Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Not a Spotify Wrap-up

by

Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.

Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.

That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….

Top Artists

Top Artists 549 total artists 1 The Orb 137 minutes 2 Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes 3 4 Dolly Parton 128 minutes Orbital 124 minutes 5 Underworld 89 minutes 6 Bonobo 71 minutes 7 Hooverphonic 69 minutes 8 Imperative Reaction 64 minutes 9 Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes 10 Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes 11 VNV Nation 50 minutes 12 Seabound 50 minutes 13 Front Line Assembly 46 minutes 14 Rotersand 44 minutes 15 Icon of Coil 44 minutes

549 total artists

  1. The Orb 137 minutes
  2. Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
  3. Dolly Parton 128 minutes
  4. Orbital 124 minutes
  5. Underworld 89 minutes
  6. Bonobo 71 minutes
  7. Hooverphonic 69 minutes
  8. Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
  9. Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
  10. Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
  11. VNV Nation 50 minutes
  12. Seabound 50 minutes
  13. Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
  14. Rotersand 44 minutes
  15. Icon of Coil 44 minutes

I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!

Top Songs

Top Songs 872 total songs 1 BAD GUYS FEELIN' ALRIGHT ELLE KING Feelin' Alright (from... Elle King 8 plays 2 Wide Open The Crystal Method 6 plays 3 Cuts You Up Peter Murphy 5 plays 4 Came Back Haunted Nine Inch Nails 5 plays 5 Dial8 Velvet Acid Christ 5 plays 6 Modern Love David Bowie 7 5 plays HOOVERPHONIC 2Wicky Hooverphonic 5 plays 8 IMMA ATE Express Yourself (Edi... Madonna Madonna 5 plays 9 The Night (feat. Aliso... Röyksopp 4 plays 10 Underworld I Exhale Underworld 4 plays 11 12 13 14 15 SOME NIGHTS INVNATION AUTOMATIC Spock VCMG 4 plays Eraser E Nine Inch Nails 4 plays Some Nights E Fun. 4 plays Gratitude VNV Nation 4 plays Funk 4 Peace... Fort Knox Five 4 plays

Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.

So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

by

I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

📚 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

by

66/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1993 Hugo Best Novel

Technically a time travel book, but the time travel itself is kind of the least important part, little more than a hand-waved MacGuffin necessary to get the characters in the right places. From there, you have the dual stories of near-future and historical pandemics. And, of course, any pandemic-centric tale can’t help but be read somewhat differently now than it would have been five years ago. In some ways, the near-future part seemed rather prescient, referring to a prior flu pandemic that would have hit in the mid-2010s, only about a decade off from our COVID reality, or the presence of protesters blaming the government; in others, it now seems sadly naïve (now that we know that most people’s reaction to a pandemic too quickly turns to “meh” or outright denial rather than taking it seriously). Both stories are excellently handled, often with a subtle dry humor in the “present day” portion balancing the tragedies of the historical portion.

Me holding Doomsday Book

Year 50 Day 207

by

Screenshot of my DJ broadcast stream. I'm in the center, wearing headphones and looking up. Behind my head is an audio waveform; to either side of my head are album covers as if they were on physical turntables. A green border near the edges of the frame includes my DJ Wüdi name and my social media addresses (djwudi on Twitch, Mixcloud, and Facebook). Behind me is a sci-fi cityscape. Text on the lower part of the screen says 'Difficult Listening Hour 2023.11.25 Who knows? No plan. Just getting back in practice. Now playing: The Chemical Brothers: Where Do I Begin (Copycat)'.

Day 207: In a few months I’ll again be DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon 46, so to make sure I’m not entirely rusty when I set up that evening, it’s time for me to start practicing again. Whenever I do this, I broadcast to Twitch, and so this is what I look like when I’m streaming. Obviously, it’s very serious business.

I’m actually rather proud of the look I came up with some time ago, after a few rounds of tweaking and playing with ideas.

The “turntables” to either side of my head display the art for whatever track is playing (and they rotate as if they were physical turntables), and the audio waveforms behind my head are the waveforms of the playing tracks; deck A (the left side) on the top, and deck B below. Those elements are all pulled from the UI of DJay Pro, the DJ software I use.

The sci-fi cityscape behind me is actually a video clip. I have a small library of interesting looping video backgrounds that I can choose from.

The text in the bottom third is pulled from a text file that I keep open on my screen; as I’m mixing, I take a quick moment to update the text file with the name of whatever track I’m playing at the moment. I think there are ways to automatically pull that info from DJay, but I’ve never quite liked the look of the ones I’ve seen, and this works for me.

The caricature of me on the lower right was drawn for me a number of years ago by Sharii Chankhamma. In the original, I’m wearing an “NSFW” t-shirt; for streaming, I’ve created a small library of shirt designs that randomly update every 15 seconds.

Today’s mix is now available on my Mixcloud page if you’d like to give it a listen, along with many, many hours of other mixes I’ve uploaded in the past. And more will come — I may not do this every week, but I will need to make sure to get some more practice in over the coming months, so I’ll be popping up from time to time.

📚 Here There Be Dragons by John Peel

by

65/2023 – ⭐️⭐️

Possibly could have been an interesting take on the Preservers, or a fun TNG-crew-in-a-medieval-society romp, but was marred by bad character decisions (we must stay undercover in a medieval human society, so Geordi and Worf obviously can’t come, but sure, bring the Bajoran Ro and the android Data, that totally makes sense) and overly unfortunately stereotypical plotting decisions (Ro, of course, is nearly immediately stripped naked and placed in jeopardy of sexual assault, and Troi is later threatened with the same, because what other peril would women face?). Even the titular dragons barely make an appearance. Any interesting bits are far overshadowed by the rest.

Me holding Here There Be Dragons

📚 Uncanny Issue 55 edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, Monte Lin, and Betsy Aoki

by

63/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

My favorites this issue were Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine”, Cecil Castelluci’s “We’re Looking for the Best”, and John Scalzi’s “Speed Racer’s Long Road”, which actually has me thinking about rewatching Speed Racer, which I haven’t seen since it first hit video.

Me holding Uncanny Issue 55

📚 A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

by

62/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1993 Hugo Best Novel

This definitely holds up, and I really enjoyed re-reading it. From the concept of various zones where FTL travel (and higher technologies) are possible as they get further away from the center of the galaxy, to the exploration of group intelligence with the Tines (packs of dog-like creatures that are singular sentient entities when in packs of 4-6), it’s a really excellent read.

Me holding A Fire Upon the Deep

🎥 Mean Girls

by

Mean Girls (2004): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’d never actually seen this, so after coming across a trailer for the upcoming remake, we decided to watch the original. I knew I knew a little bit about it from years of cultural osmosis, but I hadn’t realized just how many quotes and memes came from this. It was fun to watch, definitely funny, and I can definitely see how it has stuck around. But I also noticed a lot of things that, in 2023, didn’t play quite so well, and will be interested to see how Tina Fey updates it twenty years later.