Is time a “process” or “content” ✶

Fascinating 2013 article by Ctein. Recent readings make me wonder whether it’s minds rather than spaceships that’ll allow long-distance travel between star systems.

Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Interstellar flight ✶

But breakthroughs have to be imagined before they can be designed.

Tuesday, 24 June 2025

Piano Place Hold in Am music video ✶

I recorded and edited some footage yesterday to make my first music video for my first published song.

Thanks to Dan McBride for video technical advice. Make sure to visit his trailer project.

Thanks to Mattew Florianz for audio instrument information and inspiration via his work in Elite: Dangerous.

Thanks to Matt De Ver for the field recorder and inspiration.

Thanks to Tori Amos, Aurora, Wolf Alice, Buddy Guy, Pink Floyd, Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs, Nina Simone, McCoy Tyner, Blonde Redhead, and so many others who have inspired me.

Wednesday, 18 June 2025

Seamless looping Spotify canvas video clip with iMovie

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Having jumped into the online music world with my first song I’m now learning of things like Spotify’s canvas 8-second video loop that gives a visual motion touch to the sound.

Here’s how to make a seamless canvas video that loops with iMovie.

  1. Drag your video clip1 into iMovie, right-click on the video in the timeline and select Detach Audio, then click the audio track and press Delete to remove audio.
  2. Select the video by clicking it on the timeline, then crop it to 16:9 ratio by clicking the Cropping button above the video preview, setting Style to Crop to Fill, and clicking the check mark.2
  3. Pick a spot you like in the video and click once to place a vertical marker. Right-click and select Split Clip, then drag the first part of the split video and drop it after the second part.
  4. Reduce the length of both clips so the entire video is 7 seconds long3 by dragging from the edges in between the two clips. Don’t touch the beginning or end of the clips on the left and right side as this is where the seamless transition occurs.
  5. Drag-and-drop a Cross Dissolve transition from the Transitions tab on the top of the screen in between the two clips. Double-click the “bow tie” ⧓ icon between the two clip sections and select around 2 seconds.
  6. Export in high quality by clicking the ↑ Share arrow-icon-in-a-box on the top-right of iMovie’s window.
  7. Open the folder the video was exported to in the Finder and click View → Show View Options and make sure Show preview column is checked. Then click View → as Columns and click on the video file.
  8. On the preview column click on Rotate Left on the bottom until your video appears in vertical format.
  9. Upload your video to your song’s canvas section in your Spotify Artists management page.

  1. Slow motion clips work particularly well, but any video will do with some thoughtful editing. ↩︎

  2. If you shot the video in landscape orientation, you may want to click the rotate counterclockwise icon before cropping. You will rotate it back afterwards, in step 8. ↩︎

  3. iMovie adds some time behind the scenes, so keep the total video time at or below 7 seconds so that the full looping video in the end will be 8 seconds. ↩︎

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Tuesday, 10 June 2025

Jonathan Livingston Seagull ✶

I read a first edition of this wonderful book about the freedom of flight and of thought.

By Richard Bach, with black and white photographs, some on transparent paper, by Russell Munson.

Warmly recommended.

♫ Piano Place Hold in Am ✶

While first learning to play piano I was pressing keys without paying conscious attention to my fingers, letting the sounds flow and listening, testing Logic’s basic recording functions, and this came out, “wrong” notes and all.

An ambient audio track recorded by a creek was then layered on top with an audio pitch experiment mistakenly added in the end.

My first published song, available Tuesday, 2025 June 17, as audio waves of music transmitted from all major music websites for streaming or downloading.

Saturday, 7 June 2025

Gravity waves in the sky ✶

Beautiful photograph by Miguel Claro of a sky phenomenon also known as airglow.

Goodbye, Bill Atkinson ✶

Thank you for helping make the digital tools I use almost every day.

Yogurt recipe

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Yogurt photo by Simon Griffee.
  1. Put some ice in the bottom of a cast iron pot such as a Le Creuset to cool it for a minute or two, then remove the ice and pour 2 liters (around 8 cups) of milk in the pot.
  2. Place the pot on a stove and heat the milk to 85º C (185º F) using a cooking thermometer to measure the temperature of the milk regularly (5–10 mins). Then turn off the heat and wait until the temperature falls to 47º C (116º F), around 45 minutes.
  3. Add 4 tablespoons of plain, unsweetened yogurt you have from a previous batch or bought from a grocery store or given to you by a friend and mix with a wooden spoon.
  4. Loosely cover the pot with a plate (it shouldn’t fit perfectly, some room to breathe is necessary, so make sure there’s some space for air to enter), and put it somewhere warm, like inside a turned-off oven with only its light bulb on, leaving it there overnight so the bacteria can do its work to turn milk into yogurt.
  5. Put the pot in the fridge and wait one day before eating. Feel free to spoon the yogurt off the pot into jars for storage in the fridge.
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Monday, 2 June 2025

Get weird and disappear ✶

One of my favorite new tech writers, Nik Suresh:

But other scripts, especially the ones that are too small to think about or too large to see, drive insane life decisions. When I was studying psychology, almost everyone, including me, picked the course because we weren’t sure what we wanted to do with our lives, but the script says finish high school and then take on ten of thousands of dollars in debt. That script is so large that it basically encompasses your whole upbringing. When you try to look at it, you see grey, and think “there is no elephant here, just a cement wall”.

Thursday, 29 May 2025

Andrea del Sarto ✶

From a poem about the Renaissance painter by Robert Browning:

Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Goodbye, Sebastião Salgado ✶

May more people appreciate life the way you did.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Cartography design tutorials ✶

Daniel Huffman gets in the weeds with lots practical advice on map making.

See also Tom Patterson and Molly O’Halloran.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Protect my public media ✶

Public media is facing multiple serious threats. The Administration has proposed eliminating federal funding in its annual budget request, issued an Executive Order to block support for PBS and NPR, cancelled grants that support the creation of children’s educational programming, and plans to claw back funding approved by Congress.

Act now. Tell Congress to reject the rescissions package and stop the dismantling of public media.

Via 88.1 FM WYCE

Monday, 19 May 2025

We become what we behold ✶

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

—Marshall McLuhan (misattributed)

Friday, 16 May 2025

Dissolution Speech ✶

From the read-again-regularly list.

Thursday, 8 May 2025

Snaking Electrical Wires

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Two or four winding wires snaking wanting to touch. A way to stop all wars by stopping them, tying them together and to a ceramic circle (in the middle of a round-shaped device? Fusion?)…

Whistling singing woman, Asian features, with daughter in a bar, staying for a month. Eyes, high-pitched sound in song makes emotion well up…

Car accident, told not to stand where person fell, by wall…

Wind strong over a curved, wing-shaped roof (a way to speed up wind, directing to turbines?)…

Mom with many visitors, confused…

Skin of salmon or fish falls on floor. Messy. Next to someone eating the flesh of the fish…

Man with pistol teaching to shoot, showing that the bullets are rocks, flicking them up and letting them fall down again on his palm…

“Ask Google” LLM interface by using a prompt or thought experiment involving water and gravity…

…from a dream.

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