Now we are on the new server, here are March 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Posts tagged ‘music’
March 2022 gallery
28.03.2022Tags: 1960s, 1965, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2016, 2022, Abercrombie & Fitch, actress, advertisement, Aston Martin, Australia, BL, BMC, car, celebrity, Citroën, design, employment, fashion, film, Ford, France, humour, Instagram, James Bond, Lucire, Lucire KSA, magazine, marketing, Mini, music, Nissan, photography, PSA, publishing, Renault, sexism, South Africa, TV, Twitter, typography, UK, USA
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The return of Van der Valk
08.09.2021I came across an old post of mine on Euston Films remakes, at the time the American version of Widows hit the big screen. My last question, after going through Minder, The Sweeney and Widows reboots, sequels and remakes: âNow, whoâll star in a new Van der Valk?â
Since local TV programmers and I have entirely different tastes, I only happened across the new Van der Valk from 2020 recently thanks to a French reviewer on Twitter. I wish I knew earlier: I rate Marc Warren as an actor, it has a great ensemble cast, and for those of us who are older, the theme tune is based on the original (Jack Trombey still gets a credit in each episode, though it should be noted that itâs a pseudonym for the Dutch composer Jan Stoeckart).
As far as I know, few (if any?) of the Van der Valk episodes with Barry Foster were based on the Nicolas Freeling stories, so I didnât really mind the absence of Samson and Arlette. Mentally I treated it as a prequel, pre-Arlette, till I found out that showrunner Chris Murray had killed her off in a flashback sequence in episode 3 (giving stuntwoman Wendy Vrijenhoek the least screen time of the four actresses who have played her in the British versions). Which is, of course, the opposite to how Freeling had it, since he had killed off van der Valk and had Arlette star in two novels.
I read that one reviewer noted that the stories werenât particularly Dutch, but then, were they ever? I didnât really get into Broen or Wallander because of how Scandinavian the storylines were (though it must be said, I enjoyed Zen for its Italianness). I do, however, appreciate the change of scene from London or Los Angeles, which seem to be the home of so many cop shows. I even welcomed Brighton with Grace, starring John Simm, and produced by Kieran Murray-Smith (of the Murray-Smiths), or, for that matter, Sheffield with Doctor Who.
But a Van der Valk sans Arlette does mean the heart of the old stories is gone, and we have yet another emotionally broken TV detective, a ploy that weâve all seen before. But the casting is solid, and the very likeable Marc Warren shows he can lead a series ably.
Of the Euston Films shows I followed as a youngster, it does appear they have all now been revisited in my lifetime, except for one: Special Branch. Bring back Craven!
Tags: 2020, actors, Amsterdam, book, celebrity, Euston Films, ITV, music, Netherlands, remake, TV, UK
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Nostalgia: Money for Nothing
06.09.2021
Money for Nothingâimage from Amazon Prime, where, as of yesterday, you can watch a presumably cleaner copy than what’s on YouTube.
As a young lad, I enjoyed the Screen One TV movie Money for Nothing (1993), which aired on the BBC in the UK and TV1 here. Not to be confused with the John Cusack movie Money for Nothing (1993).
As someone who started my career very young, I could identify with the lead character, Gary Worrall (played by Christien Anholt), a teenager who finds himself in the adult worldâand in the TV film, well out of his depth in a massive property deal that takes him to New York. Itâs one film where Martin Short plays it straight (and is really good), Jayne Ashbourne does a cute Scots accent, Julian Glover is his usual brilliant self, and thereâs a fantastic Johnny Dankworth score, with his wife Cleo Laine singing. I had the good fortune to see them both perform in Aotearoa in 1994.
Because itâs television, of course the deals that Worrall does at the start of the TV movie work out. And heâs audacious. It was a little easier to believe as a 20-something (Anholt and I are about the same age), not so much in middle age!
I’m still a romantic at heart and the love story that screenwriter Tim Firth added for Anholt and Ashbourne’s characters comes across nicely and innocently.
Thereâs a line, however, between actually having made something or being able to do something, then proving to the doubters that youâre capable (which is where real life is, at least for me); and BSing your way forward not having done the hard yards. As itâs fiction, Worrall falls into the latter group. You wouldnât want to be in the latter in real lifeâthatâs where the Elizabeth Holmeses of this world wind up.
I hadnât seen Money for Nothing for over 25 years, but on a whim, I looked it up on July 27, and there it was on YouTube. Enjoy this far more innocent, post-Thatcher time.
PS.: Only today did I realize that Christien is the late Tony Anholt’s (The Protectors) son.
Tags: 1990s, 1993, actors, Amazon, BBC, celebrity, Cheshire, Chester, Cleo Laine, England, fiction, John Dankworth, music, musician, nostalgia, retro, TV, TVNZ, UK
Posted in business, culture, interests, TV, UK | No Comments »
InShot Music Player is also forgetful, though it’s not as bad as the last two
20.08.2021One bug that creeps up at unpredictable intervals with InShotâs Music Playerâthough it is not as severe as the bug on Muzio Playerâis that after a while, it forgets that it should shuffle the tracks and resorts to alphabetical order, starting from the top.
Considering this isnât something that has affected any other music player, I find this very surprising.
These four screenshots were taken between July and August of the recent tracks. Thereâs no rhyme or reason the player would suddenly go to the top of the list, but when I begin hearing the same sequence of tracks, I know somethingâs not right. And it has been happening since I installed the player, though the first couple of times I didnât realize it was a bug.
I would tell Inshot directly but my last (highly positive) email went unanswered, so a public blog post is the next best thing, in case others have come across this bug.
With how forgetful computer programs are all the time, including the player I had on my phone prior to this, I wonder: should I invent the ini or preference file? It seems that in this universe, these havenât been invented yet!
On a side note, Meizu’s native music player has also forgotten to show the list of tracks, which remain linked after my herculean effort earlier this year. Its search still fails to scan the SD card.
Tags: 2021, bug, cellphone, Google Android, Meizu, music, quality control, software
Posted in design, technology | No Comments »
Cellphone apps: InShot’s Music Player may finally be the one; Ăber remains a total waste of time
14.05.2021Forgetful Muzio Player has been replaced by a program (or app) called Music Player, which isnât the best brand name considering the many other apps out there with the same name. This oneâs version 2.5.6.74 and its maker is InShot Inc., so if all goes well, this is the one Meizu users should go for.
First, a good bit: it picks up the directories on the SD card, which, till Meizu upgraded its Music app, I thought I could take for granted.
The not-so-good bits. It doesnât pick up the album artwork, so you have to link each cover yourself. The disadvantage is that you have to search for the cover by image, and thereâs no option to search by name. Mind you, it was the same story with Meizu Music, and provided you have a rough idea of when you downloaded the album (as it displays the covers in reverse chronological order), it isnât impossible.
It did, however, pick up the graphics from the songs where the cover image was embedded and used them for the album covers ⊠at least it did till today, when it forgot all about those and I spent more time relinking the dozen or so that the app forgot.
What is it about forgetful software, or at least software that operates differently every day? Do I need to invent the dot-ini file (since it doesnât seem to exist in this universe) or radically suggest that software follows a set of instructions, line by line, that do not vary each time?
Above: InShot’s Music Player displayed an album cover for Gone with the Wave yesterday, but today it appears to have forgotten what it was.
Nevertheless, Music Player does âshareâ the chosen album cover with the individual tracks, so when theyâre played, the image appears on the player screen, something that Muzio was loathe to do.
In other words, Music Player does what Meizu Music used to do before it became a lemon and, providing it doesnât forget all the linked album covers (all 280 of them), itâll stay on my phone for the foreseeable future. Since it didnât come from an app store, it wonât be âupgradedâ to something inferior, either, which appears to be the path of a lot of cellphone software.
It doesnât look too bad, though admittedly Muzio Playerâs interface remains superior.
Linking 280 covers with each album over the course of a day and a bit sure beats linking over 1,000 of them with each song on Muzio Player, and to have three weeksâ worth of labour vanish despite the program saying, âChanges savedâ.
If InShotâs Music Player keeps things as they are, then itâs the replacement Iâve sought for some time. Since I didnât hear back from Muzio Player, Iâve deleted the app.
One program I can say is a genuine waste of time is Ăber, if you happen to use a Meizu M6 Note like me. Iâve always resisted it, on principle. If they didnât play silly buggers on tax, I might be more inclined to have supported them, but Iâve remained very faithful to public transport and taxis all these years.
Because of timing and circumstances that I wonât go into here, and having had a virus all of last week that I havenât fully shaken off (one symptom being short of breath), Ăber was suggested again today. My first choice was driving to the station, catching the train (being careful not to spread any of my germs about), then either a bus or cab, to pick up a press car from town. That would mean after returning home, I would have to walk to the station while not feeling 100 per cent to get my own car. I know first-hand that a cab from here in the northern suburbs can be priceyâand thatâs when one even shows up, as my partnerâs faced ridiculously long waits for them during the daytime. So Ăber was a realistic choice and Iâd be suckered into helping to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few milliardaires high up at these tech firms at the expense of working people.
Never fear, for Ăber is a half-baked app that cost me two missed trains and I could have been typing this an hour earlier than I am now.
Thanks to the full factory reset that PB did last year on my phone, and my installation of Meizuâs far more advanced Chinese OS afterwards, I was able to create an account this time and log in. It didnât keep returning the message that I had attempted too many log-ins, even after a single attempt.
After that, it takes about half an hour to read the terms and conditions and the privacy policy on a cellphone. You can opt out of promo messages, or so they claim (to be on the safe side, Iâve done it thrice: once when reading the T&Cs before I accepted them, once after I read them, and once more from the desktop when an email with an unsubscribe link arrived).
And thatâs really about all it does. You canât type in any destination; I later checked their instructions on a proper computer and I was doing exactly what was asked. I could feed in my home address (it came up after I began feeding in the basics), and I could feed in some favourites, but I canât actually go to them.
Naturally, it will take your credit card details: Ăber made sure that that part worked.
Having saved the Railway Station as a destination, and attempted to order a ride to there, I got to a screen to tell me that Ăber isnât available in my area. Whether that means Tawa, or Wellington, or New Zealand, I donât know.
Above: It’s impossible to feed in a destination in Ăber, but it’s probably because it’s not available in Tawa.
I have map software on my phoneâboth Here Maps and Baidu Maps. And my partner does successfully use Ăber from time to time, on a Huawei phone which, like my Meizu, is Google-free. She has no Google Maps, so I know that isnât a prerequisite for Ăber. I also know Google Services arenât, either. At least these are points in their favour. I canât be bothered troubleshooting beyond that, since theyâll just deny everything and pass the buck.
Eventually, when I realized Ăber is a monumental waste of time, I carried out plan A, and took a train an hour after the one I could have taken had I not attempted to get an Ăbercab. And walked in the wintry air to collect my car.
It was an easy decision to delete my account and the app soon after. Just as well, really. Big Tech loses once again. To think, the little music player made by a small company is more reliable than the milliards behind Ăber.
Above: Relieved to be on a desktop computerâand hopefully I won’t need to have any connection with Ăber ever again.
Tags: 2021, apps, Baidu, cellphone, Meizu, music, Nokia, PB Technologies, software, technology, Ăber
Posted in design, technology | 1 Comment »
Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card
19.04.2021This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired.
Julia Carrie Wongâs excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebookâs platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course Facebook denies it, but once again itâs backed up by a lot of evidence from Zhang, and we know Facebook lies. Endlessly.
Facebook claims it has taken down over â100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior,â but I repeat again: if a regular Joe like me can find thousands of bots really easily, and report some with Facebook doing next to nothing about them, then 100 networks is an incredibly tiny number in a sea of hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, 100 networks is tiny considering Facebook itself has claimed to have taken down milliards of bots.
And people like me and Holly Jahangiri, who found a massive number of bots that followed the Russian misinformation techniques, have been identifying these since 2014, if not before.
Zhang reveals how likes from pages are inflating various postsâforget the bots Iâve been talking about, people have manufactured full pages on the site.
She uncovered one in Honduras, and then:
The next day, she filed an escalation within Facebookâs task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to a network of fake accounts supporting a political leader in Albania. In August [2019], she discovered and filed escalations for suspicious networks in Azerbaijan, Mexico, Argentina and Italy. Throughout the autumn and winter she added networks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.
Facebook was inconsistent with what it did, and its own self-interest interfered with it taking action. In other words, Facebook is harmful to democracy, and not just in the US which has received most of the occidental news coverage. On Azerbaijan, Zhang wrote in a memo:
Although we conclusively tied this network to elements of the government in early February, and have compiled extensive evidence of its violating nature, the effective decision was made not to prioritize it, effectively turning a blind eye.
She was ultimately fired for her trouble, Facebook saying she wasnât doing the job she had been hired for.
So if you are going to work for Big Tech, leave your conscience at the door. That blood on your hands, just ignore it. Redâs such a fetching colour when itâs not on a balance sheet.
Little Tech can be troublesome, too. Last year, Meizu updated its Music app after a few years of letting it languish (a familiar theme with this firm), and it was a real lemon. It wouldnât pick up anything on my SD card, at the location the old Music app itself saved the files. When I could still access the Meizu (English-language) forum, I managed to post a comment about it. Only today did I realize someone had responded, with the same issue.
I can read enough Chinese to get the phone to do a search for local music files, and the only things it could pick up are whatâs on the phone RAM itself, not the card. Thereâs no way to point to custom locations such as a card (even though there is a custom search, but it applies to the phone only).
Above: Meizu Music will only find music on the phone’s RAMâin this case sound files that come with the dynamic wallpaper and a couple of meeting recordings I made.
Eventually I restored the old app through the settings, and all was well. It would occasionally forget the album cover art and Iâd have to relink it (who says computers remember things?), but, by and large, Music 8.0.10 did what was expected of it.
Until this last week. The phone insisted on upgrading to 8.2.12, another half-baked version that could never locate any SD card music.
Sure I could just move the entire directory of 1,229 songs to the phone, but I wondered why I should.
Restoring the app would work only for a few hours (during which I would try to relink the album cover art, ultimately to no avail). Blocking the new version the app store did nothing; blocking the entire app from updating did nothing. Blocking network access to the Music app did nothing. Essentially, the phone had a mind of its own. If anyone tells you that computing devices follow human instructions, slap them.
Above: I asked the app store to ignore all updates for Meizu Music. The phone will ignore this and do what it wants, downloading the update and installing it without any human intervention.
I had a couple of options. The first was to make Migu Music the defaultâand I had used that for a while before I discovered I could restore the Music app. Itâs passable, and it does everything it should, though I missed the cover art.
The other was to find a way to make Music 8.2.12 work.
There is one way. Play every one of the 1,229 songs one by one to have Music recognize their existence.
Using ES File Explorer, you head to the SD card, and click on each song. It asks which app youâd like to open it. Choose Music. Repeat 1,228 times.
Above: I finally got there after doing something 1,229 times. As a non-tech person I know of no way to automate this easily. I can think of a few but developing the script is beyond my knowledge.
Whoever said computing devices would save you time is having you on. They may have once, but there are so many systems where things are far more complicated in 2021 than they were in 2011.
You may be asking: doesnât ES let you select multiple files, even folders? Of course it does, but when you then ask it to play them, it ignores the fact youâve chosen Music and plays them in its own music player.
And even after youâve shown Music that there are files in an SD card directory, it wonât pick up its existence.
Itâs at odds with Meizuâs Video app, which, even after many updates, will find files anywhere on your phone.
For a music player with the same version (8) itâs vastly different, and, indeed, inferior to what has come before.
Howâs the player? Well, it connects to the car, which is where I use it. But so many features which made it appealing before are gone. Editing a songâs information is gone. Half the album cover art is unlinked (including albums legitimately downloaded through the old Meizu music service), and thereâs no way of relinking it. European accented characters are mistaken for the old Big 5 Chinese character set.
The only plus side is that some songs that I had downloaded years ago with their titles in Big 5, as opposed to Unicode, now display correctly. That accounts for a few songs (fewer than 10) of the 1,229.
I know Meizu will do nowt, as its customer service continues to plummet. I may still file something on its Chinese BBS (the western one is inaccessible and, from what I can tell, no longer maintained by anyone from their staff), but itâs highly unlikely Iâll be brand-loyal. It’s yet another example of a newer program being far, far worse, by any objective measure, than its predecessor, giving credence to the theory that some software developers are clueless, have no idea how their apps work, have no idea how people use their apps, or are downright incompetent. It’s a shame, as Meizu’s other default and system apps are generally good.
In the future, Iâm sure someone else in China will be happy to sell me a non-Google phone when it’s time to replace this one.
Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, Big Tech, bot, cellphone, China, computing, corruption, customer service, Facebook, justice, media, Meizu, music, newspaper, politics, software, technology, The Guardian
Posted in China, design, internet, media, politics, technology, USA | 3 Comments »