It was recently recommended to me to make a Newsletter to save my friends and group chats from being spammed constantly by the various things I come across that I find interesting. Now, I will be cold and dead in the ground before I voluntarily send out mass mail. Advertising/spam is one of the banes of my existence, so I thought I would try out the concept here instead and see how it goes. If you like it or thing I could add something, let me know in signal or at cenotaph.contact@pm.me. If you don't like it, then view my blog through this link and you will only see my technical guides, nothing of my personal opinions.
Now that that's out of the way, on to the main event!
Album/Band Recommendations That May Be New To You
(working title)These are not in any particular order or ranking. I don't really have "favourite" albums, just what's in the rotation at the moment for regular listening, but that changes pretty regularly because I love finding new artists and spend a good amount of time on music discovery.
Data Doom - Frankie and the Witch Fingers
Frankie and the Witch Fingers are a band out of Indiana I found through listenbrainz recently and have really been enjoying the rhythm section they have going, in particular the drummer, Nick Aguilar (current, there have been others). Their music falls into the realm of post-punk and psychadelic rock, but they have a style all their own that I think makes them a standout in both genres. This album is in my opinion one of the better "introductory" albums to first listen to if you've never heard them before, and it is one of my favourites in their discography. Worth listening through from start to finish.
3D Country - Geese
This one is fudging the "seen recently" part because I've been a Geese fan since this album came out in 2023, but I think it bears mentioning because it is easily one of my favourite albums of all time and I think they are criminally underrated (or at least they were when this album came out). Not a single song on the album that I don't like, or even one that I don't love. Big fan of these guys, if you can't tell.
Geese are another band that falls into the post-punk sphere coming out of Brooklyn, NY, but these guys have a very different sound to the Witch Fingers up above. Bringing in influences from Rockabilly to Gospel music to their music and maybe leaning a little into the experimental, Geese tends to focus on some really slick time changes and a lot of build and release with all-out vocals. I've come to expect great things from Geese and so far, they haven't disappointed.
Last year their lead singer, Cameron Winter, had a breakout solo album that brought them much more into popular culture. I know this because when I saw them in 2023, they were opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and the tickets were pretty easy to get. They came to my town this year and they were headlining, sold out real quick, and being resold for ~$550! Happy for Geese, sad for me.
Boys These Days - Sports Team
Sports Team are coming out of London, England, and are maybe more alt-rock than they are the experimental and punk from above. That said though, they bring a whole different kind of unique sound to the table that was something of a stylistic pivot from their last album, and I'm loving seeing their range. Their lead singer, Alex Rice, has a unique voice that complements the rest of the band's musical style exceptionally well.
While I feel that the first track on the album is definitely the weakest, it's worth listening to the album from start to finish, as I feel it's paced well. "Bonnie" is easily one of my top 5 tracks that came out this year, it won me over in like 10 seconds. Really, this whole thing was a breath of fresh air this spring when it released and it's remained in my rotation through the rest of the year.
Irrelevant to the music, but a fun fact about this band is that on the very first day of their US tour in 2024, shortly after entering the country, they were robbed at gunpoint of all their gear and their passports. "Sports Team vocalist Alex Rice recounted that onlookers seemed unfazed by the robbery, and drummer Al Greenwood claims the Starbucks employees simply "carried on with their shift". No officers arrived to investigate the robbery, and the band was advised to fill out an online form. The band was able to play their planned tour date in Sacramento, as their musical instruments were not among the items stolen in the robbery.1"
That's it for music this time, but if there's interest I'll keep it going and do a few more of these.
Science and Tech
For now, this is going to be a collection of links with some short details on why I think it was interesting and worth a look. I might develop it further in the future.
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First up we have a pretty cool 3D printing technology that I was hitherto unaware of: Gel Suspended 3D Printing. A new technique has been developed where the volume of the 3D printer's staging area is filled with a gel that allows for 3D printing without the use of supports, allowing things to be printed in interesting orientations or shapes that would have been more difficult to do with a full set of supports. See more here.
Yes, I know the Hackaday post is from May. But it's news to me, and maybe to you.
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Beszel is a fantastic tool for anyone who is regularly remoting into a headless server. It's a dockerized monitoring system, and one that can monitor multiple machines as well as identify docker containers and the resources that each of those docker containers are using as well. If you check out their homepage at the link you'll find pictures of all the nice graphs it gives you, and I honestly found it more easy to set up than many of the other options available for doing similar things. My only complaint about the software is I cannot find a way to get this damn thing to show time in anything other than UTC. If anybody figures it out, please let me know.
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ConvertX is another tool that I've been wanting to shout out for a while that I don't see a lot of talk about, but is also simple enough to set up that I really don't feel like making a guide for it would contribute anything to the existing documentation. This is a simple docker container to set up and selfhost that works as an all-in-one file converter combining a TON of tools. I'm going to list them here for dramatic effect:
- Inkscape
- libjxl
- resvg
- Vips
- libheif
- XeLaTeX
- Calibre
- LibreOffice
- Dasel
- Pandoc
- msgconvert
- dvisvgm
- ImageMagick
- GraphicsMagick
- Assimp
- FFmpeg
- Potrace
- VTracer
All of which are converter tools that can convert to and from several (if not many) file types. It puts them all together into an easy, drag-and-drop webUI. It's probably the tool I self host that is useful at random times in my life more than any of my other tools, other than maybe Jellyfin. Well worth checking out!
That's all for this time, if I do another one of these I'll make sure to drop in some more interesting science I come across, this one was a bit more of a spur of the moment thing so I don't have much prepared in that regard.
In any case, if you liked the albums I'd love to hear any recommendations you have! I am always looking for new artists, so feel free to DM me!