Author Archives: skierpage

About skierpage

As you might guess, my site is mine. My Schema.org info is at .

music: Crosby not Stills, Nash, and Young

Posted on 2023-01-28 by skierpage

Jeff Beck died, now David Crosby. So I listened to If Only I Could Remember My Name, his solo album. It’s beyond star-studded, Wikipedia: “Guest musicians on the album include Graham Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and members of Jefferson … Continue reading →

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music: Tuesday Heartbreak attempts

Posted on 2023-01-26 by skierpage

One of the pure joys of going through Stevie Wonder’s incredible 6 album run was rediscovering the perfect rainy-day funk of “Tuesday Breakup.” I was in a store and heard the song, but wait! it’s Macy Gray. It turns out … Continue reading →

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eco: nuclear and decarbonizing electricity

Posted on 2023-01-24 by skierpage

If every country had followed France after the 1970 oil crisis, the world would be generating a majority of its electricity from low-carbon nuclear, and nuclear plants would have probably got cheaper and quicker to build so replacing the aging … Continue reading →

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audio: still looking for a replacement speaker

Posted on 2023-01-09 by skierpage

Five years later, I’m still listening to audio through a Chromecast Audio dongle plugged into my aging Jambox! I could get a soundbar, but they tend to be over 36 inches wide, too long to easily flip from facing my … Continue reading →

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computers: put the screen above a laptop

Posted on 2022-12-31 by skierpage

If you search for “external laptop monitor”, most images show a screen beside the laptop. So you have to look sideways at it, or use a separate keyboard. Some even show a tray raising the laptop to the screen height … Continue reading →

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music: Havona is a penthouse on the Mount Olympus of bass

Posted on 2022-12-20 by skierpage

Dirty Loops’ Henrik Linder (best Justin Bieber cover evar!), Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart, and YouTuber Charles Berthoud are all bass monsters in a golden age of musicianship. But “Havona” by Weather Report is a different level. In my memory Jaco Pastorius … Continue reading →

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AIs making images of music!?!! 🤯

Posted on 2022-12-19 by skierpage

Hi music fans. OpenAI’s Jukebox was generating music waveforms from scratch way back in 2020 (as I wrote). Since then, silence from OpenAI. I suspect half the music in Spotify’s “contemplative acoustic music for yoga/Pilates” and “mid-tempo EDM for hip … Continue reading →

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crypto exchanges are a predictable disaster

Posted on 2022-11-12 by skierpage

FTX and 130 related companies (!!) declared bankruptcy, losing billions in customers’ money. Wait, what? I thought the whole point of crypto is only you know the password (the key) to the string of numbers (the wallet), for which the … Continue reading →

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music: a chorus of Blackbirds

Posted on 2022-09-10 by skierpage

Did Paul McCartney know he wrote the greatest jazz standard since the golden age of the American songbook? The supremely confident moving bass line, the single note “Blackbird singing in the”, the early “dead of” leap in the melody, the … Continue reading →

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software: making it safer to run random programs

Posted on 2022-08-29 by skierpage

I was dubious about Google’s new Fuchsia operating system, but it has some very interesting ideas, including capability-based execution. Programs that can do nothing until you grant them capabilities are so much better – I hate downloading some Windows .EXE … Continue reading →

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