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Limo

Knob Twiddlers
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    Cycling bikes

    in General Banter

    Posted

    1 hour ago, IDEM said:

    Wouldn't mind a stand on my gravel bike either, but still hesitating, might look a bit strange after all.

    Hehehe ... if you do this in The Netherlands, it just ends up looking like a regular bike (like this one does).

    I spent years without a stand on my single speed commuter bike because it didn't come with one. Always a hassle to park your bike, always need something to lean it against. This being The Netherlands, with millions of bikes around, all the good spots are always taken so I'd always have to spend time hunting for a place to park my bike. Mounting a €15 Decathlon bike stand was *so* liberating.

    Cycling bikes

    in General Banter

    Posted

    IMG_0850.thumb.jpeg.1e566cd817b140613d554b2bccd88e50.jpeg

    Adopted a new touring bike: a Cube Hyde Race the original owner decked out with useful things like mudguards, a luggage carrier, a bike stand (sooo useful) and, of course, a lock. Shimano 8 speed Alfine hub and a belt so everything between here and the foothills of the Alps is perfectly doable and there’s no need for maintenance.

    Previous owner didn’t get along with it so sold it back to the store almost immediately meaning it’s good as new.

    • Like 2

    Cycling bikes

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by Limo

    6 hours ago, IDEM said:

     

    This is my daily driver, a Riese & Müller Delite GT vario with continuous hub gear and belt drive, nicknamed The Beast. It's sturdy af -- it's built like a tank, feels and rides like a tank, and I absolutely love it. What it does is give me confidence and security, I feel like I can do anything (apart from any serious trails perhaps, which I have no interest in anyway) and go anywhere (at least as long as the battery holds up). And, maybe, just maybe I sometimes imagine I'm Batman when I ride it.

     

    IMG-20230322-WA0000.thumb.jpg.a378c4aab20c4ee77be9757e45b2b342.jpg

     

    So here's my story: two years ago, when it was time for a new bike, I decided I was old enough for an electric one. I'm a lazy ass, and my mountain bike was gathering dust. Since I got this machine, my radius of movement has extended considerably, because I'm no longer afraid of any steep hill or long climb whatsoever. Still, I mostly drive it in eco mode and only unleash the kraken when the situation calls for it. I do my daily shopping with it, go for longer tours on the weekend or take it for a quick round through the woods, and it brings me great joy.

    And yet, there is one thing that's been bothering me, which is that I can't really go any faster than 25 km/h. In short, I guess I'm still a little bit too fit for my e-bike, and I have to admit it can be a little frustrating when those aerodynamically optimized human projectiles on their little road bikes zip past me. I could chip it, which would be illegal and potentially dangerous. The alternative would be a second bike, a light, nimble, fast bike. Ironically, it seems like the e-bike has gotten me so into biking that I would like to bike more ... seriously? So when my beloved beast was in the shop for maintenance a couple of weeks ago and I was suffering from massive bike withdrawal, I thought, fuck it, did some research and discovered that gravel bikes were not only a thing, but actually quite the rage. Mind you, I'm the opposite of a hipster, but I do think I have a use case for it. I don't like to ride on roads populated by cars much, so I guess a gravel bike would be the best of both worlds, a bike that I could take off the beaten path but that would also be fast on tarmac. So I ordered a Cube Nuroad C:62 SL on a whim.

    The thing is, I'm sort of getting cold feet now. My back is properly fucked, I had hernia surgery five years ago and now have another slipped disc, and I'm concerned with comfort. The Cube has zero suspension and I fear for my back and neck. Do any of you have experience with actually riding a gravel bike on gravelly or forest roads? Would my old bones be rattling uncontrollably? I'm also not sure about the more sporty position due to geometry and drop bars. Unfortunately I won't be able to really test drive it. The days without any bike at all were really hard, I hadn't even realized how much I had gotten used to riding daily, and it would be nice to have a second bike ready in case there's something wrong with the e-bike, but it also feels like quite the indulgence when I'm actually pretty happy with what I have, except for that one little niggle. What to do, what to do?

     

    Semi-edit: While composing this epic post, I just got the e-mail that the ordered bike has arrived, lol. There is no obligation to buy it, they won't have any problem to sell it, but if I want it, I got five days to pick it up. Argh. Help me, WATTTUMMMMMMM!

    637cfee04297c_637cc2a340b14_1.jpg

    Buy it, of course.

    BTW, fenders and mudguards don’t weigh *that* much and they seriously improve your quality of life, bike wise, especially if you do your daily shopping with it. Same goes for some sort of luggage carrier. I know it seems silly to add them to bikes like these but it really improves them. And in the end you still have a nimble racing monster, just one that’s a bit more useful. And since you’re not going to win the TDF anyway, who cares if it weighs a bit more?

     

    • Like 2

    posh beers and ales and stuff thread

    in General Banter

    Posted

    33 minutes ago, beerwolf said:

    Quite partial to a radler. Don't see it in the UK much, if at all. In fact I never heard of it until I went to New Zealand where its very popular. That was a long time ago though.

    They sell that shit all over the Netherlands. It's foul: sweet and sour lemonade with a hint of artificial bitter to simulate beer. -1 would not recommend.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1

    AI - The artificial intelligence thread

    in General Banter

    Posted

    5 hours ago, Summon Dot E X E said:

    There's just so much you can represent in the audio space, and the training files are so large, hence training is slower and more expensive

    Right, but they said the major / minor thing was tested on MIDI files, which are really small. So whatever the reason is, it's not this.

    5 hours ago, Summon Dot E X E said:

    I can't help but think that there may be insufficiently descriptive metadata for a lot of music, too, which is key.

    You might be on to something here. For image recognition (which ML is very good at) the metadata is clear and descriptive. For language models the training data itself is the metadata. But how would you describe a piece of music accurately? If this was easy to do, music critics would be out of a job.

    • Like 1

    AI - The artificial intelligence thread

    in General Banter

    Posted

    10 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

    https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/ai-and-music-making-the-state-of-play/

    https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/ai-and-music-making-part-two-tomorrow-is-the-question/

    Quote

    In a talk arguing for the continued importance of “symbolic music generation,” Julian Lenz of AI music company Qosmo pointed out that raw audio models aren’t yet good at grasping the basics of music theory. For example, Google’s MusicLM, a recent general music model trained on hundreds of thousands of audio clips, has trouble distinguishing between major and minor keys. (emphasis added)

    Interesting. Would have thought that this was easy (they’re talking about MIDI so the amount of data should be more than manageable).

    Then again, major / minor is only a thing in Western classical music, so maybe it’s difficult for human brains too.

    • Like 2

    stupid first world achievements and successes

    in General Banter

    Posted

    12 hours ago, Wunderbar said:

    One positive thing about teaching i assume is that you feel like you are doing something positive with your life?

    Yes.

    Although most of my students will go on to spend their lives building needlessly complicated CRUD applications for use by marketing companies, I tell myself that at least some of them will do something useful with the skills I teach them. I’m not sure this has already happened but one can always hope.

    Russia is now bombing Ukraine

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Yeah, this is all a big WTF. But then this entire war has been WTF from he beginning (in 2014). None of it has made sense. Ukraine was not a military threat to Russia until they invaded Crimea and the west started arming and training the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian government was so weak it didn’t need any active destabilizing whatsoever for the country to remain too big of a mess for the rest of the world, let alone the EU or NATO, to touch it. Vast segments of the Ukrainian population were basically Russian and thought of themselves as such until the invasion of 2022. On of the largest armies in the world, and the only significant army that had major experience with being in action during the past two decades has made mistakes even a rookie computer strategy game player wouldn’t make (a single file of slow moving trucks and tanks, really?).

    Luckily there’s our resident WATMM Russia expert @Hugh Mughnusto explain things for us otherwise I’d be even more confused than I already am about his.

    And I’m not being flippant here. Your take is probably the most sensible one.

    • Like 3

    stupid first world achievements and successes

    in General Banter

    Posted

    2 hours ago, dcom said:

    In Finland, if you get sick during vacation, you just go to a doctor and get a sick leave certificate for the days you're sick, and you get to use the vacation days later. This is very nice.

    It works like this in the Netherlands as well, but I work as a teacher so, you know, not really possible.

    stupid first world problems you're dealing with

    in General Banter

    Posted

    2 hours ago, luke viia said:

    I've been set up with a woman by a mutual friend and I've never been set up with anyone ever, how the hell do people do this? Do I just ask her about whether she's heard the new aphex? and ghost her if the answer is no? That seems like the thing to do

    If the answer is "no", don't ghost, but start educating her. Women like that.

    • Big Brain 1

    What TV series are you watching at moment?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Started "For All Mankind" hoping it would be hard sci-fi. It's not. It's drama drenched in cliched writing (pretty sure ChatGPT was involved).

    Still curious as to where they take this.

     

    But ... can anyone recommend some truly hard as nails sci fi (as opposed to "game of thrones with spaceships", like Foundation was)? I'd be much, much obliged.

    the watmm GAS thread

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Limo

    29 minutes ago, source_rec said:

    can anyone suggest any creative uses for the sp404 mk2? i got it and doesn't feel like i'm jelling with the workflow very well - the sequencer is too archaic (after using digitakt) and i find it difficult to use besides as a resampling fx box, which feels like a waste considering how much it costs

    Hey, this is something I have some experience with!

    FWIW (YMMV, OFC, ETC):

    • The sequencer is indeed horrible. The canonical workflow of SP machines is that you resample, that is to say record "sequences" in real time as new samples. If you're good at finger drumming, more power to you. If you're not, there is now, as you have noticed, a sequencer, but it's not very good. It gets better with practice, but it's still a frustrating POS. The step sequencer that was added in recent firmware I haven't used yet, but it doesn't look great.
    • Sampling and resampling is quite fast, as is trimming samples. Even chopping is fairly quick. Basic operations such as panning, normalizing and tuning are also super easy.
    • The effects are very, very good. Not bread and butter (equalizing a sample is a bit frustrating and the two reverbs are ... characterful) but they can quickly turn pedestrian samples into pure gold. Also, every studio should have the SP303 vinyl sim as an end stage before the final recording.

    So yes, it's basically a resampling fx box, as SP machines always have been. The mk2 tacks on a lousy sequencer but that does not change this basic fact.

    Whether this means you should keep it is up to you. I had one myself for about six months, decided I didn't really need it because I already had an MPC One, which is in all respects a much, much better device, but ended up buying it again recently because the effects are just that good.

    My couch workflow is now to sample into the SP 404 mk 2, usually with effects to rough things up, maybe process a bit further (tuning, trimming, more effects) and then sample the result into an MPC 500 for sequencing. Sometimes I also sample a sequence from the MPC back into the SP 404 for further processing - and then back into the MPC again. Finally, if I decide something is worthy of becoming a track, I sample the sequences from the MPC into the SP404, apply a vinyl sim to the result and record a final track into Ableton.

    Whether this works for you, you'll have to figure out for yourself. Me, I like messy, hazy lofi stuff (Basic Channel, for instance, or the LA Beat scene) so for me this works. If you're into cleaner, more precise music, the SP 404 likely isn't for you.
     

    Good luck!

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