Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Tools of the Trade

Apps I depend on and recommend

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some writing essentials, based on my daily dependence:

▰ Obsidian — best note-keeping tool I’ve found, works cross-platform, syncs seamlessly (via iCloud and its own paid tier), and I’ve temporarily paused my use of Ulysses and Scrivener in favor of this for proper writing, both short-form and long-form (when I need an editor to take a look, I pop it into Google Drive, for which I’ve yet to find a worthy alternative)

▰ TextSniper — copy text from images, like PDFs, ads, and photos

▰ Dropbox — far from perfect but I haven’t found a worthy alternative

▰ MacWhisper — transcribes my recordings, as a solid subset of my notes over the course of the day are audio bits I tape on the fly

▰ Blurred — makes it (on a Mac) so all the windows except the active one are a little darker

▰ Reeder Classic + Feedly — I use this combo as my RSS reader, Feedly for the subscriptions and Reeder to actually read them (less cluttered than Feedly); you can use Reeder Classic with iCloud, but I found it slow

Middle Lake

Local semi-wild life

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The rehabilitation of Middle Lake in Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco is absolutely gorgeous, like someone put a Monet filter on it during the planning and construction. Bonus: there’s a two-track audio tour, accessible via QR code. I had to hit pause to figure out if birdsong was in the audio or reality.

At the moment, these are the only two tracks in the SoundCloud account of the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department, soundcloud.com/sfrecpark.

On Repeat: Granular, Schulz, Suda

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Quanta is the name of a granular synthesizer developed by Audio Damage, and a new version, Quanta 2, is due out soon. This is a demo in which a slow melodic sequence is echoed and otherwise blurred in real time.

▰ I believe the title of the new Jeannine Schulz release, Kanso, is from the Japanese for “simple.” It’s a pair of elegant ambient pieces, one gently industrial, the other more aqueous. Schulz is based in Germany.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=264905439 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ Nobuto Suda’s “Gazing the Sun Fading” is a hazy, loping ambient track that sounds like the sonic version of light glistening off a dirty windshield. And to be clear, that’s a compliment. Suda is based in Kyoto, Japan.

Scratch Pad: Pessoa, Foghorns, Corey

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ A bit of Fernando Pessoa after a very quiet three-day weekend, and as I’ve heard there’s something of a Brazilian social media diaspora underway:

I contemplate the silent pond
Whose water is stirred by a breeze.
Am I thinking about everything,
Or has everything forgotten me?

▰ The foghorns of the San Francisco Bay are doing Jaws karaoke again

▰ Me to my guitar teacher: “Instead of me trying to learn a new song at the same time as I am trying to learn to play it, how about I learn to play a song I already know well?”

Also apparently me to my guitar teacher, unwittingly: “How about I choose a song that changes from 4/4 to 2/4 briefly whenever it wants, and in which the melody is almost never the root note of the chord at the given time.”

▰ We’ve entered consecutive week 662 of the Disquiet Junto — which has been running since January 2012 — and I’m still astounded when within hours of the music prompt going out, recordings begin to pop up online.

▰ Yesterday in the car I got a Silver Alert on my phone at the same moment the driver got one and we were at a stoplight so after we turned off our alerts I could still hear the same alert klaxon ringing from the phone of the driver in the car next to the one I was in

▰ I was practicing on my parlor acoustic guitar and it was making the weirdest noise, a raspy resonance I’d never heard from it before, and I figured out that the snap on my shirt sleeve was resting near the bridge and ever so lightly vibrating. And yes, I’ll be recording, amplifying, and otherwise employing this analog effect in the future.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods. Corey is the name for the two authors who also wrote the Expanse books (and TV series).