Jan Krutisch

Every two years, on even years, on weeklybeats.com, there’s a sorta kind music contest (without the actual contest part) where the idea is to submit a piece of music, at least one minute long, every week, for the whole year.

I have attempted this twice so far, in 2014 (Where I managed to create 15 beats) and 2018 (14 beats). I always had a phase of joy in the beginning, then it became work and then I quit. This year, at least so far, feels different, as I am giving myself a lot more slack and let stuff be unfinished, if I can’t make it. Let’s see how many beats I can make this year. I thought it would be kinda fun to write up some notes on all of these beats I managed to release so far.

These are more or less the notes I wrote as descriptions on weeklybeats.com plus extra information or thoughts whenever I see fit (Marked as “Editor’s notes”. I’m going to update this article over the year.

This is a continuation from this post containing all beats from Q1.

Every two years, on even years, on weeklybeats.com, there’s a sorta kind music contest (without the actual contest part) where the idea is to submit a piece of music, at least one minute long, every week, for the whole year.

I have attempted this twice so far, in 2014 (Where I managed to create 15 beats) and 2018 (14 beats). I always had a phase of joy in the beginning, then it became work and then I quit. This year, at least so far, feels different, as I am giving myself a lot more slack and let stuff be unfinished, if I can’t make it. Let’s see how many beats I can make this year. I thought it would be kinda fun to write up some notes on all of these beats I managed to release so far.

These are more or less the notes I wrote as descriptions on weeklybeats.com plus extra information or thoughts whenever I see fit (Marked as “Editor’s notes”. I’m going to update this article over the year.

Last year in June, we sunset Artdoxa, an online arts platform I more or less worked on from its humble beginnings and have been the sole developer of for the last 11 years or so. The reason we took it offline is that while there were a couple of active users still using it, we never managed to get it to pay for itself and its owner (and quite frankly me as well) didn’t want to maintain and operate it at a loss.

When we finally took it offline, we had agreed on me spending a bit of time to try to create an archived version, fully functional in read only mode. This is what I am currently working on.

Recently, I went back from using Visual Studio Code almost exclusively to using Sublime Text for most of my editing work. I’m a paying customer (And have been using the most excellent Sublime Merge as my git GUI of choice all the way through, as I found the VS Code git integration a bit lacking). Also I have to set up this new machine (More on that in another blog post) and so I am going through all of the tools I need and figuring out how to best install them on this machine.

For years now the official instructions on how to install Sublime Text and Sublime Merge are somewhat wrong. The reason is that Ubuntu (And, I believe, Debian as well) have changed the way the GPG keys are supposed to be stored and referenced for third party repositories. I am still not 100% sure why this change, that actually makes installing software from third party repositories so much harder, was neccessary, but there are probably good security reasons for it.

In any case, by taking inspiration from the official Docker instructions I was able to cobble together the instructions to do this in the “official” way on modern Ubuntu.

I thought it would be useful to have a version available that explains this line by line and thus make it applicable to other cases.

If you have read my blog before, you may have noticed I have completely overhauled and stripped down the design of this page. I am not 100% happy with it but the branch was lying around for so long that I finally pulled myself together, fixed the worst stuff and just hit the button.

There are a few things still missing but this should be good enough for now.

And yes, this is the third post with this headline. The first one is from 2011 and the second one is from 2014.

In my last article about Mastodon (and Twitter), I was very hopeful for the future, because I felt like we’ve been moving into the right direction. The fediverse felt (and still largely feels) like a very internet approach to social media. Decentralised, federated, very Email like and with a strong incentive to embrace that decentralised nature.

I am a little less hopeful today, but my thinking is still very much in flux.

So let’s talk Bluesky for a second. It seems like most of its promises of interoperability are largely unsubstantiated at this point. People have been mostly raving about its superiour (over Mastodon) onboarding process (which is much easier if you don’t have to take federation into account) and the cool vibes (which seems to be largely credited to a very deliberate slow onboarding and vetting process. Again, much easier if you’re in full control).

An ongoing critique of Twitter peope about people on Mastodon is that on Mastodon, one only talks about Mastodon. Totally predictably, throughout the last few days, this increasingly was the case and is probably normal for a period of heavy growth. To be fair, with recent events even Twitter became much more self aware and meta.

So Twitter is now officially the playball of a billionaire with a history of questionable business practices, a strong anti union stance and a self proclaimed free-speech-absolutionism.

Sounds like a plan. Not necessarily a good one, but a plan.

As I write this, almost every single country on this planet is dealing with some sort of “environmental” disaster. Floods and wildfires, both “fueled” by weather patterns pushed to the extreme by, let’s just get this out of the way, human made climate change. The extremes of 2021 may be a very seldom outlier on the historic scales of humankind, but if you have read the IPCC report carefully, we can almost guarantee it won’t be an outlier for very long and the extremes of this year will feel muted to us in the not so far distant future.

Well, let’s talk about something different, something more fun, shall we?

The corona virus is a global pandemic that has caused, so far, around 4 million deaths (that we know of) globally. It has disrupted our lives in a way only very few events can, and I would go as far to say that it probably has affected more humans (absolutely) than any other previous event. Okay, that’s easy. In 1918, we had probably around 1,6 Billion people - We’re now close to 8 Billion.

So, what do these events, apart from the horror and pain they stack on top of each other, have in common?

The European Union is a fascinating construct. It has brought long standing peace to a region that never had more than a few decades of that at a time. It has brought together former enemies and has produced a young generation of Europeans with a complete disregard for borders and language barriers. I love this part with all of my heart.

From very early on, though, Europe, as much as it was about togetherness for those who are on the inside, it was also about the otherness of those outside. Frontex, founded in 2004, is the latest bureaucratic manifestation of that. In 2005, one of my favourite rap groups, swedish “Loop Troop” (they later renamed themselves to “Loop Troop Rockers”), published an album and a single named “Fort Europa”, a strong statement of condemning this fortification of the European continent. More and more legislation, on the other hand, ate away at the human right of taking asylum, putting more and more of the burden on the victims, making it harder and harder to enter the EU as a refugee.

So far, I’ve only written on my various other blog-like things about my departure from the Apple eco system. Probably about time to write a “proper” blog post about it, but this is not going to be that post.

During the lest few days, I noticed that I became more and more frustrated with my current setup and this brought me back to the original reason why I liked my Apple Macs so much.

I swear, I did try to write a “year in review” for 2019, but again, I was very much failing to compress a year with massive ups and downs (with a mild emphasis on downs, I think) into one cohesive blog post. So I think, what I’ll do instead is try to write several posts on the various themese that dominated 2019 and that will probably dominate 2020 as well for me.

This first post is, well, you may have guessed it from the title, about our climate crisis. 2019 was, after the foreshadowing by the super hot summer of 2018, the year where nobody could (any longer) deny the existence of a climate crisis. Now, of course, I was aware of climate change for a long time. As a studied environmental engineer and with a somewhat solid base of knowledge in natural sciences, it’s not as if I could have escaped it in any way. In fact, during all of my time at university (1996-2002) this was already an ongoing discussion. Heck, my main work experience project was a thing called “climate network” (Klimanet), a website that educated public schools on how to save energy. My diploma thesis was working on solar chargers for rural Namibia, a project meant to aide rural communities in cutting down on gas lamps and open fires.

This has been sitting around for quite some time but after a very hectic spring and a loooong summer, I’m now slowly ramping up my indoor activities.

I’m planning on remodeling my living room / office for quite some time now and one of the reasons I haven’t done it yet that I have way too much “stuff” (in all forms and sizes) to gracefully move it from the living room to my bedroom and still have a livable place.

For that reason, I need to get rid of a lot of stuff. As I despise working with platforms like Ebay classifieds for stuff like this, I’m trying something different: You can find all of my stuff I want to get rid of on my new “Spring Cleaning” web page. If this works, I will add a lot more stuff to that list.

If you’re interested in something, let me know. There’s some really weird and interesting stuff in there.

I’ll also probably will start to add some books to it.

Between the years I started to work on a “year in review” post but I couldn’t finish it. There are a couple of things I simply can’t write about that were so dominant throughout the last year that if I wouldn’t have written about them it wouldn’t have felt right. And still, no, sorry. So, yeah, 2017 had it’s ups and downs like every year, but I’m afraid the ups were largely drowned out by the downs. And unfortunately (the main reason I can’t really write about it) the most important downs were personal. But, of course, the state of the world has something to do with it. And, reflecting on my own behaviour and especially my media consumption while trying to write that retrospective, I realized that I needed to change things a bit.

Ugh, I didn’t exactly blog much here lately have I? I did blog in this other place, though, and this other place, called Depfu, is our latest try to actually build our own product.

Depfu helps teams that use Ruby and Rails to keep their dependencies up to date by creating Pull Requests on your Repos on GitHub with the updates that are coming in via rubygems.org. It is inspired by greenkeeper, which does the same thing for JavaScrip projects using npm.

Today, Depfu is on ProductHunt. If you want to support us, me or Depfu (or ideally: All of them), you probably know what to do.

This day is an experiment, as we have temporarily borrowed some really loud loudspeakers and want to create as much buzz as possible. If we can get that done, it will probably help us a great deal in bringing Depfu forward on the path to sustainability, which is, of course, our long term goal.

Ten days ago, I got myself a Pebble. Yes, a Pebble. In the light of the recent announcements of the now-ex-manufacturer of the Pebble, this sounds like one of the most idiotic ideas ever, and it probably was. The thing is, it was never as cheap to get one of these. I paid less than 100 EUR for a Pebble Time. And I was genuinely interested in the ecosystem. I’m not a watch person, for the most part, otherwise I probably would have gotten one earlier. And now, I’m wearing a Pebble for 10 days and even though reviewing it seems kind of pointless right now, as it is not a product with any sort of future (apart from a few faithful hackers trying to rescue the ecosystem), I think it might actually be interesting to share my findings, especially in the light of the company’s demise.

This may only be of interest to some of you, but it’s something I wanted to have documented somewhere, so that’s why I made a blog post out of it.

I just got my Modal Electronics CRAFT synth, a surprisingly powerful little synthesizer that comes in a very interesting form factor.

(Update: Today, the app(s) came out and I updated some information in the gist and in this article).

Over the last few weeks, I had random conversations with people where the US presidential elections came up. On more than one occasion, someone brought up the typical “Well, Trump is a crazy person, but the American president doesn’t have that much power anyway, so what should go wrong. And by the way, Hillary is a Hawk and that might be really bad, too” line.

By the way, this is a European perspective, but I assume it is something Americans have heard in conversations as well.

Here’s a few reasons why I think this line of thinking is extremely lazy and dangerous:

On thursday night, I planned to work a little on this big ember app I’m working on for a client. For some reason, even though my app was the only tab opened, Chrome had a pretty high CPU usage. Now, I know Chrome is generally good at that, but I was intrigued. My app can use quite a bit of your CPU at times, but just sitting there, idling around, this should not happen. Opening the Chrome task manager, I determined that indeed, it was my app that was causing the load.

I started to do more and more screencasts (mostly for Open Color Tools) and today I finally had the feeling that I didn’t screw up completely.

Here’s what I think I have learned so far: