2026-09-12 16:59:43
We went to the cinema last night to see Practical Magic 2. It was the first time I'd been in 8 years (since Solo: A Star Wars Story) but 27 years for my wife!
The first Practical Magic is one of our favourite films and is rewatched regularly. As with other favourites, various lines and phrases have become part of our daily lexicon.
There have been some pretty critical reviews of PM2, and a certain amount of disinformation spread, but we tried to ignore as much as possible before going in.
I won't give any spoilers, just suffice to say that it's a little darker than the first (which is great as it raises the stakes) but it perfectly brings the vibe and humour from the first movie.
It is perfect fan service whilst holding it's own as a self contained story. Yes, some of the plot points are obvious, but in a good way — just like Christmas films largely follow a pattern to give you that warm fuzzy glow.
Anyway, we absolutely loved it and, in future, will no doubt watch it just as often as the first. If not both together.
2026-09-11 21:41:02
Following on from the other day, I now have a /friends page.
While it could be used as a blogroll, I'm taking it a bit wider including YouTube profiles and more.
There's only a few names there for now but more will be added as I'm trying to be really thoughtful as to who I add.
2026-09-10 05:16:47
On Monday evening, I did a load of prep on the RD-9 so I could record a new track for 909 Day.
I already had an acid line I wanted to use so it would have been fairly easy to record it live in, at most, a couple of takes.
I say would...
Last night, I realised that everything I'd done on the RD-9 hadn't saved; it had obviously been switched to manual save mode accidentally.
I wasted time going through all the banks/songs in case I'd written the wrong one down.
Nope!
Next, I turned everything else on and there was a horrible noise coming from a couple of channels of the audio interface — well, from the ADAT expansion connected to it.
Power off. Disconnect. Reconnect. Power on. Shit!
I thought the unit was toast as the TD-3 sounded fine plugged directly into the interface itself.
Another disconnect, plug the RD-9 into the interface. Shit!
Power cycle everything. Disconnect and reconnect everything. Shit! Shit! SHIT!
I turned everything off and grabbed a screwdriver. The interface came out of the rack to be checked: nothing obvious, it wasn't hot and didn't have that "I'm fried inside" smell to it.
Leaving it out if the rack, I reconnected it...
No noise. Woohoo!
I don't know what was going on, but by this time I only had a out ten minutes left of the time I had available.
Change of plan!
The track was going to be the opener for the next EP. Fortunately, I already had the third track finished which employs the RD-9, so used that instead.
2026-09-07 21:32:42
It's been two weeks since I took delivery of a shiny, new 15" MacBook Air M5.
And I love it!
It's in the sky blue colour but that certainly isn't overstated. From some angles, and in certain lighting, you wouldn't know it wasn't grey. When you do notice the blue, it's subtle and a refreshing change. Still, we're not in MacBook Neo territory by any means.
My old MacBook Pro (2015) was dying a slow death, both from a hardware and software perspective. It had topped out natively with MacOS 12 Monterey, but I had been using Open Core Legacy Patcher to keep one of the partitions up to date. That, however, stopped as of MacOS 15 Sequoia. With Tahoe finally dropping for all Intel models, even OCLP couldn't go any further and the project has shut down.
An increasing number of apps now require Mac Silicon, with no Intel // universal option, leaving you with no choice but to upgrade if you want to use them. Apple will be dropping support for Rosetta, the framework than translates x64 apps to run on Mac Silicon, next year so the problem is only going to get worse.
The poor device had been dropped more times than I care to remember. One of the USB ports stopped working after one incident then, miraculously, started working again after another but could be a little temperamental. Not ideal when you're trying to record and it "lost" the audio interface which crashed Ableton.
MacBook Airs may no longer be as thin and light as they used to, but they're still much thinner and lighter than my old Pro. Moving from an 11 year old device also means the performance is like night and day. The first time I exported audio from Ableton on the new Air, I thought I hadn't selected the range properly; it happened that quick.
Yes, Macs can be expensive but they are built to last. If I can get anywhere near 11 years out of this one I'll be extremely happy.
2026-09-07 15:31:17
A couple of interesting things have hit my inbox in the past week or so.
First, Nick reached out asking if I was interested in making a /friends page (see here for more details.)
/friends is described as:
A page on your site where you link to the people you like and follow. Make the Internet more human!
Yes, we already have blogrolls but this is meant to be something a bit more personal; not just a list of people you read.
I think it's a great idea!
I've got a couple of people in mind already, but I really want to think about this and do it justice.
Next, Oleh got in touch about a side project he's working on called Pixel Area:
Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made.
You can find me here...
When I get time, I'm going to go through who else is included. Discovery is the hardest thing on the indie web and I love things like this that help solve that problem.
2026-09-05 06:22:24
It really doesn't feel like only two weeks since I initially released "is, was, and always will be" on subvert.fm — it seems like so much longer.
It's been a crazy couple of weeks, sure, but that doesn't nearly account for it. 1
Maybe it's because I started work on the EP back in May (finishing the first track in June) and have mentally moved on. Having the next project well underway no doubt exacerbates that.
I always get so hyped for what I'm currently working on that everything else takes a back seat in my brain — it takes a while for me to come back and appreciate it.
The staggered release (with the two week exclusive on subvert) has thrown me. It also wasn't a particularly successful experiment; in one day on Bandcamp I've already almost matched the total plays from the time on subvert.
Still, it's early days for the platform and more people need to start using it.
maybe I'll post about some of that at a later date ↩