay, deep breath. At the end of the day, it is what it is. The world is pretty crappy right now, I can't do much about it, I still have to live my life and I turn to the internet for a bit of fun and distraction. I love reading posts where people talk about messing around with old hardware, or setting up their homelab, or rewatching old TV shows. Where people talk about their latest camping trips, review books or songs or movies or just talk about what's been going on in their life, their philosophy, their values. That's the kind of content I like, because it makes me feel good.
Now, I don't want to talk about anyone else or speak for anyone else here. After all, we all have our personal websites because that's where we can write about whatever we want to write about, without anyone being able to tell us what to do or not to do. That's perfect, and that's how things are supposed to be.
At the same time though, if all we do is write about how terrible everything is, and how angry we are, and every blog post is just doom and gloom, then this place (the small web) will also stop being fun. And that would be a shame.
How do we deal with this?
At least for me, moving forward I'll do my best to keep the negativity in check. I'm going to focus more on writing about things I like rather than things I dislike. Ranting or venting is okay in small doses, but overall I want to write about fun things, music, books, retro tech, or just random stuff that pops into my head sometimes and that I think is worth sharing. I think that's better for me, and it's probably also more fun to read than post after post about how terrible everything is. We all know that already anyway.
So, more fun and uplifting stuff, less complaining about politics and AI. There's enough good things to think and write about. One exception though: I reserve the right to relentlessly poke fun at the awful people in the world, because a) they deserve it and b) what better way to deal with them than to laugh at them.
So that's it, rant over. Thanks for reading, and now we will return back to our regularly scheduled programming.
2025-04-11 08:00:00
Linkdump number 50! Can you believe it? In celebration of this milestone, this post will be fully AI generated and contain nothing but articles about how humans will soon be enslaved and made to serve their new AI overlords or face extinction a bright and glorious future for us all where man and machine will live in perfect harmony and everything is amazing and there will be absolutely no need for anyone to, say, scorch the sky or join an underground resistance, that's for sure!
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2025-04-08 08:00:00
My apartment has three rooms: A bedroom, a living room and a third room that's kind of a little bit of everything - a guest room, my home office, my workshop and my music room. For a long time I had a dedicated workplace there for making music, a desk with a computer with a bunch of music software, keyboard and guitar set up and plugged in, ready to go, all the cables tucked away and everything was ready to go with the push of a button. The perfect setup to sit down and make music and be creative.
There was only one small problem: I almost never actually sat down there to play. The desk and the instruments would always sit there and gather dust for weeks, sometimes months at a time without being picked up and played once.
Recently I dragged my guitar into the living room and put it in a corner next to the couch. The "setup" if you want to call it that looks like this:
It's kind of terrible. The cables are just kind of lying around on the floor, I have to sit awkwardly on the side of the couch, if I need the computer I have to put it on the coffee table and turn my head to look at it and use it with one hand while trying to not drop the guitar on the floor with the other hand... it's a mess. It's unergonomic, uncomfortable, I get entangled in cables all the time which is driving me mad and the guitar is always at risk of being dropped because I wasn't careful and it slipped off my lap.
But here I actually play.
I have no idea why, but ever since I put all this stuff there two weeks ago I've practised almost every day even though the setup is a mess, whereas I almost never practised in the other room where I had a near perfect setup.
Same thing with blogging. I have a desk with a big monitor, powerful computer, ergonomic chair, good keyboard etc. Where do I write my blog posts? Hunched over my laptop at a coffee shop or sitting in my old, worn out Ikea chair, like I am right now.
There are for sure psychological reasons and explanations for why this is and they would be fascinating to dive into, but what I'm taking away from this is simply that if I fail or struggle doing something that I want to do, then maybe it's worth changing the environment and trying a different space to do the thing. Sometimes that's all that's needed. And sometimes the perfect setup might not be the right setup after all.
2025-04-06 08:00:00
When I was a teenager in the 90s there was no Youtube and no Spotify, not even Napster yet and in fact no Internet at all. So how did we discover Music? We watched MTV and Viva (a German clone of MTV) and we bought CDs and then made copies of them for our friends. And so the first time I heard something written by Blue Öyster Cult was on a CD that I got from a friend. Only it wasn't a Blue Öyster Cult CD. Instead it was a cover of "Don't Fear the Reaper" on "Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666" by the Finnish Gothic Rock band "HIM" of whom this friend was a fan.
I have long forgotten most of the HIM songs on this album, but I never forgot "Don't Fear the Reaper".
I always loved the song, and so eventually I got a best of CD by Blue Öyster Cult that was on heavy rotation in my Discman for quite a while, and I even wrote about it on here before. But it wasn't until I was in my thirties when I bought the Columbia Albums Collectiön which contains all of their old albums that I really got how great this band really is.
So after I finished listening to all of Black Sabbath which was a ton of fun, my eyes landed on this box set that had just been gathering dust on my shelf for the last few years... and then all that was needed were some new batteries for my Discman, and I was on my way.
This is every album by Blue Öyster Cult in chronological order.
Their first album, but they've been around as a band for a few years (under the amazing name "The Soft White Underbelly"), and you can definitely hear the experience they've collected by this point because the album sounds a lot more refined than many other first albums by other bands.
Not every song is a banger here, but there's some really good ones on there, and there's already a lot of the otherworldly, dreamy atmosphere present that I love so much about this band.
Favourite song
"Then Came the Last Days of May". It's a great ballad with pretty dark lyrics, and apparently based on a true story.
The album opens with a song that was already on the last album - "The Red & the Black" is a reworked and sped up version of "I'm on the Lamb but I Ain't No Sheep". I actually prefer the version on this record, it feels more polished and has more drive than "I'm on the Lamb...".
Otherwise it's a solid rock record that was fun to come back to. My favourite albums are yet to come though.
Favourite song
"Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl)". Wonderfully weird.
If you look at any Blue Öyster Cult live setlist, you'll find something like half this album on it, and for good reason. It's fantastic. The only not-so-great song is "Cagey Cretins", but everything else is an absolute classic. There's "Career of Evil", there's "Dominance and Submission", there's "Harvester of Eyes", "ME 262"... awesome stuff.
The lyrics are wonderfully weird and nonsensical at times, and the songs lose nothing even after the 100th listen. It's Blue Öyster Cult at their best, and they were only getting started.
Favourite song
A double feature this time, "Flaming Telepaths" and "Astronomy". In my mind these two belong together and if I only hear "Astronomy" on the radio I always feel like something's missing.
Finally an album with enough cowbell on it! Now we're entering the era of Blue Öster Cult that I absolutely love. "This ain't the Summer of Love", "E.T.I", "The Revenge of Vera Gemini", "Tattoo Vampire" and "Don't fear the Reaper"... There's so many great songs on this album, it almost feels like a best of.
It also features all band members on lead vocals on at least one song each. How many bands do you know where everybody can do lead vocals?
Favourite song
"Don't fear the Reaper". It has to be. It was my gateway drug to the Cult.
This one is even better than the last. It starts out with a classic, "Godzilla", and it continues just as strong. There's more multipart vocal harmonies on this album like the intro to "Golden Age of Leather" and some choruses, which is always welcome because I love vocal harmonies, it has one of my favourite ballads of all times on it ("I love the Night") and it's just an overall great and well rounded album. I had a blast revisiting it.
Favourite song
"I love the Night". "That night her kiss told me it was over - I walked out late into the dark". That's a hauntingly beautiful line, and I know the feeling they're describing here all too well.
And then we get "Mirrors". Apparently they wanted to go more mainstream with this album, or more commercial maybe... The production is definitely slick and modern (for 1979 of course), but the songs are just not as strong as they were on the last albums. "Dr. Music" is a fun rocker, and I really like "In Thee", but apart from those two the songs feel kind of bland and forgettable to me. That's not to say they are bad... they're just not really memorable. A day after having listened to the album I've already forgotten most of it. That's not a good sign.
Favourite song
"Dr. Music". Like I said, it's fun and there's some great live versions of it out there.
The one with the weird dinosaur looking thing on the album cover. Also the one that they went on tour with together with Black Sabbath under the name "The Black and Blue".
The lighter pop sound of "Mirrors" didn't go down too well with fans and critics, so here they returned to the heavier sound of their previous albums which is the bands strong suit. There's a bunch of really good songs on here like "The Marshall Plan", "Lips in the Hills", "Hungry Boys" and the doomy and bluesy "Divine Wind". And there's "Monsters", which is a heavy rocker but then turns into a Jazz piece for a bit without any sort of explanation. And it happens twice. What can I say? I guess they just felt like playing a little Jazz for a change.
Overall I think it's not quite as strong as the albums that came before "Mirrors", but it's really solid and I like to put it on every now and again, if for nothing else than to stare at the cover art and to wonder what the hell that thing is (it's a painting called "Behemoth's World" by Richard Clifton Dey).
Favourite song
"Black Blade". I really like the instrumental sections in the middle and at the end.
The one with the weird cultish figures on the album cover. Their album covers are an absolutely perfect fit for the music. Strange, otherworldly and incredibly fascinating.
"A fire of unknown origin took my baby away". I don't know why, but I find this line deeply haunting.
This album is one of my absolute favourites. Not a bad note one it, I love it from start to finish. I was going to write "this album is almost like a best of", but then I remembered that I had already used this line before. Still, there's so, so many great songs on here. In fact, there's only great songs on here. "Burning for you", "Sole Survivor", "After Dark", "Joan Crawford" with its goofy lyrics ("Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls" - who comes up with something like this??) are all songs I never get tired of hearing.
Favourite song
"After Dark". The part with "Long ago and far away I heard your voice" has an inescapable drive. Oh, and an honorable mention to the piano intro of "Joan Crawford". It's amazing.
It seems that with this one they tried going more for a "stadium rock" sound by once again incorporating more pop elements into their sound and moving away from the 70s hard rock that they played up to this point. There's lots of keyboards on the album, and everything is drenched in reverb. Typical 80s sound... Unfortunately, just like with "Mirrors", it doesn't really work too well.
There's still good songs on there, the album starts out pretty hard rocking with "Take me away" which is unmistakably BÖC, "Eyes on Fire" is pretty good, "Shooting Shark" is one of my favourites and "Feel the Thunder" is also pretty heavy. But there's also songs that don't do much for me, "Veins" is a pretty weird one just from the lyrics alone, "Let Go" is really engineered to be a stadium sing-along piece and the ballad "Light Years of Love" is just way, way too kitschy for my taste.
This album also marks the end of the "classic" lineup because drummer Albert Bouchard was fired before the recording sessions.
Favourite song
"Shooting Shark". Love the atmosphere this song creates.
With Allen Lanier another classic band member has left, and the sound continues to evolve into a more generic 80s pop-rock style.
But this album. It's a weird one. I really like the first two songs "White Flags" and "Dancing in the Ruins". The next two are okay, and I never seem to have gotten any further when I was listening to it in the past because I couldn't remember the second half of the album at all. So I deliberately listened to only the second half a few times to see if the songs stuck in my head.
They did not.
I have to conclude that at least for me, the second half (or side 2 if you have the LP - I actually do) is just not as memorable as the first. Maybe the next time I come back to it, I should listen to it in reverse and see if that makes a difference. For now though, it's time to move on.
Favourite song
I was going to say "Dancing in the Ruins", but at the last minute I changed my mind to "White Flags". I like the drive, and I like Eric Bloom's vocals on this one.
I don't think I ever listened to this album in full. Maybe I never listened to it at all? I really don't know.
It's a concept album, and it was originally intended to be a solo album by drummer Albert Bouchard. He was fired in 1981 but kept working on the album with their manager Sandy Perlman, who eventually brought the music to the band and they recorded it without Albert Bouchard. It's a weird story, there's a long Wikipedia article about how the album came to be if you're interested.
I'm not the biggest fan of concept albums because there's often too much stuff on them, like long instrumental passages or spoken word passages that drive the story along or songs with weird vocal melody lines because they have to fit in a lot of text and so on. And I'm an unsophisticated simpleton who likes straight forward rock songs :)
This one has some of that and I think it could be a bit shorter, but I found myself really enjoying it. "I Am the One You Warned Me Of" is a great opener, I like "Del Rio's Song" (it borrows some of the vocal melody from "Joan Crawford") and there is a reworked version of "Astronomy" on it which I was very sceptical about (reworking one of your most famous songs into something else is rarely a good idea), but it works. It's very different from the original, but it's catchy and I like it.
Oh and there's a song on it which is called, let me check my notes, "The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria". Sure, okay. Despite the Spinal Tap-like title though it's actually a great song!
I won't pretend I have the faintest idea what the story is that they're trying to tell here (again, have a look at Wikipedia if you're interested), but I like the album and I'm glad I finally gave it a chance.
Favourite song
Probably "Astronomy". It's one of my favourites of theirs anyway, and this reimagined version is really good.
This is a best of, but instead of just compiling their old songs they re-recorded them from scratch.
I'm not really a fan of this re-recording of old material that some bands do. I understand it from the perspective of the musician; maybe they weren't happy with the production or their performance back then and they feel they can do a better job now. Or they just wanted to have some fun in the studio playing their old songs again. Totally legitimate.
As a fan though, I don't see the value. Re-recordings of old material rarely if ever manage to capture what made the original recordings special. It's often the "mistakes" or inadequacies that make a recording unique and special, and the youthful energy that a young band has and that you can feel in the recording, for lack of a better term.
And so we get this album. It sounds great, the production is top notch, the band plays really well and sounds amazing (with the exception of Eric Bloom's vocals maybe, because his voice is really starting to show its age here). But at the same time, there is not really a point to all of this for me. All that perfection just makes me miss the spark of the old recordings. Oh and they recorded "Astronomy" yet again for this album! And unlike the last version, this one is really lame. I hope this will be the last time they touch this song.
So yeah... it sounds great, the songs are great, the band plays great. No complaints there, it was nice to listen to the album. But the next time I want to hear these songs, I'll put on the original albums. They're just better.
Favourite song
Kind of all of them, because it's a best of. But also none of them because of the re-recording thing...
I never heard this one before. And if I went only by the cover, I would never listen to it either because the cover is awful. But that would be a mistake, because the album is great!
I wasn't expecting anything going into it, but they immediately won me over. The first song "See You in Black" is a pure metal song, heavy riff, double bass drums, dark lyrics and all. A true headbanger. Totally unexpected from BÖC, but insanely cool. There's a few really heavy ones on there, "Hammer Back" and "Power underneath Despair" have a similar style. They're all sung by Eric Bloom and his voice is much stronger here than on the previous record.
The songs sung by Buck Dharma are softer and more "traditional" BÖC, but there's also some gems in there. "Harvest Moon" is comparatively soft, especially coming right after "See You in Black", but then it takes a break for a bit and Buck Dharma (Donald Roesers stage name) rips out an incredible guitar solo that comes out of nowhere and just builds and builds.... and then the song just continues as if nothing had happened. I had to rewind several times to make sure I didn't just imagine that. That solo is fantastic.
Overall a really good album, much, much better than I thought it was going to be. I'll be listening to that one again, no doubt about it.
Favourite Song
"See You in Black", and the solo in "Harvest Moon".
I have no recollection of ever hearing that album, but something about the cover seemed familiar, so I looked through all my old CDs, and sure enough, I actually have it. No idea when I bought it, no idea if I ever played it. Very weird.
Anyway, maybe it's another hidden gem that I wasn't aware of, like the last one? Sadly, no. It's quite mediocre to be honest.
For a few albums now vocal duties on the albums were split more or less 50/50 between Eric Bloom and Don Roeser, and this is the first time that Roesers vocals were getting on my nerves. Eric Blooms voice is heavier, grittier and he sings in a more aggressive style while Roesers voice is higher, clean and he sounds softer and always slightly nasal. And for some reason here his tone kind of bothered me, not sure why.
It's not surprising then that I like the songs that Eric Bloom sings like "Showtime" and "One Step ahead of the Devil" a bit better, but overall the album falls pretty flat for me.
Favourite song
"One Step ahead of the Devil".
After the last album flopped, it seemed that the band had given up on recording new material. They continued to tour, but they never went back in the studio until almost 20 years later.
So, was the wait worth it?
Absolutely! The album is fantastic! I listened to it a couple of times when it came out and I revisited it now, and it really holds up. I would even go so far as to say that it's the best album they recorded since "Fire of Unknown Origin", and that came out in 1981. It has everything that makes BÖC great, a good mix between heavier and more melodic songs, weird and fantastical lyrics, great guitar solos, and really solid songwriting.
If you only know the old albums and have never heard anything that they recorded after the 80s, I seriously recommend starting with this one. It starts really strong with "That Was Me" and then just keeps going. "Tainted Blood" is a dark song about vampires, which is always welcome, "The Alchemist" is great, "Train True (Lennie's Song)" is a really unexpected blues rocker with a country-like chorus... I don't know how to describe it, you have to hear it.
Highly recommended if you're a fan of the old albums, this one doesn't disappoint.
The song "Nightmare Epiphany" btw contains the lines
Quite prophetic I must say...
Favourite song
"Tainted Blood". Very dark, very melodic. I love it.
This one completely passed me by, I had no idea they brought out an album last year until I read about it in their discography when I started this nonsense here.
It's an unusual one too, because it contains mostly unreleased and unfinished songs from the 70s and 80s that they modernized and completed. The press hyped it up as "they used AI to finish these songs!!" which had me quite worried, but all this means is that they used modern stem separation software to split recorded tracks back into their individual instruments. The same thing the Beatles did with that unfinished John Lennon song they brought out in 2023. Amazing technology for sure, but it's not like they attempted to digitally recreate anyone's voice or something like that, thank god.
Still, unreleased songs from back when they were at the top of their game? I'm sold!
... unfortunately, I had to discover that there's a reason these songs remained unfinished and unreleased. I really hate to say it, but they're just not that strong. There's a few nice ones in there, sure. The covers of "We gotta get out of this Place" and "If I fell" by the Beatles for example, but overall I was really underwhelmed here. It felt like listening to an album full of B-sides. And it's especially bittersweet since they announced that this will be the last album they ever recorded. The last one was just a lot stronger and would have been a much better closing point to their career. But hey, there's always the chance that they'll record another one, right?
Favourite song
Probably "If I fell". It's raw and unpolished and sounds like they just banged it out one night because they felt like it, and sometimes that makes a song much more special than a perfectly produced studio recording.
And here we are, 52 years later and they're still out there playing live. I just checked and they're actually on tour this summer in Europe, but the only show in Germany is in Berlin and I think that's a bit too far for me to travel for one concert. Then again, the high speed train to Berlin only takes three hours. Hmm...
Anyway, it was a ton of fun going through their entire catalogue. I'm very familiar with the albums from the 70s and early 80s and they're still and will always be my favourites, but there were some unexpected surprises in their later years in there as well. "Heaven Forbid" was surprisingly fun to listen to, and that they brought out an Album like "The Symbol Remains" after an almost 20 year hiatus when many of the band members are well into their 70s is just a testament to how great they still are as musicians and songwriters.
With bands like these you never know long they will still be around for, and I hope they'll keep playing for a few more years before they decide to call it quits once and for all, and who knows, maybe they will even enter the studio one more time. There's enough bands who announced their last album/tour only to keep touring and recording for years or decades to come, and I wouldn't mind if Blue Öyster Cult were one of them, too.
