The “J album” now has all its recording done, a name, an album cover (hush, Sean Connery), and is partially mastered. That process has been a little tricky and slow on a couple of tracks so far, but it’s moving along.
I’ve decided that, when Budapeszt is released, I’m going for it. I’ll plan to set aside Rings and Katowice — however, depending on how it goes I might want to at least try Budapeszt and Rings working together.
As a sort of apology to my no-gear pledge, I’ll forgo any new software synth this year.
I’ve decided I’m annoyed enough with Big Tech in general and Google specifically — now they are planning to completely replace their search with an AI-based mess — so I’ve decided to move away from their services a bit more. I’ve heard good things about GrapheneOS but am not quite ready to step away from Android yet. YouTube isn’t really something I want to give up either. But search, browser, calendar, notes, email, and maps? Those all have more or less decent replacements.
The email change is the most work, because I’ve been giving that email address out like candy for both important and trivial things. But having GMail forward to my new email makes the transition not terribly painful nor something I have to fix immediately. And now I have multiple email addresses, with their own folders, on my own domain, on a single login. Nice.
For Maps, Here WeGo isn’t as refined as Google’s offering, but it’s functional enough (and in some ways the interface is a bit nicer), and private.
For mobile browsers, I don’t remember now why I switched back to Chrome — it may have been DDG trying to promote AI crap at me — but I’ll have another go at other options.
As for search… I am going to give Kagi a try. StartPage and DuckDuckGo are less of a mess than Google Search has become, but they’re still honestly not great. Every review of Kagi I’ve read has been like “this is the best subscription to anything that I have.” So… yeah.