tiredof.technology

Summer is nearly over. Our garden has been in full swing with loads of cucumber, lettuce and some potato. My chilis are blooming and the tomatoes are growing. Next year all the berries should be more settled. I love the sounds of cicadas in the evenings and the bees buzzing around our wilded garden 24/7.

Other highlights:

• Spent early June on the beaches of Normandy with the famliy.
• THREE mixes are done for an upcoming collection of songs I’ve been gathering for release. This will be a massive weight off of my mind, body and soul… sort of a time capsule revisited.
• Biked along the canals and record shopped in Söderköping:
  • Swans Children of God in VG
  • The Cramps Smell of Female in VG+
  • The Alan Parsons Project Vulture Culture in VG+
• After some experiments in generating this site using shell and pandoc I managed to quickly bend Jekyll to my will and spin up a CI/CD with Codeberg Pages + Forgejo to publish here ¹.
• Reading has been sluggish this year for reasons… at the moment I’m bouncing between Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman graphic novel and Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau by Kevin Dann.

All in all, most of the summer has been away from the computer. More and more I’m embracing the Luddite lifestyle. I’m so fucking sick of tech, tech companies, tech execs, Slop, social media, and on and on and on and on…

Music Recommendations:

I re-discovered True Widow, it’s not groundbreaking but it’s a solid interpretation of my favorite genres. There’s also a new Durutti Column, while I used to love Vini’s vocal songs, I prefer the non-vocal on this album. Where Rivers Meet by Your Brothers Keeper & Gary Bartz will probably be jazz album of the year (for me). Otherwise It’s been a very 70’s/80’s soft rock summer, there’s something very comforting about that sound.

Makaya McCraven live at Fasching.

It’s not often I splurge on Bandcamp Fridays like I did this round. I even opted for a vinyl copy of Viewpoint by People in Orbit.

The other releases were digital and consisted of:

• La La Lars - LILLA LARS
• Janel Leppin - Slowly Melting
• Janel Leppin - Ensemble Volcanic Ash: Pluto In Aquarias
• no artist - unknown artist 未知艺术家 (mainly for the backstory)

Tangerine Dream is a journey, not a destination. How one begins to… ahem synthesize… a catalogue of ~160 releases since the groups inception down to a 2 hour set is beyond me and a problem I wish I had. I really enjoy this era, Thorsten is amazing at keeping the spirit alive and moving forward.

Tortoise at Fasching.

Recollections of the setlist in no particular order:

• “Tin Cans & Twine”
• “Layered Presence”
• “Djed”
• “Glass Museum”
• “Ten-Day Interval” (Encore)
• “I Set My Face to the Hillside”
• “Vexations”
• “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Women and Men”
• “Along the Banks of Rivers” (98% sure this was played)
• “Promenade à deux” (75% sure this was played)

While I’m not really into new years resolutions, I do have a few goals that come to mind for 2026:

• More nature walks.
• Less consumption, more creation.
• Fix my deteriorating reading habit.
• Move off my aging Synology and Docker to a repurposed workstation I have 100% control over. I’ve installed and begun dabbling in FreeBSD with its much more efficient Jails feature.
• Finish the build script for this site so I can autogenerate the index, a standalone post and RSS feed!

Obviously, what’s eating up my soul and humanity is the fact that I haven’t released any new music in a long, long, excruicatingly long time. It’s not a “task” one can just bullet point, so I lay mention to it here as a reminder to myself.

A few years ago, I bought a portable Zoom microphone for capturing all sorts of sounds for use in music which I still haven’t fully embraced. Perhaps I need a bag that’s always ready to go with headphones, mic, pen, notebook and a book that I can grab on my way out.

It happened… I turned 40 last week… time flies. I figured I should write a little something commemorating the occasion. To temporarily numb reality, I treated myself to two pedals. The first is a new TC Electronic “Infinite Sample Sustainer” along with a used Wampler “Ego” compressor I managed to come across in great condition (including the box).

To be honest, I’m not really bothered by my age. I’ll take 40 over being a teenager any day. Here’s to (hopefully) another 40 years!

I got to sit up close and witness the brilliance of Jasper Høiby’s 3Elements live at Fasching in what turned out to be a somewhat unpublicized and intimate show.

Set list (from memory, so not in order, was too immersed):

• “Illusion of Choice”
• “Fluid” which did lead into…
• “Like Water”
• “What it means to be Human”
• “Flying”
• “Never Forgotten” (in honor of his sister whom he lost recently)
• I think “Breathless” was played…
• “Her Deepness,” he mentioned thinking about long range swimmers who spend days in the ocean.

Fire! came to my attention after the unfortunate death of Steve Albini. Bandcamp put out a list containing loads of great records he recorded and Fire! was one of the many (new to me) that stuck out. Hailing from Sweden I figured they’d pop up at some point. A slow burn ending in an explosion.

If you haven’t read about “Taco Bell” programming I suggest you read Ted’s post in full. It’s short and enlightening, trust me.

Otherwise, here’s the basic idea:

Every item on the menu at Taco Bell is just a different configuration of roughly eight ingredients. With this simple periodic table of meat and produce, the company pulled down $1.9 billion last year.

The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set.

Read more

The family took a brief visit to the Elektronmusikstudion installation at Scenkonstmuseet this past weekend. The museum was free the entire month of January so it was quite busy… I plan on going back.

Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm is one of the world’s oldest and most prominent centres for electronic music and sound art. This is the story of a utopian vision of the future, new technology that will save the world, and a major national initiative in electronic music.

Among a lot of tech I was already familiar with was a curious company called Dataton. I had never heard of Dataton until this visit, these modules were primarily targeted at schools for educational purposes. Unfortunately, the goal of getting a System 3000 to every school was derailed by a right-wing government.

The Dataton 3000 was a modular system designed by Björn Sandlund in the early 1970’s. The system was small and portable Any number of units could be connected in any order, so that they interacted just how the user wanted. The idea was that schools could use it in their teaching and they did, all across Sweden. Later on, the company Dataton also developed control systems for slide shows - a genre that came to be of great significance for the electronic music scene in Sweden.

I read a lot of tech history. Just this year I’ve wrapped up the founding of Compaq, microcomputers in 80’s Britain and am about done reading a very thorough history of Commodore.

It probably sounds crazy to the unimaginative mind but I often get quite jealous, not so much nostalgic, of those who were able to experience the heyday of the microcomputer boom. Not because of any future riches (most companies went bust or were gobbled up on the cheap) but the fact that these computers (either assembled from a kit, pre-built or built from scratch) were a foundation, not a pre-packaged experience. The word “liberating” comes to mind.

Not only did people no longer have to pay for the use of a computer (notice how we’ve already gone full circle here with “cloud computing?”) but these could sit in their homes. They could be extended, tweaked, optimized, bent and on and on. A working embodiment of the individual, not the corporation.

What does it even mean to “compute” these days? Consume? Already a generation is growing up never once having to open up their device to fix or install new hardware. Even Linux has much better hardware support and flashy UI’s out of the box. More often than not, they are handed the “experience” and sold a “lifestyle” to which there is no VIP backstage access.

I think often about the “low-tech/high-tech” in Star Wars. All their devices seem to be very focused, highly repairable and interoperable. Anyone can hit up the Jawas and find a part to fix this or that and most seem to have enough knowledge to go it alone without needing to chase down a warranty or sit on an AppleCare line only to be told it’s “no longer supported” or… god forbid… “VINTAGE.”