busybee: Entries for 2022/11 — 2022/12 (30)

I suppose I should do my daily dump of $INSERT_ALLITERATIVE_D_WORD_HERE

In the aftermath of the issues with the major social media platforms, there have been a number of initiatives to reclaim social networking in a way that makes sense for people, with safety and personal control being at the forefront of a lot of peoples' minds.

However, many of these initiatives which have often showed up out of the blue have a bunch of red flags, and somehow people aren’t noticing them when they decide to commit wholeheartedly to a new platform. I think it’s worth sharing some of those warning signs, as someone who’s been around the block a few times.

PSA: If you’re running Komplete on an M1 Mac under a DAW which supports an Intel/Rosetta plugin bridge (such as Logic), DO NOT update Komplete Kontrol to v2.8.0! This WILL break compatibility with any Reaktor or Battery instruments you’re using! (As well as any other legacy Intel VST2s that you’re hosting by Komplete Kontrol for whatever reason.)

Komplete Kontrol 2.7.2 still runs under the Rosetta bridge, but 2.8 has been updated to be M1-compatible — but Battery and Reaktor HAVE NOT yet, and they’re not expecting to have those updated for a few more months.

There are a few workarounds:

1. Launch your DAW under Rosetta (and lose your CPU performance everywhere)
2. Convert the Komplete Kontrol plugin to directly use Reaktor/Battery (and lose NKI and preset browsing)
3. Perish (or, y'know, wait for the plugins to update, same diff really)
4. Update: Native Instruments were kind enough to provide a download of v2.7.2 for those who need it

This year I managed to do 25 out of 30 tracks, and some of them were even used in games!

I’ll be releasing the Bandcamp version of the album on Friday (which is, of course, Bandcamp Friday), and if you wait until then to buy it I get the full purchase price. (Better yet, buy my entire discography and receive a crapton of music spanning over 20 years of releases!)

Another day of remodeling!

Today had some pretty big progress: countertops!

Today all of the work was happening off-site, with the fabrication of my countertops. But! The new fan controller arrived, and I took the initiative to (partially) install it myself, to get it tested. It works, and it means that now there’s a path forward to update the outlet by the stove as well.

Not a lot of visible progress today, but a lot of progress has been made!

Things are continuing to go great and I am kind of annoyed at how impressed I am with how smoothly this one is going. Have I actually gotten a competent crew for once?!

I think this counts as day 4 (the “catastrophe” post having covered day 3). Things are going smoothly. In particular, some stuff finally arrived and things are moving floor-ward! I mean, forward.

So, almost every single home renovation project I’ve ever had has had something go very wrong.

In this one, everything’s been going quite smoothly, except:

1. The flooring was supposed to arrive on Thursday, then it got delayed to today, now it’s delayed to tomorrow, and the contractors can’t move forward until the flooring is in hand (and they’re getting restless) EDIT: Oh right they did get some painting done (specifically applying a primer coat everywhere)
2. On Friday I tripped over some of my stored clutter and injured myself worse than I’d realized at first (although not nearly as badly as it could have been!), so now I have impaired mobility and also a rather nasty scrape on my left shin which seems to be slightly infected (which is painful but doesn’t seem like it needs direct medical attention just yet)

Basically, if this can be the worst that happens on this project, I’ll be pretty happy. Thankfully it doesn’t seem like much else can go wrong, unless there’s some awful secret lurking in the laundry room (which is quite possible).

Today was my last day using Twitter, unless something changes entirely. I have done the following, and suggest others do the same:

• Went through all of my connected applications to make sure that everything that I was using Twitter to log into now has a username/password login; the only two things I couldn’t fix on my own were Webtoon (which I don’t care about) and Imgur (which I hardly ever use), so hopefully I can get their respective support folks to help me out
• Disabled my ifttt Twitter autopost stuff, so this blog entry will not show up there
• Disabled my Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter connection
• Folded my indieweb.social account into my actual Mastodon account, since there were a bunch of people following me on one but not the other, and the only reason I had the indieweb.social one was for Twitter-crossposting purposes
• Discovered I had literally hundreds of pending follow requests from mastodon.social, mostly spammers or thrown-away “just checking out Mastodon” posts from a year or two ago, gah
• Posted a transitional post to my #novembeat thread which moves my remaining posts over there; however I’m not sure if this will actually work, because of how Mastodon threads work, and I might have to just start a new thread or something