In response to Sean at the Boston Diaries, who's writing about having to listen to "Somber Wurlitzer", by Greater California.
Hearing it described as "Gothic Bubblegum Pop", and "as horrible as it sounds", I knew I had to give it a listen, because I have *notably* bad taste in music. I found it on Spotify (ew), and tried it.
It sounds like "what if nostalgic boomers had invented Darkwave", which makes it not exactly my cup of tea, but I actually wouldn't call it bad. It's interesting, especially since I learned it's a 2004 album, so not actually a dark product of the late 60s.
I did find a good, largely positive, review of it on the big web:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3671-somber-wurlitzer/
I'd give Sean's dad an A+ for finding new music relevant to his interests, even if I'm not crazy about it myself.
I'm responding to a couple of gemlogs on using webp images on Gemini.
Basically, the consensus is that even though webp is a Google-controlled "standard", it's a good image format. My thought is that, be that as it may, it's too soon to be using webp, because they're poorly supported everywhere except Chrome and Firefox. I installed the webp CLI tools a long time ago on Linux to convert Telegram stickers to PNG for use in other messengers, because just sending the liberated webps meant stickers that friends couldn't see.
Here's what that smiling calculator webp looks like on Elpher (Emacs 28.0.50):
Been not having a lot of energy left after day job, managing kids' virtual school, and chauffeur duty, and this has kept me from writing and from doing recreational computering. I have done some light reading, and I heartily recommend _Gideon the Ninth_, by Tamsin Muir, and its sequel _Harrow the Ninth_. They're meme-filled mystery potboilers about lesbian necromancers in space, and a great autumn read.
Oh, and basically none of these homebrew solutions seem to have cracked the “I
want to share photos of my kids with just their grandparents and a few of my
friends” problem. Facebook, Google, and Apple have all solved that mostly.
Anyone can share anything to everybody pretty easily, but sharing to only a
handful of people on the planet is much, much more difficult to get right and
easy and not subsidized by ads.
While I do generally agree with the idea of "pay someone a monthly fee to manage your network services" (unless someone in your family is a sysadmin), I do have to say that Nextcloud offers a reasonable solution to the "share kid photos with only a few people". It allows you to create public links to files or folders in your file space. The links can be merely obscure – long unguessable URLs – or also be password protected. It's not perfect, but neither are the commercial solutions.
