Media - Page 10 | virtualwolf.org

A screenshot of the "King of VHS" app on the iPad. It's basically a screen full of nothing but knobs and dials, with a very 80s-looking feel to them.

I've discovered that there are a bunch of synth apps available on the iPad, and they work magnificently with my little Arturia MiniLab 3 keyboard. This may be a very large rabbit hole I'm about to fall down. :ohno:

(At least I'm not getting into actual physical synths though.)

music screenshot midi keyboard

Posted on 4 November 2025, 21:15

I've been doing some transcribing of songs following the lesson on justinguitar.com, and someone in the discussion forum linked to another batch of 15 that were good to do. They're just power chords and I'm just doing the initial riff and not doing anything fancy, but I was going through some of them this afternoon using Transcribe! (also on Justin's recommendation) and I managed to totally nail The Donnas "New Kid in School" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"!

Posted on 26 October 2025, 21:23

A photo of a standard-looking silver 16" M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. It has two Deep Space Nine stickers on it, one shows has Garak the Cardassian from the chest up standing there smiling with his hands up as if in greeting, he's looking very pleased and it says "Friend of Garak". Behind him is a rainbow. The other sticker is Major Kira holding a Bajoran phaser upwards in front of her and pressing a button on top of it, with the caption "This machine kills fascists." (Presumably she's setting her phaser to kill.)

This toot is brought to you by my ex-work MacBook Pro that I installed Asahi Linux on! (I figured I'd chuck a couple of stickers on it to distinguish it from my completely and utterly identical-looking M4 MacBook Pro work machine that arrived last week.)

Gotta say I'm extremely impressed with the job the Asahi team has done, the installer was a breeze, it all Just Worked and I even have working brightness and audio keys (and audio!) out of the box! I decided to go for the KDE environment, partially because I haven't used that since 2003 when I took this screenshot of KDE 3.1 back under Mac OS X when I was mucking around with running XWindows inside it, and partially because that's the Asahi team's main focus in terms of polish. I haven't pushed it yet but just doing light browsing and general poking around getting things set up, the battery life is exactly what I'd expect the machine to be under macOS; right now it's reading 85% charge and 10 hours of battery life remaining, and it's completely cool and silent.

I haven't looked into the keyboard shortcut swapping yet (having Ctrl-C be copy everywhere except in a terminal session where you have to remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C irritates the bejesus out of me every time, and in general I find the ergonomics of having the Command key position being the primary modifier to be far superior to Control) but that'll probably be my next mini-project. I got 1Password working, although they don't have a proper distribution of aarch64 binaries yet so I'm having to start it in a terminal session like some sort of barbarian. The browser extension works fine at least.

[EDIT] Well that was easy, someone wrote a thing called Toshy that takes all the hard work out of remapping everything!

our house darkroom linux

Posted on 26 October 2025, 20:14

A photo of a slice of lotus biscof cheesecake sitting in a plate. It has three layers and the top has a really intricate swirly pattern.

We went to Crows Nest today to drop my remaining two guitars off at Mannys for a restringing and full setup, and caught up with @[email protected] for coffee and sweets.

We get on the Metro at the very first stop, today there were a ton of people already there, 90% of them Indian and like 75% dressed in either Australia or India cricket jerseys (including kids being dressed in the Australia jerseys and their parents in Indian ones), and it turns out the third game of the Australia vs. India one-day match is today. It was a good vibe, everyone was cheerful but MAN was it absolutely chockers by the time we got off at Crows Nest!

I was wearing one of my Arch Enemy t-shirts and when I got into Mannys the guy behind the counter said "Cool t-shirt!" and then pointed out the Arch Enemy tattoo he had. And then on the walk back to the carpark on the way home someone was wearing a Fear Factory Obsolete t-shirt, and we both did the metalhead nod of recognition to each other, haha.

darkroom food portrait mode crows nest guitar dessert

Posted on 25 October 2025, 15:00

We had our air conditioning unit replaced today, the old one worked but holy crap it was loud and the unit that lives in the roof had this incredibly irritating high-pitched whine. You couldn't notice it too much during the day when there was ambient noise, but at night we would have to wear earplugs or it'd keep us up. 😫

Definitely not a great day for it given we just inched over 40˚C, so I can only imagine what it was like up in the roof, I was genuinely concerned for the two tradies who needed to go up there! Now that it's all done though, wow, it feels like we have grown-up aircon. It's so quiet I legit can't hear it over the sound of the fridge, and even on the maximum fan speed it's barely audible! This new unit is a Daikin which apparently interfaces far better with the AirTouch system we got last year, and it seems to use less power as far as I can tell and the temperature control is a lot better.

our house renovations text only

Posted on 22 October 2025, 20:42

A screenshot of the "Course Complete" achievement you get when you finish the course. It looks like a round badge, it's black with flames in the background, and says in a very angular metal-looking font "course complete" on it.

Almost exactly two and a half years since I got my bass guitar, I have finished the BassBuzz "Beginner to Badass" course! 🎉 I probably would have finished it a bit faster but a) I have too many other hobbies, and b) around the start of this year they released an entirely revamped course with better videos and lessons so I decided to start totally afresh from the beginning.

I still wouldn't say I'm anywhere near a good bass player (I feel like an utter noob when playing with people at work), but obviously I'm going to keep practicing, and there was a final video in the course giving suggestions on a bunch of lessons to go through and check off to ensure you can really smash them, plus some tips on where to go next and how to build a practice routine. There are also some "masterclass" videos that introduce playing with a pick, slap bass, and a few other things that I'll make my way through too.

screenshot bass guitar

Posted on 17 October 2025, 21:40

A photo of two round golden brown loaves of bread dusted with flour sitting on a cooling rack. They both have excellent-looking splits on top and look amazing.

And done. 👌🏻

our house darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 10 October 2025, 12:03

A photo of the corner of one of our spare bedrooms with five guitars hanging on the wall. At the very left two are one above the other, my black Epiphone SG at the bottom and my white Fender Stratocaster at the top, then right of that and down a bit on the wall (to save a little space I staggered the wall mounts a little) is the new red Fender Telecaster, then my Ibanez JIVA10, and finally my Yamaha BB434 bass guitar.

The guitar strap and wall mount for my new guitar arrived today, so that's all put up now too!

our house music guitar

Posted on 7 October 2025, 18:39

A photo of a dining room table with the game board and cards around it. On the very outer section of the board are a bunch of people who have invented something or made scientific discoveries, then directly inside of that is (not in order) their inventions. Then inside THAT is a hexagonal ring that you move around, inside which there is a THIRD section that involves three concentric circles, and the inner two are raised higher on a plastic circular ring that sits inside the middle of the game board. The cards that are sitting next to the board have the inventors on it, then there are smaller cards, some of which you can trade to other players, and the whole thing is just bizarre from a gameplay perspective.

Tonight we went over to a friend's place and played Beyond 2000: The Boardgame! (For the non-Australians, there was a TV show called Beyond 2000 that was a staple of our elder Millennial childhoods, it was basically an educational science and technology show about new technologies and scientific discoveries.)

Apparently at some point someone decided to make a board game out of it, but it was weird. It was part Trivial Pursuit but had all these extra elements as you get further in like being able to steal cards from other players or join forces with them, and they all felt really disconnected from each other, like they'd come up with three different ideas for games but decided they should mush them all together. The facts were interesting but man, we're not going to be playing that again. 😅

darkroom board games seven hills

Posted on 5 October 2025, 23:04

A photo taken from our patio looking out into our rather modest backyard. The grass is looking rather overgrown and very weedy, and there is grass coming up from between the bricks of the patio, and the small slightly raised section that's directly in front of the back fence is also completely overgrown with weeds.

The exact same view as the first photo, except the grass is short and neat, the edges are all neat and tidy, and I've gotten rid of all of the grass that was in between the bricks of the patio too. Looks MUCH nicer.

Finally got around to mowing the lawns and doing the whippersnippering, and now I am dead. I was going to do the edging along the driveway too but ran out of steam.

our house gardening darkroom

Posted on 5 October 2025, 13:38