Ra.i.dio Ga Ga.
Vol. 6, No. 8
While this brave new world of AI is also a hellscape of rapacious capitalism, the ability to bang out tiny pieces of hyper-specific software is pretty sweet. I dropped Marktwain last week on GitHub. It is not some earth-shattering thing, it’s a simple markdown editor that does things that suit my specific idiosyncrasies. It’s neat and probably not terribly useful to many people (though if you’re writing a novel, it’s worth a shot).
But my new favourite thing is called “Pop Loser FM.” It’s a personal radio station (really just a playlist manager) and I’ve been running it nearly 24/7 for almost a month. Here’s the logic:
‣ The player defaults to shuffling a large folder of music I love.
‣ I have other folders for different moods or themes, including a Mornings folder that shuffles between 5 and 10 AM, an hour of 90s’ alt-rock nostalgia every night, etc.
‣ At the top of each hour, it plays the most recent five-minute CBC news update.
‣ Podcasts I like play at specific times on specific days as though they were live radio programs — Passan on baseball every Wednesday at 5 PM, Bookends on Thursdays, This American Life on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and so on.
‣ Plays a random episode from my 10-year collection of Iggy Confidential episodes every Saturday and Sunday morning at 10 AM, plays from an archive of old Art Bell Coast to Coast episodes from midnight until 4 AM, and so on.
‣ You get the point…
It runs all the time — I just turn speakers on and off as I need them, and I can update the playlists over my network. (Instead of adding pod catching to it, I use Downcast and point PLFM to those folders and customize the handling for each podcast in Downcast and point to its folders.) The current build has been running non-stop since last Friday on an old iMac, and I cannot overstate how much I love it. Currently it streams around my home using AirFoil, letting me send to multiple Bluetooth receivers at the same time, as well as any computer or iOS device running the AirFoil client (it’s a very nice utility, though it doesn’t send everything quite in sync, so if you’re standing somewhere where you can hear two of the speakers at the same time it sends your brain into a minor fit), but my long-term plan is to connect it to a micro FM transmitter that covers my house and maybe bleeds a little so I can pick it up out in the garage (though I live on a flight path, so probably I need to be careful there).
I have no larger point on AI. These are just simple tools built quickly (and poorly) to plug into my life. They are neat party tricks, which is what this tech seems to do best on the consumer side.
A “grotesque” from Bon-Mots of the Nineteenth Century / Alice B. Woodward / 1897
Confusions.
Subway Takes and the tyranny of web video shows: ❝If the show is the medium, the clip is the message: an entire video shoot reduced to its catchiest few seconds, reaping the maximum amount of attention with the minimum of content.❞ / ⚱️ James Burrows, David Hockney and Om Malik died. / 📰 When one 4Columns shuts, another Starlog (re)opens, or something. / 🎥 David Thompson and AO Scott reckon with being film critics: ❝Of course, interesting movies continue to be made, and now and then crowds of people still leave the house to see them […] But the longstanding habit, among critics and other devotees, of holding movies apart from and superior to all the other screened content may involve a crucial category error. Could it be that, instead of being distinct from television, streaming, TikTok, A.I. slop and all the other screen forms, movies are actually their common ancestor, their home planet, the H.R. Giger alien xenomorph that has replicated itself across the universe of human consciousness?❞
Extensions.
📺 The official Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood YouTube channel. / 🛠️ brevio, free browser tools. / TownSquare, so people can hang out on your website. / ⚾ Ribbie, 8-bit baseball. / 📚 BannedBookLibrary, banned books hidden inside light bulbs. / Faded Page, free public domain books. / 🎹 MCP 2000, browser-based sampler. / stemdeck, wish this existed in my club days. / Minedrums.
Explorations.
📺 Stanger Things, now into S4 with the 14yo. / 🍿 Nothing, so good. / 🍿 Moonfall, so stupid and I’m starting to work on a unified theory of Roland Emmerich movies. / 📺 Doctor Who, down to our last handful of Jodie Whitaker episodes. / A lot of Star(s) Trek(s) on shuffle.