shinyhappyrainbows

A personal Reflection, can't be arsed crossposting, so read the full article here on my reflective blog . Electric bicycles don't need illegal power, if you're young and healthy, you don't need an e-bike but, if you have poor health, with or without riding, e-bikes are like a wheelchair for your mojo. Enjoy.

From the department of "For Want of a Better Title" Nebraska: Bruce Springsteen, source = wikimedia Last week, 'scuze my moment of SQUEEEEEEE , Mary Spender distributed an article of mine in her 21st Century Musician newsletter. Yes, she has a newsletter, you can subscribe here . Sorry, just a bit more squeeeeee... Mary is a musician after my own heart but, where the tools I had at her age were cassettes and CDs, she has Youtube, streamers and an album for download. She also grew up in the UK, rather than my little cultural backwater of Tasmania, so her reach gives me heart for the future of music. She sees music like I do. (Or do I see it like her? I'm only a retired pub rocker. I see it like she does, yes, that's it.) She sees the inequity and exploitation and rather than giving up on music or accepting the ripoffs and broken bones AC/DC sang about in the 70s, she is advocating. And she is enlisting her fellow independents to advocate with her. That's par

Spotify and I are now at war. Artist accounts have no delete buttons. My distributor, RouteNote have removed my "Secrets of The Hand" songs from distribution to all paid streaming services, yet Spotify are still displaying them for play. I have issued a Takedown Claim, they have rejected it. So what's a po' boi left ta do? I've "vandalised" my Spotify profile as per the image, above. I'm grinning like a twit right now. I didn't get the nickname, "Crunchy" for nothing... Do us a favour, drop a comment below if the link shows the image taken down.

I have this idea to "toob" cycling and walking in Melbourne, Australia. That's it up there, the title of this blog entry. The idea came about last year while I was training for my "weekend adventures", the latter an idea that has been, well, troubled because of my health causing me to struggle to get anything like the necessary fitness. Meanwhile, I've persisted in trying to get back to cycling longer distances, but 30km (20 miles) feels like a brick wall. I used to be able to tour 100km (60 miles), camp, then do another 100km, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat... It feels like it was ripped from me, but I persist with training, finding lower traffic routes for the peace and quiet, and looking for ways to use this training time for another tube channel. I've been doing a lot of urban "rat runs" on the bike but don't like the connotations of post holocaust Nazis in that term. Today, it came to me while contemplating Doctors Without Border

A friend sent me a link to a Naomi Kritzer short story on Clarkesworld, today - Better Living Through Algorithms." It's a quite true-to-life and amusing tale about a group of friends and a new app. Not my usual style of sci-fi preference, but it had me hooked from the start. There was something in the tone that hooked me before my too-cool-for-school 'tude could get in the way, and I'm really pleased that happened. Look, read it for yourself but the #tldr is this:- Linnea, June and Margo are friends having lunch and June explains her new social media app, Abelique, that "has changed her life." She's happier than she's ever been and feeling fulfilled, achieving day-to-day things easily and efficiently, thanks to the app. Of course, Linnea and Margot are skeptical. Margot dismisses it with, "It sounds like a cult." And it actually does a bit. Linnea returns to the office after lunch and her boss insists she and her colleagues use the app beca

Over at McPherson Music They have a no-power-required, signal boost pedal, the "Golden Gizmo." It's more of a crunchbox than a fuzzbox but, in his youtube video , Waylon McPherson details how this pedal makes clever trade-offs on bandwidth, to create a stronger signal, using a "common or garden variety" audio impedance matching transformer with secondary (low impedance) as the primary, and vice-verse. Essentially "the wrong way round." He also details some extra mods (2 transformers, clipping diodes) to give it more versatility. Waylon's circuit is basically one transformer, a switchable diode circuit for optional clipping and a level pot with a bypass capacitor for a bit of filtering. It provides a little over 3dB of gain on a typical guitar signal. Enough to drive a weak amplifier to a little crunch. You can buy the circuit diagram from Waylon here. The transformer circuit itself is electrical engineering 101. Playing with impedances, basical