As seen from a small jetty.

Problem: baby likes to talk to grandma over video call, but the little one also presses every single button there is on the touchscreen, resulting in (at best) hanging up or (at worst) the phone being left in some indeterminate state.

Panasonic cameras have always been video-heavy and their compacts were no exception. They have since exited the segment, and now I'd say the crown is either held by Sony with their ZV-1 cameras, or Canon with their PowerShot G7 X Mark III. But the LX-15 was, when I bought it in 2018, half the price of them both. For a measly $400, I got 4K video, a 1" sensor, an f/1.8 lens and raw capture. Those were the days.

While trying to organize the sound files that I produce in my newest hobby, field recording, I came across the problem of combining the outputs from several multimodal models.

Organizing sound files comes with a number of challenges that aren't present when organizing photos or videos.

Ever since Linus Torvalds provided the final piece of the puzzle by getting his Linux operating system self-hosted in 1991, we software developers have basically owned the means of production. Anyone with computer access could get an operating system and, thanks to the massive undertaking that is the GNU project, also a top-notch compiler (GCC) and editor (vi or Emacs). Later, with the birth of a viable platform for in-browser web applications, anyone with access to a web browser and a text editor could learn JavaScript.

Or - how I stopped worrying and learned to aggregate SQL queries. This is a pattern that can be used when you have multiple SQL SELECT queries Q_(1)...Q_(n), each returning zero or one rows, except for the first which must return a single row, where Q_(n) can depend on the result of Q_(1)...Q_(n-1), and you want to reduce the number of database roundtrips.

I was selling my old GPU on Blocket when I saw an ad for a Zoom H2 for 300 SEK ($30). Ever since I filmed Yamato - The Drummers of Japan and was surprised at how much better the final product was thanks to the Nikon ME-1 microphone that I used, I've wanted to improve the sound in my videos.

The little bumblebees were out en masse this evening. There was a light drizzle, so I got to try out my new old Zoom H2 recorder.

Ika Johannesson, one of the authors of Blod, Eld, Död, has created Total Metal, an exhibition at Kulturhuset.

This is a modification of the Overnight Bread Rolls. Add one shredded carrot and a lot of walnut kernels, then put the dough in a bread form. I guess you could let it rise overnight, but I've gone with the faster method.

Sometimes, someone really hits it out of the park. Written in 2016, HyperLogLogLog (alternate) pretty much sums up LLM misuse of today. It's funny, and as with all the best jokes it is based on a kernel of decidedly unfunny truth:

A new paper in preprint by an interdisciplinary team of researchers reviews over a dozen cases reported in the media or online forums and highlights a concerning pattern of AI chatbots reinforcing delusions, including grandiose, referential, persecutory, and romantic delusions.

(...)

The underlying problem is that general-purpose AI systems are not trained to help a user with reality testing (...)

— Marlynn Wei M.D., J.D. / Psychology Today

I came for the swan, but found the great crested grebe.

Birding at Laduviken.

I thought I'd try HDR video and while at it, see if it makes sense to shoot in 1080p and then upscale to 4k. The latter would make it possible for me to use my Nikon D600 and my collection of lenses for it, besides drastically cutting down on the size of the recorded video files. If not, I'd have to shoot on my only 4k-capable camera, a Panasonic Lumix LX15.

Erik Eckersten, a student at the SLU wrote Next station: Igelbäcken nature reserve, subtitled Design of an abandoned subway station into an entrance to a nature reserve. I find it a bold transformation of the now unfinished and abandoned subway stop.

Simon Stålenhag used to post some digital paintings he had done of an imagined retrofuturistic Sweden. They depicted everyday life in an alternate '80s and '90s, with huge, towering structures in the background, hovering freight ships in the night sky, and rusty robot hulks dotting the landscape of the islands in Lake Mälaren where he grew up. A few noticed.

The Labyrinth was for many a departure from Stålenhag's usual style. This time, the world is really ending, and the horror is not something that is under the surface - quite the opposite, the remnants of humanity hide in underground shelters and the world is covered in ashes and the remains of those who didn't make it to the shelters.

After two books being set in an alternate Sweden, Stålenhag jumps across the pond and tells a story of a girl and her robot trying to make it across the southwestern United States to San Francisco, as society, hit by the horrors of a civil war and unable to recover, crumbles around them.

When I saw the Kickstarter for Sunset at Zero Point, I almost reflexively pitched in. I think Simon is a gifted storyteller, and crowdfunded culture appeals to me. A bit later I realized that this would be queer SF about two gay boys growing up, which isn't my usual fare, but (a) the pledge was in and (b) I was curious about what Stålenhag would do with the premise.

I have this memory of a synopsis of a short story: it's an alien living in a universe completely filled with stone, and it's called something like "my stone telescope". Every now and then that memory pops up, but I've never been able to find the story. Now that we live in the age of AI I figured I'd ask, so I started the Gemini app, forgetting that I wasn't interacting with a search engine:

I paid for it once, therefore I should be allowed to keep it running forever. Thus spake my sense of entitlement. My sense wasn't wrong, but it sure didn't know what suffering was ahead.

When recompressing videos it's a good idea to get the video as right as possible. Since we're going to apply lossy compression to it we want to make sure that we end with as good a copy as possible.

Get into video, and you soon realize one thing - these files take up space. "But storage is getting cheaper!" someone says. Yes, and I want that to translate to actual savings for me, not get eaten up by a horde of gigantic movie clips.

Vegetable hanburgers, sort of.

Sophisticated MIDI keyboards like the Roland A-800PRO let you operate more than one instrument from them by splitting the keys into zones. For example, you can play background strings with the left side of the keyboard and the main instrument with the right side. But if all you have is an old Casiotone CT-640, you'll have to do it in software. For that, we'll use loopMIDI and MidiLayer.

Once you have read and understood Hack Music Theory Part 1, you should get this PDF. If the aforementioned book is the best ten dollars a beginning musician can spend, this PDF is easily the next best ten dollars. It basically answered exactly the questions I had about how to compose music.

I made a a sliding drawer for my keyboard, and while at first I thought that I would not further derail myself from actually practicing, you know, making music, a brief experience with LMMS sent me right away doing things other than actually doing music. See, the keyboard is not just a bit in front of my "typing" keyboard and my mouse - it's also offset a bit to the left. This makes it quite a reach to get at the mouse when I needed to do something in LMMS, and of course that's a job for the hobby engineer to solve.

Tills alla dör (Until Everyone Dies) is a brilliant nonfiction book that could well fit into the horror genre, if it weren't for the fact that it's a true story.

Echopraxia is a side-quel to Watts's hugely successful Blindsight, taking place almost in parallel with the events of the latter. It continues Watts's argument against the utility of consciousness, expanding it to an argument against logic, reasoning, and the scientific method. The argument against the latter three proceeds in the same way as against the first - Watts acknowledges the utility of them, but believes they will be superseded by other methods by post-humans.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an author with a message, and after reading this book you will understand why terraforming is impossible and why humanity will never succeed with interstellar colonization. Aurora is the counterargument to his earlier Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), which, if you were to read them, would make you understand why terraforming is a practical method for taking humanity to the stars.

After Blindsight, I went on a Peter Watts spree and after reading his masterful short story The Island I ended up with The Freeze-Frame Revolution.

I think Peter Watts is trying to tell us that he isn't conscious. Besides being a science-fiction version of The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, Blindsight is a story that sets out the author's argument that consciousness is an evolutionary mistake and that we would be much better if we would just let our unconscious get rid of that slow and unnecessary awareness.

The book is good enough that I'd be willing to buy that argument if he'd reveal that it was written unconsciously.

Much like Hugh Howey, Greg Egan is an author that I approach with caution. They are both capable of great writing, but they also have their limitations.

The Azure Window is a natural arch on the west coast of Gozo. It is quickly eroding, and the top of the arch is not expected to last for many more years before plunging into the sea. The window will then be renamed "The Azure Pinnacle". The HBO series Game of Thrones filmed Daenerys and Khal Drogo's wedding here, but covered the uneven and rocky ground with a layer of sand prior to filming.

Much like excruciating stomach cramps may be a sign that deadly nanobots are eating you from the inside, a proliferation of subtitles usually means that a good story is being gobbled up by the franchise it spawned. With the subtitles come the world-building, the fan-built wiki and the most dreaded thing of all: A self-replicating, never ending swarm of books and spin-offs. Juliette replacing a a rubber gasket on one line of Wool is now an Epic Saga of no less than fourteen books. It was therefore with a sigh that I noticed that Howey, not one to go for half measures, bounces straight from the four-letter Wool to the almost comical First Shift: Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo series) (Wool). Oh dear. I'm never buying that.

Wool is a story about survivors of a global catastrophe living in an underground silo. Poisonous air above, cold rock below, and an oppressive fascist system within. Humanity bottled up in a post-apocalyptic cliche.

Zelda proved that a raging, alcoholic, self-destructive, self-hating, self-absorbed, irresponsible, manipulative, fat, hairy feminist could be an engaging and sympathetic character, and that a comic about such a character could be a lot of fun to read.

Monster Island is very much a followup to the excellent Fragger. Like its predecessor, it involves lobbing explosives at enemies, but expands on the gameplay by introducing different types of grenades - called "minis" in this game. It stacks up surprisingly well. Like Fragger, the Flash version is available at Miniclip.com.

...and now for something completely different. No history, no war, no genocide. Just a little Snail's Heart beating with love.

When I scourge the pocketbook shops at airports I end up with something involving Hitler too often for it to be a mere coincidence. Given that Adolf was active between 1933 and 1945, either his presence on the bookshelves is way out of proportion to his slice of human history, or I'm some kind of subconsciously controlled Nazi drone.

Way back in 2000, a man named American McGee created American McGee's Alice. It was a re-imagining of the Alice in Wonderland stories in the form of a first person shooter / platformer. I bought it for the visuals and loved it. Alice: Madness Returns is the sequel, now powered by the Unreal 3 engine. On the whole, Alice is a great game that is brought down to "barely passable" by some very poor decisions by its creators.