Today I went to Findlay Market, rode the Connector, wandered around Blink, and found a lizard inside my house in my dog's water bowl. If I had made it to a Bengals or Reds game and ate chili my Cincinnati bingo card would have been full.
I recently found out that a band I really liked in my younger days back in the 80's is playing at the Ludlow Garage this Friday, The Fixx. I checked to see if there were any tickets left and there are, but they start off at almost $90 a person. How do people afford to see concerts these days? I hear about ticket prices for huge names like Taylor Swift and I am literally astounded. I mean I have been to a lot of great concerts, I saw Tears for Fears back during their heyday and I think I paid around $20 for a ticket. I saw the Rolling Stones in the early 90's and my ticket was $55. Of course with inflation those numbers would be much higher but my god, I mean I love the The Fixx and if you can afford the tickets I think you should go see them, but I just can't justify spending that much money to see them. It seems like a lot of other people can't as well as there are quite a few tickets left for sale. I know the band and the venue have to make money and I know that TicketMaster/LiveNaton are getting most of the money, but wouldn't it be better to have lower ticket prices and fill all the seats?
I love Blink and I can't wait to go this year, but I think Blink has got way too big for its own good.
I lived in the Netherlands for a few years and before Blink ever happened there was a festival of light art in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. It took place every year in the Fall and was absolutely wonderful. One of the reasons it was so wonderful was the fact that you could see all of the pieces and easily navigate to all of them because they were all laid out on an easy to follow path around the city.
Blink is so big it is really hard to see everything and it isn't terribly easy to get around the event. Also it feels like Blink is focusing more on quantity than quality when it comes to the pieces included. Many are wonderful but some feel like filler and others feel like advertisements masquerading as art.
I really hope the people in charge of Blink consider reducing its scale and scope and focus more on user friendliness and quality.
I just made a donation to the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, it is so sad that we lost Dolly but we can all help keep her legacy alive.
A couple of weeks ago I was on Amazon looking for a really cheap laptop and came across the Surface Laptop SE. Microsoft made these to sell to schools and they have pretty miserable specs. An 11.6" LCD display surrounded by a fairly hefty plastic bezel, no touch screen, a 1mp camera, a Celeron N4120 processor, 4gb of ram, and all plastic construction. But at $132.00 US I thought I could make it work. After it was delivered I booted it up for the first time with a live USB drive that had Lubuntu on it. Everything installed perfectly and after changing a couple of keyboard shortcuts I was able to get the volume and brightness keys to work. I haven't tried the camera so I don't know if it works but everything else seems great.
I just wanted something small and light to take with me when I travel, sadly not very often, and I only plan on doing things like checking email and web browsing with it so it was the perfect fit for me. Since everything worked as soon as I installed Lubuntu I didn't bother even trying the Surface kernel but after looking at the documentation I don't think the Laptop SE is supported anyway.
Anyway, just wanted to shoutout a Surface device I don't see talked about very often!
Many, many years ago I owned one of the desk lamp style iMacs that ran OSX. One of the things I really liked about the OS was that all of the applications came as packages, one unit that included everything the software needed to run. This meant that you could simply drag and drop the package to an external drive and it would run from there with nothing needed on the hard drive (it also made it super simple to pirate software but that's not what I am interested in at this point). It was great, if I was working on a project with someone and needed PhotoShop but they didn't have it I could just put it on a flash drive and take it with me to their Mac. Is there anyway to do this with Linux? I would love to move some of my less used applications over to my external SSD and let them run from there when I need them instead of having them take up space on my internal SSD.
A few days ago I posted about getting a Microsoft Surface Laptop SE and installing Lubuntu on it. Everything is working great but there is one annoyance I was wondering if someone can help me find a solution for.
After I installed lubuntu I noticed that the volume up and down keys weren't working, the mute button worked fine. I went into keyboard shortcuts and saw that shortcuts existed that should make them work but they didn't. I simply changed the shortcuts to the volume up and down keys plus the function key and they worked, problem solved, almost. They keys only work to control the built in speakers on the laptop but I also use a USB speaker and bluetooth earbuds, for those the volume controls do nothing. To change the volume on these devices I have to open up Pulse Audio and change the volume there. Does anyone know of a way to have the volume control keys work for whatever output device I happen to be using at the moment?
A few days ago I purchased a new Microsoft Surface Laptop SE for barely over $100.00 US. It's a rather nice looking machines but it has terrible specs. 4gb of ram, a Celeron N4120 processor, a 64gb SSD, and a 1mp camera, it's really kind of crappy, but it was cheap! I was looking for a machine that was small, and that could handle really simple stuff like watching videos and checking email and act as a white noise generator through Sox, when I travel. I decided to try out Lubuntu and it has been perfect. I use Fedora and KDE Plasma on my desktop so LXQT took a little bit of work to figure out, but now everything works great and it does exactly what I need it to. So thanks to all the Lubuntu developers!
My camera only records when it senses motion. It sensed some motion yesterday. This is in Westwood.
I have been following the progress Aptera Motors has been making for a long time now and I am in love with this car. I would absolutely love to own an Aptera. I also see that getting these cars actually into buyers hands and out on the roads is a highly difficult and expensive thing to do. So my question is, what if another car company were to buy 51% of Aptera Motors? Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Geely, pretty much any of the larger car manufacturers could do this and in doing so it would give them access to all of the R&D and patents and everything else that Aptera has come up with which could be quite beneficial to them. Not to mention that they would have this amazing looking technically advanced halo car to make them look better, so while it would undoubtedly involve some risk for the car manufacturer but I think it could also bring about a pretty good pay off (maybe even more so for a Chinese manufacturer as they could get a foot in the door in the US). There would also be some risks for Aptera as the larger company may just want to take their best tech and leave them for dead or try to dilute their design down to a point where it would be unrecognizable, but if it worked out it could be wonderful for both companies involved. So does anyone know if there has been any talk about involvemnet from a larger company in Aptera Motor's history?
Hi everybody, yesterday I posted a tin type photo of my husband and myself and everyone seemed to enjoy it. It is a pretty weird photo, and you guys embraced it and celebrated its weirdness. This made me think a little about Cincinnati as a whole, and it's kind of weird. It got me thinking that maybe we should all embrace the weirdness of our wonderful city and maybe even promote our weirdness to the rest of the world. Think about it, we have the real life Hall of Justice, the second largest Oktoberfest in the world, the largest abandoned subway system in America (possibly the world), the Northside 4th of July parade, we are possibly most famous for a radio station that only existed on TV until recently, some crazy architecture, there is just a lot of weird stuff in Cincinnati. What if our city adopted the slogan "Cincinnati, Midwest Weird!" or something similar? We also have an amazing art scene, a great beer scene, a statue of two babies nursing on a wolf that doesn't look too happy about it, we can celebrate our weirdness and maybe even amplify it a bit. I would love to see the city expand the streetcar system a bit but also add a series of aerial cable cars that would go out into a bunch of the different neighborhoods. Imagine going to a cable car station and riding it to a main hub downtown where you could either transfer to a different cable car to go on to another neighborhood or just hop on the street car to get around down town, it would be efficient, fun, and weird! What do you think, should we celebrate our weirdness and increase our weirdness and show off our weirdness to the rest of the world?
During the Findley Night Market The Collective 513 Gallery had Alex Lippert of Blue Creek Tinworks doing tin type photos. My husband and myself went a little odd with what we were wearing but we love the result! I see people asking about photographers in here from time to time so I just wanted to throw out another option for consideration!
I am an American, born and raised in Tennessee, who lived in the Netherlands from 2013 to 2016 and so I got the chance to learn what living in a democratic socialist country is really like. Hit me with your questions!
