Another Wednesday, another show! Setup was hassle-free, and the show itself went by without any issues. Exactly how I like it. 🙂
And we had a bunch of lovely tracks tonight! Asteroid have a new single out, called “Rapture,” and it’s the bee’s knees! Ilan Bluestone has released his take on Chicane’s “Saltwater” (with the lovely voice of Moya Brennan), The Blizzward’s “Kalopsia” as remixed by Matt Fax is a wonderful track, and Kenny McAuley gave us “Open Your Mind.” (I tried to find out whether Kenny and Ciaran are related but Discogs have a new homepage which is bordering on unusable so I still don’t know.) However, this week’s Favourite of the Week has to go to Fisherman’s remix of Ferry Corsten’s and Giuseppe Ottaviani’s “Magenta!” What an absolute banger!
And as usual there are many more tracks, you just have to listen to them:
The next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, the 20th of September, at 19:00 CEST.
If today’s show had a title (other than “Newsflash”), it would be “Lurk Central.” All of today’s conversation fit on a single screen. I loved it! ❤️
The other thing I love is summer even though I kind of hate the heat. I still prefer summer over every other season. Fight me! 😄
Anyway, it’s too warm to wrangle many words out of myself so let’s get straight on with it: The Favourite of the Week is — of course — Richard Bedf—wait. I can’t pick him twice, can I? [checks notes] hmm… [consults the law] well, it doesn’t actually say anything about this… [talks to forest spirits] alright, okay then. So, the spirits say that even though I totally could do that, I really shouldn’t. And maybe they are right… so, this week’s Favourite of the Week is this track:
Listen to it and all the others right here:
The next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, the 13th of September, at 19:00 CEST.
So, yes, today you will once again be able to verify all my claims about how good the songs were! And indeed we had a couple of nice tracks again, including a new Bedford™! ❤️ Oops, did I just give away the Favourite of the Week?
Other tracks I liked that you should most definitely check out are “Reinvigorate” by Jon Mangan, “Are You Not Entertained?” by B.E.A.R and Bryn Whiting, Allen Watts’s “Spectral” was also almost incredibly good, as was “Blitzar” by NrgMind, and then I also liked Mike Van Fabio’s “Entity.” However – and let’s be honest here — nothing beats The Bedford™, especially not when teamed up with Roman Messer and remixed by Alex M.O.R.P.H. ❤️
In other news (and rants) I started working on my OBS overlay tool again, and while JavaScript (well, its ecosystem mostly) is still driving me nuts, I have a number of ideas that I will be working on in the next weeks, I think… some things will make my life easier, and something will make your experience a bit better, I hope. But, we’ll see!
I’m also thinking about what to do with the show at the end of September that I’m not going to be able to play (because I’ll be on vacation again)… there’s a national holiday following my vacation and if the weather is nice, who knows, maybe I’ll take the new setup outside? I guess the weather will have a rather large say in this… 😄
Anyway, the next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, the 6th of September, at 19:00 CEST! Don’t miss it!
So… as I’m getting more and more into the groove of setting things up, some old habits are creeping back in: I have once again forgotten to hit that 🔴 button! 😥
Which means that I can only tell you about the nice tracks I have played for you today and you have (almost) no way of making sure I’m actually telling the truth! 😄
The only way to verify the niceness of all the tracks I played is now the playlist, and while the setup and the show itself ran flawlessly (well, almost, the Browser source for the overlay froze once — it has never done that before), the real kicker came after the show when I wanted to prepare this blog post: somebody over at nushell.sh decided that the “html” output formatter was now considered an “extra” feature that had to be enabled during the build and the Homebrew people are apparently not considering these extra features worthy of their energy so I suddenly found myself unable to create the playlist table! My initial reaction was 😠, followed by 😡, and then I simply went to bed. This morning I whipped up 10 lines of shell script that will probably do that job from now on… or maybe I’ll integrate it into my playlist export? 🤔 I’ll figure something out!
Anyway. This week’s Favourite of the Week was already with us last week — and it was already mentioned as a contender for the Favourite of the Week — and as none of the new tracks made a comparable impression on me this week, I still get to pick it! This week’s Favourite of the Week, dear listeners and readers: Andrew Beyer, Gabriel & Dresden, and Sub Teal’s “Other Eye!” ❤️
Unfortunately you cannot download the show anywhere but you may take a peek at the playlist:
Setup was relaxed, the Windows machine did not misbehave, and the show started off with a number of real bangers! At some point some people even got a conversation going that lasted until the end of the show! 😍
I do have quite some trouble picking a Favourite of the Week today… and there’s a lot of choices! I loved “A Trillion Suns” by Daniel Skyver, the new single “Other Eye” by Gabriel & Dresden, Andrew Beyer, and the lovely voice of Sub Teal is just ❤️, and then there also was “Flow State” by Asteroid which caught my eye ear. In the end I settled for this track, and not only because of the memories that connect me (and apparently other people who were watching today ❤️) to Nitrous Oxide which were one of the first trance producers that made a long-lasting impression on me (“North Pole” is still one of my most favourite tracks of, like, ever): “Naga Viper” by Nitrous Oxide and Boom Jinx. Love it!
Today’s show was foreshadowed by a bluescreen during setup, and that’s not a good sign. And indeed, the Windows PC spontaneously decided to reboot in the middle of the show. How could I ever expect shit to simply work? 🤷
And then it was also the shortest episode of my show that I can remember, not even 90 minutes! The charts are really moving slow this week, eh?
Anyway. I do have a Favourite of the Week to tell you about. It’s a lovely track that goes by the name of “Exactly,” it has been created by John O’Callaghan and Bryan Kearney, and Sam WOLFE did a wonderful remix of it!
As usual, you don’t have to believe me, you can verify everything I said right here:
Another month has gone by, just like that, and setting up this show with the current equipment is getting more and more relaxed even though I was cutting it awfully close today. Everything worked out perfectly, though, with not a minute to spare!
I’m still a bit exhausted from last weekend’s Evoke so I’mma make it short: This week’s Favourite of the Week is “DivAs” by Artento Divini and Davey Asprey (also known as A.D.D.A.) and onTune.
And in case you agree (or don’t!), here’s the complete show to listen to:
Alright, this week’s setup and show were actually rather uneventful. I had zero stress when preparing the show, zero stress while setting up, I didn’t forget a single thing (even though I felt like I did), and during the show? Zero stress! I could get used to that… 😀
So now the only trouble I have is that I have to pick a Favourite of the Week and once again it’s not easy. I still like “Futuro” by Giuseppe Ottaviani and Ilan Bluestone, “Mirrored Soul” by Metta & Glyde is great as well, and then I was also quite smitten with “Hit Me” by Shugz so I guess it’s the Favourite of the Week now. 😁
As usual, please don’t rely on my judgment, there may be many more tracks you actually like more than I do! 😄
Will there ever be a week again where all setting up for this show is completely, 100% uneventful? I really hope there will be because I’m not sure how much more of this stress I can handle…
But I really should start from the beginning. I have small collection of shell and Python scripts that collect HTML, extract JSON from it, and convert that to CSV. This collection is situated on my server, and runs several times a day.
On my workstation at home I have a project with the chart generator tool and it needs the JSON data generated by the script collection. For easier handling, I rsync all the data files from the server to my workstation when I want to generate the charts for a new week.
So, on monday I rsync’ed all the files, ran the tool, and was met with an exception. A short investigation yielded the result that the JSON file had a length of 0 bytes. Well, that’s no good!
I took a look at the accompanying HTML file and it was full of data… and it looked different, like, structurally. It finally happened, Beatport changed their website! (On a sidenote: the website now is actually usable, before you had to wait forever for pages to load but now it’s way faster than that!)
The script that extracted the JSON lived on the server so I hopped over there and changed the script to match the new format of the HTML. It’s way easier to work with now! Easy change.
I had to change a whole bunch of files, though, so I whipped up a bit of shell:
for h in *.html; do j="${h/html/json}" ./extract-json-from-html.py < "$j" > "$h" done
This script will extract JSON data from an empty JSON file and write the results (which will be empty) to the HTML file.
Sounds wrong? That’s because it is wrong. It is even maximally wrong, the kind of wrong where you not only waste time and other resources but also lose the possibility to fix your mistakes because you mangled/deleted your source files.
I didn’t notice, though. I fired up the rsync script on my workstation, restarted my chart generator and was expecting different results — but… nope. The JSON was still empty. What?
Oh… oh, I see. Fuck.
FUCK.
“Fuck.” – Geralt of Rivia
Not only did I manage to delete the HTML files on the server, no, I went right ahead and removed them from my workstation as well! 🤦
I was angry and frustrated after that and had to step away from the computer so instead of shredding everything that uses electricity I went to have some dinner. During dinner not only did I feed my body, but apparently also my mind. “Hmm, didn’t I add a new disk to my NAS a couple of weeks ago? Yes, I believe I did!”
How is that relevant? Well, you see, the NAS is where Time Machine makes its backups to. And before I added the new disk the space on the NAS was full and I couldn’t make any backups but since I added the new disk I can finally make backups again! (You really, really should have backups.)
The directory where I rsync’ed the files to regularly was also being backed up so at this point it was a breeze to go back to earlier in the day and restore all the HTML files, saving the day and the show. I regenerated the JSON files, changed the chart generator to parse its data from the new JSON structure, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Phew, what a story! Anyway, Favourite of the Week? Easy! Time Machine! ❤️ Oh, I have to pick a track? Oh well, Nhato it is, then… 😁
The rest of the Nhato EP is also still in there, and it’s all in one single, easy-to-listen-to block! 😄
Alright, second week with the new setup (under conditions of having to work) and today everything was very relaxed, and I had plenty of time to spare. So I’m not sure why exactly I forgot to connect the most important thing: the console’s master output! 😅🤦
This week’s show was heavily overshadowed by Nhato’s “Colour Trance EP” which gave us four (4!) tracks, and they are all great! So… I guess the only possibility is to pick the whole EP as Favourite of the Week? No, that’s weak sauce! I will choose one!
There you have it. From the four tracks, this was my favourite but don’t be fooled by this, every single one of those is a banger. I guess you have to hear for yourself, not only for the great Nhato tracks but also for all the other good tracks!
