I just thought I should write a short post explaining that I’ve decided to drop my old dedicated photoblog at eidetic.photos and have merged it into my leonard.earth blog. It just didn’t make sense to keep paying for two domains and two WordPress personal plans when I am mainly just photoblogging.

Luckily WordPress makes it easy to migrate my blog subscribers/followers, so anyone who used to be subscribed to the old Eidetic Opacity posts should now be getting notifications/emails from “On a Variety Of Topics” (as I call my leonard.earth blog).

It will continue to primarily be a photoblog, but occasionally I’ll write about other topics.

For those using RSS who just want to get photoblog posts, you can always just follow the RSS feed for the photoblog category:

https://leonard.earth/category/photoblog/feed/

But I suspect there aren’t too many RSS users out there!

Also a redesign

I decided to also take the opportunity to redesign the site completely. Took a little while to find a base theme I liked, but then used WordPress’s new theme block editor to rejig things how I like. It’s a little more complicated than the old WP themes approach, but it’s definitely a lot more flexible.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new site and I’ll keep on posting a photo every day for as long as I can manage.

The old site should start redirecting to here soon (just waiting for the name server change to propagate) (yes I’m still a nerd at heart).

Two years ago I migrated my self-hosted website to WordPress.com. In doing so I decided to experiment with splitting the site into a dedicated photoblog on eidetic.photos, and the rest over here on leonard.earth.

Now that the time is approaching to renew my WordPress biannual subscriptions, I’ve decided I just don’t do enough written blogging to really justify having two separate sites. So I’m in the process of completely revamping the theme on this site to prepare for merging my photoblog back in.

Things might behave a little oddly, or look out of place (I’ll regret not being more consistent with featured images on this site), but hopefully before the photoblog’s renewal date sometime in May I’ll have everything migrated and merged, and there’ll be a new photoblog section of this site.

With any luck the new merged site with daily photos going up might actually get me back into more regular blogging as well.

So this morning I headed off to the airport to visit my parents for a few days. Foolishly I somehow managed to leave my water bottle on the kitchen table.

I didn’t realise until I got to the airport where I discovered, to my horror, that a 500ml bottle of water cost €3.75.

Naturally, out of principle, I refuse to pay that much for water. The airport has water stations beyond the gates where you can refill your bottles, so I had a good drink of water there and I’ll be fine.

But as I was walking around the airport I noticed all the little shops and cafes which were, in my personal opinion, completely dead – considering how many people were walking around. Perhaps all those people, like me, know that buying anything in the airport is only in case of desperation given the obscene prices that airports always charge.

I wonder if an airport made it very clear that all their prices were standard and not marked up – would they discover that people would actually buy a lot more and not be so cautious with their wallets.

Having lived in Ireland where there seems to be a very high ratio of unbelievable bullcrap performed by landlords to maximise the value of their properties (and in the process force people into accepting worse and worse living conditions), I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how things tend to be in Berlin when we arrived 7 years ago. Despite it being difficult to find a place due to high demand, the quality tended to be decent and I had an impression that renters were well protected and it was overall a good place to rent an apartment.

Now that we’re being evicted (using the hard to fight “personal use” clause), we’re plunged back into a rental market after 7 years not having to think about it. And it seems that given the amount of money to be made, Berlin landlords are not immune to being tempted to take the absolute piss in order to find a way to make a bit more cash.

Here’s an example of an ‘exclusive refurbished 3-room’ apartment in Weissensee, just around the corner from us.

Here’s a photo of the entrance hall leading down to the front door.

But what’s the object in the bottom right, and why are there a row of tiles on the wall on the right hand side?

Oh, THEY PUT THE KITCHEN IN THE HALLWAY….

I mean, seriously.

This charming abode will set you back €1,150 a month. That’s €100 per month more than our 93m2 place with a garden, 4 rooms, and a kitchen not in the hallway. Shows you how much the market has inflated in 7 years

The advert will disappear at some point, but here’s the link anyway.

There’s a video as well, which doesn’t dwell too long on the kitchen, but you get to see how tiny the hob and sink are.

Looks like they’ve left space for a dishwasher, which possibly seems excessive considering that you’ll never ever want to cook in this kitchen space.

I’m in the process of reorganising my studio a bit (given the fact that we are being evicted from our home of seven years in Berlin), and one task I’ve been meaning to sort out is selling my old Elektron Digitakt 1 which has been superseded by the superior Digitakt 2.

I’ve dragged my feet on it a bit because I knew there was some material on there which I’d written on a long train ride to and from London over a year ago and I suspected it would take a while to sort out and record off the machine.

I wasn’t wrong. It’s taken quite a few hours to record the stems off in a manner that will make them as useful as possible for later development into full blown songs.

But after I’d finished I thought it best to double check the other projects on the machine.

Lo and behold I discovered 4 track ideas I’d drafted out for a Dronal EP. I can’t even remember when and where I wrote them now, but it’s a good reminder to always keep track of this stuff and take the time to finish what you start!

Anyway, lots of new music in the works across a wide range of different projects – just gotta make sure to finish them all

I’ve said this before and on the rare occasions that it comes time for me to book long distance travel, whether by train (preferred) or by plane, I am instantly reminded of it again.

The pricing fluctuations on long distance train and any plane ticket are just too extreme in my mind, and have some seriously negative connotations.

It’s extremely easy to see just how ridiculous this situation is. Let’s have a quick look at some examples.

Quickly looking at booking a train from Berlin to Amsterdam. If I book two months from now, I can get a ticket from around €38. If I was to need to go two days from now I could see a ticket price as high as €257. Nearly seven times the price.

It gets even more extreme looking at flights. If I look one month ahead I can get a direct flight to Dublin from Berlin for €35. Looking at same-day or next-day flights I’ve seen prices as high as €638. That’s 18 times the price..

The opportunist who books in advance just because it’s so cheap they may as well could be sitting on the plane next to some (now impoverished) poor soul who desperately needed to return home perhaps due to ill-health or death of a family member. They have the same flight experience, but the person that was just flying on a whim and didn’t really need to take the trip is sitting beside someone who’s been forced to dump over €600 to subsidise their and many other flyer’s tickets.

Proponents of dynamic pricing will say that it helps airlines to ensure flights are flying full instead of half-empty, making them more efficient, but I think this is a slightly misleading argument.

Artificially Inflating Demand

Naturally it is great to think that with dynamic pricing an airline can ensure that they fill up the flights and maximise the use of the transportation for the carbon emitted. But by allowing airlines to sell the initial seats for an absolute pittance whilst ferociously punishing those that must fly at short notice, we’re surely getting an artificial sense of the true level of demand for that route.

I remember well meeting a friend who said “oh we’re going to {some island I’ve forgotten} for the weekend”. I proffered surprise – I didn’t know they had planned it. They explained that they’d seen tickets for €5 each way – and at that price they’d be “crazy not to take it”..

At a time when we desperately need to reduce our emissions and waste of resources, we don’t want to be luring people into buying travel tickets who otherwise would be quite happy to go hang out in the park at the weekend.

Restrict Dynamic Pricing

Naturally the airlines and rail companies know what the average ticket price needs to be per seat for them to cover costs and make a reasonable profit – but consumers haven’t really got a clue.

When I catch the tram and a train from my house to some other part of Berlin city, I know it’s going to cost me €2.70 for the trip. Imagine we had dynamic pricing on our local public transport “Oh, this tram is nearly full, your ticket’s going to cost €36, sorry”. There’d be uproar! No one would stand for this behaviour at all – and yet we accept this behaviour on long-distance travel.

That flight to Dublin, or that train to Amsterdam – presumably there must be a base price. Perhaps it’s €150 or something. The train to Amsterdam, maybe instead of the early-bird price of €38, the more realistic price is €60 or €70?

Why can we not regulate long-distance travel providers to say that they can’t discount or inflate the base price by more than say 20%, so that we don’t have a situation where people are looking at that flight to Mallorca and thinking “Hey, we can fly for €20 each way and have a little weekend getaway that we’d never have considered otherwise”. Perhaps the base flight of that trip is €100. With a dynamic pricing restriction then the discounted seats would be a far more realistic cost of, at its cheapest, €80 each way.

This would immediately cut down the opportunistic flyers and undoubtedly would result in a reduction in the number of flights being taken, whilst meeting the realistic needs and impressing upon people a realistic impression of costs.

Furthermore it would also reduce the amount of spurious additional flights being taken – where flight comparison engines show people that instead of flying a single direct flight from X to Y, they can take two or three flights for half the price of the direct flight which due to dynamic pricing has been artificially inflated in price.

Of course I’m just a regular punter without any real knowledge of the byzantine complexities and intricacies of the global transport systems – but considering our desperate need to reduce our carbon emissions to meet our potentially lacking targets, surely we should be looking at anything that is inflating demand that might not otherwise exist.

I’m absolutely open to hearing arguments and explanations as to why I’m wrong, but it feels like quite a common sense solution to me.

This morning I read that US President Joe Biden had given a speech yesterday in which he stated:

We can’t allow this violence to be normalized

I’m sorry to report, but everything points to the fact that gun violence is already well and truly normalised in the USA.

My younger brother is over in the US working, and yesterday I heard from him that he was woken at 5am by some commotion in the street junction below his hotel room in Dallas, followed by a gunshot, followed by police and ambulance services. Later on he scoured available news sources to find out what had happened. Nothing, not even mentioned.

Violence is so normalised in the USA that “regular” shootings don’t even make the news any more.

I was curious to find some figures, and the numbers are shocking. According to the Gun Violence Archive, it seems that there are around 60,000 shootings in the US every year, of which about 20,000 are fatal. If we average this out that means that there are approximately 164 shootings resulting in injury or death per day across the USA. And this doesn’t include gun-involved suicides…

I have spoken to Americans in the past who seem to find it incomprehensible that I’ve never owned nor held a handgun in my life (I did once do a clay pigeon shoot at a friend’s brother’s stag party, so I can’t say I’ve never held any gun – but I don’t think we need to count that). When you read the Wikipedia page on Gun Violence in the US, that incomprehension starts to make a bit more sense. Back in 2009 a country with a population of 306 million had 310 million firearms, with 10-15 million firearms being purchased every year.

Not only is the gun homicide rate approximately 18 times that of other “developed” countries, it’s particularly bad for young males (17-24) who are “70 times more likely to be killed with a gun than their counterpart in the eight (G-8) largest industrialised nations in the world”.

To me the idea that a child would need to go through drills on how to respond in a school shooting is utterly bizarre, and yet this seems to be the general reaction in the US. Instead of:

“There’s been a shooting, let’s work together to prevent and reduce shootings from happening in the first place”.

We get:

“There’s been a shooting, let’s learn and train on how to better deal with shootings when they happen”

The mind boggles.

I’ve continued using SwiftKey despite them having been acquired by Microsoft a good while back, because I’m so accustomed to this keyboard that I find it hard to switch.

Recently they’ve added AI generated stickers to the app, which saddened me – to think of all the unnecessary energy use by people hitting up AI image generators to create stickers for their IM messages (I’m perfectly content to use some “old fashioned” emoji thanks..)

Of course I can (and will) just ignore them, but coupled with a general lack of trust in Microsoft, I think it really might be time to find another Android keyboard that will come close to some feature parity with SwiftKey.

Any recommendations?

Some things I’d need:

• Good predictive text: eg it remembers frequent combos/chains of words (often SwiftKey will remember that after typing Word X and Word Y, I follow it with a chain of three/four words. This is a big time saver
• Syncing predictions between devices – I want the same stuff to pop up whether I’m on my phone or tablet
• A nice-to-have would be to have a decent clipboard which is synced between devices
• Swipe style typing built in (often use that when one handed typing on the phone)
• Decent layout/theme customisation options
• It would be very nice to have something where I’m assured of privacy of my typing and that I’m not training some LLM as I type…

Oh man. So a year ago or more I discovered a weird glitch with three UAD plugins by Softube whereby any non-realtime rendering in StudioOne resulted in latency being introduced. This glitch had not always been there, but I couldn’t pinpoint when it started happening.

After being turned away by UAD and PreSonus, I spent a long time back and forth with Softube support trying to find a fix, but sadly none has yet been found.

I will say though, their support team have always been great! So even if it hasn’t yet been fixed, their patience and continued investigations keep me a contented customer.

Anyway, the only partial solutions were:

1. Always render in realtime, or
2. Only use UAD Softube plugins within Console 1 (where for some reason, the latency compensation is properly reported and causes no issues)

Since we worked that out about 6 months ago, I’ve been careful to not use UAD Chandler Limiter, UAD Zener Bender, or UAD Tonelux Tilt as VSTs. I still use them within Console 1, but that appears to be fine.

However, a few of my old projects were done before the bug popped up and recently I needed to access some old mixes to export stems for live use.

Sadly I completely forgot about the latency bug, and after painstakingly exporting stems for 6 of 7 tracks (each time carefully selecting which tracks to group and which areas of the song to export for use), I suddenly noticed that some of my drum elements were out of sync in the bounced stems.

The latency bug

The issue is that it compounds – depending on which plugins and how many of them were used. So if one stem is going through no problem plugins it’ll have no latency issues, but the next stem might go through one problem instance and have X latency, the stem after might go through two problem instances and have Y latency.

So I can’t even really fix it.

I just have to start all over again.

There has been some audible cursing coming from my studio. Apologies to any passers-by that might have been offended.

Sigh.

I was so delighted when the Errorgrid label boss said this to me:

“It’s one part liquid, one part solid, one part insane – a sonic cocktail from a music barista with a bent mind”

The Errorgrid Machine

This release serves as a companion piece to my debut release Centic Primer, which came out in December 2021. After taking some time away from that I scoured through the ideas that hadn’t made the cut. With new eyes on everything I found some potential gems, and spent quite a long time reworking and expanding these ideas. I stripped elements back to their core and layered new ideas over through multiple hardware jam sessions. I reframed some pieces in new tempos and different spaces. It was exciting to breathe new life into those ideas which had fallen by the wayside!

I hope you’ll find something you love in this densely packed electronic experimentation. I always love trying to build detailed sonic landscapes – aiming for something that, whilst undoubtedly synthetic, somehow manages to imply a human, organic sensation, one juxtaposed with poly-rhythms and contrapuntal rising and morphing drone elements.

The release comes as a digital 6-track EP and there’s also some very limited edition prints showcasing the beautiful artwork painted by Polish artist Adrianna Snochowska.