The Summer was hot, way too hot for me and I ended up spending most of those long awaited holidays at home. No luck.

I didn’t do anything special except that I followed my son’s advice and tried the last version of BetterMC. It ran smoothly on my MacBook Pro M4 and it was a fun journey (9d18h of playtime). He joined me to fight Ignis and we ended up with full ignitium and diamong-netherite or dragon gears.

Besides, I decided to cleanup and move my backup from a very old Time Capsule to more modern SSD storage, with deduplication on another external HD. As I was in the mood of cleaning things up, I also archived a lot of stuff that I will rpobably no longer need. I also bought some macOS apps which I find quite handy as a complement to my cli-based workflow: Downie, Permute and Meta instead of yt-dlp, convert from Imagemagick, ffmpeg or id3tags; Zipic instead of ImageOptim; TableFlip for the case I’m not in Vim with vim-table-mode; News Explorer and bIRC which I already reviewed in recent posts; MarkChart to edit Mermaid diagram when I’m not using Monodraw; Audio Hijack and Fission for everything sound-related. I also renewed my Mathematica (sorry, we should say Wolfram now) license and subscribed to a cheap one for Stata 19 (I’m running on low budget at the Uni).

This was also the occasion to listen to a lot of music and watch some good old movies that I haven’t watched before.

• Music: electronic, dark and cold wave, and synthpop almost exclusively. I’ve discovered new singers or bands, and this is great. I may implement a tracking system with a summary statistics of sort because it becomes hard to summarize everything from memory. I no longer use any scrobbler, and Apple Music Replay seems a bit limited and require to log in on Safari. Anyway, here it goes, very briefly and in no particular order: Plastique noir, Cold Cave, Gothic Tropic, Paradox Obscur, Sexual Purity, Ductape, Forever Grey, Light Asylum, Tempers.

• Movies: many movies from David Lynch and some other random stuff. I was afraid at first to have to watch movies that last more than 2h30, but that was okay in retrospect. I particularly liked My Blueberry Nights, Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. I’ve already watched In the Mood for Love in the past, as well as Reservoir Dogs, Ronin, Inland Empire and Spy Game.

As you will have noticed, the blog is hopefully live again. I spent a year and a half posting micro-posts and summarizing them in a monthly summary. I don’t know if I will be able to publish as much as I did in the past few years, but I have some interesting blog posts about statistics and the like in mind so stay tuned.