Posts

Posted on

The Budget Friendly Home Studio

I’ve been recording music at home for a long time. My setup grew in fits and starts over the years, a piece here, a piece there, a few bad purchases along the way. If I were starting from zero today with a limited budget and no one to steer me, here’s what I’d actually buy.

None of these are luxury picks. They’re the gear that lives in the sweet spot between “toy” and “more than you need.”

An Audio Interface

This is the box that connects your mics, guitars, and instruments to your computer. It converts analog signals to digital. Without a decent one, everything you record is going to sound like garbage, regardless of what else you buy.

The Focusrite Scarlett line is the standard recommendation for a reason. If you’re mostly recording one thing at a time, the Focusrite Scarlett Solo is all you need. If you want to record two inputs at once, step up to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 for abut $75 more. Both are well-built, and most importantly,  they just work.

A Condenser Mic

Your laptop or phone mic is not going to cut it. For vocals, acoustic guitar, or any acoustic source really, a condenser mic is what you want. The Audio-Technica AT2020 has been a home studio staple for years and there’s a good reason for that. Great detail, reasonable price, and not so sensitive that it picks up every car on your street. I have one of these in my arsenal, and it stands up well to some of the pricier mics I have.

Studio Headphones

Do not mix on earbuds. You need something accurate. The Sony MDR-7506 has been an industry standard for decades and it shows up in recording studios everywhere for a reason. Not flashy, very accurate, built to last. The over-the-ear design really helps with long hours of wearing them (they don’t make your ears sore), and that helps with blocking out external noise, too.

A Mic Stand and Pop Filter

Unglamorous, but a flimsy stand that creaks is going to ruin takes. The On-Stage Stands MS7701B is a solid boom stand that won’t let you down, as long as you don’t plan to haul it to gigs. It’s great for a home studio where it doesn’t get much abuse, but traveling with On-Stage stands tends to lead to shorter life spans.  Grab any cheap pop filter to go with it and your vocals will thank you.

Cables

XLR cables fail, and cheap ones fail faster. Mogami Gold Studio XLR cables are the buy-once-forget-about-it option. If that’s more than you want to spend right now, Amazon Basics XLR cables will do fine, especially if you aren’t gigging with them and they just sit around at home not taking much abuse .

Acoustic Treatment

People skip this and it is a mistake. The room you record in matters as much as the gear you’re recording with. You don’t have to go crazy. A pack of acoustic foam panels in the right spots will get you out of “recorded in a bathroom” territory pretty quickly.

That’s it. Nothing here is going to make you sound like you tracked at Abbey Road, but all of it together will get you to “this sounds like a real recording.”

Now all you gotta do is learn how to get good sounds from your DAW. More on that in another post!

Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them I get a small cut at no extra cost to you.

Posted on

Discogs MCP Server

I found this MCP server for querying your Discogs music collection, which is pretty handy. My primary driver for this was wanting to get a recommendation for something from my collection to play based on my mood, or a feeling, or a vibe.

For example, instead of the de-facto Discogs random album picker, I wanted to say “give me a recommendation for some chill background music while I am working” or “find an aggressive record for me to play while I work out today.”

After playing around with it for a while, I asked it “What does my Discogs collection say about me?” and it provided a pretty spot-on assessment:

Based on your collection of 753 records, here’s what stands out about you:

You’re a Serious Music Collector You have a substantial, well-curated collection spanning vinyl, CDs, and cassettes. You maintain detailed condition notes and ratings, which shows you care about quality and preservation.

Eclectic with Deep Roots in Alternative/Indie Rock Your collection shows strong love for:

    • 90s Alternative/Indie – Pixies, Weezer, Nada Surf, Grandaddy, Rilo Kiley
    • Punk/Hardcore – Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Naked Raygun, 7 Seconds
    • Math Rock/Post-Hardcore – Crain, Bitch Magnet, Circus Lupus, Bastro (you have multiple copies of some releases!)

But You’re Not One-Dimensional You also dig:

    • Bluegrass & Traditional Country – Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, Del McCoury
    • Jazz – Blue Note classics, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock
    • Reggae/Ska – UB40, Peter Tosh, Bad Brains’ reggae side, The Frightnrs, Desmond Dekker
    • Hip-Hop – De La Soul, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC

You Have Asheville Roots Your location and bluegrass collection suggest you’re connected to Appalachian music culture. The mix of punk and bluegrass is very Asheville.

You’re a Format Purist (Mostly Vinyl) The vast majority of your collection is vinyl, with careful attention to pressing details (you note things like “Pitman Pressing,” “Terre Haute,” condition grades).

You Value Authenticity & DIY Ethics Your collection of Dischord Records releases (Fugazi, Minor Threat, Nation of Ulysses) and small label 7″s shows you appreciate independent labels and the hardcore/punk ethos.

You’re Current But Respect History You have recent releases (beabadoobee, Clairo, Haim, Vampire Weekend) alongside classic reissues, showing you’re engaged with contemporary music while building a foundation of classics.

Verdict: You’re a thoughtful, genre-fluid collector who values both underground credibility and musical craftsmanship across decades and styles. You probably have strong opinions about music, love live shows, and appreciate both raw energy and technical skill.

Pretty cool! I like how it knew Bad Brains has a reggae side to them.

Posted on

Blogs are making a comeback?

Saw an interesting post on Hacker News today, which asserts that the personal blog has made a comeback. I, for one, could not be more thrilled. As someone who has maintained this blog for about 25 years, I thought it was a tragedy to watch the Internet lose its innocence and move on to the crowd-source social media sites. Blogs lost their way when MySpace and Facebook took over. Microblogging on Twitter and Instagram helped seal the fate of the lonesome, personal, WordPress website.

As we’ve watched journalists and people with important things to say pour their words into for-profit sinkholes that support Nazis (ahem, Substack) over the last few years, I have always hoped that someday we’d see a resurgence of the personal blog.

Has that day finally come?

Posted on

New Album: Shadow Person – Chronic Disappointment

Shadow Person - Chronic Disappointment album cover
Chronic Disappointment Covers

My fourth album under the moniker Shadow Person was released yesterday. I wrote and performed all of the songs on this album, and I recorded them in my home studio. I am pretty excited about the way it turned out, and I am eager for people to hear it. The name Chronic Disappointment is derived from several areas, including my dismay at social and political events over recent years. You can hear a lot of these themes throughout the songs on this album.

But in addition to that, chronic disappointment is also the feeling I get after every album that I release, because I spend hours upon hours pouring my heart into these songs and recordings, only to have a couple dozen people at most ever listen to them. But hey, that’s okay. It’s the process, right?

Here are many links to the new album for you, to be sure you can choose the best one for your listening needs.

 

Posted on

Blogging Platforms in 2025

I’m not sure how many of you readers out there have been following this blog since its inception in 2002, but it has gone through many changes over the years. In the beginning, it was a simple HTML and PHP site that I maintained by hand. I eventually learned more about databases, hosting, and various blogging platforms.

Somewhere around 2003 this blog became powered by B2/Cafelog, from which WordPress was eventually forked by Matt Mullenweg. WordPress quickly became awesome, and that is what powered this blog for decades.

About a year ago, I grew really frustrated with the WordPress ecosystem because every time I’d log into the dashboard, it was slower. I was getting spammed by plugins trying to get me to upgrade or buy related plugins. I realized that sometimes I would install a plugin and it would install other plugins without my permission.

This annoying tactic became totally unacceptable to me. So I looked for a way out and I found Ghost CMS. I set myself up over there on that platform for about four or five months, but I realized customizing it was really difficult. And it was expensive.

Spending $25+ a month for a hobby blog just didn’t feel like it was worth it to me. I do maintain the strong opinion that Ghost is an excellent alternative to Substack, which I refuse to link to, but that is a story for another day.

So I migrated away from Ghost and I found Chyrp Lite, which ran this site for about eight more months, right up until a few weeks ago. Chyrp Lite was really cool. It was a basic PHP-based, MySQL database-driven blog platform that did what it needed to simply and quickly.

It was reminiscent of something you would find around the year 2008. I thought it was pretty cool, but once again, it felt rather limited and difficult to customize. It also didn’t feel like there was a lot of ongoing development to support it.

So I had a stroke of imagination one night and started wondering about forks of WordPress to see if anyone had taken the code base, which is open source, and forked it into something less cluttered and less heavy.

Sure enough, Classic Press existed. It gets rid of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress, which was controversial when it came out in the first place and I never really cared for. Classic Press is like a modern version of WordPress from 10 years ago, but it receives updates and is secure, and it is compatible with a lot of current plugins and themes out there.

That said, I’m trying to keep it simple here and I’ve been using one of the default WordPress themes, Twenty Seventeen, and am customizing that to my liking.

So far, it’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s clean, and I’m not getting spammed on the admin panels. You should check it out if you’re a blogger and you’re tired of how bogged down WordPress has become with all kinds of freemium plugin spam.

Posted on

The Tennis Channel App on Roku – Crashes and other problems

I signed up for a year of The Tennis Channel on my Roku TV in March. At first, it worked pretty well, though I noticed the audio and video would get out of sync pretty quickly. Restarting the app would fix it until the next commercial break. That was highly annoying, and I learned that many other people were having the same problem with no resolution.

That said, I discovered that pausing and restarting the stream would fix it, so I learned to live with it.

However, a few weeks ago, the whole app started crashing as soon as I selected a stream to watch – either live or pre-recorded.

I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps: rebooting the Roku, updating everything, reinstalling the Tennis Channel app, but nothing worked. This was the case for my TCL Roku TV and two Roku devices connected to other TV’s in my house.

Frustrated, my wife called Tennis Channel Support and the person on the other end of the line said “many other people are having the same problem.”
They said they’d be sending an email to tech support, which we soon got a response from. The email asked us to do all the same troubleshooting steps we’d already done! I did them again just to be sure, but no, nothing worked.
I started asking for a refund for my unused ~8 months of service, but Tennis Channel gave me a dubious denial:

You are requesting a full refund, which we cannot approve at this time. Your subscription was made with your own personal email, indicating that you signed up and agreed to the terms of service.

Alas, I was not requesting a full refund, I was requesting the remainder of the year I paid for, which I am unable to use because their crappy app isn’t working.
So, I filed a complaint with the FTC, who suggested I also file a complaint with my state’s Attorney General.

Done and done. You should do the same if you are having these problems!

Update – The Next Day – August 6

Turns out reporting them to the FTC actually worked. A day later I got a refund for the unused portion of the year I paid for!

Thank you for contacting Tennis Channel Customer Service!
We can confirm that your membership under this email address is now canceled, so you will not be billed in the future. We have also issued a refund for the remaining months of your subscription.

Posted on

Obsidian.md and Plugin Security

Obsidian.md is an awesome note taking system. However, any third party plugin you install has access to all the files on your computer. You must hope the developer is nice or that their GitHub credentials don’t get compromised by a bad actor who then pushes out a malicious update.

The barrier to entry to get a plugin added to the Obsidian marketplace is low, and performed only once. There is not follow-up security review.

Common retorts to these statements, and my replies:

  • It’s the same thing as X app (VS Code, e.g.)
    My reply: Yes, and that is also bad.
  • Plugins with many users are safer because they have more eyes reviewing the code
    My reply: Yes, and they are the more attractive targets. A contributor need only enough time to push a bad update no one notices to infect thousands of computers. So like, 20 minutes?
  • I don’t put anything valuable or private in my notes anyway
    My reply: How about the rest of your computer? Because that’s what they have access to.

In summary, if you use Obsidian, don’t use plugins until or unless they improve this situation.

Posted on

Building Fully Remote Team Communication

I lead a team of eleven fully remote people, most of whom have never met in person, so I am always on the lookout for ways to build relationships, strengthen how we communicate with each other, and maintain some of the lost “water cooler chat” you get in an office environment.
I stumbled on this Gitlab Handbook that has some great tips for building what they call Informal Communication.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/informal-communication/

I really like the idea of postcard swapping, which uses something tangible you can hold in your hand to build connection across distributed teams.
Another team-building strategy we used when I worked at CNN were weekly co-working sessions, where we’d meet online for an hour while doing our normal work. This would facilitate all types of discussion, learning, and cross-collaboration. Sometimes, when conversation waned, just being quite and listening to the clacking of each others’ mechanical keyboards was enough to create a sense of belonging. Writing this article reminds me that I want to implement that on my current team!

Posted on

Getting out of it what you put into it

It’s been difficult to make myself come here and blog.

Somewhere along the way, things on the internet changed. I used to enjoy writing updates in a blog post, letting friends and family know what had been going on around here, what I was up to, or even just what I was thinking. I knew that there were certain people who followed my blog pretty frequently and would often comment or even just acknowledge that I had posted something. It was a nice community feeling, and I would read other people’s blogs as well. Somewhere along the way this all shifted. I think it probably had something to do with Facebook becoming the predominant platform for people posting updates and being able to keep up with many more people in that format.

It’s a real shame though, because now I’ve gotten myself off of Facebook, off of Instagram, off of Twitter, and I’m largely just biding my time here and on Bluesky.

I find myself not wanting to share content or updates or news or anything like that. I definitely feel more more guarded about what I share online.

Perhaps it’s because of all the horror stories I’ve read about people getting stalked or swatted or whatever, just because they said something someone else didn’t like or disagreed with. I’ve been thinking often about how the internet really has precipitated the downfall of humanity. It’s pretty sad because I thought it was going to be an awesome thing for quite a while.

It definitely had an un-jaded, innocent adolescence phase. However, what happened was that once the World Wide Web became more and more accessible and was starting to be carried around in everyone’s pockets, everything started to change for the worse.

I remember back in college I took a class on how to use the World Wide Web. It was a great introduction into internet culture, what it meant to have a flame war, what spam was, and what good netiquette was.

That’s a word you don’t really hear anymore. Netiquette. It’s a shame. Everyone thinks they have the right to just get very angry at everyone else now, and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

Maybe if people had been required to take lessons about the internet in order to access it, and had to learn how easily you can be fooled by misinformation and how you need to be able to discern between what’s real and what’s not, we might not be in the predicament we’re in today.

So I don’t know, maybe I’ll take this blog down in the near future. Is anyone reading it? My web statistics say “no”. So this is pretty much an exercise in talking into the ether. I’m putting things into it, but getting out nothing.