Search Results: "Jonathan Dowland"

4 March 2026

Jonathan Dowland: More lava lamps

photograph of a Mathmos Telstar rocket lava lamp with orange wax and purple water
Mathmos had a sale on spare Lava lamp bottles around Christmas, so I bought a couple of new-to-me colour combinations.
photograph of a Mathmos Telstar rocket lava lamp with blue wax in purple water
photograph of a Mathmos Telstar rocket lava lamp with pink wax in clear water
The lamp I have came with orange wax in purple liquid, which gives a strong red glow in a dark room. I bought blue wax in purple liquid, which I think looks fantastic and works really nicely with my Rob Sheridan print. The other one I bought was pink in clear, which is nice, but I think the coloured liquids add a lot to the tone of lighting in a room. Recently, UK vid-blogger Techmoan did some really nice videos about Mathmos lava lamps: Best Lava Lamp? and LAVA LAMPS Giant, Mini & Neo.

21 February 2026

Jonathan Dowland: Lanzarote

I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I've struggled. I've had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I've not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I'd try and bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get back into the swing. I'm writing from the lounge of my hotel room in Lanzarote, where my family have gone for the School break. The weather at home has been pretty awful this year, and this week is traditionally quite miserable at the best of times. It's been dry with highs of around 25 . It's been an unusual holiday in one respect: one of my kids is struggling with Autistic Burnout. We were really unsure whether taking her was a good idea: and certainly towards the beginning of the holiday felt we may have made a mistake. Writing now, at the end, I'm not so sure. But we're very unlikely to have anything resembling a traditional summer holiday for the foreseeable. Managing Autistic Burnout and the UK ways the UK healthcare and education systems manage it (or fail to) has been a huge part of my recent life. Perhaps I should write more about that. This coming week the government are likely to publish plans for reforming Special Needs support in Education. Like many other parents, we wait in hope and fear to see what they plan. In anticipation of spending a lot of time in the hotel room with my preoccupied daughter I (unusually) packed a laptop and set myself a nerd-task: writing a Pandoc parser ("reader") for the MoinMoin Wiki markup language. There's some unfinished prior art from around 2011 by Simon Michael (of hledger) to work from. The motivation was our plan to migrate the Debian Wiki away from MoinMoin. We've since decided to approach that differently but I might finish the Reader anyway, it's been an interesting project (and a nice excuse to write Haskell) and it will be useful for others. Unusually (for me) I've not been reading fiction on this trip: I took with me Human Compatible by Prof Stuart Russell: discussing how to solve the problem of controlling a future Artificial Intelligence. I've largely avoided the LLM hype cycle we're suffering through at the moment, and I have several big concerns about it (moral, legal, etc.), and felt it was time to try and make my concerns more well-formed and test them. This book has been a big help in doing so, although it doesn't touch on the issue of copyright, which is something I am particularly interested in at the moment.

3 February 2026

Jonathan Dowland: FOSDEM 2026 talk recording available

FOSDEM 2026 was great! I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links.

19 January 2026

Jonathan Dowland: FOSDEM 2026

I'm going to FOSDEM 2026! I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act! The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell. Please recommend to me any interesting talks! Here's a few that caught my eye: Debian/related: Containers: Research: Other:

17 January 2026

Jonathan Dowland: Honest Jon's lightly-used Starships

No man s Sky (or as it s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother s PS4 but I couldn t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch1 and the game finally clicked for me. I play it very casually. I mostly don t play at all, except sometimes when there are time-limited expeditions running, which I find refreshing, and usually have some exclusives as a reward for play. One of the many things you can do in the game is collect star ships. I started keeping a list of notable ones I ve found, and I ve decided to occasionally blog about them.
The Horizon Vector NX spaceship
The Horizon Vector NX is a small sporty ship that players on Nintendo Switch could claim within the first month or so after it launched. The colour scheme resembles the original neon switch controllers. Although the ship type occurs naturally in the game in other configurations, I think differently-painted wings are unique to this ship. For most of the last 4 years, my copy of this ship was confined to the Switch, until November 2024, when they added cross-save capability to the game. I was then able to access the ship when playing on Linux (or Mac).

  1. The game runs very well natively on Mac, flawlessly on Steam for Linux, but struggles on the origins switch. It s a marvel it runs there at all.

16 January 2026

Jonathan Dowland: Ye Gods

Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of that, and helps listeners to discover them. GetMusic mail me occasionally, and once they highlighted an album The Arcane & Paranormal Earth which they described as "Post-Industrial in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound with shades of Aphex Twin, Autechre and assorted film music." Well that description hooked me immediately but I missed out on the code. However, I sampled the album on Bandcamp directly a few times as well as a few of his others (Ye Gods is a side-project of Antoni Maiovvi, which itself is a pen-name) and liked them very much. I picked up the full collection of Ye Gods albums in one go for 30% off. Here's a stand-out track: On Earth by Ye Gods So I guess this service works! Although I didn't actually get a free code in this instance, it promoted the artist, introduced me to something I really liked and drove a sale.

28 December 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Our study, 2025

We re currently thinking of renovating our study/home office. I ll likely write more about that project. Embarking on it reminded me that I d taken a photo of the state of it nearly a year ago and forgot to post it, so here it is.
Home workspace, January 2025 Home workspace, January 2025
When I took that pic last January, it had been three years since the last one, and the major difference was a reduction in clutter. I've added a lava lamp (charity shop find) and Rob Sheridan print. We got rid of the PO NG chair (originally bought for breast feeding) so we currently have no alternate seating besides the desk chair. As much as I love my vintage mahogany writing desk, our current thinking is it s likely to go. I m exploring whether we could fit in two smaller desks: one main one for the computer, and another workbench for play: the synthesiser, Amiga, crafting and 3d printing projects, etc.

23 December 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Remarkable

Remarkable tablet displaying my 2025 planner PDF. My Remarkable tablet, displaying my 2025 planner.
During my PhD, on a sunny summer s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was that due to the bright sunlight, I couldn t see a damn thing. In 2021 I decided to take the plunge and buy the Remarkable 2 that has been heavily advertised at the time. Over the next four or so years, I made good use of it to read papers; read drafts of my own papers and chapters; read a small number of technical books; use as a daily planner; take meeting notes for work, PhD and later, personal matters. I didn t buy the remarkable stylus or folio cover instead opting for a (at the time, slightly cheaper) LAMY AL-star EMR. And a fantastic fabric sleeve cover from Emmerson Gray. I installed a hack which let me use the Lamy s button to activate an eraser and also added a bunch of other tweaks. I wouldn t recommend that specific hack anymore as there are safer alternatives (personally untested, but e.g. https://github.com/isaacwisdom/RemarkableLamyEraser) Pros: the writing experience is unparalleled. Excellent. I enjoy writing with fountain pens on good paper but that experience comes with inky fingers, dried up nibs, and a growing pile of paper notebooks. The remarkable is very nearly as good without those drawbacks. Cons: lower contrast than black on white paper and no built in illumination. It needs good light to read. Almost the opposite problem to the iPad! I ve tried a limited number of external clip on lights but nothing is frictionless to use. The traditional two-column, wide margin formatting for academic papers is a bad fit for the remarkable s size (just as it is for computer display sizes. Really is it good for anything people use anymore?). You can pinch to zoom which is OK, or pre-process papers (with e.g. Briss) to reframe them to be more suitable but that s laborious. The newer model, the Remarkable Paper Pro, might address both those issues: its bigger; has illumination and has also added colour which would be a nice to have. It s also a lot more expensive. I had considered selling on the tablet after I finished my PhD. My current plan, inspired to some extent by my former colleague Aleksey Shipil v, who makes great use of his, is to have a go at using it more often, to see if it continues to provide value for me: more noodling out thoughts for work tasks, more drawings (e.g. plans for 3D models) and more reading of tech books.

6 December 2025

Jonathan Dowland: thesis

It's done! It's over! I've graduated, I have the scroll, I'm staring at the eye-watering prices for the official photographer snap, I'm adjusting to post-thesis life. My PhD thesis revisions have been accepted and my thesis is now available from Newcastle University Library's eThesis repository. As part of submitting my corrections, I wrote a brief report detailing the changes I made from my thesis at the time of the viva. I also produced a latexdiff marked-up copy of the thesis to visualise the exact changes. In order to shed some light on the post-viva corrections process, at least at my institution, and in the hope that they are some use to someone, I'm sharing those documents:

15 November 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Zoom R8

When I started looking at synths again, I had a feeling I would want to record from them, and ideally not with a computer. To that end, I also bought a second-hand standalone multitrack recorder, the Zoom R8.
Zoom R8
It's a little desktop console with two inputs, a built-in mic, and 8 sliders for adjusting the playback of 8 (ostensibly) independent tracks. It has a USB port to interface with a computer, and features some onboard effects (delay, reverb, that kind-of thing). Look a bit closer, and the USB port is mini-USB, which gives away its age (and I'll never get rid of mini-USB cables, will I?). The two inputs are mono, so to capture stereo output from the minilogue-xd I need to tie up both inputs. Also, the 8 tracks are mono, so it's more like a stereo 4-track. The effects (what little I've played with them) are really pretty cool; and it's great to apply them to a live signal. We had some fun running them over a bass guitar. However you can only use them for 44.1 kHz sample rate. If you ignore the effects the device supports 48 kHz. I've ended up using it as my main USB interface on my computer; It's great for that. The internal mic ended up being too weak to use for video calls. As a USB interface, my computer can receive the signal from the synth (and I've wasted more time than I care to admit trying to wrestle with the Linux audio stack to do something with that). It can also run on batteries, which opens up the possibility of recording piano with my daughter, or field recording or suchlike. Writing this up serves as a reminder to me of why I bought it, and I now intend to spend a little more time using it that way and stop wasting time fighting ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire/PortAudio/etc.

6 November 2025

Jonathan Dowland: inert media, or the explotation of attention

It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything unexpected to you1: it just contains music.
Safe. Safe.
There's so much exploitation of attention, and so much of what we interact with in a computing context (social media) etc has been weaponised against us, that having something some matter-of-fact is a relief. I know that sometimes, I prefer to put a record on than to dial up the very same album from any number of (ostensibly more convenient) digital sources, partly because I don't need to spend any of my attention spoons to do so, I can save them for the task at hand. The same is perhaps not true for audio CDs. That might depend on your own relationship with them, of course. For me they're inexorably tied up with computing and a certain amount of faff (ripping, encoding, metadata). And long dead it might be (hopefully), but I can still remember Sony's CD rootkit scandal: CDs could be a trojan horse. Beware!

  1. I'm sure there are ingenious exceptions.

25 October 2025

Jonathan Dowland: franken keyboard

Since it's spooky season, let me present to you the FrankenKeyboard!
The FrankenKeyboard
8bitdo retro keyboard For some reason I can't fathom, I was persuaded into buying an 8bitdo retro mechanical keyboard. It was very reasonably priced, and has a few nice fun features: built-in bluetooth and 2.4GHz wireless (with the supplied dongle); colour scheme inspired by the Nintendo Famicom; fun to use knobs for volume control; some basic macro support; and funky oversized mashable macro keys (which work really well as "Copy" and "Paste") The 8bitdo keyboards come with switch-types I had not previously experienced: Kailh Box White v2. I'm used to Cherry MX Reds, but I loved the feel of the Box White v2s. The 8bitdo keyboards all have hot-swappable key switches. It's relatively compact (comes without a numpad), but still larger than my TEX Shura, which (at home) is my daily driver. I also miss the trackpoint mouse on the Shura. Finally, the 8bitdo model I bought has American ANSI key layout, which I can tolerate but is not as nice as ISO. I later learned that they have a limited range of ISO-layout keyboards too, but not (yet) in the Famicom colour scheme I'd bought. DIY Shura My existing Shura's key switches are soldered on and can't be swapped out. But I really preferred the Kailh white switches. I decided to buy a second Shura, this time as a "DIY kit" which accepts hot-swappable switches. I then moved the Kailh Box White v2 switches over from the 8bitdo keyboard. keycaps Part of justifying buying the DIY kit was the possibility that I could sell on my older Shura with the Cherry MX Red switches. My existing Shura's key caps are for the ISO-GB layout and have their legends printed onto them. After three years the legends have faded in a few places. The DIY kit comes with a set of ABS "double-shot" key caps (where the key legends are plastic rather than printed). They look a lot nicer, but I don't look at my keys. I'm considering applying the new, pristine key caps to the old Shura board, to make it more attractive to buyers. One problem is I'm not sure the new set of caps includes the ISO-UK specific ones. It might be that potential buyers might prefer to have used caps with the correct legends rather than pristine ones which are mislabelled. franken keyboard Given I wasn't going to use the new key cap set, I borrowed most of the caps from the 8bitdo keyboard. I had to retain the G, H and B keys from my older Shura as they are specially molded to leave space for the trackpoint, and a couple of the modifier keys which weren't the right size. Hence the odd look! (It needs some tweaking. That left-ALT looks out of place. It may be that the 8bitdo caps are temporary. Left "cmd" is really Fn, and "Caps lock" is really "Super". The right-hand red dot is a second "Super".) Since taking the photo I've removed the "stabilisers" under the right-shift and backspace keys, in order to squeeze a couple more keys in their place. the new keycap set includes a regular-sized "BS" key, as the JIS keyboard layout has a regular-sized backspace. (Everyone should have a BS key in my opinion.) I plan to map my new keys to "Copy" and "Paste" actions following the advice in this article.

3 October 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Tron: Ares (soundtrack)

photo of Tron: Ares vinyl record on my turntable, next to packaging
There's a new Nine Inch Nails album! That doesn't happen very often. There's a new Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross soundtrack! That happens all the time! For the first time, they're the same thing. The new one, Tron: Ares, is very deliberately presented as a Nine Inch Nails album, and not a TR&AR soundtrack. But is it neither fish nor fowl? 24 tracks, four with lyrics. Singing is not unheard of on TR&AR soundtracks, but it's rare (A Minute to Breathe from the excellent Before the Flood is another). Instrumentals are not rare on NIN albums, either, but this ratio is very unusual, and has disappointed some fans who were hoping for a more traditional NIN album. What does it mean to label something a NIN album anyway? For me, the lines are now further blurred. One thing for sure is it means a lot of media attention, and this release, as well as the film it's promoting, are all over the media at the moment. Posters, trailers, promotional tie-in items, Disney logos everywhere. The album is hitched to the Disney marketing and promotion machine. It's a bit weird seeing the NIN logo all over the place advertising the movie. On to the music. I love TR&AR soundtracks, and some of my favourite NIN tracks are instrumentals. Despite that, three highlights for me are songs: As Alive As You Need Me To Be, I Know You Can Feel It and closer Shadow Over Me. The other stand-out is Building Better Worlds, a short instrumental and clear nod to Wendy Carlos. My main complaint here applies to some of the more recent soundtracks as well: the tracks are too short. They're scored to scenes in the movie, which makes a lot of sense in that presentation, but less so for independent listening. It's not a problem that their earlier, lauded soundtracks suffered (The Social Network, Before the Flood, Bird Box Extended). Perhaps a future remix album will address that.

21 September 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Lavalamps (things that spark joy)

photograph of a Mathmos Telstar rocket lava lamp with red wax and purple water
Life can sometimes be tricky, and it's useful to know that there are some simple things to take pleasure from. Amongst them for me are lava lamps. At some point in the late 90s, my brother and I somehow had 6 lavalamps between us. I'm not sure what happened to them (and the gallery of photos I had of them has long disappeared from my site.) More recently, I stumbled across a Mathmos "Telstar" rocket-shaped lava lamp in a charity shop: silver metal; purple water; red wax. It now adorns my study desk.

2 September 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Luminal and Lateral

For my birthday I was gifted copies of Eno's last two albums, Luminal and Lateral, both of which are collaborations with Beatie Wolfe.
Luminal and Lateral records in the sunshine
Let's start with the art. I love this semi-minimalist, bold style, and how the LP itself (in their coloured, bio-vinyl variants) feels like it's part of the artwork. I like the way the artist credits mirror each other: Wolfe, Eno for Luminal; Eno, Wolfe for Lateral. My first "bio vinyl" LP was the Cure's last one, last year. Ahead of it arriving I planned to blog about it, but when it came arrived it turned out I had nothing interesting to say. In terms of how it feels, or sounds, it's basically the same as the traditional vinyl formulation. The attraction of bio-vinyl to well-known environmentalists like Eno (and I guess, the Cure) is the reduced environmental impact due to changing out the petroleum and other ingredients with recycled used cooking oil. You can read more about bio-vinyl if you wish. I try not to be too cynical about things like this; my immediate response is to assume some kind of green-washing PR campaign (I'm currently reading Consumed by Saabira Chaudhuri, an excellent book that is not sadly only fuelling my cynicism) but I know Eno in particular takes this stuff seriously and has likely done more than a surface-level evaluation. So perhaps every little helps. On to the music. The first few cuts I heard from the albums earlier in the year didn't inspire me much. Possibly I heard something from Luminal, the vocal album; and I'm generally more drawn to Eno's ambient work. (Lateral is ambient instrumental). I was not otherwise familiar with Beatie Wolfe. On returning to the albums months later, I found them more compelling. Luminal reminds me a little of Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Lateral worked well as space music for phd-correction sessions. The pair recently announced a third album, Liminal, to arrive in October, and totally throw off the symmetry of the first two. Two of its tracks are available to stream now in the usual places.

18 August 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Amiga redux

Matthew blogged about his Amiga CDTV project, a truly unique Amiga hack which also manages to be a novel Doom project (no mean feat: it's a crowded space) This re-awakened my dormant wish to muck around with my childhood Amiga some more. When I last wrote about it (four years ago ) I'd upgraded the disk drive emulator with an OLED display and rotary encoder. I'd forgotten to mention I'd also sourced a modern trapdoor RAM expansion which adds 2MiB of RAM. The Amiga can only see 1.5MiB1 of it at the moment, I need perform a mainboard modification to access the final 512kiB2, which means some soldering.
[Amiga Test Kit](https://github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff) showing 2MiB RAM Amiga Test Kit showing 2MiB RAM
What I had planned to do back then: replace the switch in the left button of the original mouse, which was misbehaving; perform the aformentioned mainboard mod; upgrade the floppy emulator wiring to a ribbon cable with plug-and-socket, for easier removal; fit an RTC chip to the RAM expansion board to get clock support in the OS. However much of that might be might be moot, because of two other mods I am considering, PiStorm I've re-considered the PiStorm accelerator mentioned in Matt's blog. Four years ago, I'd passed over it, because it required you to run Linux on a Raspberry Pi, and then an m68k emulator as a user-space process under Linux. I didn't want to administer another Linux system, and I'm generally uncomfortable about using a regular Linux distribution on SD storage over the long term. However in the intervening years Emu68, a bare-metal m68k emulator has risen to prominence. You boot the Pi straight into Emu68 without Linux in the middle. For some reason that's a lot more compelling to me. The PiStorm enormously expands the RAM visible to the Amiga. There would be no point in doing the mainboard mod to add 512k (and I don't know how that would interact with the PiStorm). It also can provide virtual hard disk devices to the Amiga (backed by files on the SD card), meaning the floppy emulator would be superfluous. Denise Mainboard I've just learned about a truly incredible project: the Denise Mini-ITX Amiga mainboard. It fitss into a Mini-ITX case (I have a suitable one spare already). Some assembly required. You move the chips from the original Amiga over to the Denise mainboard. It's compatible with the PiStorm (or vice-versa). It supports PC-style PS/2 keyboards (I have a Model M in the loft, thanks again Simon) and has a bunch of other modern conveniences: onboard RTC; mini-ITX power (I'll need something like a picoPSU too) It wouldn't support my trapdoor RAM card but it takes a 72-pin DIMM which can supply 2MiB of Chip RAM, and the PiStorm can do the rest (they're compatible3). No stock at the moment but if I could get my hands on this, I could build something that could permanently live on my desk.

  1. the Boobip board's 1.5MiB is "chip" RAM: accessible to the other chips on the mainboard, with access mediated by the AGNUS chip.
  2. the final 512kiB is "Fast" RAM: only accessible to the CPU, not mediated via Agnus.
  3. confirmation

1 August 2025

Jonathan Dowland: School of Computing Technical Reports

(You wait ages for an archiving blog post and two come along at once!) Between 1969-2019, the Newcastle University School of Computing published a Technical Reports Series. Until 2017-ish, the full list of individually-numbered reports was available on the School's website, as well as full text PDFs for every report. At some time around 2014 I was responsible for migrating the School's website from self-managed to centrally-managed. The driver was to improve the website from the perspective of student recruitment. The TR listings (as well as full listings and texts for awarded PhD theses, MSc dissertations, Director's reports and various others) survived the initial move. After I left (as staff) in 2015, anything not specifically about student recruitment degraded and by 2017 the listings were gone. I've been trying, on and off, to convince different parts of the University to restore and take ownership of these lists ever since. For one reason or another each avenue I've pursued has gone nowhere. Recently the last remaining promising way forward failed, so I gave up and did it myself. The list is now hosted by the Historic Computing Committee, here: https://nuhc.ncl.ac.uk/computing/techreports/ It's not complete (most of the missing entries are towards the end of the run), but it's a start. The approach that finally yielded results was simply scraping the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for various pages from back when the material was represented on the School website, and then filling in the gaps from some other sources. What I envisage in the future: per-page reports with the relevant metadata (including abstracts); authors de-duplicated and cross-referenced; PDFs OCRd; providing access to the whole metadata DB (probably as as lump of JSON); a mechanism for people to report errors; a platform for students to perform data mining projects: perhaps some kind of classification/tagging by automated content analysis; cross-referencing copies of papers in other venues (lots of TRs are pre-prints).

Jonathan Dowland: Debian Chronicles

I recently learned that, about 6 months ago, the Debian webteam deleted all news articles from the main website older than 2022. There have been several complaints from people in and outside of Debian, notably Joe Brockmeier of LWN, and this really sad one from the nephew of a deceased developer, wondering where the obituary had gone, but the team have not been swayed and are not prepared to reinstate the news. It feels very important to me, too, that historic news, and their links, are not broken. So, I hastily built a new Debian service, The Chronicles of Debian, as as permanent home for historic web content.
$ HEAD -S -H "Accept-Language: de" https://www.debian.org/News/1997/19971211
HEAD https://www.debian.org/News/1997/19971211
302 Found
HEAD https://chronicles.debian.org/www/News/1997/19971211
200 OK
 
Content-Language: de
Content-Location: 19971211.de.html
 
This was thrown up in a hurry to get something working as fast as possible, and there is plenty of room for improvement. Get in touch if there's an enhancement you would like or you would like to get involved!

21 July 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Nine Inch Nails, Paris, 2025-07-07

On July 7th I did a quick one-day trip to Paris to watch Nine Inch Nails, who were performing one of their last shows for the European leg of the tour. I'd missed all the UK dates, which were announced after I was committed to a family holiday. The setup for these shows differs a lot from the norm. First, the support act was German-Iraqi techno DJ Boys Noize, who TR&AR had collaborated with on their soundtrack for the recent movie Challengers. BN did a 75-minute opening set:
Stripped down Set 1 Stripped down Set 1
The main gig was divided into four acts. Act 1 took place on a square "B Stage", situated in the middle of the main floor. Trent and 2-3 band members performed three stripped-down songs, with interpolations to other songs, alternative lyrics, and the like. I enjoyed this section more than I expected to.
Main stage lighting Main stage lighting
They then transition to the main stage for a six-song full-band set. The main stage was draped in layers of transparent curtains. One of the team was on-stage, walking around with a video camera, and the live camera footage was processed and projected onto the curtains in realtime. The visuals were truly fantastic. For the third act, Trent and Atticus returned to the B stage, to be joined by Boys Noize, who then performed four songs in a reworked, remixed, electronic dance format. This ended up being the highlight of the gig for me. I felt the reworkings breathed new life into some old songs.
remix Set 3 remix Set 3
Finally, back to the main stage to close out with a final seven songs. The traditional triad of closers was adjusted, substituting "The Hand That Feeds" for "The Perfect Drug"; a song that wasn't played at all from 1997 to 2018, and has now become a regular fixture. Several tapers recorded the show, and their recordings are up at nin.live. Overall it was great fun: I ended up flying via London and the airport time was a bit of a pain, but I did get a good start on my corrections. I was home the next afternoon. I'm trying not to think of the cost.

30 June 2025

Russell Coker: Links June 2025

Jonathan McDowell wrote part 2 of his blog series about setting up a voice assistant on Debian, I look forward to reading further posts [1]. I m working on some related things for Debian that will hopefully work with this. I m testing out OpenSnitch on Trixie inspired by this blog post, it s an interesting package [2]. Valerie wrote an informative article about creating mesh networks using LORA for emergency use [3]. Interesting article about Signal and Windows Recall. That gives us some things to consider regarding ML features on Linux systems [4]. Insightful article about AI and the end of prestige [5]. We should all learn about LLMs. Jonathan Dowland wrote an informative blog post about how to manage namespaces on Linux [6]. The Consumer Rights wiki is a great resource for raising awareness of corporations exploiting their customers for computer related goods and services [7]. Interesting article about Schizophrenia and the cliff-edge function of evolution [8].

Next.