This probably falls into the category of weird hobbies. Friends have asked me about it, so I figured it was time to write it down. Some history I grew up in the 80s and cassettes were a big part of how I experienced music. I remember recording bits of radio shows to create my own mixtapes. Furthermore, I also recorded records of friends and relatives to play on my Walkman. ...
A big post today, as last week I was distracted by too many puppies. I caught up with my podcasts and there is some good stuff like the Dunbar one. Also a small section about my cassette tape problem. Management Robin Dunbar makes the case for human connection [Podcast] - sometimes one forgets that there are people behind things like the Dunbar Number. ...
I like looking at pictures of other people’s office set-ups. With most people working from home at the moment you see more and more nice workspaces especially tuned for video conferencing. I was lucky enough to have a space and a reasonable set-up already. By chance I also had ordered bits and pieces before everything was sold out on Amazon. There are a few things I still want to improve. The light is not ideal for video conferencing and I am also going to try a separate microphone for better sound. ...
Today I finally finished digitizing all of my techno and house cassette tapes. It took me a little bit over two months. Here are some statistics: 290 “a” sides 278 “b” sides (sometimes the tapes broke after the first side) 12 tapes which unusable 41 tapes which turned out to be copies of CDs which are available to buy 5 tapes were copies of stuff I have also on CDs which are not available to buy 8 tapes had unreadable labels 249 GB in 16 bit 48khz WAVE files the whole list I probably still have some tapes flying around somewhere and my girlfriend also has some, but the vast majority of my music is digitized now. The music is mainly mixed techno and house DJ sets, from my friends like DJ Gomez, Motik and Nitin. A lot of sets are recorded from radio like HR3/HRXXL and Hithouse Stuttgart and in clubs around Stuttgart and Cologne. The most popular DJs are Sven Vaeth, Roland Casper, Richie Hawtin, DJ Hello, Dag, and Laurent Garnier. ...
My current home office setup. The newest addition is the Samsung 245b 24" 1920x1200 TFT display. It is probably not the best one around, but is pretty good for the stuff which I do, which is mostly programming. The main computer is an old Athlon XP 2400. I am currently waiting for replacement parts. I brought most of the stuff with me from London, which means it is from 2003 or older. At the moment the machine is running Fedora 9, but will be upgraded to Fedora 10 once it is out and the parts arrive. I think the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is the only Microsoft product I use. It is the UK version, because I can’t get used to the local versions. The mouse is a Logitech G9, just upgraded from a G5. I am not sure about the G9 just yet, the previous mouse somehow feels better in my hand. ...