Watched on Thursday August 17, 2023.

Watched on Saturday August 12, 2023.

Voor het eerst naar Ekko om twee Amerikaanse opkomende black-metal acts live te zien spelen. Devil Master’s post-punk meets first-gen black-metal sound is op plaat lekker rauw en tijdens het concert ook. Ze gaan op hoog tempo door hun setlist heen en stoppen nogal abrupt tot ieders ontevredenheid. Dit smaakt zeker naar meer. Iemand roept nog iets over dat “hij waar voor zijn kaartje van 17 euro wil hebben”, maar daarom spelen er twee bands vanavond.

Lamp Of Murmuur speelt een fijne combinatie van materiaal van hun laatste twee platen. Ik ben niet helemaal bekend met al hun nummers, maar het verschil in sound is opvallend. Van de At The Heart Of Winter sound van hun laatste plaat naar de wat meer post-punk sound van de vorige. Ik moet bekennen dat die mijn voorkeur heeft en volgens mij ook die van de rest van het publiek, gezien de pit die ontstaat. Stipt om 22:00 eindigt de band met het een monoloog van de zanger, die de hele avond al tussen de nummers door in het black-metaliaans aan het preken was.

Gaaf om beide bands eens live aan het werk te kunnen zien. Geluid was over het algemeen goed, bij Devil Master had het een paar nummers nodig voordat de drums de gitaren niet overstemden, maar verder geen klachten. Leuk om op deze manier met Ekko kennis te maken, door de gemiddelde jonge leeftijd van het publiek en bands en de spontane pits, deed het mij denken aan de tijd dat ik Emperor en Enslaved samen in de Baroeg heb zien spelen.

It was 2021 and during the pandemic I started all sort of new obsessions. One of these was ripping my CD library to digital FLAC files and finally have all the music I personally own available for streaming in my Plex library with Plexamp.

Why would I do such a thing when most of my music collection is easily available on Spotify or Apple Music? Well, for once, this is not ‘just’ a collection, but my personal collection, music I’ve curated since my teens, up till my thirties. There is a history here, memories, parts of my life I associate with certain soundtracks. Hell, my late teens - early twenties was an important period where I basically formed my core music interests (like most cool people).

I can possibly tell you some trivial facts related to me or the music for about 80% of my collection. It’s a huge part of me, so that’s why I’m one of the few people who didn’t get rid of their CD collection when I moved over to streaming (and kept supporting artists when I by collecting vinyl). As a good memory, my CD’s have always been following me around, bound to their Ikea shelves, wrapped in plastic when moving houses. Nowadays they sit in eye periphery behind my PC monitor. I guess that’s where the idea sprung to rip everything to FLAC files.

I didn’t really play these CD’s in years. I didn’t even own a CD player until I recently got my old Sony player back from my parent’s house (stuffed in a closet nowadays). I’ve embraced playing digital music files for almost twenty years now. It’s a lot more conveniant, easier to take with me and doesn’t take up a lot of physical space. Also I’m a sucker for new tech. I was an early adopter when Sonos was still primarily pushing their streaming devices for your own mp3 collection. Streaming services weren’t even available in my territory back then.

So almost two years later I finally ripped the last CD in my collection. Together with everything I already collected (mostly from Bandcamp and/or digital download cards that came with vinyl) I have about 1TB of music stored on my NAS. By using Plex and its music app Plexamp it’s possible to stream all my own music outside of the house. Making this my own little private streaming service. The cool thing about Plexamp is that, similar to Spotify and other paid services, they are using local algorythms, to keep listening more interesting. Especially sonically similar sounding albums are a great addition, but also creating your own sonic journey from one track to anothere is an excellent way to discover new or forgotten songs.

What did I use to rip my CD’s? From CD to FLAC I used Exact Audio Copy. As far as I know this is still the best audio ripping software. It’s not exactly fast, but accurate and at least it automatically recognizes CD’s, so the meta data is usually correct.

As a front-end developer working on a similar type of web application in the mental health care space, Eric Bailey’s article about performance of modern front-end frameworks really hit home.

I have to admit, as I assume a lot of other developers are in the same boat: I wasn’t involved in setting up the architecture at my company. I’m currently working with a front-end framework that was picked by (non-front-end) developers who choose what aligned best with their coding practices and was similar to what they worked with before.

Do we over-rely on client-side rendered JavaScript? Perhaps we do, and I would love to be able to change this in the future by moving more towards native web API’s. But the hardest thing is to convince stakeholders this is a worthy goal pursuing. With a small product team we have a lot of other projects that need attention and take up precious time. Refactoring our relatively young front-end stack might not get a high priority status (or any status at all) in the next few years.

I’m interested in solutions and ideas on how to tackle this problem as an individual developer. We are knee deep into a relatively popular client-side JavaScript framework, written in TypeScript. It’s too complex in my opinion, but works fine, is part of an even bigger complex stack and is well-engineered. But I would love to lose the complexity, the potential barriers for our users, and move more towards native web solutions. I just have to figure out how to exactly do this.

I finally updated my work Macbook to Ventura. The only reason why I wanted to risk breaking my local dev environment is that I grabbed Belkin’s iPhone mount with MagSafe for desktops and displays (that’s quite a mouth full, but it’s how they named it). It’s a bit pricey (€45) for what is basically a magnet, but it fits fine on top of my LG screen. Better than my current external webcam, which created a small notch.

I haven’t used it in a real meeting yet, but I bought the accessory to use the new Continuity Camera feature of my iPhone. It basically let’s you use your iPhone as a webcam, the Belkin mount makes it possible to easily add it and remove from the top of a screen.

I tried out the Continuity Camera feature in the settings of Slack and the most amazing thing for me is the possibility of having the camera always center people in the frame. That’s just magical. Next to that there are the options to enable portrait mode and studio lights. Which makes things a little smoother.

I guess a downside is: I’m not able to use my iPhone during a call. Perhaps this can also be seen as a positive point, since I won’t be easily distracted while playing with my phone. Anyway, I’ll be testing this feature starting on Monday. Let’s see how it handles my crappy wifi connection in my office.

At work I’ve been looking at the possibility of moving our Angular component tests to Storybook. The Storybook test runner uses Jest as a runner, and Playwright as a testing framework. Each one of our .stories files would then be transformed into a spec file, and each story becomes a test, which is run in a headless browser.

Test Runner also easily integrates with the Storybook UI by installing the interactions add-on. The whole idea makes a lot of sense. Write your stories and then create tests inside these stories that makes use of all the defined properties and scenarios.

But we have around 30 components in Storybook and a lot of tests. Perhaps it’s not the best idea to spend my time to translate all these Jasmine tests to Jest and move them into our stories. Also, we use Angular’s own internal testing feature, by moving over to Jest we will make our (already complex) stack perhaps even more complex.

I haven’t tried it yet, but right now I’m looking at the add-on @storybook/testing-angular which kind of does the opposite of test runner. It makes it possible to reuse our Storybook stories in our existing Angular tests. All args and decorators from our story and its meta, and also global decorators, will be composed by this library and returned in a simple component. We can keep our existing tests, we can keep our Jenkins process, but use our Storybook stories to feed and improve our existing and new tests with relevant scenarios. The only thing I’m missing here is the integration with the Interactions add-on.

Pinafore was a pretty cool Mastodon client. Sad to see it go, but Bruce shares some great insights into the reason why and the development of this app.

I don’t understand.

Nevermind the content

It took some effort, but I have Indiekit in some basic form running on a VPS. Which makes it possible to publish posts with Micropub on my personal website and (optionally) syndicate these posts to Mastodon (and Twitter, but I don’t know anyone who is using this).

This is the first real post I’m writing with the Indiekit interface. Which is basically a very basic CMS, but because of the Micropub standards, makes it also possible to use different Micropub clients. I haven’t tried this yet, but it should make it easier to get into the behavior of publishing my (social media) posts to my own website first.

Mijn eerste live show van het jaar was deze keer in Gebr. De Nobel. Ik ging voornamelijk voor de IJslandse black-metal band Misþyrming, maar er speelden ook drie andere bands. Eerstgenoemde was met gemak het hoogtepunt van de avond. De band speelde sterk en kwam goed tot hun recht op het grote podium. Ik had echter graag gezien dat ze wat langer speelden.

Van de drie openingsacts vond ik Kringa potentieel de interessantste. Ze speelden een soort van zeer chaotische, punkachtige, occulte black-metal. Het Noorse Ritual Death moet ik nog eens checken en Nubivagant heeft potentie, maar moet nog werken aan zijn songs, die wat aan de langdradige kant zijn (en moet minstens nog een bassist aan de line-up toevoegen). Al met al een geslaagd avondje zware metalen.

The Menu gaat verder waar The White Lotus stopt. Harde kritiek op onze klasse maatschappij, waarmee de film zichzelf gelukkig niet altijd 100% serieus neemt. Deed mij denken aan de keer dat we in Amsterdam óók met de boot naar het restaurant op Vuurtoren eiland gingen. Dat liep gelukkig wat beter af. Maar The Menu zet je wel aan het denken. Aanrader.