Now
By definition, a Now page is a dedicated space on a website that tells the audience what you are focused on at this exact point in your life, acting as a bridge between the static "About" page and the more dynamic blog posts. The concept was popularized by Derek Sivers in 2015.
Projects
Personal Website
As mentioned in the About page, I've been thinking of setting up my own site for a while. Over the decades, I've hosted a few, like my personal site at Bradford Uni in the early 90's (very basic!) and my UCF one at the end of the 90's. That is probably better described as a one-page linked list of sites, almost like a public bookmark page. Then came many single use tools such as Pinboard to satisfy those needs. Of course, everyones attention space has reduced significantly, and so few people have the patience to write long form anymore. Who am I kidding, maybe I'll give up too! But at least I wanted to give it a try. I spend some much time reading feeds across a number of topics, and I'd love that work to be more available to others who might also find it interesting.
There are a lot of hosted options out there but I couldn't resist geeking out a little on the implementation. So this site is using one of the nicer default templates using Ghost (an open‑source content management system and publishing platform for blogs and newsletters), running on a DigitalOcean droplet (essentially a own small Linux server running in DigitalOcean data center in San Francisco). For the pricely sum of around $6/mo. this will be my voice out there on the interwebs.
Music Collection
I have a lot of music. Nah, I really have quite a lot. Vinyl (mainly progressive house and trance from the UK and Europe, 1992-2002 ish), CD's (a lot of mix CDs from the 90's and 2000's, and a ton of CD singles) and more recently over the last decade, a lot of digital downloads (preferably lossless from original masters). It's been a bit of a project trying to get all this under control, but the future looks bright.
Digitizing Vinyl Collection
The current process follows these steps:
- Ultrasonic cleaning with special cleaning fluid and rinse.
- Capture with AudioTechnica turntable via USB to Mac Mini M4 into Audio Hijack Pro.
- Process with iZotope RX 11.
- Drop into a dedicated Swinsian library.