I haven’t watched this video yet so I don’t know if it’s any good or not. I’m just saving it for later.
Apple announced an update to Logic Pro today. Logic Pro 11, to be precise.
I’ve been using GarageBand since, what… 2010? Something like that. For years now I have been thinking of upgrading to Logic Pro. The $200 price tag is basically what has kept me away. Now?
I use the crap out of the session drummer in GarageBand. I don’t think I would use the session bass player, even if it’s awesome. I said that about the drummer function when it was announced too, but I think it will stick for the bass. A keyboard player? I generally don’t write for keyboards. I like the idea of a three piece, guitar bass and drums. That’s it. If I had a keyboard player who could write for his or her artificial self though? Can I make it sound like Jon Lord? Rick Wakeman? (gasp) Keith Freakin’ Emerson???
Is it finally time to upgrade? No. When we get back from our trip to Florida a few weeks from now, will it be time?
My father bought our first computer from what was probably the only computer store in Tewksbury, MA. It was on Main street sort of near the intersection with Chandler street. I’m not sure what is there now. It had a monitor, a keyboard, and two floppy drives. I believe it was 1983.
I don’t recall the specs beyond that. Maybe before I click publish I’ll ask the stupid AI Assistant if it knows. I do remember we had a joystick but it didn’t work very well. We also had a modem wired into our telephone. We could plug a phone line into the computer, connect it to the phone, and dial out direct. We used it to call some old bulletin board services. It was completely epic, like the movie War Games but without the treason or the nukes. Unfortunately the modem was so slow it made the whole experience useless. We did have a text chat with some random person once. That was ground breaking, indeed.
I used it for school to write papers and essays. We had a word processor program that worked pretty well. I also played a lot of games, but that experience wasn’t quite as good as what we had over at Mike the (future) Bass Player’s house as he had a Commodore 64 which was a better gaming platform. We had a great baseball game and an olympic decathlon game that was really fun but difficult. We had a text based game that I think was a Zork knock off that I seem to remember was called Mobius.
It was a great computer. Eventually, at some point in the 90’s, my father had a friend who built IBM clones and we moved on to Windows 3.1. I messed with Macs for the first time when I was at Northeast Broadcasting School in ’93 (I think?), and then when I went to Middlesex Community College I took a class called Intro to Computers that covered an office suite called Claris Works that also used a Mac. Later, while at UMass Lowell (for my second time around) I got a job at a computer lab where I was tasked with putting a tech focused talk show onto the radio station. My desk had a Mac Quadra that I used for editing audio. I also used a program called Nifty Telnet that let me connect to the university’s Unix system so I could do my programming homework. That machine was epic. I didn’t become a Mac owner until years later, after I moved in with Jen. I got a MacBook Pro and have literally never looked back. I am 100% invested in the Apple echo system now. MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, AppleWatch, HomePods all over the house. How long until they pull me into the new Vision Pro? Someday.
There you have it, my first computer was an Apple iie and it made me the computer nerd I am today. Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.
Hey, AI Assistant, what were the specs for an apple iie?
The Apple IIe, released in 1983, featured a 1.023 MHz 65C02 processor, 64 KB RAM, and used 5.25-inch floppy disks for storage. It also supported a lowercase character set, which was an improvement over its predecessors. The computer sported a sleek design and was compatible with a wide range of peripherals, making it a popular choice for educational and personal use.
* I was going to send the owner of the Flickr account a request to use the image on my page but it hasn’t been active for 12 years. Fortunately, it did have a license listed on the page which allows for use of the image for non-commercial purposes so long as I credit the owner. The link in the caption should suffice as a credit. Click it, please. That means I can never monetize this post. That’s fine as I have no plans to monetize this site ever. Thanks, mysterious Flickr account!
Today is the release day for the new MacOS! Sonoma should be available, but it hasn’t shown up in my Mac App Store yet.
I have to say that there isn’t a whole lot here that I am excited about, apart from the normal “newer is better (and hopefully faster and more efficient, but who really knows)” vibe. I might look into widgets. I don’t really use them on my iPhone and barely acknowledge they exist on my iPad. Maybe I’ll see what’s out there for hockey and baseball and notepads and weather and news headlines and blogging stuff and random things like that.
I don’t use Safari so even though some of the updates are interesting, I am never going to see them. Oh well. That’s the downside of using third party browsers, I guess.
Whatever, Happy MacOS Sonoma Day, Apple fanboys and fangirls. Enjoy the day (assuming the download actually becomes available in your neck of the woods)!
Ironic yet unrelated note, I was prompted to take an OS update in Windows on my work machine today. What a small world, huh?
ADDENDUM: I guess the Mac App Store was just waiting for me to start complaining on the blog because the OS Update download became available to me just a few minutes after initially I published this post. Thanks, universe!
I worked on some lyrics for three of the November songs tonight. I won’t do car music tomorrow, but whenever I do it I’ll have November stuff to work on.
I had my step son’s Air Pods Max that he loaned to me on when I started and there was weirdness. I had two guitar tracks. One was panned hard left so it only plays out of the left speaker. The other is panned hard right so it only comes out of the right speaker. When I had the Air Pods Max on I was getting stereo output, meaning I had music in both ears, but the right guitar wasn’t there. I switched to wired headphones without changing any of the tracks and the right guitar was there.
I’m a Mac user, babie. None of that Windows crap for me. Well… except for work… and except for when I want to use something that doesn’t run on a Mac.
Jen has inspired me to try my hand at gaming so I installed World of Warcraft on my Mac. It works fine. Cool. Then there was the game I tried to play the last time I tried to get into gaming… which was something like 2012 or so? Star Wars: The Old Republic. That puppy doesn’t run on Mac.
So what’s a red headed Mac douche to do? Emulate, bitches! I installed Parallels and Windows 11. That works fantastically. Groovy like you’ve read about. Next, I installed Steam. That seems okay except that I always always always lose my password and had to jump through 2000000 hoops to actually get in. Once that mess was clean I downloaded and installed Star Wars. Success! Then I had to go through another 100000 password hoops before finally getting into the game and finding out that it doesn’t work with a track pad. I’m sure it works fine if I had an actual mouse with two buttons, but for the moment?
Happy August 1st, everyone! August doesn’t have a national holiday so this year I am going to try and make it feel better by acting like every day is an extra big deal. No I’m not. I’m just so happy that July and its constant rain is over. Granted, August might get constant rain too, likely will thanks to climate change, but for this one, sweet, shining morning, August is dry and I am happy about it.
I wore a mask at my mother’s house yesterday. Not all the time, just when I knew she was near me. We are both vaccinated, but she ain’t catching jack shit from me. The MA department of public health is recommending vaccinated people wear masks when they are indoors with other people around because we can’t tell who the morons who aren’t vaccinated are and if they aren’t going to do anything to protect their own health, then we the vaccinated have to do it for them. Because they are stupid. Because they are morons.
Thanks to the never ending pandemic of the unvaccinated we are still using instacart for groceries and they screwed up big time today. We had to go back for a second round. All in all I am happy for the service, they are right a crazy high percentage of the time, but every once in a while… We asked for hamburger patties and got pumpernickel bread. Riiiiight.
What else is going on on this fine Sunday morning in August that hasn’t seen any rain yet? I broke the music mold a smidgen today. We slept kinda late. Not super late, I was up at about 8:15, but for me that’s pretty late. I wanted to do some car music but the aforementioned instacart delivery was on its way, and I had some things I wanted to do before I left so I didn’t get into the car until almost 10:00. I do my car music in a movie theater parking lot, and due to the idiotic decision to re-open the state despite the never ending pandemic mentioned in the previous paragraph, the movie theater was going to be open at 10:00. I rolled the dice. I park in the back parking lot so hopefully anyone going in early to catch the delta variant and a movie would probably park in the front. My risk paid off.
I did park in a different area of the lot though. I recorded four songs. There were two technical problems but neither stopped me. First, I use Trello to track my progress. The songs I needed to work on are on a list called Complete Lyrics/Melody on a board called 2021 50/90. My normal workflow is to bring up the Trello app on my iPhone and use that to let me know which songs to work on. The last couple of times I’ve done this though, the iOS app wouldn’t refresh. It’s showing me the board from about two weeks ago. Nothing is up to date. I had to turn my iPhone hot spot on and bring it up on the Mac. That is annoying as all hell.
The second technical problem wasn’t a problem but I would have had I kept going. The temperature outside was in the mid-70’s but the sun was out and shining bright and damn if it didn’t get roasting hot in that car. I’d open the windows but then people would be able to hear me “singing” and ain’t no way that’s happening. About halfway through my little “session” the Mac’s fan kicked on and it never shut off. I don’t know how much longer I would have been able to go before it started to overheat but “fortunately” my voice ran out of gas after about an hour and I had to stop.
I did manage to finish four songs. That’s one more than I had planned. I had three songs with the guitars finished and I wanted to pick those off. I also had six songs with lyrics and melodies already written that don’t have guitars yet. A couple of those have MIDI guitar tracks acting as place holders. I did one of those.
So the plans for the rest of today include, but are not limited to, cutting some grass, recording some guitar parts, having a cookout for dinner (weather permitting, of course, though July is over so the weather will be glorious), and hanging out with my step son who only has a few weeks left before he moves to college.
Of course, as I type out that to do list I am sitting at my computer reading twitter, making fun of creationists, and thinking that it would be really nice to just sit and watch movies with Harry and Jen all day. That might be the better to do list.
Welcome to August, may it stay sunny and dry. Good luck, folks!
Patches was laying down on my desk. I thought it was a good candidate for today’s photo-a-day. Unfortunately she was sitting on my phone, and my Nikon was not quickly accessible. What can I do?
Well, I have a webcam on my laptop. Could I use that? I did a Spotlight Search for camera and webcam but they didn’t turn up anything useful. I checked Launchpad to see if there was a camera app of some kind. That’s when I saw it.
Photo Booth?
Is that still a thing? I popped it open and sure enough, it’s still a thing. I angled my lappy to face the cat and BANG, photo acquired. I opened it up in Photos to clean it up a little and, as always, was a tiny bit saddened by the lack of groovy filters. I messed around with it a tiny bit and then clicked the export button to see what my options were. It used to be able to connect to Flickr, but not any more. I clicked the “more” option at the bottom of the drop down and saw something I never noticed before.
Extensions? In Photos? Huh.
There were no options available but I wasn’t ready to let it go so I did something I never do… I went to the Mac App Store. I searched for Photos Extensions and sure enough a few things came up. I searched for Photos Filters and much to my surprise a Free app displayed. I figured I would install it just to use it as a guinea pig for the Photos extensions. Much to my surprise, it worked!
Now my Flickr Photo-a-Day pic is a Photo Booth snap, edited in Photos, using a third party filter app. It’s just a day of firsts for me!
Inside the Red Head's Head 