Matthew Hurst

Sometimes the music might be great but it’s not helped by the blurb on the website…

EG this from a Bandcamp recommendation: “a tender suite of German trio jazz tinged with Mongolian long song”.

More as I get it.

#MusicSky #wankymusicblurbs

I just watched the BBC Celebrity one, and it was laced with celebs getting emotional and saying how cruel and emotional it was (they were paid UKP40k each btw), but you know - it’s just a game. A wildly camp game. With a huge production crew around them. And lest we forget, nobody gets killed. They get given a piece of paper, saying ‘your work here is done’ and they go home to their families. Nobody is being kind, nobody has anything to feel guilty about. These are people who perform on TV for a living performing on TV to be paid. With (mostly) their mates.

And it’s not about the psychology. Anyone with ten minutes attention to the study of human interactions knows we’re terrible at spotting liars. There no interactions we don’t see. Nobody has enough information to make any judgements about anything.

It’s all entirely arbitrary. The hysteria reminds me of the ancient Noel Edmonds ‘game’ show, Deal Or No Deal, with its bullshit about odds. There were no odds. Every single round was a straight 50/50 guess.

I understand that isolating a bunch of people in a house can result in those people getting some kind of group hysteria but let’s not overstate it: the Stanford Prison Experiment was largely fake, let’s remember. But FFS, this was a silly, camp game show. Calling it cruel, stewing in manufactured ‘guilt’, or pretending it offers some kind of psychological insight is just TV’s usual self aggrandisement.

Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great questions. 2. We know you just mean ‘ohhhh pick me, I can answer that one’. 3. It’s patronising. Just answer the question. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Read: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 This is how you write popular science: engaging, clear, authoritative. Stories, weirdness and passion. It’s about how the sea works - the depths and shallows, the currents, the chemistry, the thermodynamics. An all time favourite. #booksky #bookstodon

Sometimes I’m just in the wrong mood when I listen to a musician for the first time, so I like to go back and listen again months later. I just tried #Coldplay again, and still nope. I’m sure #chrismartin is a lovely man, but his music is still shit and bland. #musicsky

I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my dualbooting laptop with my data in its own partition, so LibreOffice on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux are accessing the same files. Then I want those files from that partition to sync to the cloud, whether I’m using Linux or Windows.

Not feeding AI, and keeping my stuff private in general would be great, but at this point I’m ready to settle for ‘Just Works’ which seems to be beyond the abilities of any cloud services.

Here’s my experience:

• OneDrive: takes over Windows and doesn’t have proper sync on Linux
• iCloud: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app
• Google: uses weird strings of characters for filenames in Linux to work with them, and this screws up access from other systems. Also, it’s Google.
• @pCloud : in Linux, doesn’t automount, and when it does mount, frequently doubles up. Flakey integration with file managers.
• Filen: flakiness in general and similar mounting problems. Plus the company doesn’t seem the stablest.
• Mega: persistently duplicating files by uploading them from both Linux and Windows, effectively halving my available space and introducing syncing issues. Their support is currently being slow and obtuse.
• Dropbox: horrendously expensive
• Box: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app

I want to use Linux, because it’s a Good Thing, but it seems to be the weak link here. If I didn’t use Linux, then OneDrive, iCloud, Google and Box would be fine. Probably the others too.

And no, not gonna self host or spend ages tweaking bash scripts on Linux. That sounds like even more of a nightmare.

#Linux

The other thing that’s putting me off Linux at the moment is the flakey cloud services. Theoretically, Ubuntu’s Network package should make it seamless with the big ones like Google but it does weird shit with filenames in practice, and seems inconsistent with offline access. I’ve tried pCloud, Filen and MEGA and they all have some combination of not mounting, not unmounting, duplicating mounts, costing stupid amounts, and seeming a bit flakey as a company.

I just want something I can set up and forget about. I don’t have the time, nerdy fanaticism or patience to mess around with scripts, rsync and rclone, and from what I’ve seen they need regular tending too. For the same reason, I’m not selfhosting.

Whereas on Windows (and Mac, when I used one), OneDrive, Google, iCloud, Box, and MEGA (and many others) Just Work and integrate seamlessly.

Yes I know MS, Google, Apple et al put obstacles in the way of small developers, and open source by its nature is full of plucky fighter for Free As In Speech And Beer - but still. I don’t want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync in the command line to get it to work.

Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the less exploitative sounding ‘colleague’ does not make this woman my colleague. I do not work with her. #asda #uk #TimesRadio

Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many ways the free-est country in the world flip into authoritarian Fascism in a few months. It’s going to change everything in the same way the fall of Communism did.

I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for synching mostly documents and photos across devices, and as an offsite backup. Not scraping for AI would be good, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What I definitely need is synching and mounting automatically. I mostly work on Win11 or Linux Mint laptop but being able to get at documents sometimes on my iPad and occasionally on my iPhone would be useful.

Currently, I’m using …

• Google Drive (100g) - works smoothly across Windows and iOS but flakey on Linux. Plus it’s, you know, Google.
• iCloud (50g) - Great on my iOS devices, integrates okay with Win 11, but clunky to the point of useless on Linux.

I also have an old legacy Box account.

I’ve tried pCloud but found it flakey in terms of mounting problems, and slow to update at times. It’s also a bit small and new which worries me when it comes to data security.

I’ve used OneDrive through employers in the past, but it seemed two chunky and corporate for my liking, and at one point it just didn’t have synching between devices. You had to reupload another file. I think they’ve got over that now but still not keen.

Currently giving Mega a trial because it looks to be best integrated across the various OSes.

Anyone have Thoughts?

I used to be a local journalist in East Anglia, UK, and I thought the whole Byline network was a really good idea - a model for funding grassroots, often investigative reporting, holding local councils to account, etc.

According to their website:

“We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in East Anglia and beyond.

East Anglia Bylines is a trading brand of Bylines Networks Limited which is separate to, but allied with, Byline Times.”

However, this was on their East Anglia Bylines BlueSky account this morning. (pic also attached).

And their website is full of similar slop: https://eastangliabylines.co.uk

It’s Reach PLC style indiscriminate ‘bung it out everywhere for social media clicks’. Much as I hate the orange manchild, this has nothing in particular to do with East Anglia, or what Byline was set up to do.

Have they been taken over? Are there VCs starting to tighten their financial leash? What’s going on? Have they been hacked?

On the lake

Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne KnowHow Book Of Spycraft. I too have this book and memorised it as a kid. When is it my turn to be C?

Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and bluster and not very bright. All he has left is lying to his base

I bought a stack of very cheap CDs yesterday at a stall at a Thing. They sound marginally better than Tidal High Quality but mostly, I can’t curate what’s on them. I can’t think about which playlist to add tracks to. I just have to listen to them. #MusicSky #Music

The world’s richest man and most powerful man bitching about each other like mean girls. Meanwhile the climate is in meltdown, there are at least 3 international confrontations that could lead to world wars, and dictators are seizing power everywhere. I’m off to watch Midsomer Murders.

My therapist once pointed out that ‘everyone is not your mother’ - ie don’t respond to everyone like they’re a malign narcissist. Dont let that dynamic dominate everything.

But that’s how the world seems to be reacting to Trump and his fascist minions. I heard a UK politician talk about the increasing price of eggs the other day. Egg prices haven’t increased much in the UK. They were picking up on US issues.

Trump and co consciously

The US media must be incredibly supine for this to be remarkable. That exact tactic is utterly normal in the UK

www.huffpost.com/entry/abb…

Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep people’s attention; that’s his remuneration. more than the money. He has to come up with more and more weird, demanding stuff to keep that attention. The rest is just a means to that end.

I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian politics, and anyway, it’s all mad and scary, and will happen whether or not I know about it.