Students of The Little Disc

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Fresh

Greetings all, I hope you’re well as you read this. Yesterday, I posted to the social media platform Bluesky the following:

“So, my daily driver is now a 2016 Honda CRV, jet black. Why do I like this? One reason is this: a mix of old school and not-so-old school audio tech: Bluetooth for my mobile phone, as well as USB-A, but also an aux jack, so I can play these 😎. Oh, it has a CD player too for my large collection. 💿“

That post, with about seven replies, has (as of this moment), 112 likes and reposts. One of the comments that caught my eye started this dialog:

Commenter: I miss minidisc

Me: I still rock them on the regular, and record to them. They are very much still available, the issue is ridiculous price gouging for blanks, players, and, of course, no current releases, outside of the obscure vaporwave genre and some occasional UK hip-hop offerings.

Commenter: I’m not sure why I miss MD so much. I have access to all the world’s music now—and it feels so boring. I think it’s the curation—when I put together mixes, I thought about how everything flowed—I listened to a ton of music just to find the right song. Now I just tap and listen.

Me: You hit it on the head – your time investment towards curating of the music, making the mix playlists, having to record the music to disc, and physically having to press buttons and similar (the tactile aspects) made your whole listening experience way more valuable. You used a single device.

The dialog reminded me so much of comments I’ve seen over the last two months, especially by those influencers/creators/etc who were flooding Instagram with these “2026 is the year of returning to Analog/Physical media” posts. I predicted that these posts were fad-like and mostly done for engagement, because we are into 2026 and those posts have disappeared. You will be hard pressed, I believe, to see any current posts on the topic.

The commenter’s mentioning of a “just tap and listen” mindset describes perfectly something I’ve mentioned and have discussed with a great deal of people over time, which is why I replied in the fashion I did. Streaming has made the music listening experience, a very great deal of the time, boring. The sheer amount of music available to access largely trumps the 1000s-of-songs-in-your-pocket days of the iPod and other mp3 players. The convenience of that, in and of itself, waters down the experience. Very little effort goes into what is achieved at the end of the day and the commenter described that, in his own words above.

I’ve posted on this topic here on my blog over the years, so I won’t link the posts here, but drop me a comment and I’ll provide you with them.

I’ve been listening to the minidisc format since 2005 when I discovered and chose the medium to record my band rehearsals. It was better than mucking around with casette recorders, the footprint was smaller, and it was digital, often recording in stereo over the air. From that, my interested grew over the years and I began recording music from my CD collection so I could leave those in the house, yet take the tracks on the go. Fast forward to today, I have a MD recording deck and a number of portables that I can record to in various ways. A photo of my setup is below>

I enjoy the format and all of what it brings to the total listening experience, from recording to disc, making labels for the disc shell and disc case, making playlists and editing the track names so they show on my player and deck, etc. The MD community is very much vibrant on social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Discord.

Many ask if minidisc will make a comeback and the general consensus from those who have been a fan of the platform for the last 20+ years is that a comeback (like vinyl, for example) will never happen. Sony has ceased making discs, (as a few years ago), decks and players also. Frankly, music listeners today will not go to the trouble it takes to listen to music on minidisc today and the manufacturers who were once vibrant in providing decks, player/recorders, and discs will never make a profit as they once did.

Nonetheless, “long live the little disc”.

Peace unto you, oceans of rhythm..

Fresh.

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digital gardening.

Posted on February 1, 2026 by Fresh

Good day, I hope this post finds you well. Here is a repost from a software developer whose blog no longer exists. Something told me archive this post, most likely long before said blog disappeared. 0xshapeshifter.dev, thanks for sharing.

Digital Gardnening – 2023-12-06

On taking care rather than going crazy

What is gardening? Is it just about maintaining one’s natural environment in the long term? Or is it simply helping nature grow and flourish? I believe there’s a bit more to it.

First, gardening is a practice. It involves taking a “head down,” zen-like approach to doing things in order to reap compounding effects in the future. This means regularly watering the plants, nurturing them, and giving them access to sunlight. Generally speaking, by consistently attending to any practice, one builds resilience and confidence while establishing a strong foundation.

Second, it has a long-term and constantly unfolding perspective. When your friend shows you their garden, all you see is the result – a status. Even though you know that your friend put a lot of time and effort into it, the garden for you is just an immediate state. You can’t remember how it was growing, for example. However, every good gardener knows that a garden is never just a state; it’s not actually a noun.

It’s a process that continually unfolds, and we help it grow by practicing the art of gardening. That is, by giving it what it needs and reducing things that can harm it. Gardening is also never short-term. It involves waiting as a natural part of the process.

Third, gardening is about creating something to be admired. A garden brings joy not only to the gardener but also to those passing by or visiting. Gardening has been a part of a social display game that people have played since the 16th century BC, making it over 3500 years old. That is, gardening is done partly to be looked at — by strangers.

To me, gardening is a metaphor for maintaining a sustainable social media presence. We live in an age where offline and online practices are intertwined, and it’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the constant influx of information. Some inputs can be productive, while others are not.

In this sense, digital gardening is a set of practices that I have developed. These practices focus on maintaining my tools and presence in the digital and online environment. For example, I consider my website as one of my gardens. To maintain it, I publish new articles, findings, and thoughts to keep it up to date with information about who I am, what I’m all about, and what my plans are. My website serves as my digital headquarters, and when guests visit, I want it to be clear, helpful, and useful.

I don’t stress over it—I use it (and abuse it: it went through too many redesigns). I understand the importance of taking care of it, finding and fixing bugs, correcting typos (I make a lot of typos), and adding small features. To those familiar with bonsai, this might sound relatable.

Approaching my digital and online presence through the lens of gardening helps me stay sane, focus on producing signals over noise, and adopt a different perspective. I believe people often share a lot and quickly to “stay visible,” on social media, but I personally don’t find this neither useful not healthy. So the gardening approach, which requires patience, not only teaches me to share more meaningful things but also prevents me from contributing to the social status race induced by social media that my mind would otherwise happily join.

To sum it up, digital gardening is the practice of maintaining one’s social media (and digital) presence (and tools) by taking care of it when necessary and contributing something meaningful rather than opting for the default race of “more”.

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Why personal websites are replacing social media.

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Fresh

Greetings all, and Happy 2026. This is my first post of the year on the last day of the month so I achieved my goal, albeit late. Hope all is well with you and yours.

The other day, a good friend of mine sent me a text with a link to the following Substack post: Why personal websites are replacing social media. It wasn’t too much of a surprise as both he and I started blogging on our respective platorms back in 2007, and I actually (as the Substack article mentions) handcoded my own website on Geocities back in 1997 or so. The article, as I think about it, is probably the best I read on this topic. It resonates with me because I’ve never lost the desire to blog and it became even more worthwhile when blogging became “a thing” with sites like Substack, Ghost sites, Medium, and the like. Sites like those became very public front facing offering features like subscriptions, newsletters, etc. – far from the niche and very personal and early blog platfroms like Blogger, Blogspot. Tumblr, etc. While these sites have and make it easy to obtain reach far more than my blog ever will, I still have control, in everyway, over what content I post, which always remains free from algorithmic influence.

There has been a big push for inviduals wanting to gain “ownership” of many things, such as music, art, and the like just because of where social tech has taken it, in terms of what it controls, and what/when it chooses to show us based on a slew of metrics that . I much more prefer to tend to my “digital garden” in the way I prefer to do so.

Well, that article really lays everything out more succinctly than I can here, so if you’re interested, give it a read.

Untik next time, oceans of rhythm…

Fresh.

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The Great Streaming Exodus – An Addendum Post

Posted on December 20, 2025 by Fresh

7:28PM EST – Greetings and Happy Holidays to those that celebrate. I hope this post finds you well. It’s a cold Saturday night and this hot tea next to me is hitting the spot, along with some ambient music flowing in the background making for a chilled out mood.

Earlier today, before a late lunch, I spied a post on Bluesky by user Ivan Tomic (@vinterkarusell.substack.com) about an article he wrote entitled The Great Streaming Exodus – Why 2026 Might Be the Year We Take Music Back. By the title alone, I knew what the context of the post would be about. Depending on your social media travels, you may have noticed that listeners and artists alike have ceased using Spotify as a streaming platform and there has been a number of anti-Spotify social media posts discussing the reasons why. If you’re not familiar, I’ve touched on those reasons (overall) in a recent blog post. If you’re an avid music listener, I suggest you give Ivan’s blog post a read, you’ll find it interesting and maybe even note some things that align with you.

The reason I decided to post this entry is because of a few things in his article that reminded of sentiments I have and have posted about in past blog entries (which I’ll list at the end of this post). When it comes to listening to music via streaming platforms, it’s long been said that having an “unlimited” amount of music at your disposal highly energizes one’s level of ADHD, if you will. Being able to fast forward to songs at infinite level can create a scenario that continually makes music disposable and the listening experience degraded (at least in my opinion), but this is obviously another level of technology-born convenience we can choose to deal with everyday. Such a scenario can also cause levels of overwhelmed feelings that may not even be consciously known, yet it’s quite common to carry your mobile device connected to your streaming platform of choice, construct your playlists as you see fit, and continue on your merry way. Playlists are, or course, nothing new but the ease of constructing theme via streaming platform features make it easier than ever. While I don’t down the activity at all (it’s just another form of organizing, anyway), the ease of it can becoming overwhelming if allowed to be.

Playlists are hardly a new thing, they were made pretty much when you had portable music media devices from the cassette player onward. The obvious difference in the early days was the effort one had to put in to make said playlists. In my opinion, the ease of it rose with the introduction of the Apple iPod and similar mp3 players afterwards. As I begin to think about the iPod (I was fortunate to own the OG model), the fact that your carry thousands of songs in your pocket was no different, in essence, to what streaming platforms allow, it’s just that the latter (by construct) allows for GREAT deal more.

There are a few major differences, as we know, between the pure listening experience (my term) and that of streaming only. The first that comes to mind are the algorithms used to “suggest” music for your listening pleasure based on your constant use of the streaming app. Nothing new there but, oftentimes, one is faced with the residual of suggestions put forth that really don’t fit your desired tastes, making you wonder “What the….?” Secondly, you get none of the experience of what/who was involved in making this particular song you’re currently listening to, things such as songwriter/artist/band credits and similar. The best you get, in this case, is artwork, song title, and maybe lyrics. Lastly, there seems to be a belief that once you find a track on your streaming platform, it will remain available indefinitely. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people say a particular song used to be on “________”, but now it’s not, or “How come this song is not on “________”? The bottom line, from my understanding is permissive rights from the record company, in a nutshell, as their could be a number of reasons why a song is no longer available or never made to the streaming platform to begin with.

As Ivan mentioned in his post above, there is a noticeable shift regarding people leaving the convenience of streaming and the reasons, to me, are understandable but how many are really ready to forgo the convenience of doing so? I think listening to music on any portable medium allows for the making your listening experience degraded simply because you ARE mobile and with that, the listening does become more of a background activity to your driving, chores, sight seeing, or any other activity that takes precedence.

This shift is not surprising to me and, at the same time, quite understandable, because I’ve never made streaming an overall substitute for my listening experience, primarily because of the things I wrote of above. I still listen to music on CD to maintain/enhance what I believe is the greater experience. Anytime an artist I really enjoy releases music on CD, I purchase on that medium and when I do, I make time to sit down and listen attentively to the entire project. noting the physical artwork, the liner notes, song credits, who mixed and mastered that tracks, etc. I often record music to minidisc and grab a few to purposely reduce the “100,000 songs in my pocket” to focus on an album or two. It’s easy for me (and less convenient) only because it’s part of the journey I’ve been on prior to streaming. I’ve even gotten back to getting some releases on cassette (since it’s indie artist popularity on that medium has increased) because there are those that only release music on cassette. Seeing as though I have dual cassette player in my recording studio, it makes for the sit down listening scenario a must because I don’t own a portable cassette player.

Here are some of my previous posts related to this topic:

Overall, could you see yourself making the transition back to listening music in a less convenient way?

Thanks for the read…oceans of rhythm,

Fresh.

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Cognitive Ability Offloading & AI (plus a milestone)

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Fresh

Greetings all, I hope you’re well as you are reading this post.

We are, again, at the last day of the month and I realized, earlier, I didn’t publish at least one blog to reach my goal. At least this serves as that achievement. The milestone I speak of may be more of a pre-milestone, but nonetheless I’ll count it as a regular one.

This is the 450th published blog since I started self-publishing via an official blog on my own domain in Dec 2008. The math tells me I’ve averaged two blog posts a month since I first started, not bad when I consider myself an average blogger. Pretty cool. I’ll do this type of post again when I reach 500 blog posts.

As for the first part of the blog title. I came across an article earlier this evening that was shared on Bluesky by someone I follow who is a postdoc neuroscience researcher. The title of the article is Learning via ChatGPT leads to shallower knowledge than using Google search, study finds. The title and topic is not new to me and, I suspect, the same for you. I’ve purposely felt that it bares some truth for sure, however, it’s just the latest, but same type of, discussion that has occurred during some technological advances in the past. What it could be, in the sense of ML and AI, is that it now seems accelerated but, in principal., not much different than before. Since the age of computing (in the broadest sense), it’s been happening – technological features that do things, automate things, for us that require less thinking, resulting in more cognitive ability offloading. This requires, most of the time, a level of trust and comfort that tells is it’s one less thing to have to think about. While there are many examples, I’ll use GPS for navigation. I’m old enough to remember having to rely on paper maps to get from point A to point B for routes I have no familiarity with. At some point, physical GPS units were commercially available to put in your vehicle, even if maps had to be periodically downloaded to them in order to provide the latest accuracy. Today, it’s on our consumer mobile devices and doesn’t require anything but download your app of choice and for us to trust what the GPS tells us for navigation – this is cognitive ability offloading at best, compared to having to use that Rand McNally (or similar) paper map.

As far as learning via ChatGPT vs using a web search, how different are they, really, from a basal standpoint. Off the top of my head, I would say that AI saves more time than doing a general web query, however, the more specific (with both) you are in regards to your level of “prompt engineering”, the better your results will be. We’re still at the point of ML/AI that AI still needs to be fact checked as a result of providing wrong/inaccurate answers at times because, well, look at what it’s trained on via webscraping alone.

I was having a discussion with a good friend/music composer/producer and large advocate of AI tools, just before starting this post. My belief at the end of the day is, multiple studies or not, how does this affect you as an individual? We all learn, comprehend, ascertain, differently, but at the same time, whether it’s via a web search or AI, how much fact checking, how much time and energy do you regularly invest to ensure that the information is correct? AI cannot fact check itself today. On the contrary, you could best believe that large strides were taken for information accuracy before that set of World Book or Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes for the year (fill in the blank) were purchased by your parents for the home library.

Things to ponder as technology evolves.

Happy Holidays to all of you.

Oceans of rhythm,

Fresh!

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AI music composition = A(ccusable) I(nsanity)?

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Fresh

9:27 am. Greetings all,

I hope all is well as you’re reading this post. I almost forgot that I didn’t plan to get my monthly blog post in and, here we are, the last day of October. Nonetheless, I’ll begin.

As of late, I’ve been seeing increasing social media coverage about the use of platforms like Suno being used by anyone has access to it and can issue prompts into the app, to create AI generated music that sounds extremely realistic, keyword here is “anyone”. I’ve not only come across ads from the website itself, but other entities that sponsor the use of Suno for AI generative music. For a background on the origins of the company, you can read about it here.

To avoid this post ending up as TL;DR, there is an understandable uproar about AI generated music, as such that is created with little to no talent (aside from the arguable notion that you have to possess some talent of “prompt engineering” to achieve improved results). In addition, the shouting about the ever growing methods of web scraping (if you will) of human generated music uploads to train platforms like Suno, and finally the long going issues about copyright infringement and the many lawsuits flying about. As one example, I’ll present this one video, which has links to websites providing more information.

As you may have read over the last few months, Spotify (now in supposed redemption mode to some extent) has allowed for an AI generated music group called Valvet Sundown to inflate tons of streams across multiple playlists. Similar issues across other streaming music platforms have been occurring with gen AI songs doing the same over and over,

Let’s face it, get AI music is here to stay and will only proliferate as time goes by. Sync music licensing platforms are already using said music in lieu of going through the process of accepting and reviewing composer submissions for the usual reasons new technologies present – the saving of money and time. While the former process is in full effect, it hasn’t killed the latter long time process but, nonetheless, the impact is apparent.

Earlier this week, I came across a sponsored post about Suno on Facebook. The comments about AI music production hate were well in place, countered by a few replies (one in particular by a younger user) that defended the fact (immaturely, by the way, based on rebuttals) that no matter what kind of musically trained skill you have attained prior to AI, if you don’t use and adapt to it, you’ll be left in the dust. This mindset is obviously felt by many in terms of using AI in general and is understandable because it is applicable, not just to general AI, but much of the development of technology prior. Since gen AI music will not be gong away, there will be a generation, correction – currently is and will be, that (as listeners) won’t care if the music is gen AI or not, let alone being able to tell if it is or not. This is inevitable, however, musicians and artists like myself will continue to express the concerns we do. A comment was made in this FB post that the same fearful mindset was said about drum machines, in that they will eliminate the need for drummers. I replied that while that statement is true, the comparison is not the same, as you must have some talent to program a drum machine beyond using any premade loops that it possesses, and even with programming and/or loop usage, you still only end up with a drum track, not an entire song.. Secondly, there is no AI involved, so there is no process it enter prompts into it for music to be generated.

The obvious argument is that music generated by Suno, much like code generated by Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Warp, and the like, are products generated by AI trained on what humans have provided, not the human real time creativity, let alone the interaction of humans to create music. Therein lies the continual activity of cognitive ability offloading, and in the case of gen AI music, no “musical composition” talent needed. Of course, the aspect of having no talent to create music spans decades prior to this post – one example being use of turntable sampling to created hip hop records – different technology, same foundational principal.

Where will all of this go? Time will, as usual, tell. Feel free to comment (or not) as you wish.

Oceans of rhythm,

Fresh.

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The Importance of Documentation for Preservation

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Fresh

Greetings all. I hope, as you read this, you are well. Here we are, about to enter in the last quarter of 2025, thus the proverbial saying…”where did the time go?”

During the middle of last week, I got a message in my inbox that reads as such:

Okay, sir….. You understand the importance of documentation. I have officially decided that I will be more active in recording videos of time with family and friends. I grew up in a world of living in the moment, and I still live by that, BUT as I get older, I realize how important photos and videos are. Since I’m an nostalgic old gal, I’ll be recording these videos in a VHS filter 🤣 Throw them in a Google Drive folder and give family the link to it

This person knows that I’ve been journaling regularly for the last five years, though (ironically), I missed the last few days, so this prompted the beginning of a dialog on the importance of documenting/preservation. We ended up discussing the approaches I’ve taken and made some suggestions she may want to consider. One of things this she mentioned was, while photos are great, video is better, not just because of the visual, but the audio that often accompanies it, specifically the ability to hear one’s voice. I definitely agree with her (as I’m sure you do as well). The first item that came to mind that supports (for me) this aspect greatly is this photo below of a cassette tape…note the timeframe written on it. It mostly includes a family gathering during Christmas time and has the voice of my mom who passed away a year later when I was only 8 years old. You can imagine what it would be like to hear your Mom’s voice so many years later because, at the age of 8, how many really remember much of any relationship with their loved ones?

I still have this cassette, and have transferred the contents to DVD, external hard drive, and minidisc for preservation. As long as I can remember, I’ve been an archivist, especially to digital format, of fragile items such as cassette and video tape, photographs, etc, for longevity and preservation. Back in the day, the recoding devices and mediums LONG before the mobile phone that were of use for me were primarily cassette tape, followed by VHS for video. It was until recently that still owned a Sony 8mm camcorder I bought in the early-mid 1990s that I used to record tons of family video onward. My daughter was born in 1996 and I had just got my first mobile phone (which I still have) around that time, upgrading from a pager. From the looks of the phone, you can clearly see recording video wasn’t EVEN an option.

I’ve recorded a lot of VHS and 8mm video tape content of all kinds (wedding day, movies, TV concerts, daily family life, vacations, etc) to DVD thanks to a VHS-to DVD recorder my cousin gifted me with decades ago, which still works like a charm. I have hard drives of scanned photos and video spanning 30 years easily and I’m glad I took the effort to do so simply because tape can be so easily damaged if not well kept in many ways. I’ve chosen not to back up any of this content to the cloud only because not everyone’s content needs to sit on someone’s remote server that you have no access to. I have enough devices (since I baby a lot of my tech, old and new) that this content can be viewed and heard by family long after I’m gone, and means a lot to me.

In any event, thanks for the read.

…oceans of rhythm, Fresh.

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General handwriting in 2025 – a lost art?

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Fresh

This is my third post for the event #blaugust2025.

The last seven days have been very busy at work. I had a 6am start this morning, which means by 2:30pm, I was headed home. After having lunch, I decided to check the Tech News feed on my Bluesky account and came across this article: The End of Handwriting

I started not to read it, even though the title made me curious mainly because I thought it was about the end of handwriting as a general communicative skill (as in writing letters). There are some poignant quotes in the article which do make sense to me, such as the following;

  • Email began edging out cards and letters decades ago. Then smartphones hit the market, and our reliance on paper notes, wall calendars, and Post-it reminders dwindled.
  •  There are real benefits to learning to hold a pen in your hand and use it.
  • …researchers hypothesized, time spent holding devices rather than pencils might be impacting whether kids had all the motor skills they needed to learn handwriting when they entered kindergarten.

Being one that grew up two decades prior to computers and then digital mobile devices that can store the text you generate, I was taught handwriting, cursive included, because it was the norm. Even outside of having to write out all my homework to turn in, I was writing letters to friends and famil, and as a young engineer in the late 80s, was instructed to and taught the value of always writing engineering notes in notebooks (many of which I still have since then). To this day, I still purchase and send out Christmas cards where I have to sign them, in handwritten ink, versus those you can purchase from CVS, Walgreens, Shutterfly, etc with your or your family’s name pre-printed within the card.

Handwriting is an analog approach, not to say that typing and email (for example) isn’t, but the gist of this blog post is more in line with the personal touch of writing a letter or doing such in a card, that I tend to believe is far more personal than anything easily done digitally.

It’s ironic that I came across this article, as a friend of mine since I’ve known since I was 15, and one who I dated for a brief time, happen to keep AND show me some pictures of a FEW letters I wrote to her in college. It was weird to see what my handwriting looked back then, something I’d forgotten. Never in cursive, but the photos were clear enough that I could read the thoughts I conveyed back then.

In addition to this analog approach, there is the type of stationary used, even (for some) the type of writing implement used (fountain pen, anyone?) that defines the whole art of writing. Oh, scented letters to that man or woman you were involved with? Yeah, that too…none of which can be done digitally.

The digital approach is far more easier, expedient, and takes less effort, I get it, you get it, but the art is lost. Maybe it will resurface, like vinyl records have… Time will tell.

Thanks for the read. Oceans of rhythm..

Fresh

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The “glory”days (?)

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Fresh

Greetings, I hope all is well with you. This is my second post for the event #blaugust2025, and while I decided to participate knowing I wouldn’t post a daily entry for the month, I’m enjoying it nonetheless. I’ve been one to enjoy creating on demand, though I’ve had to do it for music production.

Photo credit: u/bono (reddit)

I saw this photo some months ago, ironically around the time I dropped off my Mac Classic at a semi-local retro computing service shop for repair. The backstory is that I was introduced to the Mac platform during my first job as an engineer back in the late 80s. The business manager on the program I worked on was an Apple aficionado and though the office’s main computing platform was PC, he ran all the business aspects on the Macs we had in the office: a Mac IIci, Mac Plus, a Powerbook, and a LaserWriter II. Coming from a previous job of IBM machines, I immediately fell in love with all things Macintosh and was able to my first computer, a Mac Classic II, in 1992. Ever since then, the macOS platform has been my go-to platform for computing, hands down. Needless to say, I’ve used and own MANY since 1992, but the gist of this post is about a recent situation that has occurred along with some relative nostalgia.

I was having an online chat with Riccardo Mori, along time Apple fan and aficionado about the state of Apple’s current existence vs that of the company’s early days and product offerings. Riccardo has posted numerous blog entries regarding his thoughts on this and, while I don’t consider myself to be an aficionado, but more of a diehard fan, my thoughts align with his. One thing we both agree on is the “magic” that once was in the 90’s timeframe, which is sorely missed by people who experienced Apple’s evolution during that timeframe. I’ve talked about “magic” in previous posts here so I won’t belabor that at this point, but it does tie into this recent situation aforementioned.

My original Mac Classic II bit the dust sometime ago and I ended up getting Mac Classic somewhere along the way, so long ago I don’t remember exactly when and from where I got it. Needless to say, I ended up getting another because it reminded me of my fond experiences using the Classic II for everything computing-wise but specifically it being my first entry into computer-based music production – couple that with the magic that was Apple then, and it all explains why I wanted to keep the Classic in my life.

Fast forward to this past May. The Classic was sitting in my recording studio unpowered for months, as I had no space to really have it plugged in, keyboard connected, etc, I just wanted it as a showpiece. In April, I flipped the power switch on but got no screen, though I could feel the computer powered on. I immediately suspected the usual issue for a computer this old: bad logic board , or could be in need of recapping in the least. Nonetheless, I did some research to determine if I wanted to try and perform this repair myself but, as a result, opted against it. It took me awhile to find a repair center that could fix it, but ended up choosing one in the next state over, relating in a 40 minute or so, drive.

Cool, I dropped it off, chatted with the owner who had an office full of retro computers he does repairs on, assisted by a staff of two people it seemed. The repair form stated I could opt for expedited service but I decided against it because there was no rush in getting it back. The dropoff date was 5/27/25. To date, I still don’t have the computer back.

One thing I am a stickler about is customer service and the thing that annoys me the most is that this proprietor never once contacted me to provide status on the repair situation UNLESS I contacted him first. I understand that there could be an unforeseen backlog, I even understand (as I am told) that he got the wrong logic board, and had to get another, but not once did he decide to give me status on either. I’ve told him TWICE that his lack of communication is poor and unacceptable.

In any event, I’ll see how longer it will take to get my Mac back, but it makes me wonder if it’s all worth it. The memories will always remain, but to have a working machine this old, and not being one to want to learn how to self maintain it to the extent needed as far as repairs go, makes me just want to settle for the fond memories.

I’ll always be a fan of the Apple ecosphere. While some argue that Apple hasn’t had any real innovation since the iPhone, I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s true but I haven’t really seen anything since then that has wowed me. I know that the industry has changed and that is inevitable but with the change, so left the “magic” (at least to me).

Have a great rest of the day.

Oceans of rhythm,

Fresh

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…and it’s Blaugust 2025

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Fresh

Greetings all, thanks for stopping by, as usual. I hope, as you are reading this, you are well. In the spirit of this week of Blaugust, I’ll introduce myself to those who have never read this blog. In short, I started this blog, vibesnscribes, back in 2007, as a means to blog about favorite artist tracks I’m currently listening to AND just to write about what’s on my mind currently. The former reason quickly came to be tedious as my initial idea was to provide reviews of songs, complete with artist history, studio credits/liner notes, etc. That burden made me choose another direction which let to my foray into podcasting. Out of that was born “The Sunday Soundtrack” a podcast that was an alternative to the various smooth jazz genre wave of tracks popular across the airwaves in the last 2000s. The Sunday Soundtrack featured lesser known tracks from the genres of chill out, downtempo and (smooth) electronica) – shoutout to AMic for the nice podcast logo design. It was a weekly podcast usually posted on Sunday evening in line with those needing to relax as they prepared for the following week. I did that for quite a few years and really enjoyed it Oftentimes, I’ve considered resurrecting it but I need to find the time to do so. There’s a subpage in my page menu that talks about the podcast more and provides links to the podcast episodes I’ve released. You can find another sub page here named Tech Times, a mobile podcast showcasing 5 – 8 minute episodes regarding me waxing philosophically (if you will) about current consumer technology in our daily lives. There are two interviews among them as well

As for who I am, the About Me page of this blog summarizes me well enough that I won’t repeat it here. I still enjoy blogging because it essentially represents the indieweb aspect of what Blaugust is about. It’s my “digital garden” and I control how it grows and is tended to, untouched by the “algorithm”. While I used to blog incessantly at one time, I now do it enough to keep it enjoyable, without any specific topic theme (as you can see by my topic cloud hashtags). The blogroll lists blogs that describe my general interests. Most time, when I’m blogging, I’m usually listening to tracks from SomaFM streaming artists from the Fluid, Groove Salad, Deep Space One, DefCon, or Beat Blender channels.

All that being said, what is Blaugust? Here is a blog post that I think sums it up succinctly AND has an updated feed of bloggers participating this year. I’m looking forward to exploring these participant blogs (once I find a good RSS reader for macOS and my iPad.

That’s it for now. Take care, protect your mental.

Oceans of rhythm…

Fresh

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