Knuckledragger

A good friend of mine mained a Samsung Galaxy Fold for years. He said it kept him from needing to replace his laptop (which died) for quite some time. There were a bunch of obvious and not so obvious limitations. Case selection was a big one at first. Also, some apps just don't play nice on the big screen. Linus of Tech Squeaks ran a newer Fold for a while and he said the same thing. Of course, AAPL has clout with app makers that not even Samsung can muster. I'll be a bunch of developers will make it a point to update their app for the iFold here. I would never buy one (I hate smrt phnes and view them as a necessary evil at best) but I will watch how the saga of Apple's last geegaw, ahem, unfolds.

Apple unveils iPhone Duo.

Holy shit. I just learned that a guy named Sebastian that I went to college with the 90s died of leukemia last month. He was 56. Sebastian was an interesting character. He was significantly dyslexic, and so was in college at a far later age than most of the students. The college we attended (Landmark) was specifically for LD students, so he didn't stick out that much. I had a strong if occasionally antagonistic friendship with him. I caught another student referring to him as "Sebbie" so I started calling him that. He immediately put the kibosh to that, telling me if I kept it up he wasn't going to respond to me when I talked to him. I complied with his wishes. Not that long after we watched Dumb & Dumber on Laserdisc (a huge deal at the time.) I saw the famous "Kick his ass, Sea Bass!" scene, and poor Sebastian had to deal with me calling him "See-Bass" for the rest of his time at Landmark. Apparently Sebastian had been sick for many years. He was, to put it charitably, a very heavyset fella in the 90s. We're FB friends, but he does fuck all on that platform (which is to his credit.) Occasionally family members tag him in photos and I had noticed that Sebastian had lost a shit-ton of weight. "Good for him!" I thought foolishly. Now, looking at his profile (it's his birthday today) it's clear he had kept losing weight and not for good reasons. Sebastian is not the first college chum I've heard about dying entirely too young. Hell, he's not even the first Landmark student. There was a guy named Alex Knowlton who died of cancer 2017 at age 45. Still, it's never not a shock when one of one's peers dies of a disease like leukemia.

How about amp box porn?

The "ACK!"rooms.

I have like six AAPL posts in the works, but right now I'm going to focus on this: Someone on island is selling The. Worst. Mac. ever made. A good friend of mine bought one of these when it was new. His was over $3K (jn 2013 dollars) and it was an utter piece of shit. Nevermind the lack of upgrade path an other limitations due to the form factor. He knew all about that going into it. The damn machine hard locked at least once a day. Not when he was working, but if he left it on and came back later, it'd be completely unresponsive. No amount of OS reinstalls, calls to AppleCare, and even having the unit sent in to be serviced ever fixed it. The techs "could not replicate the issue." Conversely, the "cheese grater" G5 tower and Mac Pro he owned on either side of it continue to work to this day. He maintained that the little trash can was the worst Apple product he ever owned. TBH, if the seller was asking ...$150 and not $350, I might buy it just for the lulz. At the price he's asking, I could pick up a used low end Apple Silicon Mini and get far more performance at much less power consumption.

This song has been going through my head recently, for some odd reason.

This is a mindfuck:

Interesting bit of history here:

As I have said previously: Time Machine, once a jewel in the Apple ecosystem, has become a neglected, buggy shell of its former glory. Currently I have Schrodinger's backup. I have "successfully completed" the first backup of my M1 MBP to my M4 Mac Mini. Apple have been making increasingly insistent noises about discontinuing support for Time Machine backups on drives attached to a router. With this in mind, I bought a second 8 slot Thunderbay enclosure from OWC (see Jacob's Jacobless Jacobing.) I reformatted my 8TB backup drive for the M1 to APFS. This cost me all of my old backup images, but I have learned that in practice I only care about the most recent one. The backup process was nontrivial. I had to update both machines to Tahoe (something I had been dragging my heels about for quite some time) and make sure both had every other software patch applied. Prior to upgrading to Tahoe, I could not get the MBP to play nice with drives attached to the Mini. I also had to dig out my CalDigit TS3+ TB dock (and, ahem, the damn Thunderbolt cable) because wireless is too slow and too unreliable for a ~1TB backup. With the CalDigit and TB3/ethernet, the backup process only took a couple hours. As a bonus, the Time Machine image is now on a drive that is backed up to the cloud Backblaze. This is an arrangement I've wanted to do for five or six years. Of course, none of this actually fucking works. The backup was successful (it completed 100%) but it also wasn't (the Time Machine app doesn't think the backup completed properly.) I spent considerable time pestering some of my geekier friends and even when as far as employing Clod Claude AI for help. Apparently this is a "known issue" with Tahoe. There are some fussy workarounds, but I am currently a bit low on energy and very low on patience. I'm going to pursue the problem further at later date. On the other end of the spectrum, the 2012 (ya rly) Mini my (sainted, octogenarian) mother uses now has an external HDD enclosure attached to it via USB3 and it's cheerfully backing itself up every hour. Also the Mac Thunderbolt Display she uses with it has built in speakers of sufficient quality that she can watch some of her British TV shows on it and understand the dialogue. We really have lost ground, haven't we?

Interesting. I was peripherally aware of this fellow because of a couple EPs he released years ago. I had no idea he was still at nor that he had such a substantial modular rig.

Way back in 2003, a creative and wacky Norwegian (is there any other kind?) named Gisle Martens Meyer eleased Resound, his first full length under the name Ugress. It was a breakbeat driven sampledelic good time. On it is the killer track "Decepticons" which among other things, features the sound of Transformers ...transforming being scratched by a DJ. In the 2000s, I used it to lure some of my more nerdy friends into the world of electronic music. It's also littered with samples from the TV series and 1986 movie. (This was years before the Michael Bay CGI slop fests tainted the Transformers name.) "Decepticons" was the first thing I thought of when I heard (voice of Optimus Prime) Peter Cullen died. Do not grieve for him, he shall become one with the matrix.

RIP Peter Cullen voice of Optimus Prime. He has become one with the matrix.

Void cat is checking out appreciating the heat radiating from a vintage Harman Kardon Citation V.

Promotional stress reliever from a company that makes ear plugs.

"I'm gonna scratch the shit out of those speaker grills."

A guy on reddit rehoused Alec 604e in new enclosures:

I'm not saying, I'm just totally saying.

RIP Frank Beard drummer for ZZ Top. The band is down to one original member(!)

Let's talk about Frankie, baby! In the early 1960s, Frank Sinatra commissioned a home hi fi that was an impressive mix of studio gear and high end consumer kit. The heart of it was a modified McIntosh C-22 preamp. It had one input that was three channel, made specifically for an Ampex correction: a Presto 800 open reel tape deck (visible behind Frank.) Studio recordings in those days were primarily three channel, with the center being for the lead vocals. Final mixes were almost always mono, of course. Sinatra liked to take home the day's recordings from the studio and see what he thought of them that evening. An artist taking home the actual multitrack masters might sound insane, but it was Old Blue Eyes in the 60s. Though visibly impressive, the three units below the Presto are just VU meters. The tuner below the C22 is a Fisher R200. Below the Fisher at the bottom are a trio of tape head preamps made specifically for the Presto. Of course the tape transport, VU meters and preamps are all studio gear, not generally used by (or available to) the public. There were three power amps for the speakers, housed in a different room. Presumably they were Mac tube monoblocks, but there is basically no info out there. Similarly, there is no reliable info on the make/model of the speakers themselves. I've seen Altec-Lansing and JBL floated as likely brands. There was also a huge "Rek-O-Kut" turntable system that could both play back records and cut acetate disks(!) It had its own dedicated space. What the unit lacked in sex appeal, it made up in physical stature. Even a stock C22 has complex mono/stereo routing. (I oughta know, I've owned two of them since 1999 ...for reasons I cannot entirely explain.) Frank's custom unit was modified, but I don't know to what extent. Based on my research there is conjecture that the television output was wired into the C22. Frank was an early pioneer in the world of home theater. In the bedroom, Frank had a high end Grundig all-in-one system. I can neither confirm nor deny if Nancy Reagan ever got to hear a tune or two on that Grundig. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, now help yourself to a pack of smokes on the way out.

It's like seeing a Bentley parked in a trailer's car port.

RIP Katsushi Murakami who designed a lot of really neat Japanese toys. I am the farthest thing from being a weeb (except for Japanese audio gear, Japanese cars, Studio Ghibli animation, Japanese camera equipment, Kurosawa films, giant Japanese robots ...you know what? Nevermind.) With that said, I always had an appreciation for the Japanese toys from the 70s and 80s.

Oof. RIP William Orbit. He had a long and colorful career, including producing and remixing a bunch of pop music. I'm quite partial to his early 90s work.

TL;DW: $2000 flagrant Chinesium clone is significantly inferior to the real deal $7500 Mac. Amusingly, the Chinese amp is 20 lbs heavier.

The good news: Today was the The Vineyard Series. The bad news: Just about everything else. I got there late. Many of the Land Rovers had already departed. The lighting conditions were absolutely abysmal. The medication I am currently on mandates that I stay "out of the sun" so I have to wear long pants and a button down shirt in the summer head. It was an unpleasant experience to put it mildly. I did get a few photos, and they will show up eventually.