When are you most happy?
I’m at my calmest when I’m doing some strange do-it-yourself modding on some device in the living room, with TS knitting dog sweaters, and the COLD midmorning daylight is filtering into our home. I try not to chase the happy-mindset, as it’s a fleeting and fickle emotion. Happy? Unhappy? I know too many people who are chasing that emotion all over the place. I’ll chose contentedness and calmness over joy-rapture any day — its effects last far longer and do me better. Yes, I’m taking an unpopular view of happiness. Fine! I’m at my calmest when I have a tummy full of food or drink, I can hear cats purring in the background, I know TS is doing tasks that help her build her home-business, and I’m tinkering… sharpening… honing… polishing… sanding… a bunch of objects hopefully for sale. If I detect a defect or unexpected wrinkle in the object-of-my-power-puttering, I get joy when I can suss out a workaround.
Let’s take a recent example. I wanted to build a display rack for my audio equipment. I had a whack disused construction brackets, hardware, surplus cabling, and a limited budget. I picked up several cheap pine-wood crates from Canadian Tire during a Owen Sound Farmer’s Market day. I sanded them down and applied a couple of coats of boiled linseed oil to them. In retrospect, I should have used a darker pigmented protective oil (as pine doesn’t darket up quite like hardwood like maple or oak). The oversized metal brackets holding the crates together required plastic spacers to ensure a snug fit.
I then dug up some scrap plywood, sanded them down, linseed-oiled them, and used hidden shelf-brackets to secure them inside the pine crates. Under the supervision of an elderly house-panther, I secured a Raspberry Pi, SPID/F hat, and touch screen into the structure and anchored it to the end table.
The surplus cables are sticking out the back of the crate-creation, where I shaved down some of the pine straps to reduce cord stress. The IKEA monstrosity in the background will get moved into the DAY USE ONLY bunkie-studio. Hopefully, we can have custom hanging shelving added to the wall next year, along with a workshop for me to do my tinkering.
Does it sound better? Nah. I like swapping in/out kit to see what it does to the sound. I was convinced by THIS content provider’s episode about how human perception can’t really discern the difference between analogue and digital music. One should focus on HOW-WHERE THE ORIGINAL material was recorded. Compression? Re-recording? Re-mastering? Re-mixing? Hell… using sober session musicians and getting the artists off alcohol-cocaine? That can affect the recording. I also have audio connections wearing out, despite me being extra neurotic and careful avoiding cable flexing. Shit stretches and breaks. Before I whip out my soldering gun and set up a temporary electronics repair station, I’m hoping the headphone vendor will help me out.
{{{{{jetpack won’t translate wordpress’ web UI cleanly so…}}}}} the link is here: https://youtu.be/lzRvSWPZQYk?si=AGQO9c–glibkuZc
Incidentally, the above content creator is a collaboration of the following people: Brian McManus, Sean McManus, Stephanie Sammann, Mike Ridolfi, and with AV support from Graham Haerther & Simon Buckmaster.
I appreciate their research integrity. They also have a presence on Twitter-X, Instagram, Facebook, Discord, and Patreon.
They even had a list of references, in the form of footnotes. Most content creators are not doing this and it gives their video essay (which is what I consider any episode like this on YouTube as such) legitimacy. Check it out:
Pssshhh. Why wait! Here’s what I was able to find, as of Boxing Day 2025:
- Thanks to streaming, Americans are listening to more music than ever before. Caroline Cakebread. Business Insider, Website. Key topics: “total music listening hours have increased during the past few years… streaming music subscribers listen to 4 hours more per week than non-streamers”. Posted November 7, 2017 at 7:27 p.m. GMT -5h. Verified 25/12/2025. URL is https://www.businessinsider.com/technology-is-changing-the-way-americans-listen-to-music-2017-11
- The loudness war is real and we can prove it. Blog posting. Unfortunately, this site is now inactive, as of 25/12/2025 and it now points to a gambling site. URL is supposted to be https://blog.echonest.com/post/62248127937/the-loudness-war-is-real-and-we-can-prove-it-with …error message is ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
- Over 7.6 million vinyl LPs were sold in the US during the first half of 2018. The Vinyl Factory. Posted July 9, 2018. The site was active 25/12/2025 at 12:30 p.m. EST. Description of the website: “The Vinyl Factory is the world’s foremost vinyl enterprise. A record label, pressing plant, magazine and curator/collaborator for artists and musicians to explore new ideas in audio-visual arts”. They might be an NGO or a non-profit agency. The Vinyl Factory Limited, 16-18 Marshall Street, London W1F 7BE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under no. 04184222. URL is https://www.thevinylfactory.com/news/record-vinyl-sales-usa-first-half-2018
- Music streaming boosts sales of vinyl. BBC News, website. Posted April 14, 2016 and its link is active as of 26/12/2025. Articles’ subheading: “music streaming sites are helping to drive sales of vinyl, new research suggests”. This pole was published by a UK company called ICM (Walnut Unlimited, Accenture). Unfortunately, the online article quotes some musicians about their thoughts of vinyl and digital sales. Sir Elton John comes across as a cranky old man who laments about how people not having the attention span like they used to. URL is https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-36027867
- Certain Topics In Telegraph Transmissions. H. Nyquist, member of the AIEE. Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 90, Number 2, February 2002. The wayback machine (Internet Archive) had a copy that I eagerly downloaded — for my own use! On 25/12/2025. It’s 21 pages of gloriously technolicious physics and acoustics that’ll keep me off the streets at night, eh. URL is either http://www.loe.ee.upatras.gr/Comes/Notes/Nyquist.pdf …or… https://web.archive.org/web/20060706192816/http://www.loe.ee.upatras.gr/Comes/Notes/Nyquist.pdf
- Communication in the presence of noise. Claude E. Shannon, member of IRE (international recording engineers?). This is a very technical document about how digital recording selects bits of an analogue wave and reproduces it…. somehow. Read the article, eh. It’s associated with Nyquist’s 2002 article. URL is https://web.archive.org/web/20100208112344/http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf …or… http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf
- Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback. E. Brad Meyer and David R. Moran. Boston Audio Society, Lincoln, MA. It seems 2 members of the Audio Engineers Society (AES) tackled the which-is-better-to-listen-to question with digital music. It’s an interesting 2002 deep dive by a couple of gearheads, that’s online as of 26/12/2025. Their URL is https://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf
- The big squeeze. Mastering engineers debate music’s loudness wars. It was published Dec. 1, 2005 at 12:00 p.m. by Sarah Jones for MIX – professional audio and music production (website or magazine). Its URL is https://web.archive.org/web/20100825003547/http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_big_squeeze/
- Several of the episode’s links were inactive or led to articles behind paywalls. If you want to educate yourself about audio compression, the differences between analogue and digitally-recorded music, troll around the Audio Engineering Society. The AES has chapters all over America, Europe, Africa(?), and Asia(?).
- Hell, I’ve even had luck reading Audio Recording For Dummies. It was surprisingly well-referenced and worth a read if you want to get into the nuts-and-bolts of audio listening. For Dummies is a Wiley publishing company. Here’s a link to 1 such book: https://www.dummies.com/book/technology/software/music-recording-software/general-music-recording-software/home-recording-for-dummies-6th-edition-281735/ Or podcasting: https://www.dummies.com/book/technology/digital-audio-radio/podcasting/podcasting-for-dummies-4th-edition-281822/
Post christmas 2025 until the new years’ eve (2026) updates.
We’ll be attending a funeral & memorial this week before New Year’s eve. One of my core friends in Toronto lost her dad and we want to pay our respects to her family. This week’s also tough because December 28th is the memorial day for the death of my brother Eric. I’ve given TS a heads up of how mentally taxing this week can be and will need to be extra mindful of my behaviour. For all of this death, we know of 2 families that have new human babies in the extended household — CB (the family that developed our Black Dog Biscuit logo) and SR (one of TS’ pillars of support from her old teaching gig). Both CB and SR are now grandmothers and that makes me smile. It’s funny. I don’t see either of these women as “old”. They’re vibrant. They’re beautiful. I wonder if that’s how my grandmother, Leida Neem, might have looked to other people. I’m grateful Leida-granny was able to meet and spend time with my spouse.
(((WordPress’ blogging feature is screwing around with my formatting; here’s what the above images are trying to articulate to you)))… Beer and cookies. Cafe Gilou’s chocolate chip cookies are best with a boozie Neustadt wheat beer and I strongly recommend that pairing to anyone who has a chance to access it. Meditating using a service like Headspace. I’ve been using it for over 5 years and it’s part of my routine. We did 1 Christmas Sunday market at Owen Sound… and that almost ended in a disaster (PN had a near miss with smashing an entire glass-bottle sauce inventory). Our specialty snow brooms for the glass photovoltaic panels arrived after being shuttled around by Fed Ex Canada (Fed Ex game up delivery attempts and gave it to Canada Post to finagle [I just got another request for duty payment a week after delivery — Fed Ex Canada is hot garbage and not worth the extra money they charge, even for INTERNATIONAL BUDGET-PRIORITY-FUCKYOUWE’LLDELIVERWHENWEWANT] shipping).
We’re making headway with enclosing the pavilion (double-coating acrylic exterior painting to be done in a propane-heated bunkie). I’m using a wire-brush head on my cordless drill to rough up the surfaces, in hopes to promote better paint adhesion (I‘ll let you know if it really makes a difference). Empire cookies for GP and MW when we visit THE BIG CITY. I’m hoping we can attend a BBQ chicken wing night at Ferndale flats. There was a weird art piece being offered at the Bayshore holiday sale (and I included a picture of us at our salesperson-best). TS captured a rare photo of our little old lady (Io) being a cat loaf. When we got back from selling dog biscuits for 3 days in a row, we had at least 1m of snow to clean up around the rock farm. As of December 27th, it’s thawed out, refroze, and is now being scoured by wind!
This is what a $350USD audio cable looks like when it fails (that works out to be ~$480CAD [link to vendor’s gucci accessory]). A hair-thin red connecting cable snapped off due to the most gentle of use. Fuck. Will Dan Clark Audio of San Diego, California repair this cable or do I have to hazard a risky soldering repair job? I need someone who has a VERY STEADY HAND and has soldering implements for microcircuitry repair. If the vendor shrugs and tells me nahhhhh, I’ll seek out local talent!
BCB&B, neemtree, bdb, and blog 