Andy Ferguson

Fragments of thought

It’s November, and like a lot of other people I’m attempting to write 50,000 words. At least 40,000 of those are going to be fiction (hopefully more), but I thought it was also worth trying to write down the other things in my head – the things that don’t really belong in a piece of fiction. I have no intention of posting them all here, but I thought a few fragments based on the sort of things I usually write in this blog wouldn’t hurt.

Things I have done this week have involved writing, a small bit of housework, and a few hours in front of the TV (watching Hemlock Grove, a bit of Once Upon a Time and all of Mr. Robot). The latter has some themes that are quite close to what I’m writing, which made me consider stopping what I was working on (I didn’t). I also answered some questions (via email) for a website related to the http://nownownow.com/ movement. I should probably update my /now page to say that answering questions about things like this is generally something I’m willing to do (I love being interviewed).

I’m listening a lot to old Cardiacs records this week. I’ve also found some complete concerts on YouTube which I’m enjoying very much.

My Rough Trade album of the month is Elaenia by Floating Points. I love it, and it sounds a lot better than the description. I like discovering new artists in this way, although I’m a little miffed that the vinyl version won’t arrive until after I’m back at work, and will therefore involve a trip to the post office.

I’m now watching this recording of the Masada String Trio from 1999 – time to catch up on the hundreds of hours of concert footage I’ve downloaded from YouTube over the last few months. The software I use is called youtube-dl (you can get it for Linux or OS X).

One day I’ll get round to writing a blog post about my musical heroes; people I’ll buy/listen to everything they have ever done. Joy Division/New Order, The Cure, British Sea Power, Cardiacs, Red House Painters/SunKil Moon, Jim O’Rourke and John Zorn. Maybe a few others as well, but these will probably have to be the main ones. I suspect this would be a very long piece of writing (10 pages +). I might want to talk about my teenage Felt fixation, and probably throw in a bit of House of Love/Wedding Present related writing as well. I also suspect people will realise exactly how much music I own if I write this post, and also how much some of it is worth (I have New Order and Cardiacs CDs/cassettes that I could sell for above £50 each right now).

Also a post about my vinyl buying experiments, and what you get for your £20 (which varies greatly depending on the artist/record company). Also some of them are a lot less than £20 now which pleases me (I’m waiting for my 1st sub-£10 record purchase in many years to arrive – a re-pressing of Joy Division’s Closer).

I think John Grant wins the “what you get for your £20” competition right now. Double album, CD version included, plus a bonus CD and an insert containing a load of really nice artwork.

Closer arrived, and it’s gorgeous. An exact replica of the 1980 vinyl, with sound from the 2007 remaster. Best of both worlds. Ian Curtis hung himself just after making this record, but listening to it always fills me with hope.

I’m listening to Felt’s The Splendour of Fear. One of the first records I ever bought, and something I love, but would probably never recommend to another human being. Six tracks, four of them instrumentals, clocking in a little over 30 minutes.

I am not sure I’m going to write anything today apart from this. The story I’m writing has hit a brick wall in that I’ve written a whole load of fragments, edited them together into three sections, and now I can see the narrative and chronology starting to form. I’m not sure what else to do though – it’s not clear enough for other people to understand, and so many sections need fleshing out more and rewriting in a more descriptive style. I’ve also got whole chapters that are just dialogue – probably more dialogue than other people write. I think I’ve probably written something that needs to exist in a variety of formats – novel, poem, play, movie, interactive adventure. But I also think it’s not original enough, and that I’ve managed to drag a few things into the chronology that I wasn’t expecting (like the way it’s turned out to be a Grail quest, like everything I write does, it seems).

My process for creating art (of any kind) is largely the same. Improvise fragments, juxtapose the fragments until their context to other fragments gives them meaning, and then take that as a starting point to flesh it out into a finished piece. It’s what I do with music, and writing, and pretty much everything I create. The finished product is just a synthesis of distinct parts that work due to their proximity to other parts. Also known as “there is no perfect chord” (sorry Leonard).

I’m listening to the new Grimes album on Spotify. I’ve read a few reviews of this record, and thought I’d have to actually listen to it as the reviews are really not that helpful (in that no-one can agree whether it’s a good record, whether they like it, what sort of music it’s meant to be). I’ve only listened to it once, but my first impression is that I like it, I’ll listen to it again, and that it’s intelligent pop music that utilises a really varied sonic palate. It’a also on 4AD, who have a habit of never releasing bad records (I may be a little biased as many of my favourite musicians have some sort of link with 4AD). I think the Quietus review does the best job (as it often does), although some of the comments are horrible.

My nownownow.com profile page went live last night. I should get round to writing something about this movement soon, because I think it’s really important.

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.

New Music : September 2015

September was a month where I spent a lot of time at work and not a lot of time listening to music. Many evenings I found myself listening to Max Richter’s From Sleep as a way of winding down from a long and busy day, but I also watched a lot of TV (Lie to Me and a fair bit of sport), and well as being pleasantly surprised by New Order’s new record which arrived right at the end of the month. I think this review sums up my thoughts fairly well. The rest of these I’ve listened to a few times whilst commuting, but have not spent the time with them that I would have liked.

Widowspeak – All Yours
Max Richter – From Sleep
Royal Headache – High
Yo La Tengo – Stuff Like That There
Beirut – No No No
Ben Folds – So There
Chvrches – Every Open Eye
New Order – Music Complete
Ought – Sun Coming Down
The World is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die – Harmlessness

Downtime

I’m particularly busy right now. It’s traditionally my busiest time of the year anyway, but it also seems like every project I’m working on is at a stage where it could easily become a full time job. I’m very conscious of this though, and I try and make sure that when I do get a whole day off then I do as little as possible to ensure I recharge my batteries.

As people who know me well will attest, I’m terrible at doing nothing. And so when I have one of these days where my calendar is empty then the best I can hope for is to spend my time doing things I wouldn’t normally have time for.

So far today I’ve watched a football match on TV (Everton’s demolition of Chelsea), read two books (Paul Auster’s Invisible and Neil Gaiman’s script for Day of the Dead), started a third book (Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade), and eaten some very tasty Indian food. I’ve also listened a a few records, as well as Beirut’s new album on Spotify. I’ve also done a little editing on a very long blog post that will be going out soon, and am now sitting in my study writing this before I settle down in front of the TV with a large G&T and a small dog.

This is probably the least I’ve done in a single day for a few weeks, and it’s certainly the least I’ll do for a few weeks following this weekend. But I know that September is generally a month where I have to pretend to be an extrovert more often than usual, and so when I do get some downtime then I need to make sure I’m sensible about spending my time doing things that actually make me feel better.

New Music : August 2015

This month I largely listened to my vinyl collection, including about a week where I had Jim O’Rourke’s Simple Songs on loop. I also (re)discovered Jethro Tull’s Passion Play (both on vinyl and the Steven Wilson remastered version), and have had a bit of a New Pornographers/Sea and Cake binge. As a result, I listened to very little music that was actually released this month until the last few days of the month, after which time things went back to normal.

Mac Demarco – Another One
Georgia – Georgia
Paul Smith and the Intimations – Contradictions
The Phoenix Foundation – Give up Your Dreams
Pere Ubu – The Pere Ubu Moon Unit (not on Spotify playlist)
Drinks – Hermits on Holiday
Frog Eyes – Pickpocket’s Locket
Tempel – The Moon Lit Our Path
Destroyer – Poison Season
The Bohicas – The Making Of
C. Duncan – Architect
Eleventh Dream Day – Works for Tomorrow
Toro Y Moi – Samantha (not on Spotify playlist, but available for free)

Georgia’s debut album was a bit of a bolt out of the blue. I’d not heard of her until I received the album through the post from Rough Trade, but it is pleasantly different to most of what I listen to, and very much a record for 2015.

Destroyer, Mac Demarco, Paul Smith, Eleventh Dream Day and Frog Eyes are safe bets for me. I own record by all five artists already, and between them they nicely cater for my need for interesting and intelligent song-based music. All of these records may very well be career highlights, and I’m particularly pleased that Poison Season doesn’t disappoint after the very high benchmark of Kaputt.

C. Duncan, Drinks, Tempel and The Phoenix Foundation I’d not heard of until this month, but are well worth a listen. Tempel remind me a bit of Pelican, who feature heavily in my Post Rock Classics playlist.

And then there is Pere Ubu. They are another band I own a lot of music by, and (very much like The Fall) I always try and listen to everything they put out. This one is a very short live (I think) record, but it’s interesting for fans (and probably not that interesting to anyone else). As an aside, I also picked up their Cloudland on vinyl for for a lot of money, and have been remembering listening to Waiting for Mary when it first came out (1989?) and thinking it was one of the best songs ever written. It’s not, but it still brings back fond memories of summer and childhood and the period of time where I was starting to discover more alternative music.

Converting documents using Pandoc

I’ve recently found myself needing to do a lot of document conversion, and maintaining documentation that needs to be available in a variety of formats (HTML, Word documents, Markdown and PDF). My tool of choice for this sort of thing is Pandoc, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, although most of my usage so far has been on Linux (it’s a command line package that outputs to Dropbox, so it doesn’t matter where it runs really).

There are instructions for installing Pandoc on quite a few platforms. I’ve found that following these is generally enough, although it’s worth installing the latest version of the .deb packages rather than the one in the Debian repositories which does odd things to some of my html.

Pandoc works for me because I write everything in markdown, and Pandoc is great at taking markdown and converting it into almost anything else. The syntax is fairly simple for most document types:

For example:

pandoc input.md -s -o output.docx
pandoc input.md -s -o output.html
pandoc input.md -s -o output.epub

Conversion to PDF works the same, although I’m not a fan of wide margins, so I tweak it slightly:

pandoc -V geometry:margin=1in input.md -s -o output.pdf

If you’re using Pandoc on Mac OS X there is one more command you’ll need to issue prior to the first time you want to create a PDF file:

sudo ln -s /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex /usr/local/bin/

This will ensure Pandoc knows where to find pdflatex. If this step isn’t followed then you’ll likely get an error message along the lines of pandoc: pdflatex not found. pdflatex is needed for pdf output.

Pandoc does a lot more, but the documentation is great, and the commands above should be enough to get you started.

New Music : July 2015

July has been an odd month. It’s the first month for a while I’ve spent an extended period of time in one place, and I suppose the music I’ve listened to has reflected this. I’ve had more time to read blogs and websites and hunt out new and unusual things to listen to, and I’ve also spent a fair bit of time reading this month, which tends to require a more ambient and instrumental soundtrack.

It also strikes me I’ve listened to a lot of new music thing month; certainly more than any other month this year.

The full list of what I’ve discovered (and would recommend) is:

Ezra Furman – Perpetual Motion Music
Veruca Salt – Ghost Notes
OHMMS – Cold
Nordic Giants – A Seance of Dark Delusions
Carpet – Elysian Pleasure
Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge – Twelve Reasons to Die II
B Dolan – Kill the Wolf
Wilco – Star Wars
Tame Impala – Currents Anthonie Tonnon – Successor
Abyss – Pastel Ghost
Desaparecidos – Payola
Passion Pit – Kindred
Four Tet – Morning/Evening
Marsheaux – A Broken Frame
Toe – Hear You
Locrian – Infinite Dissolution
God is an Astronaut – Helios | Erebus

I’ve also caught up on a few things I missed earlier in the year, specifically Steven Wilson’s excellent Hand. Cannot. Erase. which is probably the most impressive vinyl release I’ve come across since I started buying records again.

August is another month of travelling (starting on 1st, and ending some time in early September), and I’m looking forward to exploring some of this music through headphones when I’m far away from home.

Upgrading the hard drive on a 2011 Mac Mini

I’m off work this week, and I thought it was about time I upgraded the hard drive in my Mac Mini to an SSD. I’ve had this machine for just under 4 years, and it’s been my main desktop computer throughout that time. As such it’s got a lot of data stored locally, and while it’s backed up in three different places it’s still a 4 year old hard drive that is getting a bit slow and clunky.

Replacing the hard drive in this model of Mac is tricky. It requires dismantling most of the computer, and also requires a couple of non-standard screwdrivers (T6 and T8 torx). Thankfully I found some great instructions, and didn’t run into any problems dismantling the computer, removing the drive, and putting in a new SSD.

The challenge with this upgrade was that I planned on migrating to a much smaller drive (500–>240) as as such I needed to organise my data in a different way. What I’d normally do with a drive replacement would be to back the whole drive up using Carbon Copy Cloner, replace the hard drive, and then restore the backup over the new hard drive. That’s served me well with many other upgrades, but it just wasn’t an option this time round.

Analysing what was on the hard drive, it soon became evident that there was a lot of music. Over 200Gb of music in fact (that probably doesn’t surprise anyone). There was also a lot of really old data that was backed up in lots of places, but which was from very old computers (over 10 years old at least). I decided to move the music to a dedicated partition on my external hard drive (500gb, to allow for expansion), and to accept that I probably didn’t need to waste hard drive space on 10 year old files that I had multiple other copies of.

That left about 90Gb of other files, or in other words less than 50% of the new drive. I was happy with that, and started the reinstallation process. I booted the Mac Mini from the clone I made earlier (thus testing that everything works fine, as well as giving me an environment to run the actually cloning task from). I formatted the SSD with Disk Utility, and created a custom Carbon Copy Cloner one-off task that excluded the whole of my music directory plus a few other things I didn’t want on the new drive. I chose the clone as the source, the new drive as the destination, and let CCC do the hard work.

30 minutes later it was done. I rebooted from the new drive and set about doing a couple of post-installation tasks. Firstly I enabled trim support on the new drive. Native support for this was rolled out in OS X 10.10.4, and it’s fairly simple to set up. I then rebooted to allow this to take effect.

I also needed to tell iTunes where it could find my music now. I opened iTunes with the ALT key pressed, and it asked me which iTunes library to use. I pointed it at the external drive, and it thought about it for a bit, and then opened with all my music exactly as it had been on the old drive. I then updated the CCC task I back up my music with to reflect these changes, re-enabled all my other backup tasks, and made sure Time Machine was happy with the new drive and that it could continue to do incremental backups. I ran each backup task manually and made sure data was being copied to the right places.

And that was all I needed to do. The computer feels significantly faster and more responsive, whilst still feeling very much like my computer. I also think that with maxed out memory and a decent sized SSD drive there probably isn’t anything else left to upgrade.