Month: October 2015

New Music : October 2015

October saw the release of a few records that will probably make my end of year list. It also saw the release of records by some of my favourite artists.

I’d been looking forward to the new John Grant record for a while, and it ended up being Rough Trade’s album of the month (as well as coming with a CD version, so I have 2 copies). Grey Tickles, Black Pressures sounds like the best bits of his first two records re-imaged, which is just fine by me, and even the pink and orange vinyl didn’t put me off too much. I suspect this is a record that needs repeated listens, and I also think that the variety of musical styles makes it the sort of record that would work on a random playlist.

At the same time I picked up a record by Protomartyr (about who I know very little). The reviews mentioned Joy Division, and it came on green marbled vinyl with a small pamphlet of lyrics and other artwork. The Agent Intellect is a classic 45 minute 12 song album that doesn’t stick around too long but is a perfect example of what it is trying to be.

I’m not going to write too much about The Twilight Sad, Joanna Newsom or British Sea Power. I own every album that each of these artists has made (and a fair few other things as well), so I’m certainly writing from the perspective of a fan. The Twilight Sad record is well worth a listen; the songs are familiar but the arrangements are more stripped down and intimate, and it acts as a nice companion to their last album (from which most of the songs are taken). Likewise, the BSP album is re-workings of old songs, with the addition of a brass band, which adds additional texture and a whole new twist on songs I’ve listened to many times before. Joanna Newsom’s record is all new, took 5 years to make, and is one to listen to on repeat and try and work out what it all means.

The full list is:

Eliza Rickman – Footnotes for the Spring
John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressures
Protomartyr – The Agent Intellect
Youth Lagoon – Savage Hills Ballroom
The Twilight Sad – Oran Mor
Yacht – I Thought the Future Would be Cooler
The Decemberists – Florasongs
Joanna Newsom – Divers (not on Spotify playlist)
British Sea Power – Sea of Brass (2nd disk not on Spotify playlist)

Probably the best single month of music so far in 2015 I think.

A short account of a three-day break

I’ve been off work for three days this week. I had some leave from last year that I needed to use, and this was the first opportunity to take it. I didn’t have much of a plan apart from to listen to some music, read a book or two, and catch up on the episodes of Doctor Who that I’ve been ripping from DVD to my NAS over the last few weeks.

So far I’ve made fairly decent leaps towards achieving those goals (although I’ve only watched a few hours of Doctor Who due to American Horror Story hitting Netflix on the first day of my break), but I’ve also been dabbling with various bits of technology that are probably worth a mention.

Mac OS X 10.11.1 hit on Wednesday, along with iOS 9.1. AS I have a few Macs and iOS devices, I spent an evening making sure everything was up to date, and also checking the integrity of my backups. iOS 9.1 saw the introduction of Apple News, which I browsed for an hour or so, closed down, and have not looked at again. This is probably something I’ll come back to, but at the moment I’m happy with the news I get through my RSS reader and probably don’t need any more.

Wednesday was also the day that I had a serious look at Pancake which combines Markdown and Dropbox (two things I love) and allows the hosting of decent looking websites with little more than a Dropbox account and a text editor. I made something with this that I’m fairly happy with, but that probably deserves a separate post.

Yesterday was Ubuntu release day. A few years ago I’d always take this day off work to install the new version (if I wasn’t running it already) and sit on irc and on various forums to deal with support questions. I did some of that yesterday, and also seeded torrents of the installation media for a few hours seeing as I wasn’t doing much else with my bandwidth.

Today I’ve done nothing technical at all, but did head in to town for an hour or so to pick up the new records from Joanna Newsom and The Twilight Sad. I figured that seeing as I’m off work I might as well go and collect them rather than having to listen out for the doorbell.

Building a budget computer

I’ve been meaning to set up a low-powered Linux machine for a while, but developing a new Ubuntu-based service at work made me realise that having something at home to experiment with would be useful. I wanted something with real hardware, but also something that wouldn’t use too much power or cost me too much money.

After a bit of research, I settled on a Gigabyte Brix BXBT-2807, which is a bare bones solution that requires a hard drive, memory, and an OS to complete. Amazon says that this model now costs £94.98, although with my Prime Now discount and another voucher it cost me just over £60. I chose this model because it’s got a USB3 port (as well as 2 USB 2 ports), and it outputs to both HDMI and VGA meaning I can use it with both my existing monitor and my TV. Size-wise it’s a roughly square black box that doesn’t look big enough to be a real computer, and which takes up about the same space as a Mac Mini (being much narrower but slightly taller).

I decided to make this machine as powerful as it could be, just in case I ever needed to use it to do anything more taxing than web development and a little light browsing. I already had a 128gb SSD (which would have added about £40 to the cost), but neither of the sticks of memory I had were suitable (one was too higher voltage, the other was only 2Gb and I wanted more than that). I ended up buying an 8gb stick for around £30, which maxes out this particular case as it only has one memory slot.

Assembly was straightforward, and just required a phillips screwdriver. Once I’d fitted the hard drive and memory I connected the computer to my existing monitor, plugged in a keyboard and mouse and booted it from an Ubuntu installation USB. It booted from the USB fine, and installation didn’t take too long at all. I went with 14.04 LTS because it’s what the machine at work is running, and I do enough software updates on my other machines without having something else that was on the bleeding edge.

All in all this machine is working well (and very well for the price). I needed to add a bluetooth adaptor to get my solar powered keyboard working (but I carry a couple of these with me anyway), and this computer seems incapable of connecting to a 5MHz wireless network, but these are the only two things that are sub-optimal, and are easily fixed with a bluetooth adaptor and an ethernet cable. I’m also very impressed with how fast this machine is, and even how quickly it will perform processor-intensive tasks like ripping DVDs.

So far I’ve set up a minimal Plex server on it, plus a LAMP development environment and the tools for making Ubuntu live USB installers. I’ve also used it for a couple of days for email/web browsing, and didn’t really notice that I was on a much less powerful machine.

I’m very pleased with how quick this was to set up, and it’s good to see that it’s possible to have a fully functional computer for under £150.